I’ve never been much of a fan of Twitter, but seeing that so many influential people (as opposed to the pond scum known as “Internet Influencers”) like to put their thoughts out there on a daily basis, I thought I’d have a go.

I am left-leaning politically, maybe physically as well, I don’t know, so I have “Followed” some people who I think I might find tolerable. Among them Jo Biden and Kamala Harris in the US, and Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and Christia Freeland in Canada. All are centrists with a lean to the left, at least compared to the populists who occupy the news media these days.

People I don’t follow include Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Green in the US, and Pierre Poilievre and Marissa Lantsman in Canada, because they are all of that populist rightwing political genre mentioned above. It’s not that I don’t want to see stuff from them occasionally, but I don’t want my daily feed full of their nonsense.

Over the past three months I have had no posts at all come up on my feed from the politically friendly accounts I chose to follow. Not one. I go and look for their feeds and they’re churning tweets out daily. Hmmmm.

Over those same three months I have had daily tweets from all the people I don’t follow, all of whom have descended to the grotesque depths that Trump and Poilievre have been reaching into. I get updates from spineless fools like Ted Cruz, the Trump children, Mike Johnson, Dan Bongino and a host of other scurrilous US Trump apologists. From Canada I get Poilievre, Lantsman and even the vile trash that is the Toronto Sun. None of these accounts are people I follow.

I have resorted to blocking the worst of them because it’s the only way I can stop the flood. Are they replaced with tweets from people I actually follow? No, of course not, because now I get posts from other right-wing populists, all of whom I wouldn’t follow on Twitter in a month of Sundays.

If you’re ever in doubt that Elon Musk has seriously skewed the Twitter algorithms in favour of his favoured political stance, try it yourself, but be prepared for some awful, awful content.

I still dip into Twitter occasionally, search out people I follow (following is meaningless unless Elon approves, of course), and daily block more right-wing loons. Ah well, there are still the tweets from Canada’s foremost Trucking account to see, and I could watch bad driving videos all day.