Warning for strong language.
A year ago this week, I told Twitter to go fuck itself. That’s probably the simplest way I can put it.
For those of you who joined after I left, and there are probably about 2,000 of you, here’s how it started. I opened an account, I think it was July 2023, with the express purpose of shouting “crotch goblin” at Jacob Rees-Mogg, because he was being a proper Tory at the time. And when I say proper Tory, you know what I mean. The real cruelty, the unabashed cruelty, that the Tories are so good for.
I started my writing life as Iratus Ursus Major, the Big Angry Bear, all very Latin and, looking back, cringily intellectual. And then things started picking up, and picking up, and picking up. I gained significant numbers of followers, and before I knew it I was deeply entrenched in the world of Twitter.
When Twitter took over
I would spend hours every day trawling, fighting, being a proper online troll if I’m honest. I’d look at what a politician had said, repost or quote-tweet it. I’d get millions of views a week. At my peak, I think I got about 100 million views a year, which is insane for a guy who’s really just sat here with his second-hand MacBook and a propensity to become very verbose.
It all came to a head around the time when Musk took over, because Twitter really took a dive – a massive dive.
Outside of my Bear account, I’d actually been on Twitter since 2011. I’d always followed, always been on there, but I was definitely more of a lurker, very careful about what, if anything, I said. It really consumed me once I started creating content, and it just kept escalating. There was recognition from a couple of people too. I had a post liked by Nigella Lawson – still one of my proudest days. I managed to link up with Sangita Myska. I became friends with Carol Vorderman. I made huge inroads through all of this, and it grew my presence significantly.
So I do, if I’m being very honest, owe a fair bit to it.
The post that finally did it
But last year, around this time, I posted something completely innocuous, not meant to be particularly controversial, very much run-of-the-mill commentary. A guy going by Thickwilly responded with this:
Charming, right?
That was the post that pushed me over the edge. Last year was already a hard year, I was dealing with my dad’s failing health, and I was in an NHS role that was immensely and unstoppably demanding. I just hit an absolute wall, and I decided that if there was one thing that had to go, it was Twitter.
I realised there was absolutely no point sitting there getting abused constantly for no good reason. And I’ll be honest, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, without a doubt. The first bit was hard – really, really hard, because we do get addicted to it. I’ve got the divot in my right pinky to show just how addicted I was to my phone. There’s a particular kind of addiction that comes from being on Twitter, wanting to see what someone has to say, wanting to see the commentary around whatever the new political subject is, wanting to get angry, wanting to feel something.
I cut myself off pretty much immediately. I still held onto the account at that point, I just locked it down. I think I had something like 47,000 followers – which as a side note, I’ve always had a problem calling people who want to see my posts “followers”. It makes me feel like some sort of weird messiah in a death cult, but that’s beside the point.
I put everything on hold and switched over to Bluesky. I opened an Instagram account, a couple of others too. The only other ones I still use are Threads and Bluesky.
I genuinely missed it, though.
(Very luckily, it was around that point that I discovered Dungeons & Dragons, so I had a new thing to become obsessed over instead, and the less said about that the better, given I was up until 2am this morning painting seven paladins. Yes, I have become that guy.)
But ultimately, it was the best decision I could have made. My account stayed open, and I’d occasionally drop a Substack post on there for further distribution, but mentally, I saw an improvement within about a week. It’s amazing how much better your mental health can be when you’re not being called a filthy faggot a couple of times a day by some random account claiming to be in the Midlands but potentially sitting in a troll farm on the other side of the world.
Things haven’t got better since for Twitter, though. I did delete my main Twitter account in January this year, when Elon Musk’s AI started producing non-consensual sexual images of women and children. I remade an account under the same username, because I want to protect the @BearlyPolitics handle, it’s pretty important nobody hijacks it and pretends to be me, but I deleted the app off my phone and left it there.
Going back to X
Since January, I hadn’t been on Twitter at all until I went back onto that alt account a little while ago to have a look. And honestly, not a single thing has changed. Tom Harwood is still terribly confused about the fact that businesses close on Sundays and getting worked up about how it’s the decline of civilisation.
There’s Katharine Birbalsingh taking Hannah Spencer, the Green MP, to task because her local Beavers group asked her to take their toy beaver to Parliament and make a video about it, that is in between her hyperventilating at the fact that Meryl Streep will be voicing a pretend lion that lives in fucking Narnia and comparing it to the end of civilisation.
Isabel Oakeshott is still on a mass gaslighting campaign about the decline of the UK from Dubai, Adam Brooks is still getting worked up about anything that remotely resembles a position taken to the left of Enoch Powell and the whole site seems to revolve around the battle for the hearts and minds of racists being waged between Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage.
What struck me most when I briefly went back, though, wasn’t that Twitter was still petty. It was that the ugliness had become darker.
I’ve had the app on my phone for two weeks now, and I’m taking it off again today, because I can already feel myself falling back into the habit of checking it.
But I can’t help but worry that social media really is incredibly unregulated.
We had a period of a bit of self-regulation in the early 2020s, during Covid, where there was an effort made to get rid of misinformation, but since Mango Mussolini got into his second term, things have got a lot worse. There’s no pretence, on any social media platform except maybe Bluesky, of any real moderation.
And I do worry that the radicalisation happening online is speeding up significantly. Have a look at Restore and some of the accounts around it specifically; there are some very dangerous things being said. Openly dehumanising language about migrants. Open racism about black and brown people. The talk about remigration isn’t theoretical to these people any more. Yes, a lot of them will be bots pretending to be human beings, or bad-faith actors stirring things up, but there’s a significant number of people who genuinely believe this and are willing to write it down, which is just fucking insane.
The point is, X is somehow getting even worse than it was when I left, and I think because I’ve been off it for so long, that it really feels significantly more dangerous. Had I stayed, I’m pretty certain I would have been the proverbial frog in the pot, slowly boiling to death. I’m glad I jumped out. I’m very happy to be off Twitter.
The price of leaving
I will say it came at a cost, though. The growth of Bearly Politics slowed down significantly once I stopped posting on X, it was a huge source of readers for me, and there’s been a financial impact from that.
My paid subscriptions took a hit too. And believe me when I say that paid subscriptions are completely secondary for Bearly Politics. I run a soft paywall that only kicks in after seven days, and if you’re on Universal Credit, a journalist, a student, or simply not doing so well right now, I’m very happy to give you a free subscription. I’ve given out hundreds, and I’ll happily keep doing so.
But the fact remains, I have taken a financial knock.
And you know what? That’s 100% perfectly okay by me. Because I can’t help but feel that staying on Twitter would have been selling my soul, nibbling away at the edges of my sanity, and it just wasn’t worth it any more.
I don’t think Twitter is going to get better. I think it will continue rewarding the worst instincts of politics, journalism and human behaviour because those instincts are extraordinarily good for engagement.
And yes, leaving cost me readers. It cost me money. But staying would have cost me something I value rather more.
Anyway, this was a bit more of an unusual ramble than actual politics. Normal service resumes towards the end of the week. I’ve got a big week ahead, including a trip up north to, of all things, play padel (something I’m entirely unsure what it actually is).
Thank you very much for reading my mad rant into the interwebs.
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here and consider supporting his work.
More from East Anglia Bylines
What happens when the media itself becomes part of the problem? Who holds it to account? 14 years after the Leveson Inquiry reported its findings, has anything really changed? And how can we build something better?
Join Bylines Network on Wednesday 21 October, for a vital conversation about the media Britain needs — and what it will take to get there.
The event will conclude with a live audience Q&A.
