It is with sadness that I announce my departure from Twitter.
I say this a bit sarcastically and definitely dramatically, but also with actual mourning. Twitter has been my go-to social media platform for news, pop culture, commentary, and lots and lots of doom scrolling for 13 years.
I joined way back in the optimistic, hopeful times of 2009. This was Twitter at its simplest with users sharing thoughts in 140 characters or less from web browsers or as hard it may be to believe, texts. Retweeting was manually copying the text of an original tweet. The fail whale was a familiar fiend, and I could see every post from the people I followed in sequential order.
I quickly learned that Twitter was a way to gain insights and connections in my work life, too. The first time I used Twitter professionally was at the conclusion of a college student advertising competition that I ran. During the post-event wrap up and Q&A, the competition’s sponsor was tracking feedback from the students in real time and invited me to take a look. The students’ unfiltered comments were an insightful addition to what I was seeing and hearing in the room.
The next year, I switched jobs and created one of the first Twitter accounts for the National Institutes of Health. I convinced leadership that this was a good way to connect early career research scientists to NIH and help foster their careers by alerting them to funding and professional development opportunities. My goal was to break down institutional barriers and help researchers from diverse backgrounds succeed at getting their research funded. This is social media at its best — connections that prove fruitful and foster new ideas and access.
In the following years, social offered more options to connect and even reach audiences who didn’t directly follow you, and I joined larger government messaging campaigns where social was one of the key ways to communicate both organically and paid. My first general public campaign focused on getting people to stop smoking. It was my first time overseeing a large paid social campaign, and the first time I saw a wealth of negative comments in response to proven facts like smoking can kill you.
That experience was just a sign of things to come. When promoting the 2020 Census, my team had to actively combat “misinformation” and other messaging that could and did prove harmful to getting an accurate count, especially from immigrants and communities of color. We used social listening to follow online conversations and learn and address the falsehoods circulating about the count. My team also had ongoing conversations with the major platforms in an effort to ensure accurate information would outpace rumor.
After the census, NIH once again became a client, and I worked on community outreach to counteract COVID-19 misinformation that spread like wildfire on social platforms. Increasingly, people believed and shared alternative facts that seemed outlandish (e.g. the needles used for vaccines also inserted tracking microchips).
These more recent experiences are why I’m skeptical of leaders who prize “free speech” over valuable content moderation. Too often, “free speech” is a euphemism for traditional gatekeeping and age old ways to maintain the social, political, and economic structures that have fostered inequities and discrimination. Instead of inviting diversity of thought and lifestyles from people who have existed at the margins, “free speech” gives those who resist change or evolution a way to stifle diverse ideas and lifestyles. While on the one hand Elon Musk states his platform will not become a free for all, his political misinformation post from this weekend shows those assurances and his actions are misaligned. To paraphrase Dr. Maya Angelou and Oprah when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
