Cher is the only good tweeter

I don't miss Twitter, but I do miss weird celebrity Tweets.

Perhaps this is a matter of personal opinion, but I would say that Twitter (now X, ugh) used to strike a strange equilibrium between good and bad parts. The yin of Russian bot farms was balanced against the yang of the Arab Spring. Former CEO Jack Dorsey practically made his living defending white supremacists, but the platform also fostered multiple communities of hilarious weirdos.

Then Elon Musk took over, and the whole thing went to shit. I deleted my Twitter account the same day they reinstated Donald Trump’s, which I had decided was my own personal red line when Elon bought the place. Life is actually better without a constant mainline to the entire planet’s outrage, but there are certain things about it that I miss.

Among my very favorite parts of Twitter was the brief, unfiltered peeks into huge celebrities’ brains. These are a class of folks people who usually depend on dedicated handlers to maintain their carefully crafted public identities. However, sometimes their tweets would cut right through that artifice, revealing which of them are funny or which don’t have a brain cell to spare. This sort of innocent yet revealing silliness was lost when the internet’s public square turned into a message board for tech bros to shout about Cybertrucks.

In fairness to Britney, there’s actually a good explanation for this tweet.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no lack of places for celebrity content. (Shoutout to resident Substack celeb

Garrison Keillor

.) But X itself has become culturally irrelevant. There’s no reason for famous people to post there anymore. Meanwhile, Instagram and TikTok are much different mediums than Twitter; a post on one of them simply can’t be funny in quite the same way as a truly unhinged tweet.

If you ask me, there’s one specific celebrity who is better than anyone else at distilling their own chaotic essence into 140-280 characters. The title of this post has likely ruined the surprise, but they’re not a writer, a comedian, or even someone born in the digital age. No, it’s iconic singer, Oscar-winning Nicolas Cage-kisser, and mononymous septuagenarian… Cher.

Cher is a self-taught master of the form. She instinctively understands a few key truths about tweeting. I say it’s instinct because she very clearly does not put much active thought into her tweets — which is a good thing! Tweets should absolutely not be about anything important. One of the biggest problems with Twitter has always been too many people sharing “serious” opinions.

Another key skill of naturally elite tweeters is to remain surprising. Long-time celebrities have a built-in advantage here. Expectations around Cher have been established for so long that they’re easy to subvert. She is a mere Tony short of EGOT status… which makes it inordinately funny that she’s willing to clap back at horny fans in her mentions.

(A brief aside: Predictability might be the biggest reason that Elon himself, try as he might, sucks at tweeting. He’s hackneyed and unsurprising at all times, most especially when he’s trying to be edgy. Contrast him with Donald Trump, who would not have gotten to the White House without his extraordinary gift for rubberneck-inducing digital idiocy.)

Lastly, good tweets are revealing, often without even meaning to be. Cher has been among the world’s most famous people ever since “I Got You Babe” hit number one in 1965. So, what things go through someone’s mind after 60 years of rarified celebrity?

Surprisingly relatable! We are all Cher. Cher is all of us. (If all of us were grandma-aged disco queens who LOVE CAPS LOCK and do not give a shit about anyone else’s opinion.)

Cher’s tweets are what the internet should be for. Why is there so much bad stuff on here, when we could just be laughing about whatever Cher is thinking?