X Marks the Spot

It is now officially over.  I am no longer connected to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. 

I deactivated my account on "X" in early September after being harassed for committing the unspeakable crime of criticizing a black woman's cornrowed hair, but it accidentally got reactivated briefly in mid-September when my mother signed into it thinking it was her account - after logging into my settings on our desktop thinking she was logging into her settings.  Once I deactivated it a second time, I waited patiently for every tweet I ever posted, every reply I ever tweeted to someone, and every nasty tweet I got in reply to the tweet that ended my time on the platform to be completely annihilated from the ether.  Now I'm totally free.

I just saw a PBS documentary on X owner Elon Musk, who renamed Twitter after X because it's his "favorite letter"  (does he think Silicon Valley is on Sesame Street?).  The documentary noted that, once Musk let all forms of speech to proliferate on X as part of his plan to allow anyone to say anything (so long as it doesn't affect him or his bottom line), racist and sexist tweets shot up dramatically.  I continued to use the platform to post links to this blog and also to write or reply to tweets and occasionally post pictures, thinking that my posts other than my blog links were too innocuous for anyone to bother with or care about and had nothing to so with racism and sexism.

How ironic, therefore, that it was my own idea of what constituted a racially or genderly appropriate tweet that ended up getting me into trouble.  Though I was never banned for telling a black woman that she looked better without cornrows, the relentless abuse and scorn I got as a result was enough to make me defect from X with my tail between my legs.