Stephen Fry has spoken out against Twitter and its users after deactivating his account with the social networking site.
The comedian and presenter, who was one of the social network’s earliest celebrity adopters, left the site after receiving a barrage of comments regarding a joke he made while hosting this year’s Baftas, after he called Mad Max: Fury Road costume designer Jenny Beavan a “bag lady” in reference to her choice of outfit for the awards ceremony. Fry defended his comments on Twitter, stating that he and Beavan were friends, which Beavan has confirmed. Beavan later said that she was “absolutely not upset” by Fry’s joke.
However, the vitriol seemingly lobbed in the direction of Fry following the joke caused him to deactivate his account, with him having now penned a blog post bemoaning the site. He wrote:
“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.”
Fry added that “the tipping point of Twitter has now been reached” and that “the pollution of the service is now just too much.”
His comments come during a transitional period for the site, with it struggling to court new users as its management look towards ways they can improve its reach. With much emphasis being placed upon the platform’s users and their continued harassment of one another, with Twitter even unveiling a new ‘Trust and Safety Council’ in order to allow people to “express themselves freely and safely” on the site, Fry is one of the first major users of the site to denounce his support of it as a result of its problems with addressing online harassment.
