I recently started as a twitter user. Hopefully not long term, the place was always immediately toxic to me - and right now is no different. But I wanted to keep tabs on some current events in UK politics and boy do I regret it.
For years, I've catered my online life to keep it at arms length. I have just the right amount of politics an commentary, drowned in a seat of dog and cat videos, stupid AI animations, and music & educational content.
Instagram has been ideal for this, which I mostly share in the evenings with the wife things we've sent each other with about 5% serious/interesting content, 95% funny/animal content.
Facebook on the other hand has been more of a private group thing, with forums of teachers or musicians or 'dull people' I can have shared interests in and engage with. There's some BBC articles and stuff but entirely 'friendly' to my mental health.
I'm not in any such circle jerks or safe zones - I still have my fair share of political variety - but arms length.
YouTube is a bit darker but still exactly how I want it. I have some political commentary on both sides and the centre if we continue with that flawed metric, but the rest is the same: music, education, funny stuff, historical stuff and so on.
Even reddit, a place I loathe, all I needed to do was get myself banned from the most insufferable places and my feed happily transformed to music, education, terraria & dragonball forums.
But twitter... ho boy. Sure, you can craft the algorithm the way you want, seemingly. If you're into tennis, you can just shape your feed that way. But there is some kind of pull towards toxicity that I apparently couldn't avoid, and it seems to be the case for most people. Is it smarter than the others, more malicious? I don't know.
But, it wasn't long before I stepped back and saw my overall feed: Terrorism, Islamism, Crumbling economy, inequality, Trump Trump Trump is Evil / Great / Evil, Elon Musk fucking everywhere, protests, riots, corruption, war, genocide. I mean, holy shit.
Even something seemingly harmless like a comedian is then commenting with pictures of Syrian Corpses, blood rivers pooling out of their heads to make some point about what's going on over there.
I must say too, I have noticed since Trump came into office, my years of careful catering has been breached a bit. I'm starting to see twitter-esque stuff, albeit in much smaller doses. I make sure to scroll quickly by as to not make the algorithm think I want more for staring for more than 2.5 seconds. I'll clean them up if necessary.
The question is, do I really blame Twitter, or myself? Am I just currently morbidly into this stuff more than ever before?
I... highly doubt it. The world has gone through some awful shit over the years, and I managed to maintain this healthy balance regardless.
But today, when I saw a video of Syrian Muslims forcing about a hundred Christians on their hands and knees through the mud to crawl to their death site where they were to be shot, and read about the women, stripped naked, beaten to shit, then killed... I started feeling the online anxiety so many people suffer from which I have until now so successfully avoided.
It took a few hours out of my day as I couldn't really focus on what I'm supposed to be doing. I just had to consume some more, rather than more innocent stuff, because it seemed it would reduce the shock somewhat by giving it more context. Understanding something has always been my way of getting through hard times. Ignoring it never worked.
After some time, I could then transition to normal content and my own actual work.
It really messes you up! I'm going to have to nip it in the bud while I still recognise this feeling for what it is.
Balance is everything, and Twitter has taken that balance and shot it in the back of the head.
If you're an old-time twitter user, I suppose it's easier because you've already got an established profile and followings that's hard to break. But somebody new like me, I'm just thrown right into it.
I think it is because of the intentions of the prolific userbase.
Depressingly so. The short form enables it in rapidfire though, which is why I never liked it. Lacks any context and nuance. Just EXCLAMATION OR ELSE!!