Wil Wheaton on quitting social media: "I don’t deserve to be treated so terribly"
Earlier this month, Wil Wheaton decided to take part in a little protest called #DeactiDay. The plan was for a bunch of people to delete their Twitter accounts because, among other reasons, the social media platform had refused to oust hate-spewing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Despite having been on Twitter since the early days, Wheaton happily walked away, finally free of the website’s anxiety-inducing infinite scroll. Now, in a new post on his website, he details his decision to take things a step further and leave the whole of social media in his wake.
Upon leaving Twitter, Wheaton began his search for an alternative social media space that would provide him with the things he still enjoyed about engaging online, i.e. jokes, cat pictures, and the occasional dopamine spike. Unfortunately, what he found when he turned to the hot new microblogging site, Mastodon, was simply more of the same.
I found a harsh reality that I’m still trying to process: thousands of people who don’t know me, who have never interacted with me, who internalized a series of lies about me, who were never willing to give me a chance. I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the “shut up wesley”s and “go fuck yourself”s to taper off after a day or so, it never did. And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined (Mastodon is individual “instances” which is like a server, which connects to the “federated timeline”, which is what all the other servers are), one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.