Toxic Twitter

Dear Vocal Readers,

Oh, Twitter, how the mighty have fallen. Nowadays there are so many ways for people to voice their oh-so-strong opinions to the world. Do all of them need to be heard? Absolutely not, but there will always be a platform for someone to spout hate. Sadly, it seems as though Twitter has become the ultimate haven for this type of activity to run wild. Simply look at the trending page and you are sure to see a hashtag ending with "isoverparty." It's blatantly obvious to see the toxicity this app has amassed over the years, and it's sad to see how many people continue to take this abuse.

I remember the good old days where society didn't feel like they had to fight about every little thing that was said or done. Make a bad joke once? Well guess what happens to you if it's discovered today that you made a distasteful joke back when you were twelve? You're canceled and Twitter will inevitably aid in your career's demise. Now of course there is hate spread across every social media platform so this is not a problem unique to Twitter alone, but from my experience the worst hate comments I have ever seen have come from the app with the little blue bird.

Months ago I had a Twitter account of my own, which I mostly used to share funny memes with my sister. Every once and awhile I would explore hashtags and see what fans had to say about a show I was interested in or explore the current political climate. Nothing could have prepared me for what I would end up witnessing in these explorations. Having been a fan of the reality show Big Brother since I was a child in grade school, I thought it would be interesting to see how fans were reacting to the latest season. Boy, was that a bad call on my part. I could scroll for hours just reading hate comments including phrases similar to or exactly the same as "go kill yourself." Beautiful words to see from fellow human beings for sure. It would especially kill me when a contestant named Bella was slut-shamed for having a boyfriend in the house (which is something that happens quite regularly). Even though the man ended up cheating on her on live television, she was still branded a villain and would be tweeted at daily with messages telling her how much of a "stupid slut" she was.

As nobody deserves such heinous treatment, I decided to stand up for her. To someone who told her she was irrelevant among plenty of other words, I told him to just leave her alone and get off her page if he had such a problem with her. My response from him (in improper English) was to kill myself. From his other recent tweets it was plain to see this was normal behavior for him. Shortly after, the man's account was suspended from Twitter which put a smile on my face. This was a time that Twitter had gotten it right, and from checking up on it from time to time it seemed they permanently blocked the hateful user. But how is Twitter supposed to stop every user like this one? The simple answer is that they can't. No matter what they implement they will never be able to stop the onslaught of hate comments that flood the site. Even if they did try something, this would be problematic when it comes to freedom of speech which is another huge topic in itself.

After seeing the immense amount of hatred Twitter had to offer, I quickly deleted my account. From countless attempts to stand up for people I had learned that stupid will be as stupid as is, and there isn't much I can do to stop it. Finding the most common insults I would receive were being called "gay" or being told to "kill myself" I decided it wasn't worth it any longer. Here I am defending someone I don't even know, against someone who doesn't know them either but is willing to waste their time harassing them. The other issue that really got to me was the quick deletions of harmless tweets that simply had someone's unpopular opinion. Oh, you didn't hate that one girl from that show? Well you obviously deserve to die because of that and you are just as bad as her. The amount of times I saw people deleting their tweets in a matter of minutes due to their comments filling up with hate was quite humorous. We are told that our opinions matter, but if we aren't on the same page as someone else we are criminal. On a platform where you can't win, why even try? The funny thing is that if this platform allowed comments, I'm sure I would be torn to shreds for some of the opinions I've shared. But you know what? There are no comments here and I am free to say whatever my little heart desires, and at the end of the day that's all my writer's heart needs.

Sincerely from my Twitter-hating mind,

Kacie