Why I Left Twitter

I was always a big fan of Twitter. I had a mid-sized account of about 9500 followers and billed myself “The Neighborhood Sociologist.” My tweets were a combination of social science and progressive politics.

Twitter helped me gain tenure. Like many scholars exploring online behavior, I used Twitter’s third-party application service to collect data from the platform. I used that data to publish two academic papers (about white nationalism and Black Twitter, respectively). Because Twitter was so central to my career progress, there was a lot of goodwill there.

When Musk took over, I anticipated more emboldened conservative and “anti-woke” users, sure. Their man had purchased arguably the most significant public square in the world and was very vocal in making the space comfortable for them. Musk is vocally anti-woke and openly worries about a “woke mind virus” destroying civilization. I expected to see more tweets from them. I expected to see more tweets I consider low-key bigoted, and much more conspiracy theories and peddling of misinformation. Of course, they would consider these tweets exercises in free speech, a difference in interpretation that one must expect in a multicultural, multi-ideological society. I reasoned that while I found their content problematic, at least I could understand the different perspectives of people I disagree with. I could learn, for example, how we came to interpret the same actions and ideas so differently.

For these reasons, I was slow to sour on Twitter. When Musk’s purchase was finalized…