Time was when being a member of the Twitterati, marked you out as a technologically progressive liberal keen to share your views with an elite group of pseudo-intellectuals (well that’s how my family perceived it – and most of my friends). Twitter was distrusted because it gave a voice to every loudmouth in town and enjoyed for the same reasons.

My point is that twitter is not really the home of the visual image (as Instagram) or the moving image (Tic-Toc) but of the cerebral and the cerebral-celebrity. There are exceptions, it is used by many sporting fans to commentate on club’s fortunes on and off the pitch, I am sure it has many niche followings that I know nothing about, but twitter has always been about ideas.

But now “free speech” and “hate speech” have found a common friend

Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk has redefined free-speech to include the kind of thing that many people consider the preserve of those who use violence to get their point across. Violence in words may not break bones but supporting those with violent actions is too much for many.

In an article for the Guardian on Monday, a former Twitter executive, Bruce Daisley, said Musk should face personal sanctions and even an arrest warrant if he continues to stir up public disorder online.

Over the weekend, Jess Phillips, a Home Office minister who has more than 700,000 followers on X, said she wanted to scale back her use of the platform as it had become a “bit despotic” and was “a place of misery now”.

A government minister also told the Guardian they had reduced their posts on X over the summer and that Musk’s actions had made them “very reluctant to return”.

There is a very strong feeling in this country against civil disorder on anything, but disorder targeted at the vulnerable and in particular at foreigners, offends something deep inside the liberal conscience.

The worry is that if the conscientious liberal walks away from X, it will leave it the playground of the extremists. A very big, noisy playground where people who hold centrist views will find they have no voice.

What space will the Guardian , the BBC or in the pensions world, Steve Webb and Jo Cumbo have, to promote their information? What an opportunity for those who have less pleasant opportunities to promote theirs?

Like a sauce that is intensified in flavour, the slow boil of intolerance on twitter could reduce its output to a bitter and pungent potion of discontent.

I hope this doesn’t happen , but fear it will. After more than 15 years using it, I fear it is now doing very little good for me. My searches are now confined to a handful of people I want to hear from, my utterances on twitter get an ever diminishing percentage of my reads.

There is as yet no medium to replace twitter, though there are pretenders.

Lots of people leaving X
Would you consider cross posting in BlueSky?

— Al Klein (@Al_Klein_1) August 12, 2024

Interestingly, my calls on South West Trains to help passengers got action in the past. Nowadays they get ignored. Twitter is no longer a place of interaction by South West Trains , merely a bulletin board for public service announcements.

This I think is the heart of its problem. The long and complex conversations that made it a place where views were shared and formed, seem a thing of the past. Instead, Twitter is a place of revelation , a drop and go zone which leaves it a minefield of unexploded bombs. When bombs do explode, they are destructive not constructive.

This is what you get when a platform loses its sense of being social and reverts to having the single voice of an overly powerful editor. I fear that Twitter’s spirit is dead and has been replaced with the dead hand of extremist intolerance.

If it gets to the point that people start talking about the “kind of people who use X” and I don’t think we are far from it, then middle of the road twitter users like me, will take down their accounts and go and do something less toxic. I don’t suspect that this would be a victory for free-speech, though it would give a lot of people the right to day ” I told you so!”