Logging Off the Sewer

My Break-Up with Musks's Hellsite - and an Invitation to Starve the Beast

Last night, it finally happened. Something that many people, very rightly pointed out, came to pass.

I told Twitter/X to go fuck itself.

I’ve been internally, since moving my long-form writing to Bearly Politics in June, debating my presence on the hellsite, but early yesterday evening, I finally decided that I just don’t feel like feeding the machine that keeps spitting bile back at me my time or my money.

The post that tipped it?

It wasn’t a post about Gaza that had a thousand people shouting “anti-semite” at me, or Brexit that was followed by hundreds of people writing all about their “sovirinity” and how the economic damage we’ve been subject to over the past five years has been worth it.

No, no. I literally just said, I am happy to pay a bit more in tax to scrap the two-child benefit cap. That was it. A fairly morally beige stance that would have passed pretty much uncommented on if it was done on a platform that didn’t give the vibes of a love-child of Ayn Rand, Enoch Powell and a thousand angry sewer rats.

Within a few minutes, my notifications had turned into the usual slurry of racism, homophobia, class contempt and that very retro flavour of homophobia that I thought we had left behind somewhere between Section 28 and dial-up modems.

And then came the reply that was the proverbial straw that sent the overburdened camel straight into spinal surgery. A blue-tick account with the terribly on brand name “Thick Willy” popped up with:

At first I was just amazed with how in three lines he had managed to be homophobic, racist and stigmatising about HIV - like he had just done a speedrun of 80’s pub bigotry, algorithmically delivered into a conversation.

Now, my normal strategy with things like these are to call someone “Petal” or “Peanut”, deliver some sass, mute the account in question and swiftly move on with my day. I have had far worse from much better people, and compared to the number of death threats (of which I receive so many on a weekly basis I’ve started subconsciously filing them by theme), this was mild.

But it was where I decided I was done. It was the rapidly dawning realisation that X as a platform is designed to push this exact kind of putrid nonsense straight into my face and keep it there, because, above all, outrage is profitable - and more than that, I’m providing the raw materials to manufacture it with.

My account performance metrics potentially make the point better than my exhaustion does though. Over the past twelve months, my little Bear account had built up about 119.9m impressions, with around five million engagements over that same time. Drill down a bit and you get 2.3 million likes, 375,000 reposts, 61,500 bookmarks, 15,300 shares and - the bit that really matters - 186,800 comments.

Spread those comments over a year, and it works out to around 3,600 comments a week (or 514 a day). On any given post that goes even semi-viral, easily (at a minimum) 60% of the responses would be pure, unadulterated hatred.

That works out to around 112,000 hostile replies across the year - so about 2,100 a week or 300 a day - every day. Can you imagine opening your front door every morning, walking out and having three hundred people shouting slurs, bigotry and conspiracy nonsense at you on your way to work and while you check in on your phone every now and then between meetings? That’s not a conversation or debate anymore - it’s a damned firing squad with (questionable) punctuation.

This is not completely subjective or down to my own sensitivities either, because research published in February of this year showed that hate speech on X increased by roughly 50% after Musk bought it and… stayed there. Not a spike and then a return to normality - a new baseline. The worst of categories - transphobic slurs, racist garbage, homophobic bile - all rose, and because the platform is powered by those sweet, addictive clicks and views, those rancid blurts into the internet that we now call posts weren’t just allowed to exist, they were rewarded. Likes on posts that were pretty much just pure hate-speech went up by about 70%, so the algorithm didn’t just decide it would tolerate someone sounding like Jim Davidson on meth, it would hand it a damned megaphone and a centre stage spot.

The matter of misinformation is also not to be looked over, because it has become, to put it mildly, fucking rampant. It used to take actual effort to find disinformation on Twitter - you had to set up dashboards and Boolean searches to track down untruths, whereas nowadays all you have to do is open the app or just go onto the owner of the platform’s account to be covered in a deluge of untruth. And that’s a sort of a big issue, considering that Musk himself has become one of the platform’s most prolific spreader of misleading or false posts, with 50 of them during the 2024 election amassing 1.2 billion views at the time.

Misinformation spreaders themselves have been massive beneficiaries of this new age of feelings over facts we find ourselves in having seen their collective popularity grow by an average of 42% per tweet since Musk walked into the headquarters while European fact-checkers (i.e. people who actually know what’s true) found that “not a single one considered that X takes the disinformation problem seriously.” The platform binned its relationship with professional fact-checkers, shutdown many of its international offices and left fact-checkers with absolutely no one to turn to when the issue raised its ugly head.

Meanwhile on the really serious stuff - actual crimes - the floor completely gave way. The child-safety partnership, which included the UK-Safer-Internet-Centre and multiple bodies with actual child-safety experience? Gone.

A charity that provided the expertise and software that could pick up and actually address the escalating issue of CSA on Twitter? Contract ended.

Since then, researchers from Alliance4Europe with far stronger stomachs than mine have document whole networks sharing staggering amounts of CSA content and found that enforcement was pretty much non-existent in a harrowing report that would leave any functioning human being cold to their core.

The infrastructure of Twitter alone has become a hellscape, but even more importantly, the psychological impact it has on us as users is, to say the least, inexcusable.

People tracked by studies in real time using Twitter found that it reliably lowers your mood - spiking up outrage, ramping up polarisation and boredom at the same time and leaving you feeling even worse off than when you first opened the app. Teenagers and people who were already struggling with their mental health were hit by far the hardest.

