There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.

In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.

If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.

Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code; the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.

And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.

This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly — in a way the old news media would never have allowed. When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?

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Twitter began to ask itself the same questions, and finally, after Trump’s response to the disturbances of 6 January, the decision was made to chuck the most famous and powerful man in the world off the platform. He went the way of Katie Hopkins into the next world (aka Parler) along with a string of others. Just this past weekend an odious little toad and anti-Semite called Nick Fuentes was chucked off the platform. Very few people were sorry to see him go.

But Trump’s removal was the most audacious sign yet that the platform was willing to make editorial decisions. It could no longer pretend that it was simply a neutral platform — it had become a curated outlet. The suspicion grew, too, that they were playing more insidious games behind the scenes. Twitter had always denied the practice of shadow-banning, which is when a user’s tweets mysteriously stop appearing, before it was eventually confirmed by Twitter that they were doing exactly that.

Yet all of this is as nothing compared to the devastating virus-like effect that Twitter has had across the public arena.

It has undeniably coarsened public discourse. There are commentators and journalists for whom I used to have some respect, but who use Twitter so constantly that I read their work with ever less anticipation and regard. There is almost no prominent figure on Twitter who hasn’t lowered themselves in one’s estimation. There are those who use the platform as a venue to carp about everything that their contemporaries, rivals or friends are saying. They berate other journalists, as though they are masters of the genre whose verdict is final. The pleasant communal hackery of old has been replaced by a melee of endless fall-outs, unnecessarily initiated and often with irreparable results.

The platform has also given the greatest possible voice to the general scold: the type of person who achieves great pleasure in taking offence and even causing someone to lose their livelihood or reputation — the “I am offended by that” or “I don’t find that funny” brigade. Where once people simply shrugged, now they “take to Twitter”, in the annoying parlance, to show that they are unimpressed, or to tell people off for saying something which they disagree. There is a performative rage which the platform has encouraged, and which people find it hard to withdraw from once they are caught up in it. It’s addictive. It’s thrilling.

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And then there is the chihuahua effect: the way in which any small, yappy animal can distract the platform for at least a day at a time. Would-be chihuahuas can get the hang of this very easily. You simply say something silly and instead of the grown-ups just ignoring the small yappy dog, all respond to it. A whole day can go by in which some relatively good minds and a great many more mediocre ones have done almost nothing but got themselves in a lather about how annoying the small yapping dog is.

There are countless other reasons to loathe the platform: photos of dinner; stories of deeply dull train journeys or traffic jams; glimpses into the mundane aggravations which are bad enough in your own life without needing to read those of others. People misery-share their lives and the sadness and anger proves infectious. It is all a colossal waste of time, of course, yet is by no means the worst aspect of the all-powerful site.

That has been illustrated once again these past few days, with the anonymous racist abuse posted at black England footballers. Twitter acted as a megaphone for the most hysterical of these bigots, and highlighted the platform’s complete inability to sensibly and reasonably offer judgements about the actual state of the world we live in.

It made it seem as though these racists are vast in number. As though they are powerful and need the full force of every arm of the state to unite against them and quell them. Never mind that many of these tweets came from outside the UK, and that they were utterly dwarfed in number by supportive messages.

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The New York Times, whose correspondent seems to spend an awful lot of time news gathering on Twitter, even went as far as to describe these as “racist attacks”, never missing a chance to take a swipe at Britain. But we live in a country which is by every standard one of the least racist on earth, with statistics all demonstrating a vertiginous fall-off in people holding prejudice attitudes. Britain is one of the countries most unbothered, indeed most favourable, about things such as interracial marriage, or living next door to someone of a different race.

We have one of the most diverse cabinets in the world and our public square, from television and film to our national football team is visibly and un-controversially multi-ethnic. And yet reading Twitter you’d have no idea of that. No wonder that in Britain, as in the US, young people think that they live in such a racist society, beyond redemption. Here on this platform a very few shrill voices can be so magnified that people mistake that sound for the country as a whole. And so, 15 years after its launch, Twitter has become not just a megaphoning platform, but a distorting one, and the distortion continues to have a toxic impact on real life.

