Twitter Leavings

So if you're not on Twitter, or left early under its latest fascist billionaire management, you're missing a lot of farewells.

"I just want to let everybody here know, I've been accepted over at X site. You can find me under my handle XX."

Although now the latest fascist billionaire management of Twitter has declared naming these new sites verboten so people are using rhyming words to let other Tweeters know where they'll be.

Almost all of these people I recognize as like-minded politicos, some more political than others, offended by the overtly fascist politics of its latest billionaire owner.

Meanwhile, other like-minded politicos are vowing to stay and fight, not cede the space to the far Right, believing they're standing up for democracy.

In their opinion, Twitter should be part of "the commons", a regulated space for politicos to express our opinions about the news of the day. Every second of the day. Thousands of us. All at once.

Having been an office temp in several of our federal departments, I get antsy just thinking about it, not that I necessarily disagree with the sentiment.

And where does this news of the day - where does it come from? Why from professional journalists of course, the most maligned people on Twitter by my like-minded politicos.

Neil McDonald, when he quit Twitter in a huff years ago now, described it as "people shouting one-liners out into cyber space". Another journalist of my acquaintance described it as "a thousand conversations going on at once and nobody listening to anybody else". He never signed up and is now retired.

Instant publication of opinion by anyone who can get it together to sign up is what Twitter is.

I retweet all my like-minded politicos' farewells so they can find each other but I won't be joining them. For me the new ownership is an opportunity to ditch a time wasting addiction, made easier by the stark realization that with a drop in retweets I'm less interested in tweeting.

Stuff your "likes". Retweet or GFY.

I also learned a valuable lesson in the last municipal election about how little Twitter matters in real life when it appeared in cyber space Catherine McKenney would soundly defeat Mark Sutcliffe in the mayoral race, instead of what actually happened, which was the opposite.

Now I imagine how different the results could have been had all the energy that went into tweeting about how great a mayor McKenney would be had gone into shouting it on suburban street corners instead.

But it was when the latest fascist billionaire owner of Twitter called us, his Tweeters, "citizen journalists",  while attacking actual journalists, I realized how I and all my like-minded politicos had fallen for The Big Lie, and were, in many instances, reacting on the basest of impulses and shooting the messenger because we didn't like the message.

Twitter tweeter twaddle.