Late-Stage Twitter

The time the platform turned into one big search party

Hazel, the missing dog that Twitter helped find.

It took me a long time to understand Twitter (sorry, I am never calling it X). Facebook made more sense to me; you posted stuff to share with your friends and thereby saw what everyone was having for dinner, or stayed in touch with all kinds of people you would otherwise never talk to or think about again. Seriously, though, I’ve made some wonderful reconnections there and kept up more easily with distant friends. But Twitter — what was that about? An endless stream of random posts made by strangers, encouraged to be shallow by the 140-character limit. Why would I want to follow that?

But I had no choice. I had to go on Twitter for work, and in those early days, I focused on following solar-related accounts. My first official solar job in 2013 involved tweeting solar news stories multiple times per hour (mostly scheduled in advance). Eventually, I started connecting with people on Twitter, some of whom have since become friends IRL. I learned that @SolarFred’s name was really Tor and he lived in my town; four years ago, I attended his wedding. I met him and some of my other Twitter connections in person at the Tweetups that Tor hosted at solar conferences, and we were even mentioned in a solar news story about those events written by another Twitter friend, @SolarFrank.

Since then, I’ve gotten more into Twitter. I’ve expanded the accounts I follow to many non-energy-related ones. I’ve learned interesting things. But also since then, Twitter has famously succumbed to the almost inevitable “enshittification” of online platforms, a trend that began before Elon bought it but that accelerated exponentially after his purchase. The nastiness. The trolls. The misinformation. The bots.

Still, I stay on Twitter because it remains a source of useful information about so many important topics: the latest in clean energy, where to get a Novavax vaccine, and more recently, Kate Middleton, the missing princess, and Hazel, the missing dog.

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Do I care about the royal family? No, I do not. I couldn’t watch more than a few episodes of The Crown, because I found the characters supremely boring. I don’t even care about them in fictional form!

But I admit that I got caught up in the recent hubbub over the apparent disappearance of Kate Middleton, aka Princess Catherine. There’s something so beautifully absurd about the royal family, at least to Americans, and the unfolding story was so convoluted, that it seemed designed to elicit laughs. It was hard not to get sucked in, especially as the theories about Kate’s disappearance grew more and more outlandish: She was in an induced coma after complications from surgery. She was having an affair. William was gay and having affairs with men. William was having an affair with a woman whose gay husband had a French lover. Kate had been unalived.

For all but the most committed conspiracy theorists, it ended last Friday with her cancer announcement, which highlighted what a PR disaster the whole thing was. Kate is a real person who is dealing with an extremely difficult situation. Her very public position must be extraordinarily trying. But her whole job consists of appearing in public, and, sadly, she’s basically considered the property of the British people, who pay a steep price for the privilege. So it’s no wonder that people started commenting when she vanished for three months — with no believable attempt to explain what was going on, much dissimulation, and a few highly questionable photos of her presented as the only potential signs of life.

The truth is, this wasn’t really about Kate. It was about a failed, outdated, misogynistic, racist institution. An institution that had gladly thrown Kate’s biracial sister-in-law to the media wolves but now insisted on privacy and dignity for Kate — while also actively inflaming the unfolding situation instead of mitigating it. It was about laughable attempts to keep propping up that failed institution. And it became a lesson that will be taught for years in how not to do PR.

It was also about how, “in an age of growing disinformation, given a nuclear-power boost with new AI technologies, the public has lost all faith in who or what can be believed,” as Will Bunch noted in a Philadelphia Enquirer article. He rightly pointed out that Kensington Palace, not the public, fueled the whole fiasco.

Whatever was really going on behind the scenes, and whoever was really at fault, KateGate highlighted both the good and the bad of the enshittified platform formerly known as Twitter. For a while, the story provided what felt like light entertainment compared to the usual rancor and nastiness that permeates Twitter. It seemed to bring people together in an almost festive spirit, it elicited many creative memes, and it was the only “news” I could stomach while on my recent trip to Mexico. But the truth, of course, was far less entertaining, and it revealed another truth: the internet had once again used a person as fodder for entertainment. It was a reminder that on the internet, we are all the product.

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Another disappearance that coincided with Kate’s had a very different feeling and a very different result, uniting Twitter users to happier effect. This story took place in Decatur, Georgia, where writer Hannah Riley left her dog with a sitter who had some cannabis gummies in her house. Hazel the dog got into the gummies, chowed down on several of them, and had to be taken to the vet. For some inexplicable reason, someone at the vet took Hazel outside without a leash, and the dog (still stoned from the gummies?) ran off.

Hannah was in Canada at the time and beside herself with worry, but the internet rallied to help. Her tweets about Hazel went viral; some got over 5 million views. As she hurried home to continue the search on the ground, the viral interest in her story got the attention of a local media outlet, which led to Hazel coming home after a week on the lam. On the same day that Kate Middleton resurfaced.

In a social media convergence, that Friday was also the day before the wedding of two podcasters who met on Twitter. I don’t know them, but he’s a writer who lives in Sacramento, she’s a school teacher who lived in New York — till she met him. They have a loyal following on Twitter who’d been eagerly anticipating this day. They even went so far as to create a hashtag for their wedding.

Detailing my personal life on such a public platform isn’t for me, and the fact that so many people do that is a highly weird aspect of our modern culture that this Flower Child can’t really get behind. Still, the social media week ended on a high note, and it’s nice to see Twitter used as a vehicle for spreading joy. More of that, please.

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Twitter, like all such platforms, has some redeeming features, but it remains highly problematic. It’s increasingly divisive and a source of dangerous misinformation. It’s subject to manipulation and control by bots who are programmed to attack our democracy. It’s unsettling. It can bring out the best in people but more often seems to bring out the worst.

Will I ever get off it? Though retirement still feels like a distant dream, one of the things I look forward to when I do retire someday is not having to be on Twitter, LinkedIn, or most social media platforms — if they still exist then, that is.

I don’t know if they will, but the most prominent ones are certainly going downhill fast. Twitter is no exception — yet it persists, though people have been predicting its imminent demise since Elon’s unfortunate purchase. Will it eventually become so enshittified that even the stalwarts abandon ship? Only time will tell.