It is time to leave the cesspit formerly known as Twitter
4 min read
Grok is just one of many reasons why Westminster should finally get off the website.
I stopped looking at Twitter entirely in 2024, but I kept an account because the critical mass in Westminster remained. My mental health has been all the better for it. Even before Elon Musk took over and welcomed the Tommy Robinsons of the world back on with open arms, it had become a vicious, depressing place to be.
My reservations with Twitter (I, like the rest of the reasonable world, steadfastly refuse to call it X) span back well over a decade.
Readers may recall the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ of 2012 in which Paul Chambers joked that he would blow Doncaster Sheffield Airport "sky high" if he didn’t make his next flight. His previous flight had been cancelled, and as many of us do, he took to Twitter to vent.
The case became a cause celebre, appealed, and ultimately overturned at the High Court. But well before it got there, it was my dad, who practiced as a legal aid solicitor in Doncaster for nearly 40 years, who just so happened to be on call the night Chambers was charged under the Communications Act 2003.
The case exposed failings which we can now see from space 14 years later. Our laws and regulations simply are not fit for purpose in an environment that is changing on an almost daily basis, where rampant illegality can take place so wilfully, while speech is policed by authorities that have neither the resource nor the expertise to do so.
I had argued well before the Musk takeover that, as politicians, we should come off Twitter.
I believed it was shaping the way we behaved, to each other, but also how we performed in debates, on television, and anywhere in public. For those of us who had come of age as politicians since the advent of Twitter, I witnessed, and was guilty myself, of the tendency to perform for the clip rather than the audience that was in front of you. It is far more gratifying to see the engagement tick up after the fact for a zingy one-liner than to engage in the more painstaking, thoughtful, and much slower effort of winning an argument and, even more importantly, persuading people around to that argument.
The tendency to behave as if Twitter were the primary, if not the only, audience has skewed politics and politicians for at least the last 10 years, and its influence has now been replaced by the rise of reels, TikTok, and whatever else the kids are looking at as I type. We know about our online bubbles and how the self-reinforcing algorithms protect us from opinions that may differ from our own. What has been less explored is how it has affected the way politicians behave and our offline discourse.
There is, of course, well beyond Twitter, the need to adapt to a new way of regulating and responding to the very real harm that people encounter online. But even within our existing legal framework, since Musk’s takeover, we have seen brazen examples of racism that have been allowed to remain on the site, wanton incitement of violence, and now the latest in the grimmest of examples.
The revelations that its AI tool is being used to remove the clothes from images of women and, even more disturbingly, children, means it is unconscionable to remain on the site any longer. Musk’s Twitter has no interest in cleaning up its act. It works actively to undermine our democratically elected government and is, as we speak, causing harm to children.
My dad’s client that night in the early 2010s was the canary down the mine for the vast panoply of issues that social media would throw up. What’s clearer than ever is that we haven’t yet caught up. In the meantime, let’s at the very least remove ourselves from the cesspit formerly known as Twitter.
Louise Haigh is Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley.
