How I Fought My Twitter Addiction, Once And For All

The third time Twitter came back to my life slightly unexpectedly.

War

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The ruzzia attacked Ukraine on Feb 24, 2022. Early Thursday morning.

For the correctness sake, I want to mention that the war was happening for 8 years by that moment.

I knew very little of the war. I knew that ruzzia attacked Ukraine in 2014, I had no doubts it’s ruzzia, and I never had this ‘it’s all so unclear’ bullshittery in my head. It was obvious who is the bad guy here.

But the war was at some distant location. Ukraine is the biggest European country (never count ruzzia, it’s mostly in Asia), so it was a few other Europeans countries — size-wize — away from my place, one of the most western cities in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, we call the invasion of 2014 the war, and the full-scale invasion of 2022 is the full-scale invasion. But still, in heads of most people, the war means the year 2022, not 2014. Often, when I mention the war, I mean the year 2022 too. Because I wasn’t affected by the invasion of 2014, and was mostly unaware of what was happening in those regions.

The most terrifying part of that attack was the lack of clear understanding, we didn’t know what to do.

• Most people were suggesting me to escape the country with my family.
• Some were offering some help on doing that.

Our family decided to stay, in order to not clog the way for someone else who might need to escape the war, people from eastern regions.

We had a nice place to live in. Less than a year before the full-scale invasion, we relocated to our new apartement in the centre of Lviv. Also, we have some distant country houses, in case of a need to escape the city. So we felt relatively safe by staying where we are. We even had some security forces nearby two most frequent locations (our apartment and parents’ place), so we felt even more safe than we expected to.

Twitter came to my focus thrice this time. However, there’s no need to make it three separate stories. It was in the scope of the same war-related exploration.

News Source

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Naturally, I’ve turned to Twitter for information. I’m pretty good at distilling information from disinformation, years of training of my childhood in russia, with relatives watching TV non-stop.

Almost immediately Kiev Regime the government turned off all the independent news channels (EspressoTV, 5 Channel, Pryamiy and maybe something else), creating a Tele-marathon (what a shame). Which led to immersive growth of YouTube in Ukraine. Many great but small channels grew from nothing to millions of subscribers within a couple of years.

Me, I was not knowning where to look for info, so I returned to my familiar Twitter. I’ve been reading news here and there, but once the news channels established in YouTube, it become just easier to run a TV on all day long in the background. It’s not my type of a thing, and I absolutely hate the always-on TV. Yet, in the time of a war, the choice is being killed. Information’s value becomes ultimate.

I didn’t actually left Twitter by that moment, I just lowered my activity for a while.

Reason with ruzzians

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Then, there was my attempt to talk to ruzzians. A futile attempt.

Anyone who knows ruzzian history well enough would expect this. There’s nothign to talk to ruzzians about. I knew ruzzia well, but not well enough to know its history, unfortunately. I was absolutely sure that they will never attack. Not because they’re good guys, I never believed in that. Remember? I’ve spent my childhood there.

I just knew they bluff over everything. They boasting all the time. About their greatness (and doing nothing to support that narrative and actually be great). Well, they are great, in territory. It’s easy, if you come to your neighbours and just slaugher them all.

‘So much russophobia is in here!’ would weep someone reading my blog. ‘Well, my dear’ I would reply to them. ‘Fuck you. And kindly, get the fuck out of here.’

Personal

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There was my attempt to reason with russians. Over the internet. Before Twitter, I tried every single medium that I had my presense at. Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and personal contacts as well. Personal contacts were especially useless, most people would say something they don’t want to talk about politics. Those were the people I personally knew, yet they had been giving zero fucks. Apparently, those blasts were somewhere far-far away from them, so why bother?

Imagine your little brother writes to you saying something like ‘fuck, it’s loud blasts outside my window. The missiles are flying from your country. Look, here’s the video’ and you tells him ‘my dear, I don’t really want to talk about politics inside my family.’

Imagined?

I don’t need to imagine that. Most of the people from my past were like that. One hundred percent were unwilling to do anything that’ll lower their level of comfort even the tiniest bits.

Some of them started ignoring me for my so-called ‘russophobia.’

I tried to reason that it’s a catastrophe not only for Ukraine, but for the russia too. I even was worried about them! They had no chance of being killed (as Ukraine never targets civilians and is not a terrorist state), yet I was worried over their well-being becoming less, so to say, enjoyable.

Well, fuck them now, of course.

The premise of the communication was quite simple: ‘fucking do something already!’ What signal were you waiting for? That’s a full-scale war, it’s the World War III unfolding right here right now. What else were you waiting for? No, really! What fucking else?

