I deleted Twitter, and my first blog post of 2026 – the first in a new job, the first where I put my goal of being less online into practice – is all about why I’ve finally decided to abandon this huge part of my personal and professional history.
Twitter vs X
This post is not a history of Twitter – news articles, research studies, or even Wikipedia can tell you about that way better than I can.
What this post is, instead, is a reflection on how Twitter, changes in its ownership and, therefore, community affected me as a pole dancing academic, writer, activist and scholar. For this, a teeny bit of background is necessary.
Twitter was never a particularly uplifting place. I should know: I have monitored and analysed thousands of tweets by members of an abusive subculture on the platform as part of my PhD. It was used for pile-ons against celebrities and average users alike. It was a place for conspiracy theories, for unregulated discrimination and harassment, and often politically incorrect discourse. I was harassed on it by Brexiters and Gender Criticals alike myself, and I’d go as far as saying that there are very few people whose experience of the platform is completely wholesome.
Yet, Jack Dorsey’s app became the centre of arguments about whether social media were now our “public square,” signalling a shift about where public life happened: accessible to everyone, a space for people to express their own freedom of speech, formulate ideas, discuss them with both like-minded people and those who disagree. Platforms rode the wave of the good, uplifting PR resulting from people using their sites to connect and organise during the Arab Spring uprising. The innovation and shifts they brought became part of their lore and of the tech industry’s reputation as a disruptor.
Twitter was where I went for culture, entertainment, connection and work. It was the home of the best shitposting. It was where Italians would livetweet commentaries of our Sanremo Music Festival, which chooses the annual entry to Eurovision. The fact that you could @ mention celebrities and read their unfiltered thoughts became a staple of the platform’s success, uniting the rich and famous and those less so in a way that was previously inaccessible. It’s where we’d all go as soon as a pivotal political moment manifested. As passé as “public square” arguments about the platform are, it sure had elements of one.
Because of this, content moderation issues always plagued Twitter. It wasn’t doing enough about one-to-one and many-to-one harassment. It became one of the main spaces for misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were data breaches, financial issues of running such a political and cultural mammoth, and public pressure.
And then there was Elon Musk, who had already been buying shares in the platform for years, the ultimate disruptor concluding his hostile take-over of Twitter by dropping a sink into its HQ and saying: “Let that sink in.” As Adrienne Massanari writes in Gaming Democracy, understanding the intersection of Silicon Valley tech barons, the gaming world and the alt-right is crucial towards understand why we now are in this worldwide, far-right hellscape. And it was clear that Musk, with his troll and gaming humour, his money, and his increasingly chaotic yet public support for the alt-right, meant no good for the future of Twitter.
Many colleagues, journalists, activists, users who knew they were gonna be targeted, left. Many went to Bluesky. And while the other, new spaces never really took off, or not in the same way, Twitter was getting worse and worse – and not just financially (the smartest man in the world had apparently tanked it).
The examples of horrors were many, way before Grok (Musk’s AI which is also part of Twitter) was used to undress women and children without their consent. Twitter became the place for Musk to spew his alt-right rhetoric. It became an incitement tool for more and more far-right marches and riots in the United Kingdom. It restored content and users (like Andrew Tate) who we know are harmful. There wasn’t one single moment that made me go: ew, enough. There were many, and they piled on like harassment on Twitter used to do. But as you will see, the community is what kept me there.
Before you mansplain this to me by the way, I am aware Twitter rebranded into X when Musk bought it. But X is a wanky name, and the platform will always be Twitter to me. It is Twitter that is etched into my memory. And the very unique blend of people that I had found on it made it hard to fully let go as I have now.
Me and Twitter
Twitter has been deeply embedded with my personal and professional history.
I was encouraged to sign up as part of my BA in Journalism in 2011, around the time of the Arab Spring in which the platform played an important role. A key tool to connect with journalists and share my own writing as a very green and inexperienced journalist, it became the way I made connections that provided a way into internships and freelancing, as well as work. It was thanks to my use of Twitter for my own writing and to promote student societies that I was then recruited (via LinkedIn) for my first part-time social media job.
