The Case for Abandoning X

On Wednesday, The Guardian announced that it will no longer be posting to X.com, the website that murdered Twitter, cut off its face and placed the skin over its own. The question for everyone else is: What’s keeping you? After another Trump election, as organizers are again talking about creating parallel institutions to supplant compromised ones, choosing to no longer hang out at the Nazi bar seems like a critical first step.

I can already imagine sets of eyes rolling away from this paragraph, paired with a groan. For one, Twitter discussion often amounts to navel-gazing for a professional commentariat perennially primed to indulge in self-absorption poorly disguised as public service. For most people, it’s not part of their recreational diet. While about 7 in 10 Americans use Facebook, only about 2 in 10 use Twitter. 

But, like it or not, Twitter is where celebrities, governments and publications went for years to instantly break news. It’s where people went to trash talk awards shows and sporting events in real time, and it’s where many turned for updates during natural disasters. However you may want to chart the growth of this virtuous or vicious cycle, it’s where journalists went to research and report tomorrow’s news, and where newsmakers went to make or announce it. 

The problem is, there aren’t any good reasons left to stay there.

On any given day, X’s owner, Elon Musk, amplifies the sort of worm-brained Nazi swill that used to be restricted to 8Chan or Stormfront. He routinely posts items that would’ve gotten anyone fired from public life 20 years ago, and he is plainly a fascist to anyone who isn’t desperately in need of public relations support for their own preferred ethnic cleansing. Worse, Musk has leveraged his role as the propaganda firehose operator for the Trump campaign into a potential gig in the Trump administration. It’s more or less State Media: The Microblog™.

The user experience itself is now openly hostile to anyone unimpressed by watching Musk steal memes from low-tier accounts and Der Sturmer. Pay-for-play “verification” prioritizes replies from fanboys and those seeking his attention, rendering the area directly beneath any reasonably popular post a sewer of crypto shills, Nazi dweebs and Manosphere warriors. In another dispatch from the Any Conservative Accusation Is a Confession Dept., Musk turned the tools of which the right wing imagined itself to be victims against its enemies. He began his ownership by kicking off journalists who reported critically on him. Users couldn’t follow the official Harris campaign account until public outcry corrected a “problem.” Accounts and topics inconvenient to conservatives routinely disappear from search results. And links to external websites — especially to actual journalism — are algorithmically deprioritized. If you want to promote your own work from Substack, a Twitter quasi-competitor that drew Musk’s ire for hosting content that accurately described him, you’re almost better off opening a window and yelling. The numbers aren’t much better for the average poster, punished by the same algorithm that muffles anything outside of Musk’s far-right preferences and posting to a following list of increasingly abandoned ghost accounts.

Trying to build a refuge of equality and decency or just plain fun in the middle of a Nazi bar where the house rules change at a whim, at your expense, and nobody besides you and your own buddies can hear you is a commitment to futility. Trying to operate an account as a traditional public service is barely better. Good luck being heard when the algorithm is pushing Charlie Kirk’s photos of his reduction surgery that finally made his head only 60%  gums. Who’s going to be around to read it anyway? Of the few left, how many are going to marinate in a deep daily sludge of vile bullshit without losing the capacity to determine the boundaries of reality? If everything around you is the Mad Hatter’s tea party with swastikas, common decency itself starts to look demented.

People and organizations without a goose in their step who remain on Twitter face (and contribute to) another problem. As Nicholas Grossman put it on BlueSky, the site with the best odds to become Twitter’s replacement: “The big success of the US right over the last decade or so, helped by a cadre of centrists, is convincing a lot of people that the Democratic Party is whoever you think is the most radical, most annoying person on the internet.” Thus, the one remaining engine driving Twitter besides the MAGA cash-in is, essentially, Bad Faith Assignment Editor.

Twitter’s native weirdness and hysterics — the sort of thing that happens anytime you get a few million people together in real time to speak their mind about the same topics of the day — already played assignment editor to mainstream journalism’s hackiest tendencies. On the most innocuous end, it gave a BuzzFeed staffer a proto-memetic trendlet to write about and make quota. On the most pernicious end, it gave rise to the animating principle behind the most frequent metastasis of legacy media’s reactionary centrism: “Anything mocking me on Twitter or correcting me in a way I consider too publicly humiliating is left-wing extremism.” 

But in most users’ day-to-day experience, that bad-faith assignment editor function becomes a kind of socially violent ouroboros. Conservatives hunt for any left-wing take, misstatement or hyperbolic overreach; bigger conservative influencer accounts then amplify it as — to quote a beaten-to-death Twitter meme — “the future liberals want” and chum the waters for followers who crave blood. 

Once enough one-sided outrage builds, or meets enough pushback to create a war of the day, mainstream media has enough pretext to cover something that’s in the conversation. A day later, a children’s hospital that helps teens transition is shut down over bomb threats, or the poor bastard targeted by the Tattoo of Right-Wing Fantasy Island Ben Shapiro has locked their account, and Pamela Paul has enough new proper nouns to cram into one of the two Mad Libs columns she’s capable of assembling for The New York Times. That the topic is now being covered even in the far-left media feeds back into the outrage loop, thus legitimized by journalists too lazy to try finding an idea in a library, or too chickenshit to look right toward flickering tiki-torchlight for actual extremism. This is the future conservatives want, and if you noticed what happened last Tuesday, it’s the present they built. 

So, where to go? If you want billionaire loser energy with contempt for the user experience, suppression of political opinion and one genocide already under its belt — but with a friendly face — there’s always Meta’s Threads. It’s the ideal social media experience for someone who wants to read the official Applebee’s account asking the official Delta account if they want to “Netflix and chill” and see the official Netflix account quote-tweet that with, “that feel…when bae texts first.” Or you could follow MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to BlueSky, which has no algorithmic feed, gives the users multiple sliders for controlling the kind of content that appears in their timeline, promises to make your content portable to other sites using the same platform, bans hate speech and harassment, allows you to disable quotes on individual posts to reduce the ease of being a target and otherwise leaves you the fuck alone. (Full disclosure: It’s not an Everything App I can bank on and date on, but I chose the latter.) 

But to answer the above question, maybe it’s best to ask two further questions. One, if you are a politician or a citizen already committed to opposing the Trump administration or organizing activist and mutual-aid organizations to offset its malignant perversion of the state — if you’re trying to build your own movement and institutions to push back — why not go where the infrastructure is easy, familiar and already built, where there isn’t an algorithm restricting your reach, and where there isn’t a daily Nuremberg rally waiting to harvest your statements for hate and leverage them into a perverted discourse?

And, if you are a government agency in the waning days of an America with real data, worried that the incoming Trump administration will try to suppress your work and that the former Twitter’s fascist dork owner will do the same, wouldn’t you want to have an already established presence somewhere your public service can be seen, if and when somebody decides to make it disappear?