The Filthiest Accounts on Early Twitter

Twitter was barely a year old and already becoming the compulsive sport of millions of oversharing nerds. I was among them. And what do nerds love almost as much as sitting alone in front of a computer all night? Right.

So it made a certain beautiful sense that some of the most interesting early accounts belonged to porn performers. Jenna Haze, Belladonna, Stoya, Jessica Drake, Joanna Angel, Roxy Deville, Sasha Grey, Sarah Blake, Jesse Jane, Marie Luv—all of them tweeting, all apparently as addicted to the internet as everyone else. The parasocial strangeness of it was still novel in 2009: you’d watch someone do something genuinely filthy on screen and then check their feed and find out they were annoyed about airport security or excited about a sandwich.

Stoya was the one I kept coming back to. She wrote well—actual sentences, actual thoughts, not just promo links—and following her felt less like following a performer and more like following a person who happened to perform in porn, which turned out to be a weirdly disorienting distinction.