Five Twitter Accounts to Follow for Happiness

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

I’m always surprised when people describe Twitter as a cesspool of hatred and garbage. I understand that if you’re a famous person with millions of followers, alongside all the praise and fawning, you’re going to get terrible replies to almost anything you say. Plus, the format of Twitter makes it incredibly easy for people to write things that can be misunderstood through lack of context and it encourages speedy, thoughtless replies.

But most of us do not have millions of Twitter followers and all of us get to decide who to follow. I get news and information and camaraderie from many other places besides Twitter, so I don’t mind curating my Twitter feed so that I mostly see tweets that amuse or enlighten me. For the most part, I follow people who tweet about technology and funny, thoughtful people who I admire and who use Twitter to further causes that I believe in. To prevent Twitter from turning into a dangerous filter bubble, I try to also follow people who don’t think like me or look like me or live where I do or who were born long before or after I was. I try to follow people who disagree with me on political things but do so in a smart and thoughtful way. I don’t unfollow people when they express an opinion that is different than my own, but I do unfollow them if they use Twitter to spread hate.