Crouch End. They live in Crouch End, where they just sort of… get on with life, while being dead. It’s when visiting the anonymous suburb while on business, that the hero of Self’s story runs into his own dead mother. It comes as quite a shock.

I imagine you might get a similar sensation when you sign up to Parler, a new social network. It’s Crouch End for the online Right. So, hello Milo Yiannopoulos (terrible infant; removed from Twitter July 2016), hello Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin (vlogger; banned August 2017). G’day Gavin McInnes (edgelord comedian, Proud Boys founder and ex-VICE editor; went to meet our digital Lord, August 2018). Wotcha Tommy Robinson (just a regular geezer; May 2018). Oh, and hello darkness my old friend: it’s Katie Hopkins (obverse churnalist; finally deleted from this life June 2020).

Parler is where the dead live — and right now, many of the living are weighing-up joining them there. The site has had a sharp spike in traffic since Hopkins’ one million follower account was banned by Twitter last month and she took her shtick there. Some are no doubt signing up simply because they cling on to Hopkins’ every word. For many more, though, the Hopkins defenestration has presented a place where they can escape the vast gravity of the progressive-run social media giants. We’re a community town square,” Parler co-founder John Matze told CNBC. “An open town square, with no censorship.” Matze’s heroes include Thomas Sowell and Ayn Rand.

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So is this moment the real balkanisation starts? Could Parler be the Fox News of social media, to rival Twitter’s CNBC of social media? I suspect the makers of Parler, despite their claims of non-partisanship, would love it to become the ‘Right-wing Twitter’. The site already has tie-ins with Fox, Breitbart, and various Republican congressmen, including Ron Paul and Ted Cruz.

Parler’s timing is bang-on. Or more accurately, Parler’s time has finally arrived. All culture wars are a battle to frame our understanding of reality. But it’s only lately that the fact that the Left hold the commanding heights of most media has become The Story on the Right.

Since the BLM protests, as they have watched opposing narratives play out between their phones and their TV screens, many have increasingly lost faith in the public square. They no longer believe in the possibility of dialogue. Big corporations back Black Lives Matter; then say they aren’t talking about that Black Lives Matter. Hermetic lockdowns are vital; then they’re not. A mainly peaceful protest injures 27 cops; then a man pissing near a monument is jailed for a fortnight.

All of this cognitive dissonance has all led to a kind of mass demoralisation, a despondency which is well captured in the drift to Parler. It’s the same gust of frustrated energy that has fuelled the recent Defund The BBC campaign. The temptation is to take the toys back. After all, the first rule of any civil war is to build barricades across the major entry roads.

The dream would be to be to own the means of cultural production — and thereby, to reverse the biases of the progressive elite. But the dream is stupid.

There’s an old libertarian saw which says that you just have to “build a better mousetrap”, and the market will do the rest — yet every attempt so far to build an online space for the Right has proven why that isn’t the case. For a start, Parler itself is only the latest in a long line of attempts to create that. Depending on what year it was, the life raft might have been Gab, Telegram, Minds or Discord. None of those has reached critical mass because, first, critical mass is vast. Twitter has 300 million active monthly users. Second, because sitting in a digital room only with people who agree with you is boring, and sitting in a room with people who espouse a condensed, calcified view of your ideology is actively unpleasant.

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Gab is the best warning of what happens when you concentrate a tendency. Once, it was billed as ‘free speech Twitter’. Its libertarian founders wished a hundred flowers to bloom. Soon, though, only those who needed the most free speech could stand to hang around in the speech swamp. It’s now better known as ‘Nazi Twitter’.