And the sad thing is, none of us need a peer-reviewed paper to know that this is true - I can feel my shoulders up around my ears after even five minutes of scrolling.

The arguments against a presence are, to say the least, completely overwhelming, so the natural question, and one that I’ve been asked a few times over the past day or so has been “what took you so long to bin it?”

And I think it’s the same reason as for many other people. Community. Reach. That incredibly seductive idea that if you can just get through todays overwhelming shouting match there might just be a meaningful conversation waiting for you on the other side. I’ve also met many brilliant, wonderful and kind people off Twitter, some of them even in person. I’ve somehow managed to build relationships with journalists, authors and politicians that I admire. When the platform works, it’s magical - tossing a thought into the void on your commute and having 40,000 people bounce it around by lunchtime is intoxicating, exhilarating and pretty damned fun as well, but it also hides the cost.

Because the cost is that you’re a willing participant - however reluctantly - in a machine that’s designed to reward the worst instincts in us. I’m a grown man who writes because he likes doing so - I can choose to not perform in the rage-economy anymore. I should choose to do so - and to be even more blunt, I don’t want my words generating ad inventory alongside people calling me a “walking petri dish.”

Because while Twitter was, once upon a time, long ago, a marketplace of ideas, it is now no more than a sewer with a good PR team.

I spent a long time justifying my presence to myself that I could act as a counterbalance on the site - but the idea that Twitter is salvageable is naive when you consider the realities - outrage posts keep people scrolling, scrolling serves up more ads, ads bring in money. Firing moderators and replacing verification with pay-to-boost stickers lowers costs and raises “engagement.” It’s the business model, and the business model is harm - and the harm isn’t a bug, it’s a blueprint.

So, I’m out.

I won’t be deleting my account or handles - I’m not particularly keen on someone with an agenda impersonating BearlyPolitics or Iratus - but they are going into hibernation. If you do still have any interest in what I have to shout into the void, I’ll be saying it all here or on BlueSky on @bearlypolitics.co.uk where the block button still works and the feed doesn’t auto-inject rage right into your veins for sport.

I will, of course, miss many of the good people on Twitter, and I’ll take a small knock to my writing income, but keeping a revenue stream flowing into a system that thinks of bigotry as growth as a viable or ethical strategy isn’t something I can rationalise anymore.

If you’re unsure about your place on Twitter, I’m not here to shame you into leaving - I stayed past the point I should have because I kept convincing myself that the abuse was a price worth paying to discuss politics online, and I believed that leaving the space would allow the worst people “win.” However, the worst people already own and operate the space, and you don’t defeat them by propping up their business model with your attention, content or effort.

You defeat them by starving the beast and building a community elsewhere, even if it might take time to do so. This means acknowledging the difference between sharing your thoughts on a toxic waste dump and moving the conversation to a room with walls and windows.

All of this leads me back to that one response - the one that finally made me say, “no thank you, fuck this for a game of soldiers.”

It isn’t because it was the worst thing anyone has ever said to me - not by a long shot - but because I saw, in a banal and disturbing way, how the system had worked as designed: a paid-verification account had been incentivised to post something vile for attention and visibility, and its hatred had been piped directly into my eyes because a platform’s owners had made decisions that reward that type of behaviour.

“Counterpoint: you are a perverted, demented Communist and walking petri dish…”

Racist jab. HIV Smear. Confusion about what a Communist actually is. Three for the price of one. A slot machine of hatred playing out in visibility, and right underneath it, the little counters flicking up:

Likes. Reposts. Views.

Ka-Ching!

I don’t want to be part of this anymore - to wake up and negotiate with a damned algorithm about whether my day is going to be filled with ideas or abuse.

I refuse to help normalise a place where child-safety protections have all but disappeared and the owner is so incredibly thin skinned that he once juiced his own tweets by a factor of a thousand because someone else got more attention than he did.

This is my clean break from the hellhole.

My writing continues - and will likely become even more prolific now that I’m not constantly inundated by notifications calling me a Socialist Cuck. My arguments for politics that treats people like, well, people will continue. I’ll keep being happy to pay taxes for kids I’ll never meet, because that’s what society does, and I’ll continue to have conversations, not pile-ons, with people on BlueSky and Bearly Politics where we can disagree with one another without having to don full body armour and a set of scimitars.

If X still works for you, great. I get it. Truly. But, if you’re reading this and recognising the shape and feel of your own exhaustion - that jaw clench when you see a comment you just can’t let go of, the doom scroll, the way a stranger’s abuse follows you around all day like a bad smell - know this: you are allowed to stop. You’re allowed to log out and find and build somewhere better.

I’m going to try it - and it already feels like a lung full of crisp, cold autumn air after a room filled with smoke.

I’ll miss some of you in my feed - but I’d rather miss you than be complicit.

Come find me elsewhere. Twitter is no longer a town square, it’s a business model - and I’m done paying.

Best,
Bear

---

I’ve had a few people asking me how they can access the archive if they can’t afford a paid subscription, and I’m very happy to clarify. If you’re on UC, a pensioner, student or journalist (or just a bit broke at the moment), please email me on iratusursusmajor@gmail.com with “Subscription Request” in the subject line and I’ll sort you out.

If you would like to support Bearly Politics with a subscription, you can click on the below button.

As ever, thank you for all the incredible support, I am very grateful.