Once mighty Twitter is now a mess of hate speech, bots and porn, writes Natasha Devon
In 2010, like most millennials in the western world, I was mildly addicted to Twitter.
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It was just so much fun – an irresistible mixture of the latest news in bitesize form, gossip, irreverent observations from clever people, dad jokes and cat pictures.
On Saturday and Sunday evenings in winter, the nation would gather around the television to watch the X Factor, phones clutched as we poised to share our minute-by-minute observations, searchable on the hashtag. Caitlin Moran was the reigning UK queen of the platform at the time, and it felt as though we had access to almost every fleeting thought that crossed her brilliant mind. I know people who met and fell in love on Twitter. I know people who made lifelong friends via the process of firing 140 characters worth of lol-worthy comments at one another. Yes, there was trolling back then, but it was relatively benign and usually resulted in the target quote tweeting with a hilarious counter-burn we could all........
