ExTwitter Cleanup

With recent political events surrounding ExTwitter’s owner, I wanted to take one extra step to terminate all relationships with this enterprise and, from my little corner of the Internet, stop supporting the actions of a technofacist king.

I joined Twitter a long time ago and left it also a long time ago. In 2017, with the transfer of a substantial part of my Twitter crowd to Mastodon, I also made the jump and barely looked back. By then, Twitter had been too toxic for me already. People would refer to it as “doomscrolling”, so the sudden popularity of a new and more ethical social network came at the right time for me.

For a while I kept running a cross-posting tool that linked some of my Mastodon activity to Twitter. I did this to try to show to my addicted and undecided Twitter friends that there is activity on Mastodon. But a few years later, I also stopped that activity. I do have doubts about the efficiency of cross-posting as an incentive to get people to move from one social network to another.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for an over-priced $44Bn (#lol), I was hesitating if I needed to do something more. I had already left. Some people were leaving Twitter for good. I wanted to help people move. Some were advising to stop using Twitter but to keep squatting their user handle, for historical and security reasons. Elon Musk was threatening to take over any unused user handle after a period of inactivity. It took me a while to decide what to do, but following Dan Phiffer’s lead, I turned my Twitter account into “protected” mode, making my past tweets private and preventing any new follower. I cleared my cookies and never logged in again.

Then Elon, emboldened by his $250M investment in Donald Trump 2024 campaign, used the most disgusting political signal of the XXth century in front of a crowd, twice. The media reaction disgusted me even further. It made me even more uncomfortable knowing I was still maintaining a dormant account on his platform. Then I found out some people with a larger following than me had completely erased their account. Weren’t they worried about security? Why was I so worried about security or impersonation? I’ve had already eliminated all the backlinks to my Twitter profile from all the online social profiles I could find. I thought it was time to let this all go. So I completely deleted my Twitter account.

As a last step, since linking and linking back is the main currency on the Internet, I just went through the hundreds of posts on this blog that had links to Twitter and broke all of them. I did keep the links in plaintext where it was necessary, in order to allow people to find sources I’m crediting. But they don’t work as links anymore, so visitors and automated crawlers will not use them to increase the visibility of Twitter. I kept the handles of people I mentioned but stopped directly linking to their profile. Again, one can do the work of copy-pasting these handles in a Twitter search bar if they feel like it. In total, I may have removed a hundred links. A small thing, I know. Will it precipitate Elon’s downhall? Don’t be ridiculous. Should you do the same too? I definitely encourage you so. It’s liberating, literally. Even if it’s not going to have any weight in the end, people will not exit my website through that hell hole because of me. And for that feeling, I’m thankful.

I think some news websites have started doing the same. I see articles now preferring to post a link to Bluesky, Reddit or Instagram than to post a link to Twitter. I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’m just being more attentive to these things now. But this is the web, where you link to is how you vote. If the saying suggests “consumers vote with their wallet”, internet citizens vote with their links. Make that a conscious vote, if you can.