Eight months and six days ago, I deactivated my Twitter account. I had tweeted a self-deprecating joke, but the response was getting out of hand – strangers were making cruel comments, and people I thought were my friends were weighing in, saying things I knew they never would to my face. I saw personal things that I’d barely ever told anyone brought up to make fun of me. This kind of thing had happened before, but this time it felt monumental.
I meant for my absence to be temporary – perhaps a week or so, to let myself breathe. I couldn’t imagine leaving forever – I spent every waking moment tweeting, retweeting, liking. Twitter was where I met my ex-partner of five years, and so many friends, and countless professional connections – crucial for a freelance writer. I learned about breaking news on Twitter and read reactions as they happened live around the world. It was my digital home.
Twitter was where I met my ex-partner of five years, and so many friends, and countless professional connections – crucial for a freelance writer.
But as more time passed, I thought about whether or not there was any net gain from being on Twitter, and concluded that there wasn’t – I have good existing relationships with editors, I can keep up with the news through other means and there are plenty of great Facebook groups for networking and, most importantly, memes. I also realised that I had derived much of my self-worth from the way that people would interact with my tweets – I’d sometimes delete them if they didn’t get enough traction within a few hours. I’d see tweets making fun of me, my work, my sex life, and I would internalise it all. I was sick of seeing, time and time again, Twitter refusing to no-platform abusers, racists, literal Nazis, and ignoring users crying out for help.
I didn’t want to seem like I was conceding defeat, but I was enjoying the clarity that came from having a break that seemed to be getting longer and longer – and then all of a sudden, it had been a month and my account was officially removed.
Nine years of tweets, gone forever – and though it felt strange at first, that strangeness was quickly overtaken by relief and a sense of freedom.
Nine years of tweets, gone forever – and though it felt strange at first, that strangeness was quickly overtaken by relief and a sense of freedom.
I’m far from the first person who’s hung up their tweeting boots – writer Lindy West in 2017 in protest against the platform’s “culture of harassment”, and the lack of action by its founders to protect users. From micro to macro-aggressions, Twitter’s “pile-on” mentality can make it a frightening place to be a woman, or a person of colour, or anyone with an opinion or personality that someone might find unpalatable. Just look to the example of actress Kelly Marie Tran, who left social media after being harassed for daring to be an Asian woman in a Star Wars film. In an for the New York Times, she admitted that the trolls got to her – “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them.”
I’ve had many conversations with friends who have experienced similar feelings on Twitter. I sometimes felt scared to say anything, afraid of how it might be warped to fit a certain agenda, or how an innocuous story from my personal life could be used to mock and degrade me. What I found particularly galling was how so many of my friends stood by silently. I often wished that someone, anyone, would stand up against the bullies with me, but more often than not, I was left to tough it out alone.
A recent project I’ve been working on with aims to address how we can support others through online harassment as “active bystanders”, rather than silently witnessing and dismissing. Though there’s no easy way to eradicate bullying and discrimination – that requires a complete cultural shift that will take some time – I hope that by fostering and encouraging an empathetic community approach, social media users, particularly those from commonly targeted minority groups, will feel safer in the spaces that they choose to inhabit.
I often wished that someone, anyone, would stand up against the bullies with me, but more often than not, I was left to tough it out alone.
But it has continued, in its own strange way, in my post-Twitter life, too. A couple of months ago someone asked me how I’d gotten my account suspended. I was confused and intrigued – my account was supposed to be deleted. Yet there it was when I typed my username in. It appeared that someone had wreaked unknown havoc under my name and gotten themselves – “me” – banned. An email conversation with Twitter support proved fruitless, as they refused to remove the account because I no longer had the login details or email address associated with it. Now, anyone who Googles me will be met with this page that suggests digital wrongdoing on my part, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
In the digital age, our identities cease to belong to us alone – they’re easily co-opted by others with agendas of their own, with little options available for us to stop it, especially when the platforms are not on our side. But rather than viewing this as a liability, I saw it as a reinforcement that I’d done the right thing by leaving a place that had no interest in protecting me – and an opportunity to speak about why that was necessary.
Social media has made the world more connected than ever before, and can be wonderful. It can also be draining, exhausting and toxic. This isn’t about grandstanding, or saying that I’m better than Twitter – it’s simply about realising what’s best for my own mental stability. Leaving has freed up space in my brain previously reserved for Twitter-induced anxiety, and allowed me to devote my time to things that actually make me happy. Occasionally I’ll get FOMO, and will admit to having a peek from time to time – and my friends send me the best memes and threads regardless, so I can enjoy the action without getting in on it – but, as I’ve realised, sometimes being on the outer is okay.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a freelance writer.
