You Need to Get Off Twitter, Right Now

You have to save yourself.

One of the saddest things that’s ever happened to me in my professional life was the death of Deadspin, the site I founded in 2005, the site I’ll forever be most closely associated with and the site that was eaten alive, from the inside out, by a vulture private equity firm. (You can read all my thoughts about the death of Deadspin here.) I’d left Deadspin in 2008 but still read the site daily — several times a day, in fact. I was such a devoted reader and fan that usually, during those times of day when I had a down moment or just needed to kill a few minutes, I’d unconsciously type “deadspin.com” into my browser. I didn’t think about it: I was just on the site before I knew it. It was my default page.

When the vultures killed Deadspin, for the first week or so, my brain and my fingers would still type “deadspin.com” into my browser, out of muscle memory. (It was a little horrifying to see what had happened to it, each time I typed it in, like drinking milk before you realized it has spoiled.) But I eventually stopped. Eventually, you no longer can stand to look at it anymore. Eventually, you move on. I haven’t typed Deadspin.com into my browser in years. I’m happier for it.

This brings me, inevitably, to Twitter. Since Elon Musk took over ownership of the site on Friday, many users have claimed they will no longer use the service, assuming, quite understandably, that it will dissolve into a morass of disinformation, hate speech and returned-to-the-service Trump Tweets. I usually don’t buy when people say they’re going to leave Twitter, because people are always saying that, usually on Twitter.

But I think it’s probably time. And this is the Tweet that did it.

That Tweet is a screenshot of Musk’s response to Hillary Clinton, who was commenting on the attack on Paul Pelosi this weekend. The Tweet, which Musk later deleted, was just “raising questions” about whether or not Pelosi wasn’t attacked by a right-wing Qanon supporter but in fact had some sort…