Opinion
Twitter is dead, but what about me?
By Rebecca Shaw
Twitter is dead. If we didn’t know it for sure before, the last few weeks have confirmed it. It’s a shambles. It’s glitchy, full of ads, and becoming progressively more unusable. Elon tried changing the entire thing to “X”, like a teenager trying to rebrand because nobody at his new school knows he’s a loser yet, but with every new decision the app is hemorrhaging advertisers and users.
Twitter is deserted and dusty, with jackals (blue tick buyers) fighting over its stripped bare carcass. It is like the wild wild west, except in this case the west is run by egomaniacal nerds who were given too much power because their families have emeralds and they make computers go. They were never meant to have this kind of social status, and this much power.
Twitter’s downfall is bad news for me – and people like me.Credit: Janet Briggs
I’ve seen people say that Twitter dying is overall a positive thing for society. That is hard to argue with, especially now that it sucks so bad. There is little positive left on the site. Engagement has dropped, fun has been sucked out, racists and transphobes are thriving. The end of Twitter is good for society, when you look at it like that… but what about ME? The ways in which it is bad for me in particular are both personal and professional.
I have been on Twitter for an embarrassingly long time. I have been on Twitter through huge changes in my life, through deaths, job losses, job gains, moves interstate, moves overseas, first dates, last dates, and first dates that were also last dates. I have met pretty much all of my best friends through Twitter. I met my girlfriend on Twitter. I have built a community there, amongst the freaks and weirdos. I am old now and have enough friends, but I think in this current global landscape, people are finding it even harder to make connections. Twitter has always had a huge capacity to help with that.
Twitter does hold the worst of people, but it also has some of the very best, all swimming around in a terrible stew. It will undoubtedly be a loss for many on a personal level, and will make lots of people’s lives lonelier. But on the other hand, if lots of terrible trolls are forced offline, they will hopefully have time to take up another hobby, perhaps badminton or going to live in the sewers.
Twitter is also the reason I have a career. I am a fat lesbian who grew up in regional Queensland in a working-class family that had zero connection to the arts or any creative industry whatsoever. I had written things for myself since I was a kid, and had hopes of being a writer, but had zero knowledge about how I would even begin to make that happen.
Then, Twitter came along. I made jokes, I wrote rants about things, I got some followers. One of them, Jane Gilmore (direct all your hate mail about me to her), saw one of my rants about lesbians on TV, and asked me to turn it into an article for her publication. It went well, and I started writing regularly.
My now good friend James Colley saw my tweets and my funny writing, and asked me to write for SBS’s The Backburner, my first comedy gig. That’s where everything started to kick off. My writing and jokes got me followers, my followers and attention got me opportunities, and so on and so forth. I have a career in comedy, in writing, in TV. It has had ups and downs, and I’m mostly just scraping by, but I’m able to say my job is being a writer. It’s what I dreamed of, and I only achieved it because of Twitter.
This fact has only been reinforced after working in TV and comedy, which means often being surrounded by people who grew up with money, or connections, or money that got them connections. They went to the right schools, the right unis, and they got to take advantage of those relationships. That isn’t to say they don’t deserve it, or haven’t worked hard, or aren’t talented. But there’s a really clear path that exists for some people, and doesn’t exist for others, based on nothing but luck.
Twitter has been an important alternative path, and it has helped level the playing field. Marginalised people have had more of a chance to make their voices heard, unencumbered by gatekeeping, the tired traditions, the limitations put on their success. For people whose work and ideas might never have been seen otherwise, Twitter has provided an opportunity to make a mark. It has allowed editors to commission and writers to be commissioned. The end of Twitter means yet again shrinking the pool of who gets to make art, who gets to speak, who gets to be seen. The pool is in danger of becoming a bath.
Elon Musk, looking really pleased with himself.Credit: AP
We cannot afford to make access to the creative industries even harder. It cannot be made harder for people of colour and the working class and the queers and the fat people who don’t fit the narrow parameters required to get you through the front door. It can’t be made harder than it already is for the chronically ill and depressed and the weirdos and the freak geniuses to make it, the ones who the people in charge don’t “get”, or have never tried to. The ones who can’t access the same system as everyone else.
These are all the sorts of people who have used Twitter to share their work, and to build an audience. That is no longer going to be an option. A large group of people are about to lose a major income source. People like me who rely on Twitter to share work, and get work, are about to lose important connective tissue.
It’s not just going to impact artists and writers and comedians. Ryan Broderick from Buzzfeed pointed out that the end of Twitter is going to also cause a creative drain in journalism, media, and activism, because Twitter has allowed for people in those industries to have their stuff seen before it has to be sanded down to fit into what an organisation thinks it needs. Academics in his replies claimed that it will impact them too, as Twitter allows for early-stage scholars from non-elite unis to have their work engaged with by senior scholars and media.
I know it’s extremely hard to feel empathy for comedians and academics, but the ones who are going to be most impacted by this are the ones who have already had to fight harder to make their careers happen. The people who have always had a head start will still have a head start, and without Twitter giving others a chance to catch up, those are the voices that will continue to succeed, and get opportunities. If the winners are pre-determined, for many people there will be no point entering the race.
None of this is good. It’s not good for creators, it’s not good for art, and it’s not good for you, if you are interested in continuing to see new and unique perspectives in the content you consume every day. I am not bemoaning the end of Twitter for myself, I am established enough that I can hopefully survive, but I can see what it’s going to mean for emerging creators, and future generations of creatives. I can see that we are going to lose so many important voices, as it becomes even harder to build a career in an already extremely difficult landscape.
Whatever will happen is going to happen, so I am trying to find the positive side of Twitter’s slow death – maybe now I’ll be able to remember what a book is.
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