Did I leave Twitter?

Assalamu alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh Alhamdulillah wa Salatu was Salam ala Rasulillah. Muslim, Twitter can be a really exhausting place to be. And very often, in the past two years, I've considered deleting the app altogether.

More often than not, I find myself just dealing with so much of anger and hatred and Vulcanus, from fellow Muslims, for simply explaining Islamic positions.

And today, I just want to discuss a bit about social media, how we use it, and what would be the best way forward. For social media? You know, one of one of the problems with our generation, is that we're the first ever generation to have something like social media, we don't really know what to what are the actual long term benefits or harms of social media? We don't know. It's only when we get old, and we look back, and we can then say, Oh, it was very harmful, or it was very beneficial. In reality, social media just kind of snuck up on us like, one day, we didn't have it one day we did, we didn't even ever realize that we had got sucked into it. And whenever something just like,

sneaks up on society like that, and becomes a new norm, it's really important for us to take a step back. And to ask ourselves, is this really beneficial? Is this really the best usage of my time.

And more often than not, in recent times, when I look at social media, I begin to think that maybe this isn't the best place to be spending my time.

So let's go back a bit, let me give you a bit of an idea of how I've been using social media over the past decade.

The first social media platform that I used a lot was Facebook. And when my Facebook following grew too large. So looking at around 40,000 to 50,000 people, I found myself dealing with too many debates and arguments and people misunderstanding me, and people coming up to my reputation trying to slander me. So I took a step back from Facebook. And I started using it very selectively. So I just log in once or twice a day to post my content. And I don't do anything else. I don't use the app at all, except for posting my content and replying to some inbox messages. There's too many to reply to all.

So what I decided to do at that point is I switched from Facebook, to Twitter. And the reason I switched to Twitter we talking like five or six years ago, is because nobody really knew me on Twitter, I had like maybe 600 followers. So I could tweet, I could follow hobby and news sites. I was following Donald Trump's Twitter page for a long time. Nobody cared, right? Because nobody knew who I was. So I enjoyed it. I would use Twitter to read the news to stay up to date, what's going on in the world, to keep up to date with my hobbies. And just to post some of my own thoughts, then for some reason, in the past two years, my Twitter page grew to a level where now have over 23,000

followers. And I honestly don't know why or how it grew that fast.

But to be completely honest, I don't like it. I don't like the fact that on Twitter, I'm suddenly popular because anything that I tweet,

it tends to reach people that don't know me and don't understand the position that I'm coming from. So just to give you an idea with a following of 23,000 on Twitter, my average monthly Rich is 1 million, 1 million, write a tweet of mine that goes viral reaches around 150,000 people. Now all those 150,000 people, less than 20,000 actually are familiar with me. Many of them have no idea the context of what I'm saying. People have completely different understandings of Islam. And I found a lot of things happening in the past few years that really make me wonder, why am I even on this platform? Now there's been good, there's been good for sure. For example, my course sales have

skyrocketed. I made more core sales from Twitter last year than any other platform besides email. So there's that there was one thing that was keeping me on but in the long term, have to wonder, are sales really worth dealing with all of that harshness and Vulcanus and I had to make changes to to deal with with the popularity so for example, people started picking on which pages I'm following whose posts I'm liking

Who's my Mutual's? People started slandering me gossiping about me taking my tweets out of context, swearing me to my face like, I mean, this is the part that shocked me the most. I come from a community where Muslim woman Alhamdulillah people have higher and dignity and character. So on Twitter when I see a woman in hijab or niqab literally sending me a message full of vulgar words and cursing me, simply because I stated a

traditional Islamic opinion that she doesn't agree with. It kind of shocked me a lot that I don't want to be exposed to that side of the room, I don't want to be exposed to those kinds of people. Because I don't want the image I have in my head of Muslim woman as righteous people full of higher, I don't want that image to be tainted by the behavior of these people online. So what exactly is going on online?

Why are these people behaving the way they do? Now for myself, one of the things I did to try and overcome this and to fix this, is I changed the way I use Twitter. So I unfollowed. Most accounts, keeping it at around 30 of just

people I work with people who are my friends in real life, just left the 30. So no one can find you knew why you are following this page or liking that post. I opened up a second account for doing all that, that doesn't have the following at all. And I

I became very intentional in what I post. And most importantly, whenever a post of mine started reaching people who I don't know, I would mute it, I would mute it. So I don't need to read the comments, and the quote, tweets, which would often be a mess.

It wasn't enough because I still find myself tempted to open it up and see what people are commenting and see what they're quoting. So and often it is so vulgar, and so harsh and so disgusting, that I ended up losing faith in the Muslims end up wondering what's the point and end up, you know, having to deal with a lot of stress because of it. So now I've decided to take a step back and and to maybe just start pulling myself away from Twitter, and focus more on YouTube, because I'm noticing with Twitter, a handful of problems. So number one, you cannot properly articulate your thoughts in a tweet.

Now, with a 10 minute to 30 minute video, you can explain your thoughts very well. And if people don't understand you can make a second video to follow up. But with tweets, you can't really explain things properly. So a lot of it is left open to interpretation. Number two, the algorithm on Twitter pushes things that are controversial and things that upset people. So the more people are upset with your post, and misunderstanding it, the more people it's reaching, and there's nothing you can do about it besides deleting the tweet.

