I may be old, but I’m trendy because I bailed on Twitter before Elon Musk’s antics | Opinion

Did you ever wish you did something more often so you could credibly boycott it?

I’m feeling that way today about Twitter and its mercurial owner, Elon Musk.

After proclaiming himself a “free-speech absolutist,” Musk has suspended from Twitter several prominent journalists who cover, you guessed it, Elon Musk.

They include CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept and Steve Herman of Voice of America, among others.

My thoughts today are what they were when previous management deplatformed Donald Trump and various anti-democracy and anti-vax crackpots from the site a couple of years ago.

It’s a private company and the owners can do what they want with it. And anybody who wants to can criticize them for it.

The overall story of what’s going on at Twitter has been covered in excruciating detail elsewhere, so I’ll keep the summary brief:

After overspending to buy Twitter as a vanity project (which he tried to back out of once he saw what the goods were like), Musk fired half the staff, warned the survivors to prepare to be exploited with long hours in the office, and brought back various propagandists and provocateurs — Trump included — to try to regenerate some kind of interest in it.

Musk maintains banning journalists is a safety measure for him and his family. Apparently, reporters told readers how to get to a site that tracks movements of his private jet, which is public information, and which Musk has also banned from Twitter.

Twitter originally told the journalists that they’d be banned permanently. Then, Musk compounded the error with a bogus poll asking users how long the journalists should be kept off the site. When users voted to let them back on now, he redid the poll.

I never liked Twitter anyway, no matter who ran it.

I find its interface to be chaotic and hard to follow, its length limitations too confining to convey any but the simplest of thoughts, and the bulk of its content pointless, with way too many F-bombs and suspect sources.

To me, Twitter is kind of like a big bag of someone else’s garbage. If you dig through it, you might find something useful. But it hardly seems worth the effort.

I never understood why some journalists were so enamored with the thing. It always seemed to me like we were just giving away our own hard-earned reporting to some other company to wrap their advertising around.

I raised that question over the years and the answer always boiled down to two things: You’re a boomer and don’t get it (guilty as charged) and This is the way young, hip people get their information (a truly scary thought).

I remember sitting in the Capitol one night live-tweeting the governor’s State of the State address. As I typed in the latest group of dignitaries being escorted to their seats, it occurred to me that it was one of the dumbest things I’d ever done in 30-plus years as a journalist.

Even before Musk started banning reporters, Twitter affected American journalism and not in a good way.

I’ve been to way too many meetings where twitalists tweeted the play by play, then cut-and-pasted their tweets together, put in a few hackneyed transitions and called it a news story. That was when they weren’t covering something someone said on Twitter.

I’m not sure what that is, but it’s not newswriting.

I checked my Twitter account today and found that I have 2,539 followers. Sorry folks, I only tweeted one story this year.

I apparently retweeted four items: a letter expressing President Biden’s condolences on the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister, a video about a kid touching Barack Obama’s hair, an update on a stranger’s bronchitis and a profane comment on the Jan. 6 insurrection.

I didn’t intend to retweet any of that and I never even looked at the originals. I’m guessing I hit the retweet button while swiping alerts off my phone screen. I do hope the lady got over her bronchitis.

By the way, if you’re reading this on Twitter, I didn’t put it there. There’s a bot that does that. Our social media manager has promised to pull it if she sees it.

I took a rare run through my Twitter feed today and found a substantial number of people leaving the site for another platform called “Mastodon.”

Hey, I bailed on Twitter years ago.

So who’s behind the curve now?