OPINION

Goodbye Elon, goodbye.

B. Jay Cooper, former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and Bush, has decided to quit Twitter. This is why.

B. Jay Cooper

Nov 7, 2022 — 4 min read

B. Jay Cooper, former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and Bush, has decided to quit Twitter. This is why.

First published: Nov 2022.

I decided to quit Twitter. I don’t expect the Earth to stop because of that nor do I even expect the few likes my posts used to (sometimes) get to miss me. But, finally, Twitter got me.

Honestly, it’s not like I even looked at it every day. I didn’t.

It took a buildup, I confess.

First, it was the phony information that made Twitter all atwitter.

Then, it was tracking ex-President Trump’s tweets. Why, I’m not sure, because they always made the news in nanoseconds anyway, so I couldn’t fall behind by much.

Twitter

Twitter finally started suspending accounts for distributing false or threatening information. Unfortunately, they didn’t suspend accounts for just being stupid (I guess because then Twitter would get far fewer postings plus, SENATOR Herschel Walker may be on his way).

Of course, there were those many irrelevant ads. I’d click to not see them anymore and other uninteresting ads took their place.

And, now, there’s Elon!! No thank you. I have to draw the line somewhere.

I did follow some interesting people – like Liz Cheney; White House Press Secretary Karin Jean-Piere; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a New York Times correspondent; Prof. Peter Hotez dean of the Baylor School of Medicine and star TV explainer about pandemics and vaccines.; Broadway’s Seth Rudetsky; Tess Gerritsen, a favorite mystery writer; Chasten Buttigieg, husband of the Transportation secretary; a whole bunch of political reporters and, one of my very favorites, Room Rater, which rates room setups of people being interviewed on TV via Zoom or Skype.

There were, of course, the occasional brilliant tweets. Like when Colm Flynn, Vatican correspondent for EWT News, tweeted:

“For the past 20 years I’ve received a Valentines card from the same secret admirer. So I was pretty upset when I didn’t get one this year. First my granny dies, now this.”

For the past 20 years I've received a Valentines card from the same secret admirer. So I was pretty upset when I didn't get one this year. First my granny dies and now this.
— Colm Flynn (@colmflynnire) February 14, 2022

Well, I enjoyed it.

One of my favorites that I posted was:

“Just for the record, you don’t have to ‘take a listen;’ You can simply ‘listen’.”

Just for the record, you don’t have to ‘take a listen’; you can simply ‘listen.’
— B. Jay Cooper (@bjaycooper) June 15, 2022

That was in response to the annoying phrase TV news people have adopted to get you to pay attention to a video clip. “Take a listen,” they say, and I wonder where I should take it.

Then again, I don’t think any of my paltry number of followers “liked” it, so maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought. Or, maybe nobody’s truly following me.

The main thing I used Twitter for was as one more “platform” to distribute this column.

I’m going to suspend Twitter today. As I understand it, it stays suspended for 30 days and then, unless I sign in again, it deletes itself (I always think of Mission Impossible when I see that).

So... goodbye Twitter, goodbye. Goodbye Elon, don’t cry!

— AUTHOR —

▫ B. Jay Cooper, Former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Also headed communications offices at the RNC, U.S. Department of Commerce, and Yale University.

Sources

Text: This piece was originally published in The Screaming Moderate and re-published in PMP Magazine on 7 November 2022, with the author’s consent. | The author writes in a personal capacity.