David Penberthy: Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has become so bad I’ve deleted it

Now full of pornographic chat bots and anti-vaxxers, this social media platform has had a massive fall from grace. David Penberthy explains why he’s ditched it.

The term “early adopter” applies to those tech-savvy types who keep up with all the latest gizmos and apps, and are consistently ahead of the curve when it comes to modern communication.

As the proud owner of a record player – and as someone who habitually gets his teenage kids to solve basic problems with everything from my iPhone to the Netflix login – I’m as far from being an early adopter as imaginable.

Somehow though, I found myself at the forefront of the Twitter revolution, opening an account just months after it took off in the late 2000s at the behest of a smart journo mate while we were creating an opinion website together.

Using Twitter to promote our content was a terrific way to drive readers to the website.

In its early days, Twitter was a collegiate space for people who liked reading and conversation, a perfect fit for our website which had contributors from across politics and society holding diverse views.

Viewed from the polarised vantage point of 2023, you almost feel a sense of melancholy reflecting on the genesis of Twitter as a place where people could agree to disagree.

Twitter was educational. It had no better practitioner in this country than the late Mark Colvin, the peerless ABC radio journalist whose Twitter account served as one long self-improvement exercise for those lucky enough to follow him.

Mark loved to read and he loved to share, and his Twitter feed, which still exists in the ether, stands to this day as a must-follow for anyone with a sense of curiosity and an interest in the world.

Twitter was also engagingly stupid.

There was a time Twitter was actually an engaging and insightful platform, Penbo says. Picture: iStock

I remember buying a product called Mr Hot Dog from an otherwise reputable department store. It was billed as a one-stop device for the domestic production of hot dogs.

It was easily the most useless thing I have ever owned, the steaming canister too small to hold a standard frankfurt, the lid fitting so poorly that steam seeped onto the buns rendering them sodden.

I took a photo of this cruddy piece of landfill and posted it on Twitter by way of a consumer warning, and spent a large part of a Friday night laughing with complete strangers sharing their own stories of domestic rip-offs.

These twin purposes of Twitter, to inform and amuse, now seem light years away from what the app has now become, especially under the derelict ownership of Elon Musk.

What should really be a vehicle for reading, chatting and drunkenly bemoaning umpiring decisions has turned into its own circle of hell.

The rot started a decade or so ago, and was less due to the management of Twitter than the behaviour of those who started using it in increasing numbers.

There was a great piece published in the US a while back saying Twitter was being ruined by “ists” – that is, socialists, fascists, activists, lobbyists – everyone who had an axe to grind or an angle to work.

Twitter, or X as it is now known, has had a massive fall from grace since Elon Musk bought it. Photo: Alain Jocard/AFP

The piece also argued that the use of the hashtag had also changed.

Where once you could type the sign “#” followed by the topic of your interest to find material, hashtags were increasingly being used as weapons to bully individuals, or so that people could piggyback their own political obsession or some brand they selling onto popular topics which were already trending.

If a fish rots from the head, the decay has proceeded apace since Musk took control, with his morally ambivalent brand of libertarianism turning Twitter (or X as he has stupidly renamed it) into a cross between an open sewer and the bar scene from Star Wars.

On any given day, my unprompted stream of tweets is now filled with pornographic chat bots, people crapping on about Bitcoin, anti-vax nonsense and mournful tweets from some Far Right nutjob in the UK who posts photos of Arabs outside English landmarks with the slogan “London has fallen”.

Elon Musk changed the name of Twitter to X after buying it. Photo: Chris Delmas/AFP

The level of pornographic entrapment is so off the charts that I would urge any parent to discourage their teenagers from using it amid surging sextortion cases.

The other day I automatically followed back a stranger and immediately received a direct message from them saying “Hi, thanks for the follow, wanna chat?”, the standard gambit of the solicitor of salacious pictures who will then demand money amid threats to post your images across all your social media accounts.

(All this, of course, from some guy in a call centre in Nigeria who bears no resemblance to your new “female” friend in the picture.)

It is in the world of politics where Twitter has become wholly unbearable, not just for the incessant braying of ideologues across the divide, but the genuinely stomach-churning images that are being circulated in the context of the war in Gaza.

In the past two weeks I have seen genuine images released by Israel of a dead baby under a sheet.

I’ve seen a bashing video which apparently culminated with a beheading (I wouldn’t know for sure as I turned off just seconds in).

I’ve seen repeated images of babies in cages, which are bogus propaganda distributed by supporters of Israel to discredit Hamas, as if you need to fabricate things to discredit Hamas.

Last Friday, keen as I was to gauge public reaction to the re-release by Taylor Swift of her brilliant album 1989, I typed the hashtag #1989taylorsversion into Twitter and immediately saw two Palestinian toddlers being removed from a bombed apartment, the person who posted it using a pop singer’s name to distribute that material.

And apropos of nothing, I also saw what is effectively a snuff movie of an ice hockey player being killed on the rink by a rogue tackle.

Where’s Mr Hot Dog when you need him?

As a haggard old newspaper guy I have seen plenty of bad stuff. I don’t need to seek it out; or rather, be sought out by it.

It has become so repellent that I have decided to delete the app. If this is Elon Musk’s vision of free speech he can keep it for himself.

He should reflect on whether his brand of “social” media is making the world less social, less civil, less bearable than ever before.

Originally published as David Penberthy: Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has become so bad I’ve deleted it