I've deleted Twitter from my phone.
I may install it again, but my main goal in deleting it was to at least temporarily prevent myself from compulsively checking it, while observing any change in my attitude, perceptions of the news, and my own mental state.
So far, it's been highly liberating (even though, yes, I do check it via computer).
As I mentioned last week, news happens very fast on Twitter, along with lightning-fast "takes" and misinformation. Twitter largely, for me, has become something of a time suck in which I observe a steady stream of people reacting (which I guess is the point), but the reactions themselves are often strongly-negative while also being somehow incredibly-fleeting.
It's not all bad. But, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, I wrote that people on social media, especially Twitter, seemed to have been having different experiences and perceptions of Election 2016 than people who were not. We now know, of course, that some of the skewing of perception and the shit-stirring was intentionally cultivated by Russian agents and Cambridge Analytica, among others.
"Today on Twitter, the President said" is just a thing that we read and hear and see over and over and over again because it is also now completely normalized within the mainstream media that Donald Trump recklessly and incompetently broadcasts his democracy-destroying utterances and warmongering provocations via his Goebbels-Schnauze, while the press largely seems to be very impressed that he speaks so "directly" to the citizenry of the world, unlike that deceptive she-bot who ran against him.
I also find that I am not always remembering some of the outrages from months ago, not because they are not horrible, but because they are so, so many. So much that I sometimes think, my god, how can we ever dig ourselves out of this? Can this ever become unbroken?
To maintain my hope, I cannot have these thoughts be the first and last that I reach for at my nightstand.
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