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Last week I had a tweet on X that gained some steam. Years ago, this might have been cause for celebration. But in 2026, the response has been enough to make me leave the platform permanently.

The tweet in question:

Cadence Weapon@cadenceweapon

Sorry, there’s no justification for a police chief from Edmonton flying 10,000 km to learn from a genocidal country’s police force. Doesn’t matter how many paragraphs you type on a post with closed comments, nothing will ever make it acceptable.

Edmonton Police @edmontonpolice

In mid-February, I joined police Chiefs from Canada and the United States, on a visit to Israel where we met police and community leaders in several cities. I spent time with police officers from Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze faiths representing a wide range of cultural and

12:47 PM · Mar 18, 2026 · 94.9K Views

66 Replies · 969 Reposts · 4.87K Likes

It was a simple post replying to some hackeneyed PR gobledegook from my hometown police department. I typed it up while making my morning smoothie and pressed send. When I noticed it picking up as the day went on, I braced myself. I realized that I had kept comments open, leaving myself vulnerable to a torrent of abuse that has become more violent in nature after Elon took over, emboldening a tidal wave of alt-right chuds to subsequently flood the app.

When the algorithm holds on tight to a post that it knows will generate engagement and impressions, I call it being put in the blender. And when you’re stuck in the churn, it only stops spinning after the machine has squeezed out every bit of value.

In the comments, there were calls for me to be deported from Canada. I, former poet laureate of Edmonton, was told to stay out of Albertan business. I was criticized for having potentially benefited from the Canadian arts grant system. But what bothered me most was someone mentioning that they had looked into my family history. As a father and a husband, that was my cue to leave.

Bot or not, was any of this really worth it? I looked around and realized that anyone who was still on X in 2026 trying for bangers by any means necessary was either an addict or had a humiliation fetish. Most of the artists and great thinkers had gone already. It was like staying at the afters too long, talking in circles about war crimes on a couch flanked by local drug dealers, degenerate gamblers, weird guys with questionable politics and inveterate scammers, all because I was too lazy to call a cab home.

The ultimate time waster, Twitter was the digital equivalent of stepping out for a cigarette. Probably just as bad for you too. I’d tried to quit in the past, but the sunk-cost fallacy around the audience I had built there over the years kept me hanging on. For whatever discourse I tapped into on X that inspired an essay or a song idea, there were significantly more moments where my mind was completely drawn away from whatever task was at hand. It made writing a book more difficult than it needed to be.

In the days since I’ve stopped using the app, a space in my mind has opened up, reminding me of all the slow culture I could’ve been absorbing had I not been on X getting blasted by death bulletins about celebrities I’d never heard of before. I wonder if there will be scientific studies in the future examining the brains of Twitter users, where they will discover a bird-shaped mass amongst the grey matter to account for a weakening of the ability to appreciate nuance and a crippling loss of the capacity to disagree respectfully.

Watching AI-generated footage of fake airstrikes isn’t making me more informed about world events. I don’t need to be the first person to know that Chuck Norris died. Ever since Musk made it so users can ask Grok to create explicit deepfakes of any person of any age or gender, the average scroll on X has become the Smithers vs strippers meme from The Simpsons, decidedly not safe for work or anywhere else.

And the only way to promote my work on there is to make people angry about something unrelated that might compel them to look me up. But do I want to be known for whatever that rage bait would be?

Why had I even used the app in the first place? It was the people: the music nerds, the artists, the authors, the fashionistas. I was there to learn, to be inspired, to share ideas, to be part of a community. I didn’t sign up to be threatened by trolls or to wade through disinformation all day. That final post I made will remain as a digital grave marker on my account as a reminder of what I specifically don’t want to spend my time doing online. If you’re still over there for some reason, let this be your cue to get out as well.

Farewell to X

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