On leaving Twitter (X)

I'm so glad people are finally leaving that app.

I left Twitter (now known as X) back in August 2024. I wanted to abandon the app sooner but, due to my book tour for Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism, I was encouraged by my publisher and book agent to stay on the app. At my peak, I had nearly 50k followers, a community I had cultivated over more than a decade from the era when Twitter was a very Black space. My tweets were mainly my opinions about cultural happenings and what I was learning during my graduate school education.

Back in the heyday of Twitter, we used to watch “Scandal” and “How To Get Away With Murder” on Thursday nights together and live tweet the experience. We watched State of the Union addresses and other political happenings. We even shared information about police killings and violence within Black communities like the killings of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Michael Brown, in real-time. But, after Donald Trump’s win in 2016 and Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform in 2022, the app we had come to love was no longer there.

For many of us old head Black Twitter members, the changes to Twitter felt like a betrayal. The app quickly became a haven for incels (young white men who are often referred to as “involuntary celibates”), Russian bots, and white supremacist trolls committed to sharing disinformation and creating chaos within Black communal spaces. As time proceeded, posting political commentary on Twitter made Black women targets for violence, threats, and other personal attacks.