One year later, I’m gladder than ever I left Twitter

Hi there, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

Last year, I left Twitter gradually, then all at once. Throughout 2024, Elon Musk’s wildly irresponsible stewardship of his social network—I refuse to call it X—left me increasingly disengaged. But the role he played in Donald Trump’s reelection proved to be my breaking point. As of this week, it’s been a year since my last tweet.

Now, I can’t claim to have abandoned Twitter entirely. I’m still lurking, though only sporadically. When my reporting for a story leads me there—it’s certainly one of the principal places people talk about AI—I go. Add up all my activity, and it amounts to maybe 2% of the time I once spent on the service. (Strangely enough, when I do check in, my feed is flooded with tweets from Theranos founder Elizabeth