The third issue is a lot of the people using Twitter are immature. They are very childish, you know, people around the age of 18 or 20, arguing with people double the age about things they know nothing about someone who has never been married, arguing with someone who's been married for 20 years, about what it takes to make a marriage work, you know, things like that people who have no children argument people who have been parents for two decades about parenting. So

you know, we're dealing with children, we're dealing with people who are mentally children, people who are immature. And we need to take a step back and realize at that age, we also are kind of stupid. At that age. We also thought we knew better than everybody else. And we're putting out really strange ideas to our friends and our family that they will just laugh off because they knew they were immature.

Now, we had the benefit that when we were that age, there was no social media. So when I was 18, and I was talking nonsensical, extreme or liberal ideas, because I was still exploring my thoughts and trying to figure out where I belong. It was done in enclosed circles with just a few friends or teachers who would help you work through your thoughts and arrive at a good conclusion.

The average 18 year old today is putting their thoughts out on Twitter, where 1000s If not 10s of 1000s of people are reading it. And this is leading to arguments.

So for myself, I realized I need to go easy on them. These are children mentally, even though Islamically they are adults. And they don't know what they're saying. A lot of these people who are cursing us and swearing at us and being really, really harsh with us are really just young kids who don't know any better. And as they live their lives and gain life experience, they will mellow out and they will realize that we were right and that they were wrong in the way that they behaved. So we shouldn't take it personally

So yeah, that's just an important point that when you are dealing with people on Twitter who are vulgar and harsh, and always miss reading what you are posting, just realize that they probably kids were probably mentally still children. And they don't know how to deal with differences of opinion. They all know how to articulate themselves in a wise and mature manner. So go easy on them, and give them time to grow. This doesn't excuse them for what they are doing. Right? So if you are someone who likes to post harsh and mean things on Twitter, understand that everything you say, you will be held answerable to Allah for the Day of Judgment. Have who's not gonna have good opinions of your

fellow Muslims, especially if people have knowledge that perhaps you must understood them? Perhaps they know something you don't, perhaps they've studied deeper than usual, they understand it on a deeper level. Don't always assume the worst. And please, can we as Muslims stop using vulgar language. I don't know when this was normalized, or how this was normalized. But for some reason, this generation of Muslims who are online use the most vulgar and filthiest of languages, even when talking about the religion, even when talking to people of knowledge. And this is not odd. This is completely completely wrong. This is sinful behavior. And this does not represent a religion and

it's managed properly. So please learn proper Islamic character, it is not befitting of your tongue to be using such words, because that is the same term that you use to recite Quran and to remember Allah to make sure that your choice of words are befitting the tongue of the believer, either speak out, which is beneficial or remain silent.

So I've decided that Twitter really isn't worth the headache, I'm not going to spend too much time on it anymore. I've deleted the app, I log in once or twice a day, just post my thoughts. Try not to read any comments, try not to read any quote tweets, don't follow anyone don't read the news feed anymore. rather use that time to make videos, to make online courses, to write books, to write articles, to build my business, to do Dawa in my community to do community service, or to spend time with my family. All of that is far more important. So you won't be seeing me as much on Twitter as I was in the past, I really don't like the fact that I have a bigger following on Twitter than I did

in the past.

And I'll be phased out over time. Either I'll just keep it as something on the side, where tweet my thoughts once or twice a day, or might just eventually delete it altogether. Instead, I'm going to focus here on YouTube, where, luckily, I don't have a big following another person wants a big following, right. And we I can really articulate my thoughts properly through these videos, and share it with people who actually want to learn, because let's face it, when you have a small YouTube channel, the only people coming to your channel are people who actually want to learn, it's very rare that someone's coming here to start a fight. There's much bigger channels for that. So now

I'm gonna spend more time on YouTube less time on Twitter. And by that I don't mean wasting my time scrolling through YouTube, I simply mean, I'll be putting out more beneficial videos, and using my time to produce more beneficial content. So next time I see something that I feel needs addressing, instead of writing a tweet or a thread about it, I will make a detailed YouTube video about it. So hopefully people will understand what I'm saying better, and they'll be less likely to misinterpret it. Allah knows best. So yeah, that's my thoughts for today. And I'll keep you updated on how my experiment with using less social media is going. My goal, one of my goals for 2023 is to cut down

on my social media usage to a level where I don't scroll through any news feeds at all. I use it productively only and not for reading. And more importantly, I don't get sucked into any kind of drama or arguments online at all. So that's my goal. And I suggest that if social media is taking up a lot of your time, did you make that your goal as well? So just ask Allah Hey, Ron, and let me know your thoughts on these topics of social media usage, Twitter, why people misunderstand each other? Why people are so angry all the time and fighting with each other all the time? And also, why do Muslims use vulgar language with each other? Where did this come from? Why was this normalized? And

what are your thoughts on all of this? Share with us in the comments, and let's have a discussion, a productive, polite discussion on how we as an ummah can grow together and learn to use these platforms in a way that is more beneficial. And if we can't, maybe maybe it's just better, that we remove ourselves from these platforms.

and focus on the real world instead she's gonna feed on Walker Tawana and hamdulillahi rabbil Alameen wa salam alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh