Beyond Selidor

Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is Tell Us about a Personal Win.



Mine is something that exists on the bordery, blurred space between fandom and personal lives: last year I left Twitter, and I didn't join any similar social media platform to replace it.

It sounds like such a silly and minor thing, but the burden it had been placing on my mental health and just general ability to manage my emotions was immense. I would see things pass by my feed that left me enraged and despairing for days (usually people quote-retweeting terrible things in order to argue with them, but sometimes just people sharing tweets whose content aligned with their own beliefs on a particular issue — but the tweet originated from someone who had otherwise terrible beliefs on other issues, or from someone I knew to be a harasser or bully — would be enough to send me into a spiral of despair*), and it would completely suck all the joy out my life and render me incapable of doing anything. Worst of all was when I saw people I otherwise liked or admired sharing what I knew to be blatant misinformation, or deliberately selective information, and the various large-scale disinformation campaigns that I witnessed unfold and take effect. This sort of thing genuinely rendered me incapable of doing anything (exercising, reading, cleaning, writing, non-work projects) that wasn't immediately essential for my survival/ability to earn money for days or weeks at a time. I was locked in this endless cycle of spiralling despair/rage/inactivity, shaking myself out of it by avoiding Twitter for long blocks of time, rinse and repeat.

By the end, the value of being on the platform (which for me was getting information and context on unfolding current affairs events from people who weren't normally afforded a permanent space in English-language mainstream media — Arab Spring activists, Belarusian opposition politicians, refugees trapped in Australia's offshore detention facilities, Ukrainian journalists, Hong Kong dissidents and so on) was by far outweighed by all the stuff that so debilitated me. I remember when I finally had wiped my entire 15-year archive of tweets clean, and deleted the account for good, vague conversations about some new round of SFF publishing drama started circulating on Instagram, I had no idea of the details, and to find out I would have had to have joined BlueSky — and I didn't join, and felt this sense of sheer, overwhelming relief that I wasn't party to whatever endless petty infighting was going to unfold over the next few weeks.

Unfortunately, I am seeing similar waves of large-scale, deliberate (geo)political disinformation campaigns circulating (and finding willing root) on Instagram, and I possibly need to do a cull of the accounts I'm following there, but it certainly feels a bit more manageable, and I have no regrets about leaving Twitter.

I'll end this post with a couple of links. After mentioning in my previous post about the Hugos kerfuffle that I feel people in democratic countries misunderstand how state censorship tends to operate, Ada Palmer (who is writing an academic book on the history of censorship) wrote a fantastic post explaining how it does tend to operate. I think it's definitely worth a read.

Edited to add a new link: wearing_tearing has started up watcherscouncil, a comm for all things Buffyverse. The description is: a community for anyone interested in embarking on a Buffyverse rewatch and discussing other Buffyverse-related content. Join and subscribe if it sounds like your kind of thing!

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*I'm too much of a journalists' daughter: it matters just as much to me who is saying something and why they might be saying it, not just what they're saying in that one single instance. But unfortunately I feel this is a futile, losing battle: my impression is that most people using social media treat the contents of any individual tweet/post as something that exists in complete isolation from any broader context. Does the content of that individual tweet/post align with their own beliefs on an issue? If yes, they'll share it, even if every other thing that person ever posted is in service of an extremely objectionable agenda — but most people won't have attempted to investigate the broader social media output of a person whose individual tweet/post they want to share, and will therefore never see this broader context.

I mean, I saw people sharing what appeared to be livetweeted breaking news about protests in China that came from a pro-Orban/pro-Polish far right propagandist. I'm currently seeing people share material in support of Palestinians in Gaza that comes from individuals who a) were supportive of Assad in Syria, b) regularly give interviews on Russian and Iranian state TV, including one individual who mocked and psychologically tormented Ukrainian prisoners of war on TV broadcasts and who is to my knowledge the only British citizen actually sanctioned by the British government in relation to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, c) have denied the Uighur genocide, etc etc. As I say, it feels entirely fruitless to fight against this, but all the above makes me want to lie on the floor in despair. Forget fannish wishlists: if I had one wish for 2024, it would be for people to stop, investigate the broader output background of the people whose pithy posts or emotionally affecting Instagram videos they're poised to share, and only share said material once they're convinced that the person's broader outlook beyond the content of that individual post is one they're comfortable endorsing.

In the end, the thing about Musk deactivating Starlink connectivity near the Crimean coast during a crucial Ukrainian military mission was the final straw. I feel grimly amused that this was the ethical line too far, the point at which I decided continuing to use Twitter violated my own personal morality, when there were many previous moments which could have brought me to this point.

