'The room had started to smell. Really quite bad': Stephen Fry exits Twitter once again
For a man so readily associated with words -- and certainly for a wordsmith so enamored with technology -- Twitter seems like something of a natural home for Stephen Fry. Over the years he has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, but last night he closed his account. Fry's latest exit from Twitter (there have been several over the last few years for numerous reasons) came about because of the backlash he received for making a joke at an award ceremony.
Hosting the BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) on Sunday, he referred to costume designer and award winner (and, indeed, friend) Jenny Beavan as being "dressed as a bag lady". 'Offended' Twitter users attacked Fry in their droves, and he fought a valiant battle, before eventually giving up and terminating his account. It comes just days after Twitter set up a new Trust & Safety Council.
The complainers seemed oblivious to the fact that Beavan and Fry are close friends -- even less that she was in on the joke. After hours of abuse from the hard of thinking, Fry lashed out by saying: "Will all you sanctimonious fuckers fuck the fuck off Jenny Beavan is a friend and joshing is legitimate. Christ I want to leave the planet".
In a post on his own website, Fry explains his reasons for ditching Twitter:
[...] let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended -- worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It's as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn't matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists... the ghastliness is absolutely the same. It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view. I've heard people shriek their secularism in such a way as to make me want instantly to become an evangelical Christian.
He likens his departure from the site to simply leaving the room. He may well return, but at the moment the waters of Twitter are "frothy with scum", and Fry suggests that "too many people have peed in the pool" to make him want to stick around right now.
Twitter has long been trying to be seen to fight trolls that abuse other users, but Fry is quick to counter suggestions that he has been run off the site:
But you've let the trolls and nasties win! If everyone did what you did, Stephen, the slab-faced dictators of tone and humour would have the place to themselves. Well, yes and they're welcome to it. Perhaps then they'll have nothing to smell but their own smell.
So I don't feel anything today other than massive relief, like a boulder rolling off my chest. I am free, free at last.
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