You never forget it when you fall in love. That rush of excitement, of novelty, of passion, of risk. The fear that you might make a fool of yourself and get your heart broken. The hope that you’ll feel a deep sense of connection, a sense of being part of something larger than yourself.
That’s how I remember feeling when I fell in love with Twitter.
It was 2009. I was filling in as the Legislature columnist for the Edmonton Journal, covering the travails and occasional triumphs of the Stelmach government, while my colleague Graham Thomson was on sabbatical. Our provincial affairs reporter, Trish Audette, told me about this fun new computer messaging system that the young political staffers, bloggers and activists were experimenting with. She encouraged me to start an account, and helped me brainstorm my Twitter handle: Paulatics.
At 44, I felt way too old to be one of the cool kids on the platform. Still, I was instantly smitten. I loved connecting with people in real time, engaging in political debate, live tweeting QP and late-night debates from the assembly. It was a revolutionary thing to do, back then. The excitement of telling the story as it was happening, to hundreds of political junkies, was delicious—especially when they responded, in real time, with comments and arguments of their own. Back then, #yeg was Twitter-mad, a city full of early adopters who soon built a virtual but authentic community. Facebook was where I went to connect with old friends. Twitter was where I made new ones—where I went to hash out issues and share funny stories, to feel myself embedded in a network of people with a wide range of political views, who all wanted to make our city and our province a better place.
I became a bit obsessive, live-tweeting whether reporting on breaking news or tweeting a funny play-by-play of my preparations to host Christmas dinner for 20. I earned my blue checkmark—Twitter’s method of authenticating account-holders, one of the first granted to an Alberta journalist—because I tweeted so quickly during the arena debate at Edmonton City Council that Twitter kept assuming that I was a bot, and putting me in Twitter jail (locking me out of my account). I had to beg for my verification just so I could stay online.
You can’t be certain anymore if the trolls who swarm and attack you are real Albertans, or even real people.
I don’t want to romanticize those early days. There were still nasty fights and occasional online witch hunts. And there were certainly trolls. But they were “real” trolls, authentic human beings with whom you could sometimes have a semi-reasonable argument. By the time Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, though, the platform had changed. In a world of Russian bot farms and online bad actors, you could never be certain anymore if the trolls who swarmed and attacked you were real Albertans, or even real people.
I still managed to keep some Twitter energy going when I left daily journalism for the Senate—where I caused a bit of a stir when I started live-tweeting the most exciting Senate debates (if that’s not an oxymoron) right from the Senate floor. I shocked a lot of people in Ottawa by providing real-time coverage of speeches on everything from back-to-work legislation for striking postal workers to medical assistance in dying to the invocation of the emergency measures that ended the siege in Ottawa.
As we absorb the shocks of the Elon Musk era, it’s easier now to see how love made us blind. We gave away our ideas and our creativity for free to a capitalist platform where we were always the product, not the client. We “revolutionized” how journalism was done, until newspapers themselves seemed obsolete. We changed the way political movements were born—until we realized that Twitter was just as adept at connecting far-right groups and hatemongers as it was at nurturing an Arab Spring or #MeToo campaign or #IdleNoMore. We loved the idea of politicians speaking directly to the people without filters—until the advent of “verified” feeds filled with lies and hate.
We embraced our symbiotic (or was it parasitic?) relationship with Twitter and shared our lives and our work there—without much stopping to think what would happen if the rules of the games were changed, if the relationship itself became toxic.
It’s like a bad breakup. And I’m still in mourning. At its best, Twitter was our collective creation, a place where we could connect with the world and with one another, where we could make our voices heard and where we could hear voices that had been silenced far too long.
But with Twitter in freefall, with Facebook in increasing decline, let’s lose the illusion that social media empowered us. We were every bit as much at the mercy of social-media moguls as were readers in the days of press barons and yellow journalism. For the last dozen years, we’ve had ringside seats to a political, cultural, economic and social revolution, wrought by social media. We thought we were the revolutionaries. Sadly, we were just ever tweeting.
Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.
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