In the long run, it turned out that the Friendster and MySpace paradigm — the idea that the social networks would be subject to regular waves of Schumpeterian creative destruction — was a blip. The real answer was exactly what economists would have predicted: ‘network effects’, deeply embedded, would entrench a monopoly. The leading social networks at the start of the last decade were leading the race at the end. There is no reason they won’t lead us to the next decade.

Twitter, undoubtedly, has its head rammed up its own San Francisco filter bubble. It undoubtedly applies its ‘terms of service’ with cynical selectivity. But for the online Right to take this personally is to miss how much of the problem is mere economics. The big social media providers understand that certain strands of opinion just don’t prettify the place, and they must prune their garden to make it attractive to advertisers.

The most transparent illustration of this rule was in February 2017, with YouTube’s ‘Adpocalypse’. Then, The New York Times’ in-house offence archeologists dug up a puerile old gag from the world’s biggest vlogger, PewDiePie, Felix Kjellberg. A moral panic in corporate advertising circles ensued, at the end of which, YouTube had limited and demonetised a wide range of commentators, mainly on the Right, effectively ending the livelihoods of many who’d spent years building up an audience.

YouTube had made good ad money off hundreds of accounts for many years, yet they were happy to sacrifice the cash in the name of a broader goal. At heart, these platforms are advertising distributors — that’s their business model — and so, on the whole, they would prefer it if the foul stench of political combat went away altogether, so that the world could be made safe for the sale of Dove Go Fresh Aerosol Body Spray and Doritos Poppin’ Jalapeño.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has consciously adopted building a low-conflict environment as their goal — deprecating posts about politics, and elevating cosier conversations. That still hasn’t stopped the CEO of Unilever imposing a moratorium on Facebook and Twitter ads until after the November US election, citing the toxicity of the online environment.

Which is why, as the political temperature has yet again risen in recent weeks, there has been both an imperative and an opportunity to send in the bodysnatchers. It’s obvious that certain people have been in the crosshairs for a long time. The present moment simply offers enough covering fire. When Tommy Robinson was disappeared from Facebook, it had been so long-telegraphed that it felt as though it had already happened years before.

Last week, YouTube deleted the channel of Stefan Molyneux, a libertarian and self-styled ‘philosopher’, also patently on their long-term kill list. Molyneux was an early adopter: he had been broadcasting for 13 years, amassing thousands of hours of content. The garden looks a bit brighter now. His livelihood is effectively over.

The naive might quibble at the distinction between Graham Linehan (RIP, last week), and Molyneux. One is the floppy-haired father of Father Ted whose views only skewed Right when it came to transgenderism. The other has a curious fixation on Islam and population replacement rates.

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But from a commercial standpoint, the logic is consistent. Both can be answered by the question “What does the marketing director of Procter & Gamble think that public opinion looks like?”. The marketing director of Procter & Gamble thinks that the public thinks that transwomen are women and Islam is a religion of peace, because these are the low-conflict ‘inclusive’ views that cause the minimum of fuss, in the short term at least.

The hard reality is that the progressive Left controls the envelope of our digital public squares, and will do for the forseeable future. And, that’s at least a better option than the full dystopia of each tribe each retreating into their own balkanised echo chamber.

The first part of improving on that reality lies in recognising we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Because the thing we’ve learned over the past few years is that being banned isn’t simply a matter of setting up your stall elsewhere. Banning actually works. Milo Yiannopoulos’ fame died off spectacularly after he was expunged. Tommy Robinson has been reduced to a rump. Heard from Gavin McInnes lately? I suspect the same will happen to Hopkins, who has a broad but not deep fanbase — in that sense she’s a hard-Right version of Buzzfeed: click-farming gone malignant.

The irony is that this weakening of the dream of a digital public square available to all is driven as much by libertarianism’s red lines — the notion that any social media company has total purview over who it lets on — as it is is by the Left’s censoriousness. Parler is a Right-wing answer to a problem that can only involve crossing those red lines: acknowledging that some technically private things also have big public consequences. As such, it might be well a great mausoleum to internets past. But it can never be the internet’s future.