Comedian Joe Mande has sent his final tweet, so don’t bother DMing him.
Mande posted an essay to Twitter on Monday calling the social media site “pointless,” “stupid as f—” and the internet’s equivalent of “smoking embalming fluid.”
“I’m not smoking the embalming fluid anymore,” Mande wrote. “I’ve decided to unplug from this toxic app, at least until they figure out how to remove the actual problematic accounts (e.g. the Nazis, the Russian bots, the red-pilled rapists, etc., etc.,).”
Mande became an internet icon by buying over a million followers on Twitter, all for just a few hundred dollars, just to prove that he could. He’s made a name for himself retweeting absurd celebrity tweets as a way of trolling, even frequently responding to other trolls online. In his essay, Mande writes that his decision to abandon Twitter came after what he said was the third time in less than a month that he had his account suspended by the social media giant.
“I was suspended for responding to an anonymous troll (who was harassing me) by saying “s— my d—,” Mande said, surprised that this is seen as a violent threat or as an inappropriate use of foul language while other users are getting off easy. “Should I be conducting myself more appropriately, like prominent Twitter users David Duke or (the “verified”) Richard Spencer?”
Mande said Twitter has stopped being fun in the time since he’s been on it. He says it at times had fully taken over his life, such as when he “made a fake account pretending to be Soon-Yi Previn.” But now it’s become a venue for people to vent at strangers or even the president, calling it “vicious and ugly.”
“I’ve become desensitized to being called a kike, a cuck, a f—-t; to death threats; to people sending me mocking gifts of my dead friend. This place has become a f—ing hellscape for me.”
Mande added that he knows it’s even worse for women, LGBTQ individuals and people of color trying to use the app as a platform to speak their mind, and he made a plea to Twitter to clean up the problem in the hopes that he might return to it someday.
For what it’s worth, Twitter seemed sad to see him go. On Wikipedia, someone updated Mande’s page to say, “he wrote a long hard to follow tweet about how he was leaving twitter but then stayed on twitter to see how well the tweet did. He did this because he is desperate for attention.”
See Mande’s tweet below:
https://twitter.com/JoeMande/status/920000164823044096