Thread by @DavidHundeyin

One thing I clearly understand about Twitter is that this place is a permanent and public representative of you. It's not a game.

It is not to be used as a stream-of-consciousness live diary, even though that can be tempting. Twitter can be very dangerous.

Here's how:

We all have incredibly stupid thoughts everyday. That's what makes us human. No matter how smart or respected we are, we all have fractions of us that are complete and utter oloriburukus.

From Kingsley Moghalu to Pamilerin to Elon Musk, all the same. It's human. It's normal.

But here's the thing about Twitter: It encourages us to fart out those unspoken thoughts because the likes, retweets and comments somehow convince us that our throwaway thoughts actually have value. (They don't!)

Sometimes we even keep dumb tweets up because they got engagement.

Think about it, how many of us have had encounters with people and thought to ourselves (without any justification), "This person is rude"? All of us, maybe.

But the minute Charles Anazodo came here to tweet that Tiwa Savage did not greet him, he gave that stupid thought a life.

As long as he kept that thought inside his head or on WhatsApp with his friends and family, his public profile remained untainted.

The minute he tweeted it, he was no longer a respected journalist, but became Twitter NG's everlasting classroom idiot.

Forever.

He's actually not worse than most of us, but that simple inability to keep those random thoughts off Twitter has smeared him forever.

There's nothing he tweets now that anyone will ever take serious. People now reply everything he tweets with "That's why Tiwa didn't greet you."

Or the lady who replied to a tweet about girls developing mentally quicker than boys (not true) by effectively calling her own son a dunce.

She's not the only one ever to think such a thing, but she was the one who tweeted it. And it will NEVER go away. Her son will dislike her.

This is what Twitter does to people. It makes it so easy to express thoughts to a large audience that we forget that it is completely unnatural and unprecedented to have a big-ass microphone next to your mouth all day, everyday, amplifying every little comment to 10,000+ people.

I use Twitter a lot and I say a lot of unscripted stuff, but my own hack is to restrict my engagement to politics, news and current affairs. Because I know that once it gets to bants, mekwe, gender wars, LGBTQ, etc, it is SO easy to misyarn and torpedo yourself.

And how Twitter works is that once you torpedo yourself, it follows you around forever. People lose real life opportunities and offline credibility because they didn't spend more than 15 seconds thinking about something they sent out to 30,000 people instantly.

Twitter is not a nice, cozy personal space like Facebook or Instagram. It is the wild, and everything you say here can and will be used against you in the legal court and in the court of public opinion.

Nobody is saying that people shouldn't engage or speak freely here.

Just be mindful that even your followers list of 300 people is a large audience, and everytime you tweet you are standing in front of 300 people and delivering a speech, but in writing and with screenshots, so you can't deny what you said or claim you meant something else.

TLDR: Twitter will ruin your entire life beyond repair if you use it to record your unscripted stream of consciousness. You have the power to curate yourself, so use it.

And if you need to self-censor to stop you from nailing yourself with your own mouth, do so.