It's a bit easier for me, as I've never really felt at home on Twitter at any point. I joined the platform in 2009, as a reward to myself for completing my MPhil (hilariously, at the time, all its biggest evangelists were touting the platform as somewhere fun and friendly, with none of the toxicity and abuse of blog comments sections; that sentiment — which I saw repeated again and again about other platforms — led me to conclude that it's the small, relatively connected initial user base, with roughly shared political and cultural values, that creates these 'fun and friendly' atmospheres, rather than anything magical about specific platforms), and kind of drifted vaguely along there ever since.

The good relationships with people I've had on Twitter are relationships that (with a handful of exceptions), were built and continue either in person or on other online platforms, so leaving Twitter will not rupture those connections. The relationships I made solely through Twitter were (with a handful of exceptions) not perceived in the same way by both parties; for the most part, I viewed them as being much more meaningful and important than the other people did — something that was brought home to me a few years ago with painful clarity in circumstances that still cause me a lot of hurt when I think about them. This was nobody's fault, it was just mismatched assumptions, but for this reason I don't feel much grief about the withering of connections that will result from me leaving the platform. They will just become other context-specific friendships that didn't survive the removal of that very specific context.

I've known for about a month that I wanted to leave. The realisation came to me when a bunch of people started vague-tweeting about some SFF publishing drama, all explanations of the drama were locked on threads on Bluesky, I realised I had no idea what was going on, and I realised that I had no interest in finding out. I'm free! I thought.

I'm not, at this point, moving to either Bluesky or Mastodon (which is where most people seem to have decamped). I'm burnt out by leaping immediately to a new platform which might be the next big thing, for fear of missing out. My needs are met quite well by the combination of other platforms (plus in-person social circles) I currently use, and I want to continue nesting in the slower-paced, text-based, comment- and discussion-heavy internet.

The sole thing I will miss, and which really can't be replicated with ease, was the access — in one place, in English, or with a fairly good instant translation tool — to expert commentary and analysis on the politics and cultures whose perspectives don't get much focus within English-language mainstream media. I followed, for example, stateless Arab Spring activists, Kurdish refugees livetweeting from within Australia's offshore detention centres, Turkish journalists, Belorusian civil society activists, military commentators providing detailed analyses of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, academics from Uzbekistan, and so on. It made it easy for me to gain at least a superficial understanding of the context behind breaking news in a wide variety of regions, as well as events that were important locally but not making the headlines globally. I've tried to sign up for newsletters (and import the newsletter feeds into Dreamwidth) from many of these people when I can, but obviously that's not possible in every case, and my own understanding will suffer. But it's not worth it to stick around just for this, and I've always been a bit suspicious of things that are too easy — so maybe it's good that I'll now be forced to work a bit harder to gain understanding and perspective of current affairs in other countries.

So now it just remains for me to delete the relevant account. I'm slowly going through other platforms and removing reference to my Twitter account, deleting the Twitter widget embedded on my book review blog, and so on. The next step will be to use a tool to delete all tweets, replies, retweets and likes (as a friend who did this recently said, I don't trust Musk not to use my supposedly 'deleted' Twitter account to train his new AI tool), and finally deleting the account in question.

It will be the end of an era, I suppose, but an era about which my feelings are decidedly mixed.

I am not generally someone who finds flashy public displays of individual charity (or charity by a business) to be laudable — my opinion is that if charity is necessary, it's a sign that a government has failed in its responsibility. Failing to prevent children from going hungry to me demonstrates that a government in a comparably wealthy country has utterly failed in its most basic responsibilities.

It is not the job of a young footballer to essentially shame businesses and local councils into stepping in and providing the free meals for children that this shameless government refuses to provide — I find Marcus Rashford's campaign extremely admirable, but the fact that he needs to do such a thing is a sign of the government's moral failure, rather than being uplifting or inspiring.

That being said, Rashford's Twitter feed (MarcusRashford) is making my heart overflow with emotion today.

(Title quote comes from a moment which is probably in my top ten favourite fictional scenes ever, in Philip Pullman's The Tiger in the Well, when my favourite fictional socialist revolutionary Dan Goldberg manages to talk down a violent mob by appealling to their sense of logic and justice. Leaving aside whether such acts of persuasion are anything other than wishful thinking, I most certainly agree with the sentiment that children should never be acceptable collateral damage of decisions made by the privileged and powerful.)