Maggie Haberman speaks at Nobel Week Dialogue. Photo: Julia Reinhart/ Getty Images
The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize winning White House Correspondent, Maggie Haberman has decided to leave Twitter after 187,000 tweets, a year and a half into Trump's presidency.
"I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me. I will re-engage eventually, but in a different way," Haberman writes in the N.Y. Times Sunday Review. "The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs, with no end in sight. It is a place where people who are understandably upset about any number of things go to feed their anger, where the underbelly of free speech is at its most bilious."
"Twitter is now an anger video game for many users. It is the only platform on which people feel free to say things they’d never say to someone’s face. For me, it had become an enormous and pointless drain on my time and mental energy."
- "Twitter is a useful and important platform. It’s a good aggregator for breaking news. I still check my feed to see breaking news developments, and I will continue to."
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey replied with a thoughtful Twitter thread, acknowledging that she has a "lot of fair critiques":
- "Fundamentally, we need to focus more on the conversational dynamics within Twitter. We haven’t paid enough consistent attention here. Better organization, more context, helping to identify credibility, ease of use."