It was the place where we all converged, at the centre of the social media map.

But it all seems to be crumbling now. I flirted with mastodon a little while ago. Nobody really had the energy for it and it was dull as ditchwater, with suffocating etiquette to learn. We hoped it would get better back on twitter (as I think it then still was). It didn’t. And this time it’s feels like a substantial exodus away from Elon world, many galvanised by their repulsion at the part X and those who use and control it, played in the misinformation and disorder.

For many lawyers it appears that the refusal to tackle misinformation and material inciting crime and disorder, means that X has become a positive threat to the rule of law. For some that means either that one must leave rather than support such a corrupting platform. For others it means they feel they need to stay to keep telling truth, correcting misinformation. This week has seen several posts from the elders of legal twitter about their decisions to leave X.

I feel both of those pulls. I don’t want to prop up X, which increasingly leaves me despairing. But nor do I want to abandon a space where voices that speak with reason, balance and from a place of knowledge are much needed.

Nor am I under any illusions that my staying or going will make any great difference to anything. I’m just one voice, and a pretty niche one at that. But those of us with a voice still have a choice to make.

I’m not sure yet what my ultimate choice will be. But I’m not prepared to flounce out in a rush. I’ve been on twitter for almost 16 years, for better or worse and somehow I’ve amassed 20,000 followers (poor deluded fools that they are). I enjoy the engagement, the ripostes, the challenge I get from those followers when I post. I don’t find those exchanges are drowned out by bots as others do. But in between those exchanges I am fed a diet of rubbish that is beyond depressing and makes me feel that it is futile to try and stop the rot, to try and use my voice to promote access to justice and public trust and confidence in our systems of law and order and dispute resolution, or even just to engage human to human at all. It is undoubtedly ever harder to stay, and less and less rewarding to do so than it has been in this past 15 years.

So, seeing that lots of those I enjoy engaging with are leaving, I have set up on Bluesky. I don’t want to be the left to turn the lights out on legal twitter. It seems nice, though I don’t know if nice is enough. I’ve found a lot of my legal twitter buddies relatively easily but worry it might be a bit clubby – it won’t be easy to replicate the much wider community I had on twitter.

Those of us who populated twitter at the outset, the first legal bloggers and tweeters, invested a lot of energy in demystifying and explaining the law and what lawyers do. We are not naive. We know it is an unending task, that most people don’t want to listen, many will wilfully misunderstand or misinterpret what we say in good faith, and that only a few will listen, absorb and appreciate the context we are trying to share.

I’ve been committed to public legal education (through twitter, through this blog, through The Transparency Project etc) for over 15 years, and I plan to carry on that task for as long as there is someone who wants to hear it. This is not the first time I’ve been thoroughly despondent, and wondered what the point was. Misinformation proliferates because its what people want to hear, because its easier to understand, to accept than the messy, nuanced truth. Its undoubtedly worse than it has ever been by some margin – it feels sometimes like people have lost the ability to discern fact from fiction, and have abandoned critical thinking.

But… if we don’t make the law and legal process accessible, understandable, relatable, to those who are willing and able to understand, we really cannot complain when people turn away from law and the rule of law and start making up their own rules, their own truth.

Anyway, like most lawyers, I’m in danger of disappearing up my own wazoo. Social media for me is also as much about pictures of cats and videos of pratfalls, about seeing the beauty and small moments in other peoples lives that they care to share, and about learning from others (especially non-lawyers) – as it is about promulgating the ‘special’ knowledge of the lawyer (ahem).

So on I shall go with my intoxicating infusion of crochet and law related content, boring and irritating lawyers and non-lawyers in equal measure. I plan to keep a foot in both camps at the moment, probably for the foreseeable future. We’ll see how things evolves, and what platform best matches the triad of reasons I do social media – to connect about law, to connect with lawyers and to keep connected with the real world and life outside the legal bubble. Who knows, I may even do a little bit more real life and a little less social media…