My BA Journalism thesis ended being about Twitter, and about how the UK’s most high-profile journalists used it to comment on the death of Margaret Thatcher. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this choice would catapult me into the world of academia: that thesis won me a Global Undergraduate Award for media and journalism in 2015, and led me to speak at the ECREA media conference.
In parallel, it was thanks to Twitter that I kept in touch with journalists and bloggers as part of my job in PR, leading me to secure more freelance gigs between London and, once I moved for my Masters, Sydney.
Fast forward to 2017, when I began my PhD, and it was obvious that Twitter was going to become my research site. I had chosen to observe online abuse for research on the back of becoming the target of it because I’d written an opinion piece about Brexit for the Huffington Post UK. Observing Twitter felt like the best way to blend my research interest in Criminology with my experience as a PR account manager and social media strategist.
So I did it, around the time when I had become a more high-profile blogger and I had started being public about pole dancing on my social media accounts. On my main account @bloggeronpole, active since 2011 with different handles, I had accumulated and curated a network of journalists, writers, bloggers, and increasingly sex workers, pole dancers, artists and performers. Because of this, at the time my PhD supervisors suggested creating an academic Twitter under which I could post with my real name, to avoid awkward situations with my students and future employers because my ass was out on the internet.
Still, Twitter had always been a huge part of my own PR strategy for myself and all my jobs, including my research. Responding to #journorequests and connecting with reporters resulted in an established press network to which I owe some of my most high-profile interviews. So the division of my content across both accounts was quite stark, but I wasn’t super hard to figure out, particularly given that I had begun to be quite vocal about platform governance and censorship of sex and sex work on the basis of both my research expertise and personal experience.
When a colleague easily found me at a conference – “So you’re internet famous?” he said on the way to the conference party, given the freelance articles I’d authored, the interviews I’d given and the few thousands of followers I’d accumulated between Instagram and Twitter as a pole dancer and activist – and when my anti-censorship campaigns led me to speak more as an expert than as a case study, a plan began forming.
Once I finished my PhD, I would unite my online presences – the pole and academic one – for better or for worse. And of course, I had to do that via Twitter. See my most popular thread to date below.
![<img decoding=]("Twitter.jpg")
This was a pivotal moment in my academic career that allowed me to not just take a stand about who I was, but to be trusted by both networks of censored participants and NGOs, government and civil society stakeholders. Through this post and through my habit of live-tweeting academic conferences to share colleagues’ work with those outside of the academy, I added academics to my eclectic curated network of followers and accounts I was inspired by. Through Twitter I built networks of academics that became friends and collaborators.
In short, Twitter marked several steps in my personal and professional career as a pole dancing academic, activist and content creator. It even started one of the longest romantic relationships in my adult life (100% do not recommend, this is now thankfully over because it wasn’t ideal).
So as you can see, because of all of these milestones, deleting it, and losing years of curated communities and networks was not necessarily easy.
RIP my Twitter presence
When Musk bought Twitter, several colleagues and fellow journalists in my network and I watched in horror as he proceeded to use the platform to give space to an increasingly looming alt-right threat, in the US and beyond. Some deleted their accounts straight away, but as my communities were still there, I watched and waited.
Then Trump won the 2024 US elections, and I knew I would have had to leave somehow, someday. I stopped posting for months, with a view of deleting my account. But my communities were still there, in ways they weren’t on Instagram or TikTok, and I decided to stay. Somehow, in a still post-pandemic world, those communities really mattered: because of the aforementioned relationship I was in, I had spent most of my lockdowns in the UK completely alone. That digital connection, at the time, meant something to me personally and professionally.
Many a post by senior colleagues I admire made the case for deleting Twitter as a matter of ethics, and I agreed. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it – not just the erasing of years of personal and professional history and networks, but also the way I somehow managed to reach all players in that history at a time when platforms like Instagram meant the algorithm showed me a fraction of what I wanted to see, and TikTok was too geared towards virality. On Twitter, I somehow felt less alone than I did on Instagram.
But as examples of Musk’s wrongdoing continued to stack up I found myself avoiding to open the platform and post more and more. As this happened, the community – the only reason I stayed – was braver than me and left.
