Why I logged off Twitter for good: A personal reckoning with its descent into hate

Shout into the void, get zero likes, and still somehow feel attacked. But maybe zero likes is better than drowning in hate.

I haven’t posted on Twitter for a couple of years now; the majority of people that I knew on that platform have either abandoned it, or jumped ship. Including myself. I’m here, posting this here, instead of over there. And I’ve finally figured out why — Twitter seems like a dystopian hellscape. It’s a collection of the worst people, anonymous by design, shouting into their infernal echo chambers. It’s racist, xenophobic, and despairing. There’s too much hate being platformed on it in the name of free speech. It was always going to end up like this, but there was always this hope that maybe — just maybe — Twitter will survive the X-ification that Elon Musk unleashed upon it. How naive, we all were.

Every time I open it nowadays, it’s the same version of talking points over and over again — Muslims are terrorists, Islam is a cancer, brown folks are replacing European descendants. There are giant mega threads dedicated to utterly insane and xenophobic discourse about how “immigrants” have made areas “no-go”. It sounds unhinged and insane, but the collective echo chamber effect reinforces these beliefs over and over again, until they become part of your infernal and rabid psyche. And honestly, it’s a chicken and egg situation. Like Mehdi Hasan says, there was always a racism problem in the West, but it was hidden because it's common courtesy to not be a fucking race baiter. Well guess what? In the neofascist age that we’re living through, it’s become quite fashionable (and lucrative) to be an open racist and bigot. And it’s not just anon accounts fanning these flames, it’s congressmen too.

Of course this whole discourse is a pivot to distract away from their shortcomings, and how pathetic they really are. Charlie Kirk, Ted Cruz, Randy Fine to name but a few, are now so severely spewing Islamophobia, that it’s become their whole personality. They’re doing it because they don’t want people talking about their moral failings and shortcomings. They keep getting reamed in, but they double down. Because as I said earlier, it is now advantageous to be racist and xenophobic. The world is making that pivot, and these bigots want to get in on the ground floor.

The world is scary, but logging onto Twitter makes it feel 50 times worse, because all you’re subjected to repeatedly is how much you’re hated because you’re not a European descendant with the correct “genes”. The skin of your color is the defining characteristic of whether you’re worthy of any consideration, or if your value is relegated to the “subhuman” category. The whole setup is so broken. Instead of being hopeful and optimistic, we’re entering a doom spiral where everything feels hopeless and pessimistic. I don’t know how and where this cycle will end. In the meantime, log off Twitter. The xenophobia won’t magically go away, but at least you won’t have to worry about living with an existential crisis everyday.