A Tepid Twitter Storm – If You Don’t Like Twitter, You Have The Right To Leave

Matthew Steeples suggests those getting overexcited about Twitter should just get over their ever-so-sanctimonious selves; at a time of strife and strikes, the tepid Twitterati do need to remember that they do have the right to leave

Some will hate me for being so dastardly to dare to say it, but I’m going to say it anyway: Twitter is something I find useful and it is something I do actually like. This is not some kind of monster that somehow controls you, it is a webspace where you can come and go as you please. Nobody forces you to arrive and nobody forces you to go – unless, of course, you go completely overboard.

Twitter is a social medium where I discover all sorts of information (some of it admittedly nuanced, some of it most definitely nonsensical), it is somewhere that has introduced me to new contacts and friends even (some of whom I’ve still yet to meet in reality; how bizarre is that?) and, most of all, it’s a completely wacky melting pot of everything from the mundane and moronic to the utterly marvelous.

Prince Harry’s temper tantrum prone supplier of private jets and a crooner anything but loved by the late Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Elton John, may have decided to silence his twittering spam last week. Boo hoo, diddums, does anyone care? Equally, a man I had personally wanted to like, but found to be the ultimate dinner party bore, Stephen Fry, has gone also. Nobody’s loss, I’d argue; a great actor, but sadly a crashing snob who talks only about his ever-so-pompous self. Next!

Facetious Fry cited something or other about Piers Morgan (how predictable, yawn, next) being part of his reasoning and this morning The Guardian predictably got into a hissy fit about the platform too. Aside from banging on about the clearly disgusting death threats faced by the likes of like-him-or-loathe-him Dr Anthony Fauci and the shocking abuse of the heroic rescuer of a boys soccer team who’d been trapped in a cave in Thailand on Twitter, an unnamed writer for the paper focused on what has ‘happened’ to the social media channel’s now former “top safety official,” someone-you’ve-likely-never-heard-of named Yoel Roth.

Roth presided over Twitter in the days that it went ‘woke’ and he is now paying the price given its change of ownership. After having initially, somewhat surprisingly, retained the support of Elon Musk after his purchase of the medium, the 34-year old has been ‘cancelled’ and supposedly forced to flee his “Bay Area mansion” after it was revealed that parts of his “thesis suggested letting children access [the] gay hook-up app Grindr.”

In his most recent tweet, this self-declared “human” with a “PhD from Penn” piously pontificated: “You can armchair quarterback specific choices and mistakes all day, but the real work is figuring out how to make principled decisions when all you have are bad options,” but what he forgets is that under the regime where he censored and cancelled others, he became a very, very rich young man and now the worm that filled his pockets has turned.

Called out as “gleeful” over his “huge sway” in deciding which posts and people could be removed and which could stay during his tenure at Twitter, I join those in saying good riddance to the antithesis of free speech that is Yoel Roth. It’s time, for now, to celebrate the new era of whatever comes next at Twitter and, quite frankly, if you don’t like it, you must remember that no one is forcing you to stay. You do have the right to leave; now, let the birds fly.

Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.