With the community gone, I felt I was speaking into a harmful void. No one was seeing me anymore, and while I kept seeing things that interested me, the spam, the bots, an algorithm that was sheer chaos added to the already unbearable lack of ethics of the platform.
So around the summer of 2025 I decided that, as soon as I would find a new job and I would be able to tell people where to find me, I would delete my Twitter account. I stopped posting in the late summer, and I found out I got my current job as a Fellow in Interdisciplinary Social Science at the London School of Economics on December 2nd, 2025. I knew then that, in keeping with my 2026 goal of being way less online, deleting Twitter would be my first step. And here it is, proof I have done it:
The joys (and privileges) of being offline
What’s suprising is that… I feel fine?
It actually feels like a relief to have one less platform to manage, and to know that it’s poiness to attempt to recreate that community born out of a unique moment in time in a unique space.
I thought deleting Twitter would give me a sense of loss, that I would be really sad about it and that I would feel like I lost a piece of myself, of my shared history with the world. And it did feel like that for a while, but realistically I grieved the space I liked and remembered that existed before Musk’s purchase, and that space was no more.
Plus, my experience on and tolerance for social media has been changing for a while. My colleagues mourned the loss of Academic Twitter as a space of connection, but increasingly I felt anxious about having to be both myself personally and myself professionally in such a public space. Having had the privilege of going to conferences, in 2025 I realised how beautiful it is to connect with colleagues IRL rather than on Twitter, having made friends with them at AoIR in Brazil instead of online.
I have gotten to a moment in my life where it is actually fine that no platform is fully there to replace Twitter’s hybrid public/private, personal/professional hybrid. LinkedIn is dry AF and full of productivity bros, and that’s fine: I shall use it just for work, and touch grass when I’m not working. Bluesky isn’t taking off in my world, and that’s fine: I’m using it sporadically. Instagram feels like the only platform where that hybrid still lives on, and for that it gives me the greatest anxiety, so I’m now treating it like work – somewhere where even my personal shares are curated. To get the “real” me, you’ll have to read me here, watch me perform, talk… or, you know, actually know me.
As a researcher activist, I am increasingly suspicious of giving my time and attention to platforms that profit off of division and literally off of my eyeballs. I have become a lot more selective about the brand partnerships I take up because of this, preferring to post explainers or pole videos instead, while also reducing my use of platforms for personal stories and shares. Plus, already last year, I swore I would go back to long-form content instead of giving my words and attention to spaces that use my content and presence to sell me stuff. And here I am.
In parallel, my participants have been telling me they are struggling to find community in spaces that are so transient, and have been ditiching mainstream platforms they don’t feel they belong on as a result. I deeply resonate with that, and I have been trying to re-evaluate my time on social media as merely work, and not entertainment.
As people’s yearning for more offline interactions and for connections that are not mediated by an algorithm grows, I am also looking for a more analog and less online life.
My yearning for analog living may just be me getting older, being fatigued by 10 years spent being very online, and by academic precarity that isn’t really mitigated by social media work. It may also be due to being in a stable relationship with someone who is very private and very offline: I feel like nurturing that more than many fleeting offline bonds. And it’s also, definitely, a privilege: for years now I’ve seen academia as my main source of work, which differs from my PhD days, when my main income came from teaching pole dance and content creation.
For sex workers, for content creators, for gig workers, life is still very much online – and yet, censorship is a key threat to those form of work and connection. For these users, deleting a platform will not be as easy as deleting Twitter turned out to be for me.
But personally, I would like to mark this deletion with a long-form goodbye in the shape of this blog post: after all, as I have previously argued, in 2011 – aka when I created a Twitter account – social media platforms were a tool to support my writing, not the main site of it. I want to go back to when social media helped me instead of ruining my life. So deleting Twitter feels like another significant step towards going back to a platform usage that suits me and doesn’t harm me, and that aligns with my ethics and hopefully marks a transition for my usage of other platforms as well.
Goodbye, Twitter.
It’s been real. It’s been hilarious. It’s been wholesome. It’s been riveting. It’s been harrowing.
But most of all, it has been time for quite a while.
Pin this post
