What If We Just… Deleted Twitter?

As any frequent user will tell you, Twitter is poison for the mind and the soul. It makes you think in specific phrases; it is anxiety-inducing; and, like all social media, it frequently makes you feel bad about yourself and – often needlessly – about others. Understandably, quite a lot of the people on the “hellsite” – as Twitter’s own users (annoyingly) call it – regularly go on about no longer wanting to be on there.

Many who use Twitter wish they used it less, and those that don’t are more than likely FBPE weirdos (who, we must remember, wouldn’t exist in their current guise were it not for “this bird app”). Even when it’s fun it becomes un-fun pretty quickly, usually because you’ve said something entirely banal and someone you don’t know has replied to it with a thread that begins with the word “Actually…”

And so I wonder: is there a case for just deleting Twitter from the internet? What about that? What if we dared to dream?

On the 4th of October, all of Facebook’s apps went dark, including Facebook itself, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Social media users were left with a choice: TikTok, Twitter or “read a book”. With the latter completely out of the question and the fact I still feel too old for the first, it felt like some sort of cosmic joke that the only thing to do was scroll Twitter, famously the most terrible of all the social media sites (although Facebook can go as well for all I care).

Twitter’s status as the dirt worst is not entirely its own fault. Any social media website that relies on rolling news has a tough gig, considering that kind of content is so terrifying and troubling all of the time (except for that one recent story about the drunk Turkish guy who joined his own search party). The fact that the phrase “doomscrolling” even exists is a pretty damning indictment of the platform.

Doomscrolling – the act of idly but compulsively reading all of the inevitably bad news in one’s Twitter feed – is a good summation of both the way Twitter is used and its unique position online: as a service that users actively hate, but stick around on anyway. But what if we freed ourselves? What if we were all just forced to embrace our individual TikTok niches? (I feel strongly that mine would be SaladTok, if only I’d let myself.)

It’s an idea that’s hard to get your head around, because Twitter is such an integral part of how so many of us now relate to the world. The internet has led to most consuming only news that confirms our biases, and our Twitter feeds are a direct extension of that. This has most likely changed the way we consume news forever, and probably means that – despite screams into the void, just like this article – there will always be a Twitter-like entity looming over society.

For many, the lure of Twitter is wrapped up in the idea that their work (or even their existence!) won’t be appreciated as widely without it. Brave individuals frequently “leave” the site, and social media in general, but are quickly drawn back by a rising tide of FOMO. There are, after all, still extremely rare occasions – like the pig fucking day – when Twitter feels like the greatest innovation humanity has ever achieved.

But what if, Avengers blip-like, the whole thing just ceased to be, never to return?

Defenders will argue that Twitter is a “marketplace of ideas” (nobody who has observed the quality of discussion on Twitter would actually say this), and that getting rid of such an arena would be bad for culture. Granted, social media’s utility for disseminating ideas, organising activism and sharing information cannot be dismissed, and it’s a crucial space for the otherwise isolated to gain community – but it’s hard not to laugh at those who think Twitter is a medium for serious and productive debate. It encourages the death of nuance, rewards bad faith arguments and turns even the most innocuous of posts into a frenzy of whataboutery and one-upmanship. 

Recently, Twitter has also become a deeply humourless place. There was a time when you’d at least see a funny video now and then, but now TikTok has that covered, and the news is currently so grimly existential that Twitter is dominated by it and the discourse around it. At the same time, however, its plain text nature has allowed it to become a strangely warped place where everyone is pretty much only ever talking about themselves through the lens of whatever the news is, which is a great way to produce hurt feelings (at least on Instagram you can just straight up express yourself via photos of sunsets and thongs).

The loss of Twitter’s capacity for having a laugh also speaks to a type of earnestness and an attraction to total moral purity (itself encouraged partly by the fear of cancellation felt by basically all social media users, particularly Twitter users) that is clearly endemic in culture at the moment – the same strain of thinking which posits that it’s immoral to enjoy books where the characters do bad things. 

This, obviously, is detrimental to both art and intelligent thinking. Humans – even the ones sanctimoniously mega-threading on Twitter – are flawed. Some of us would say literally anything for a bit of attention. Possibly, then, life would be easier if we weren’t exposed to the every thought and whim of so many people, all day every day. Of course, this is entirely hypothetical, will never happen (like MySpace, Twitter will have to die organically, only to be replaced by something worse), and I’d also like to add that I won’t be drawn on my own inevitably continued and incessant tweeting. Not me containing multitudes!

But should Twitter vanish overnight, how calmly we would sleep. Fundamentally, while we will all continue to use it to help ourselves understand the world, and to make ourselves feel important, and, perhaps, to feel connection, it’s also far from the only place where we can do these things. To use a Twitterism – what the hell! – it’s fair to say that society has evolved past the need for Twitter. Imagine that!