Leaving Twitter Is Not a Virtue—But Staying Isn’t Either

Some users say they’re staying on the platform for a higher purpose. But is that the only reason?

This is a subscriber-only edition of Humans Being, a newsletter that unearths deeper meanings in pop culture.

When I signed my first book deal in 2020, my publisher called me to discuss my personal brand. It was one of those conversations that writers tend to dislike, less about the creative process and more about the landscape of media and the business of publishing. He didn’t say it so bluntly at first, but he eventually landed on one of his main points: Authors are products. Publishing a memoir meant selling a public narrative of who I am, and my “author platform”—an industry term for a writer’s public-facing persona—is my storefront.

I could tell that he’d had this conversation with other writers before, and that he was hoping to get ahead of my objections. To someone like me, being a “brand” feels gross. Self-promotion does not come naturally to me, and praising my own work feels immodest. But my publisher’s business is based on selling products, and whether I like it or not, so is my career. My “author platform” was critical.

I still have the spreadsheet I made after that call, analyzing the health of my author platform. I listed my personal website. I added my unambitious social-media accounts: Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. I listed the publications I write for: Lifehacker, Black Nerd Problems, The Atlantic. I listed miscellaneous platforms and communities: Discord, Twitch, a sizable podcast. And then I got to work on updating them and making a plan for participating in them more actively.

I’m a brand, I told myself. I have to build an audience. For better or worse, a lot depends on it.

One of the platforms I targeted was Twitter. I started tweeting more and reading analytics, and I began caring about getting the blue verification checkmark. I grew my number of followers. I promoted my book and advanced my career.

Lately, Twitter has descended into chaos, and if you spend any time on the platform, you’ve likely seen the debate about whether to keep using it or leave for Mastodon, Hive, or any number of other alternatives. These conversations come with the sensationalism you might expect, including predictions about how soon the site will crash and whether the company will go bankrupt, and conspiracies about its owner’s goals. For the sake of my sanity, I personally choose to look at Twitter’s predicament as a win-win. If the site survives, I can continue to benefit from my efforts and the small audience I worked to build; if the site implodes, I’m free from caring about having a Twitter following at all. But in all of these conversations, one kind of navel gazing has crawled under my skin: My least favorite thing about Twitter right now is the people with large followings explaining why they’re staying without fully admitting that they have a personal interest in keeping Twitter popular.

They’re a brand. They have to build an audience. For better or worse, a lot depends on it.

There are different levels of disingenuity in these “Why I’m staying” posts. At their worst, the explanations frame staying on Twitter as a form of political resistance. In one recent tweet, the journalist and author George Monbiot (more than half a million followers) wrote, “Don’t yield territory to fascists. We stay and fight to ensure that Twitter remains a place where we can learn and organise.”

Some explanations are less exaggerated, but still fall short in acknowledging their self-interest. In The Washington Post, the writer Karen Attiah (over 200,000 followers) wrote a column called “Why I’m Not Leaving Twitter.” In it, she explains that despite Twitter being “a snake pit catering to the worst of human impulses,” it’s still an invaluable tool for activism and building communities. Many other popular Twitter personalities share this explanation. It’s the cultural version of the “too big to fail” argument—If Twitter fails, the thinking goes, there’s nothing that can replace it.

In Vanity Fair, Molly Jong-Fast shared the same sentiment in her reason for staying: There’s simply no viable alternative. But her story included a confession that is often missing from altruistic-sounding arguments and limited-character tweets. “The platform has been incredibly good to me … My hours and hours on the platform were rewarded with over a million followers,” she wrote.

And there’s the rub: It’s hard to trust culturally influential people about the need for Twitter when their influence is tied to Twitter’s survival. It’s not wrong for someone to want to keep the audience they built. Building a following and surviving as a personal brand is a lot of work. But it’s disingenuous to pretend there’s a glorious purpose to staying on Twitter, one that goes beyond a meaningful personal and professional self-interest. People should simply stay on Twitter if they want, and leave if they want.

I didn’t enjoy that conversation with my publisher, but it led me to accept the role that social media will play in my life so long as I stay in my career. Social media is a competitive sport, and there’s a scoreboard. Those of us with lower scores might be happy to reset to zero or start a new game elsewhere. Those of us who are winning may want to keep playing. But if you don’t need to play, I hope you do whatever you want. And I hope you choose not to listen to those of us who have to stay in the game.

***

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being, about masculinity and The Great British Bake Off. My favorite response came from John, who wrote, “You should know that your version of masculinity was, indeed, common in parts of Southern California in the mid-to-late ’70s.  ‘Men’s Groups’ were formed there (mine was associated with Jim Woods at Studio Watts Workshop) and flourished for a while … The sharing and the kidding was very similar to what you and your buddies do. I’m glad to hear such versions are still happening … probably more than you know.”