Twitter - my part in its downfall

Social media has changed out of all recognition in the past year - but it isn't all bad. (Longish read)

Coconuts aren’t racist

Readers of these columns may be aware that I was the victim of a peculiarly postmodern version of left-wing cancel culture. Two years ago I was suspended as a columnist from The Herald after 20 years because of a "racist" tweet which wasn’t racist. As it happened, it was the best thing they could have done for me professionally, and my career has flourished since I left following a formal reinstatement. I refer to this again now not to gloat (though, hey, why not) but because it seems clear to me that that absurd Twitter storm, whipped up by a handful of performative offence-takers, would not have led to my suspension had it happened in 2024.

This is because Twitter/X has changed out of all recognition and no longer has a chokehold on political culture. Few people take Twitter storms seriously anymore. Elon Musk has turned it into a projection of his own ego in a way no one could have foreseen. His intemperate tweets, like his unfortunate declaration of support for the right-wing Alternative Fur Deutschland before the Magdeburg massacre have alienated the progressives who used to love the platform. Editors and corporate elites no longer leap to endorse whatever is roiling the anger junkies who populate it. Cancel culture is over. Musk has killed it.

This isn’t just about me. To take a much more important phenomenon. Could #MeToo have happened in 2024 as it did so explosively in 2017? I’m not sure it could. It was a uniquely Twitter moment when women took to anonymously outing misogynistic male behaviour. #MeToo had repercussions throughout the media and politics. Something similar might conceivably get off the ground today over on Bluesky or Threads or Mastodon, but the very proliferation of social media platforms would deprive #MeToo 2.0 of critical mass. Moreover, there would now be significant pushback from the increased number of what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call conservatives now active on X. Harvey Weinstein would still have gone down. But there would’ve been less tolerance of attempts to destroy the careers of lesser individuals by what the US lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, called “guilt by accusation”. The manosphere has pitched its tent on X and many men are past apologising.

Spurious accusations of racism are similarly less likely to gain traction today on X. My particular offence arose in response to an academic who tweeted that just because the Tory cabinet had a lot of black and brown people in it, didn’t mean it was “diverse”. I quote-tweeted sardonically: “A coconut cabinet?” Cue outrage from Twitter folk who clearly didn’t know what they were objecting to.

“Coconut” has, of course, been used by black activists from Marcus Garvey to Benjamin Zephaniah to refer to people who collaborate with their racial oppressors. It is therefore almost the polar opposite of racism—especially when used satirically to poke fun at white academics accusing black politicians of not being properly black. That “coconut,” is not racist was confirmed (again) in September by the London judge who threw out a ludicrous attempt by the Metropolitan Police to prosecute an Asian teacher, Marieha Hussein, for holding a banner depicting members of the Tory cabinet as coconuts during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in London.

The Herald suspended me even though their own internal investigation established “no racial intent” in my tweet. But my real crime, as they freely admitted, was not racism as such but “using unacceptable language online.” In other words, people had been upset on Twitter. That was my offence - what they were upset about was irrelevant. Senior editorial staff told me that PR advisers to the board of Newsquest, the company that owns The Herald, had insisted on stern retribution for this incomprehensible crime in fear of “reputational damage” to the company.

This illustrates the astonishing importance accorded to these transient Twitter storms by the corporate elite only two years ago. Not anymore. It just would not have happened today. In 2023, Twitter underwent a kind of brain transplant.

Instead of being dominated by progressive scolds looking for every opportunity to denounce someone as racist, it has become almost the opposite: a vehicle for (mostly) conservative advocates of free speech who attack with equal venom anyone who attempts to use the hate playbook to denounce their political opponents.

Just look at how Humza Yousaf was taken to task on Twitter when he claimed earlier this year that Elon Musk was “racist” and was accessing his private messages. X was immediately plastered with edited versions of Yousaf’s “white, white, white” speech in Holyrood in 2020, when he complained that there were too many white people in public life in Scotland—a country, as many of his critics pointed out, that is 95% white. Elon Musk responded that the former First Minister was a “racist scumbag” for that speech. His comment was retweeted en masse by people who, back in 2020/21, would never have dared to accuse the first Muslim FM of racism on Twitter or anywhere else.

The Twitter progressives who used to police language so rigorously have not disappeared entirely. They are still there, but their influence has waned. Time was, if you made a joke about the alphabet people, LGBTQIA2SZZZZ, or suggested that non-binary is not a new gender but an affectation by people who want it both ways, you would be monstered. If you disputed that trans women are women or misgendered someone, you would be expelled from Twitter—as was the case with the nationalist website, Wings Over Scotland, and the comedy writer Graham Linehan. J.K. Rowling was too big to ban, but her tweets were often suppressed, or “shadow-banned,” to limit their reach and prevent them from trending. She is now the queen of X.

It is becoming hard to remember just what Twitter was like in the pre-Musk era. Back then, its character was moulded principally by student activists, left-wing academics, and journalists. They all tended to occupy the same space on the ideological Venn diagram, so it’s not surprising that the centre of gravity was markedly to the doctrinaire left. Having come from that spectrum myself, it took a long time to realise just how myopic Twitter had become in the noughties.

It became almost a parody of the left, like something out of Monty Python. Bearded men insisting that they were women. Outrage over “micro aggressions” like complimenting a woman on her hair. Accusing people of cultural appropriation by having corn rows or eating West Indian food. The only thing you couldn't do on Twitter was laugh at all this - and that more than anything I think secured its downfall. People hate that they can’t say things or joke about them. It was suicidal for progressives and yet they colluded with this nonsense, preparing the ground for their Nemesis: Donald Trump.

However, as 2024 draws to a close it is time now to reflect both on the mistakes made by Twitter in those days and on the cultural impact of the new libertarian X. Has it simply become a sump of racism and antisemitism or has it been liberated from self-appointed ideological guardians? It’s a bit of both. It has become a kind of Jekyll and Hide platform presenting the best and the worst of free speech