Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
I mean it was never actually a good place for news, aside from the top five trending stories, if you wanted infinite bad takes on them.
It’s no longer a good place for news, discussion, or even real opinions. It’s just an echo chamber of hate and closed-mindedness, and increasingly just bots talking to each other.
The only reason I had a Twitter account was because there was an emergency event in my local area and Twitter was the one place I could get information about it *right now*. There were locals sharing what they knew, emergency services telling people what measures needed to be taken where, and journalists on the ground saying what they knew in real time. It was invaluable.
When I left Twitter, that ability to follow breaking news as it happens was the thing I was afraid I’d miss out on most. It’s bittersweet to find out that I didn’t need to worry about that after all.
