The Case for Writers Staying on Twitter (X, Whatever)

The last few days, my feed has filled with writers (and other people, but mainly writers) saying “I’m leaving Twitter for good. Follow me at Bluesky.” The most pretentious one I saw was “I will be soaring over at where the sky is blue.” You will be doing no such thing. This is weak stuff.

I don’t care if you don’t like Donald Trump or Elon Musk. Unless you’re getting offline forever—maybe the best choice for anyone’s mental health but not really possible for most people—then leaving Twitter is just restricting your options. The current Twitter, or X, or whatever you call it, is the most insane carnival of ideas and memes and jokes and bots and shitposting that the Internet has ever seen. And writers are leaving because it’s offending their political sensibilities.

I say this as someone who doesn’t have a personal Twitter account. I deleted mine in 2017 for reasons having nothing to do with politics. My emotional reactions to personal Twitter mirrored my reactions to smoking pot or playing poker. I didn’t like who I was on the site, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my adult life flinging insults back and forth with former Gawker writers, who I intended to outlive out of spite.

But I kept reading Twitter. And I also stayed on by operating Book and Film Globe’s feed, even if that activity mostly involved posting articles and retweeting jokes about David Lynch. Then, during the COVID era, pissed off at the conformist nonsense I was seeing from my feed, I started a parody account, Very Concerned COVID Parent, which mocked overwrought pandemic panic from certain corners, including a few people who used to write for us. As it turns out, the Venn diagram between the COVID panickers and the people who are leaving Twitter for Blue Sky is nearly concentric. So I recently fired up the account again.

I have been screaming in my car all day

— Very Concerned Parent (@ZeroCOVID4Ever) November 8, 2024

Here we are, in the age of Exodus. It started off sad, quickly moved to overwrought, and has now reached a kind of pathetic conformist stage. But I find myself wondering what people are actually afraid of. Where else on Earth can you mix it up with the world’s richest man, the President of the United States, and Joyce Carol Oates? Why would you trade that in for the Internet equivalent of a dull faculty lounge meeting, a Tiny Desk concert of the mind, but without music?

At first it seemed like I was the only writer left alive who wasn’t bailing on Twitter. Even Stephen King, the god king of clueless liberal shitposting, bailed yesterday, saying he couldn’t do it any longer. Sad!

But then I noticed a counter-trend. First, I saw a post from Austin writer Gabino Iglesias, no lover of MAGA, saying he was staying. After I liked and retweeted that post, the algorithm kicked in. Suddenly, I started seeing dozens of posts from other writers, big and small but mostly small, who also were deciding to stay. In some cases, it was because they liked the new Trump program. In other cases, it was because they’d spent years building a creative community and making friends, and weren’t ready to pitch that all in the bin because of politics.

Then I saw this eminently sensible post from WWII thriller writer Stephen Ronson:

Genuine question. No political agenda. Why are so many people leaving here? My entire feed is people who love books, and always has been. I really quite like it. Is it like a solidarity thing?

— Stephen Ronson #TheBerlinAgent (@Stephen_Ronson) November 14, 2024

“My entire feed is people who love books, and always has been. I really quite like it.”

Who would have thunk such a sentiment were possible in these hyper-politicized times? I quite like it myself. My entire feed is people shit-talking bad movie directors and posting anti-New York Yankees memes, mixed in with warnings about the globalized Intifada and a few other nuggets based on sub-interests of mine. It’s all still out there.

The responses to Ronson’s tweet were all over the map, from “snowflakes can’t handle the MAGA point of view” to “I’m gradually leaving because this space is no longer safe for queer people and women,” to “if all you want to do is talk about art, then that’s all you have to talk about and that’s all you’ll see other than ads for Oreos.” The diversity of human opinions and neuroses lay before me like a splatter painting.

Writers are leaving Twitter right now as a flimsy act of political protest. When they first got on it in 2012, it was a land of liberal politics and apolitical absurdities like @dril. During the COVID era, it was a safe space for them, in part because the ownership was censoring perspectives that they might find disagreeable. Then Elon Musk arrived and unleashed the hounds of free-speech hell.

Twitter is the town square on super-steroids, a place where all ideas, great ones and terrible ones, helpful and toxic, all fight for pre-eminence in the battle royale of human consciousness. It can certainly be a huge waste of time. But it’s also definitely the First Amendment’s Final Evolved Form. Don’t like Twitter and want to take your business somewhere else less entertaining? Well, it’s a free country. That’s something that a lot of my fellow writers appear to have forgotten.