Instapundit’ Glenn Harlan Reynolds: ‘Why I Deleted My Twitter Account’

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the law professor behind popular political blog Instapundit, published an article in USA Today, Monday, explaining why he decided to delete his Twitter account which had over 100,000 followers.

In his article, titled “Why I deleted my popular Twitter account,” Reynolds claimed the social network has become a “breeding ground for thoughtlessness and contempt.”

“I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, ‘permanently banned’ someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more,” he explained. “But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.”

Reynolds added that social networks “promote bad feelings and bad behavior,” and declared, “I think that Twitter is the worst.”

“In fact, if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter,” Reynolds proclaimed. “I also think that Twitter actually makes people meaner and less thoughtful. People I’ve followed both on Facebook and Twitter are generally much meaner on Twitter, where they’re in the political arena, than on Facebook, where their friends and family are a big part of the audience.”

Reynolds then concluded his article by claiming he’s “happier” now that he isn’t using Twitter, and is instead devoting his “downtime” to “reading novels.”

In 2016, Reynold’s Instapundit account was temporarily suspended from Twitter, before it was reinstated.

Reynolds has previously criticized social media, and in a June article for USA Today, titled “Blame social media for making us more hasty and emotional. Can we fix this?” he questioned whether social networks were “bad for our brains.”