Like many others, I joined Mastodon last year (you can find me @daivarep@dju.social). The Twitter migration, as it became known, was a reaction to the change in ownership of Twitter. Famously, the oligarch Elon Musk bought Twitter and made some sweeping changes. In the last episode of our podcast of the year 2022, Eva and I discuss how are the changes on Twitter are impacting the global spread of health, climate, and security related disinformation.
I reluctantly joined Twitter in 2010, when I was already experiencing a social network fatigue — there were just so many of them. I culled my accounts on the likes of Friendster a bit later. But as I was living in Israel and many interesting conversations were happening on Twitter, I decided that I had to be there as well. At the time I did not see it as a professional tool, so I chose the playful handle “Daiva the diva” in Hebrew, as this is what struggled to memorise my name would call me. Now I’m stuck with it as Twitter has morphed into a tool to share and find journalism.
Over the past years, Twitter has become very annoying to use. It pushes American content despite the fact that I mostly follow European accounts; it started pushing Musk’s ramblings even before he bought Twitter, even though I initially ignored them and later started clicking “irrelevant”, “less of this” and the like. So the algorithm is not helping me find more content that matches my interests.
I’m still keeping my Twitter account, but do find me on LinkedIn and Mastodon if you’re using those, and remember to take social media breaks throughout 2023!