Why Lit Hub is no longer on Twitter
“Why I’m leaving Twitter” is, at this point, an irritating genre of post. Nonetheless, it’s important to go on record in the face of Elon Musk’s vacuous amorality and its concomitant amplification of actual Nazis (not to mention his relentlessly inept destruction of American government as oligarch-in-chief).
Look, the guy is bad, and his platform is bad, and most of the people on his platform are bad. We no longer want to provide free content and engagement to a deranged billionaire and his dysfunctional little clubhouse. I understand the argument that we shouldn’t cede our space in the public square to the bad people, to which I respond: How is a privately owned, algorithmically driven digital service, that suppresses speech it doesn’t like and amplifies speech (often hateful) that it does, anything like a true public square? To take the analogy further: If all your friends have left the town square, and it’s full of hateful morons with the loudest bullhorns, who just want to sell you fallout shelter supplies and dick pills, wouldn’t you leave?
So that’s why we’ve left Twitter (see below for our last post, if you don’t want to actually visit the site).
