Sheletta: Why I X’d out Twitter even after it made my family famous

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Moving to a new neighborhood often comes with some apprehension, but when I moved into my neighborhood a little more than a dozen years ago, I felt at home right away.

The neighborhood was new and I was surrounded by others who wanted to build a special culture. I became friendly with many of them. I never knew who was going to drop by to share an intriguing point of view or a laugh. As neighbors, we looked out for each other and lifted each other up.

Of course, I didn’t see eye-to-eye with everyone in the neighborhood. But we were all able to smile, nod or wave to each other in passing, like good neighbors do.

When I refer to this neighborhood, it is not the home where I physically live with my family — but shoutout to the folks who live on my street in Cottage Grove: Traci, Mike, Phil, Jeannine. Y’all have always been terrific.

No, I’m talking about the neighborhood where I’ve lived virtually — my Twitter community. (I know it was renamed X, but it’ll always be Twitter to me.)

It’s where I engaged in intellectual debate and discussion with lawyers, professors, activists, celebrities and above-average Joes from all over the world. On Twitter, I found my voice and created content that built my career and buttressed my business.

But lately, a new crew has muscled its way into my Twitter community, let in by new owner Elon Musk, who allows and even encourages them to dump daily loads of toxic waste. That changed the rules, spoiled the atmosphere and violated every norm of my precious neighborhood. It’s not healthy to live in this polluted space any longer.

So I thought about packing up and leaving.

My WCCO Radio colleague Chad Hartman advised me against it, saying, Don’t let them win. Use your voice and use the platform.

But I kept hearing the words a wise old gambling man told me many years ago: “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

I loved Twitter so much. I would wake up extra early every morning, and before I grabbed a cup of coffee, said my prayers or got my kids ready for school, I’d grab my phone and scroll through posts for hours to get news updates, see celebrity stories and read political commentary, all while laughing at jokes and viral videos.

It was always a beautiful day in the Twitter neighborhood, until suddenly it wasn’t.

I woke up one morning and all my favorite social media sidekicks were gone, replaced by renters who didn’t care anything about following the rules or junking up the place.

When you see that things have changed for the worse and they can’t or won’t ever go back to the good ol’ days, the smart money lands on running away and not looking back.

It’s against my nature to walk away from a good fight. But under X’s current incarnation, set in motion by Musk and his minions, Twitter’s intelligent and thought-provoking commentary is not celebrated, it’s attacked.

The guardrails are off. It’s become common for threats and slurs — yes, the whole alphabet soup, the B-word, the C-word and the N-word — to be leveled. I’ve even experienced insults mocking my children with autism — yes, the R-word.

It used to be when bad neighbors got downright disgusting, I could block them. Under Twitter’s new homeowner’s association rules, anyone I had blocked could now see my posts and find a way to respond with their sickening, predictably nasty comments.

My friend Paul Douglas calls me Hurricane Sheletta because of the way I energize a room. But honey, I’m not Storm and there is no way my blood pressure will allow me, without medication, to hang around with these X-men and women.

So with a heavy heart and itchy trigger finger, I deactivated my Twitter account this week. That meant that my timeline was lost, and with it a big chunk of my own history and great memories. No one can go back and read my viral posts, which have run from heartbreaking to hilarious. Even I can’t scroll back and relive some of the high points in my life that happened on Twitter.

Here are just a few times Twitter flipped my script:

In 2020, when Camping World CEO Marcus Lemonis posted that he was looking for a worthy family to give a camper to, I suggested that he could do no better than my fabulous brood.

Pretty soon my Twitter neighbors jumped into the conversation, explaining that if our family had a camper, we would be able to go on vacation with our special-needs children who, at the time, found most other travel options overstimulating.

Lemonis was impressed and not only upgraded the camper to a Class A RV (which we quickly named The Brundidge Bus), but also signed me and my children to an endorsement deal with a contract to travel and produce content for his billion-dollar company.

Two years later, our family was camping in our RV when my son Brandon saw “Let’s Go Brandon!” signs at a Texas campsite and regarded them as personal signs of encouragement. That inspired me to write a children’s book, “Brandon Spots His Sign,” about the importance of building confidence in kids with autism.

One of my tweets about the book was seen by NASCAR driver Brandon Brown, the source of the original “Let’s Go, Brandon” chant. Over Twitter, Brown introduced himself and soon our whole family was invited to join him at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis., where an imprint of my book was plastered on the hood of his car and my son got to take a thrilling first lap around the track with another confident Brandon.

This winter, I posted a video on Twitter of my oldest son, Andrew, dancing while shoveling snow during a winter storm and it quickly went viral. His fancy footwork landed him a segment on “Good Morning America” and a pretty cool friendship with the show’s host, NFL great Michael Strahan. I also had a productive talk with Toro about a possible partnership.

Every day I wake up and say the prayer of Jabez found in 1 Chronicles 4:10, asking the Lord to enlarge my territory and make my name great.

That prayer was answered time and time again on Twitter.

So it wasn’t easy to leave, but as I packed my things and planned to deactivate my account, I saw that many of my neighbors were packing up and leaving for the same reason.

Now we’re looking for each other on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. I even found Nancy Lyons, CEO of consulting firm Clockwork, on TikTok.

It’s like I’m still lost in these new neighborhoods, though. I’m looking for groups with my shared, lived experience — where are my autism moms? I’m a newbie on these other platforms, going from 7,000 followers on Twitter to seven on TikTok. I’m having to build my new social media house from scratch.

Let’s hope this time that the new homeowner’s association president, Mark Zuckerberg, will make sure everyone follows the rules, so it’ll be more like “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on PBS and less like the parody “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” that Eddie Murphy created for “Saturday Night Live.”

Please, former Twitter friends and followers, as I search for you, come look for me. Let’s start over and build great social media neighborhoods again. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?