CNBC anchor Kelly Evans leaves Twitter
CNBC anchor Kelly Evans is opting for newspapers over Twitter.
The financial journalist, who's departure from the social network was announced Wednesday by a colleague, is making a clean break from social media, she said in a column posted Thursday on CNBC.com.
"Last Friday, I deactivated my Twitter account, thereby severing an eight-year relationship that had become a big part of my professional — and personal — life," Evans wrote. "Perhaps too big."
The constant flow of social media had become a distraction, she says. "It ultimately became dizzying and exhausting to me. I felt lost in endless spools of social media, all the while emails by the thousands were piling up, phone calls were getting lost in the mix, and messages from the most important people in my life were getting drowned out in the din," Evans wrote. "I was more responsive to comments on Instagram than to my own closest friends and family."
Evans now is getting at least some of her news in old-school fashion. "I started reading the newspaper first thing daily instead of following the news all day on social media — and I've never felt better informed," she wrote.
She did not mention a specific Twitter incident that lead to her leaving. "There has been much coverage lately of the seedier side of social media. That surely played a role in my moving away from it," Evans wrote. "But I don't really blame the social platforms themselves. Being constantly confronted with gross and bizarre comments from strangers was if anything an important reminder to me that not all the world is like my supportive family."
Evans is leaving the platform — along with most other social media — to pursue a social-free lifestyle, "and agrees social 'churn' may rise in coming years," her colleague on CNBC Carl Quintanilla tweeted on Wednesday.
It's "only 1/2 Twitter's fault," Quintanilla relayed.
Evans leaves Twitter at a time the service is again under fire for failing to do enough to prevent targeted harassment of users, a problem women on the service have complained about for years. Ex-CEO Dick Costolo last year acknowledged it was a severe problem, saying "we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform."
This week, comedian Leslie Jones called on the service to do more to stop abuse after receiving a flood of racist, sexist messages.
After Jones surfaced the tweets directed at her, including several photos of apes, Twitter released a verification policy that included some ways for select users to weed out harassing tweets. Then late Tuesday, it announced a broad crackdown of abusers and banned Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative columnist who, under the widely followed @nero handle, took part in the tweets aimed at Jones.
Yiannopoulos refutes claims by some of his targets that he incites others to coordinated harassment attacks, and said Wednesday Twitter was denying his free speech.
The San Francisco, Calif.-based company said it is far from done tackling online abuse, and its continuing to improve the identification and prevention of attackers.
"We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree," the company said in a statement.
Evans deactivated her Facebook page and Instagram accounts last year, too. Still, she stopped short of saying she would never return to Twitter. "I may yet need to go back and 'lurk' on Twitter to follow the news."
Evans, who joined CNBC in 2012 after covering real estate and economics at The Wall Street Journal, is a co-anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell, a segment at the end of the New York Stock Exchange trading session.
And I still haven't been able to delete my LinkedIn account, since I've long forgotten my login credentials and apparently need to send the company a copy of my driver's license to prove who I am in order to finally deactivate it.