I’ve long been intrigued by the interplay between the dark money that fuelled Brexit (amongst other nominally democratic events), and the use of social media to persuade and to influence.
I’m surely not the only person who feels intense disquiet about the use of money to spread lies and misinformation – and the seeming impunity of campaigns which willfully spread those lies to any kind of meaningful sanction.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the amoral position taken by the surveillance capitalism giants – such as Facebook (and by extension, Instagram), and Twitter – has led inexorably to an erosion of the polity in the UK and elsewhere.
I have taken to heart the maxim “be the change you want to see in the world” and have decided to significantly reduce my activity on Twitter. I have already effectively closed my Instagram account, and I closed my Facebook account in 2008.

My decision to reduce my activity on Twitter doesn’t come without cost. It reduces my influence within the networks I spent many years building up. It means that I’m less well informed about many of the things that I care about.
But I’m happy to remove my support for a commercial giant which constantly erodes the protections it offers for user data (this goes double now that we’re leaving the GDPR protection of the European Union). I’ve come to the understanding that every tweet I make, every comment I reply to, every link I post, is adding value to a company which has proved agnostic to the notion of democratic norms.
And I’m simultaneously becoming far more comfortable with a platform which is proving to be a viable alternative, albeit with much more growth needed before it comes close to the social functionality provided by Twitter. That site is toot.wales, and it’s an ‘instance’ of the open-source Mastodon platform.
I wrote about Mastodon a while back for the Institute of Welsh Affairs. TL;DR – it’s a site which duplicates much of the functionality of Twitter, but doesn’t allow advertising, doesn’t harvest your data and has effectively banned sexism, racism and hate speech.
I still have an account on Twitter, and I’ll use it to message people, and to promote my toots on Mastodon. But I reject the notion that I’m a ‘monetizable daily active user‘ with my data at the service of anyone with a chequebook. My ultimate goal is to stop using Twitter altogether, to fully embrace an open, free and respectful way of interacting with others.