But @Twitter has been a great resource, and my follows and followers are valuable to me. So I’m loath to delete my account and ditch it just yet. Instead, I plan to wean off it gradually, sending people to my Substack, which because they give you emails, is much more peer to peer.
I realize many people won’t want to click out of the Twitter app, but they’ll get used to it as more people whose content they value put out only small snippets and redirect them to a platform over which they have some say. (That’s not to say that Substack won’t get woke and start banning unsanctioned points of view, but if you have the emails, it’s trivial to set up your own blog/newsletter elsewhere.)
As some have pointed out, if you don’t like Twitter’s policies don’t post there, but that’s like saying, if you don’t like Amazon’s policies, don’t shop there. If only they didn’t have a near monopoly, that would be great. And that’s the thing about monopolies — they don’t gouge the customer until they achieve monopoly scale. These policies would have killed the social media outlets 10 years ago, but now Twitter is virtually essential for anyone in media. And when I say gouge, I don’t mean on price — obviously Twitter is free — but in advancing the narrow agendas of interest groups that seek to control the information flow and hence public policy. There are untold resources redistributed to interests who control the discourse, and those resources are almost always taken from the ordinary person.