Well, turned out, ruzzians give zero fucks. ‘I’m a little man’ would they mumble. Yet, these little men are slaughtering, raping, and overall genociding all us in here.

Public

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After attempting to reason with the people I knew personally, I had numerous conversations over Twitter with random people from the ruzzia.

Usually they’d just mock me. Either they’ll ‘zig heil’ laughily, or they’ll just dismiss me with ‘ain’t going do something, you do.’ The ‘come and do what you ask us to do, if you’re so smart’ argument probably tops any of these discussions. It’s reaches 100% of these communications. Yeah, as if Ukrainians weren’t duying since 2014, fighting for their freedom.

Some of them were straight about being afraid. They believed into the lie that every single one of them protesting the war would just be killed. Nobody was killed (at first). Some people went to jail, a hundred maybe. That’s impressive for a 150 million people country.

Yeah, of course if you’re just three man on the red square. If you’re millions, you cannot be ignored. Having no protests (over war) in the ruzzia simply means one thing and one thing only. En-masse ruzzians aren’t against the war. They’re against themselves duying in war, that’s right. But otherwise, why care?

People ruzzians on the internet were just like ‘nah, imma going do nothing’ to our cries to do fucking something, whatever they could.

Bots

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Worth mentioning that besides real ruzzians, they have a huge amount of so-called bots everywhere.

Those are special people on salaries, who pretend they’re someone who they’re not. However, usually, they have no real need to do that, persuade other people in russian-speaking community. They are great at doing just that for free and genuinely.

The bots, they’re busy influencing others, not those they don’t care much of, their own citizens. Probably there is some department of this troll-factory, which is busy setting these narratives. But my point is that they need only to start seeding those narratives, and the ruzzian society being that underdeveloped would nurture the. It’s very easy to set the ‘you owe those pesky Ukrainians nothing, so don’t bother too much’ narrative into their heads, and it’ll live there happily ever after. Just give them a comfortable excuse on why they’re so pathetic, and they’ll glaldy accept it.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to reason with russians. I used their own language, which I was very good at, once. I tried to explain that that is this extreme situation where they ought to act. That was the point of no-return. For them. And for all of us too.

There was some night I just couldn’t sleep. I was too nervous fighting some idiots at Twitter. These people weren’t ruzzian bots, genuine ruzzians. And some of them were from Navalny’s team!

Well, they’re ruzzian assets too, as we can see now. Yet, they genuinely behave this way too.

At some point, I just realised that it’s a complete waste of time and energy. There’s no reason to reason with ruzzians.

Third and Final Attempt

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Some time later, I returned to Twitter, which is X for almost a year now. Elon Muscovite spent a tremendous effort by making it a disinformation platform.

I even created a separate story for that, where I tried to collect all the changes that led to that.

I’ve started just living my life in Twitter. I stopped trying to reason with ruzzians. I started writing exclusively in Ukrainian, and following only the people of Ukrainian origin, to follow what’s happening and what’s popular. I started genuinely chatting with them, gaining some new virtual friends. (Apparently, I’m goot at it.)

Globally, my fight with this type of social network isn’t over. I still think it’s a great way of following the topic you’re interested in. But I’ve left Twitter, because of Elon Musk, X, disinformation platform and whatnot.

Alternatives

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I’ve migrated to Bluesky and Mastodon. I have multiple different accounts, and more likely you won’t want to befriend me there, as I’m interested in a very different information bubble there. That’s why I don’t give any links publicly. I have my ‘official accounts’ in my contacts page.

Technically, Bluesky is a complete clone of Twitter, from the same creator, Jack Dorsey and possibly other people too. My point of view is that they tried to address some mistakes they made with Twitter by trying to make a 2.0 (or whatever new) versionof it.

My view is that in the year of 2024 and on, it’s indecent to stay in Twitter and use it.

• I’m not calling for everyone to remove their accounts (yet), I understand that could be difficult. I haven’t removed my official account for many years, yet it’s inactive since I cannot remember when.
• But I’m calling you all to migrate off Twitter. These days, there are plenty of alternatives. Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and more likely something else too.

I don’t see me ever returning back. I feel like my Twitter story has ended. For me, it’s just some filthy social network, like VKontakte¹ or Odnoklassniki², both are ruzzian assets. I never miss them, as much as I’m not going to miss Twitter any more. It’s long gone for me.

It’s great that Elon Muscovite rebranded it into this pathetic 𝕏 unicode character. Long live the bird.