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I used to post an awful lot on Twitter. I couldn’t tell you how many times a day exactly – but after discovering the platform in late 2010, I became intoxicated by the feeling that I was able to participate in a sort of global conversation. Here, I felt, was a platform that anyone could join, and on which anyone could be listened to. Twitter seemed to connect people: commentators spoke in enthused terms about the role Twitter played in the Occupy movement; the student fees protests; the Arab spring.
I posted, I made friends, I met people, I talked to people who I would never have been able to connect with otherwise. The relationships I made on Twitter shaped my values, my politics, my life. The “weird Twitter” style of humour gave me a fair few phrases that will never stop rattling around my brain: every time I walk into a pharmacy, I think about buying some ear medication for my sick uncle “who’s a model by the way”. Whenever I read something about Watergate, I imagine Richard Nixon condemning the movie Fantastic Mr Fox on the basis that its lead character wears “a [expletive] corduroy suit”.
I met the mother of my children on Twitter – I moved to Berlin to be with her, and then we moved back to the UK together. Through Twitter, I, who am really just some guy, was offered work writing op-ed columns; appearing on television; even writing a book. As embarrassing as it feels to admit, it was on Twitter that I became a person.
I still use Twitter – I will never call it X – but nowadays only semi-regularly, and certainly not with any enthusiasm. I am like a former heavy smoker who has whittled themselves down to a couple of roll-ups a day: maybe I’ll check it in the morning, but the compulsion is a whole lot less strong than it used to be.
I briefly toyed with Bluesky, but it’s never done anything for me. It feels pointless, almost embarrassing, to start going off on there about something Keir Starmer has said. So I now rarely log on to social media. In this, it seems, I am not alone. Over the past year, Ofcom has observed a precipitous drop in social media usage among UK adults, with only 49% actively posting on social media, down from 61% the year before.
As Ofcom observes, this is hardly surprising. Concerns about privacy, about big tech overreach, mean that many people are switching back to dumbphones. People have learned to worry about their digital footprint, that old posts might end up being dredged up to damage or embarrass them. Even someone as brand-conscious as Wes Streeting forgot to delete all the posts he’d made about his erstwhile friend Peter Mandelson, in which he called him “Mandy”. When Twitter users discovered that Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool was willing to generate sexualised images of just about anyone, it underscored the dangers of doing things like posting pictures of your children online.
Meanwhile, the biggest social media platforms – TikTok, Instagram – are nowadays much closer to being something like glossy, public-access “entertainment platforms”, where the assumption is that the average user will only be passively consuming content. One is tempted to wonder what exactly makes your average Instagram reel “social media” as opposed to just “media”. YouTube is often considered social media – but my children wouldn’t conceptualise it as being different to any of the other channels on the TV. Being an influencer is a full-time job, and whereas there have never been any particular barriers to entry when it comes to firing off tweets, contemporary social media’s “pivot to video” means that, at a minimum, active users are going to need to do some editing.
The result is that social media platforms are now dominated by a handful of big users. And what these users produce is itself increasingly homogenised: nowadays, the algorithms would have done for “weird Twitter” before it even began.
Thus we come to what seems, to my mind, the real reason why British adults are posting less on social media: in a way, “social” media no longer exists. Tweeting used to feel like a social activity – in fact, it even felt fun (I’ll never forget the evening Michael Ashcroft’s allegations about David Cameron landed, for instance). But then – around the time of the first Donald Trump win, of Brexit, and the most optimistic moment of the Corbyn years – there was a palpable vibe shift.
Amid the various upheavals, everything individual users tweeted started to feel urgently serious and important, and so private individuals started to be held to account for their remarks as if we were all personally running for political office. Tweeting stopped being fun – but it still felt kind of necessary: to me, it ended up feeling like a kind of painful social duty. Today, the pain is largely gone – Twitter is no longer important enough for being “cancelled” on it to matter. But nowadays tweeting just feels futile. Twitter has become a place you go to witness whatever horrors the powers that be have wrought upon the world – and then maybe toss a few thoughts about these horrors into the void.
But then, I’m no longer sure people on the internet are really interested in one another. Twitter was the internet as a great global conversation. But today, online society has withered to the point where people seem happier carrying on parasocial relationships with influencers, or else falling in love with large language models they’ve told to pretend to be their ideal partner.
Many of the most compelling voices on classic Twitter have retreated to their private Substacks. This seems to be the ideal now: an internet where every user is locked into their own private world; a Plato’s cave where the shadows learn to mould themselves to your subconscious preferences over time. There’s no such thing as social media any more: just individuals and their algorithms.
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