I’ve quit X. You should too.

You’ve probably heard this week that the CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, has said he will charge all X users “a small monthly payment”, he claims is needed to combat “vast armies of bots”. This business-model-killing ploy may never come to pass, remember “block is going to be deleted as a feature“? But this latest desperate attempt to shore up a failing company (Musk himself has admitted Twitter has lost around 50% of its ad revenue since he took over, which itself was over 90% of the company’s revenue), might just be the nail in its coffin. Here’s why I hope it is. And even if it’s not, here’s why you should leave and build your following somewhere else (possibly Meta’s Threads?) for your own safety and wellbeing, and before X collapses completely.

The issues

Through our presence on the platform, we are supporting the company and thus tacitly, the values it represents, and those of its owner. Musk has repeatedly shown himself to be an alt-right Trump and Putin supporter, even attending the World Cup Final with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the Superbowl with the right-wing media-owning Murdoch family. Musk has allowed literal Nazis back onto Twitter including Andrew Anglin, editor of white-supremacist website The Daily Stormer. Anglin had been banned from Twitter back in 2017 after calling for death to “enemies of the white race” at the rally where an anti-Nazi protestor was murdered by a self-confessed neo-Nazi. Meanwhile, Musk was quick to ban five left-wing journalists including respected Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, for daring to draw attention to his frequent private jet travels.

Earlier this month, Musk boosted the hashtag #BanTheADL, a campaign against the internationally respected charity fighting antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League. In a series of tweets such as this one, Musk amplified attacks on not just the ADL but on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), organisations that exist to fight discrimination and inequality. He has threatened a defamation lawsuit against the ADL and bizarrely blamed them for X’s fall in advertising revenue. Recently Musk has given a platform to America’s chief insurrection supporter and election-denier, alt-right darling Tucker Carlson, after Carlson was fired by Fox for lying about the 2020 election (and being chosen as the fall guy). Carlson and others’ constant lying about the 2020 result contributed to the January 6th 2021 violent attack on the Capitol which resulted in seven deaths, and Carlson continues to lie, in his X-hosted content, about the terrible events of January 6th.

Musk has also gone after the LGBTQ+ community, posting without evidence that the horrific hammer attack on the husband of then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi might have been a “gay lovers’ quarrel”, and in this single tweet both mocked trans people and boosted anti-scientific medical disinformation:

My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci

Elon Musk on Twitter, 12 Dec 2022

He has spoken repeatedly about the “woke mind virus“, a common trope in the alt-right community that suggests that “being woke” is a socially contagious disease, rather than just, as Kathy Burke suggested, “not being racist, not being homophobic and just calling out bad things”.

In April 2023 Twitter removed a section of T&Cs that specifically protected trans people from “targeted misgendering or deadnaming”, leaving it as the only major platform without specific transphobic abuse protections. And Musk’s release of former Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth’s internal communications, in a document dump Musk named “The Twitter Files”, followed up with deliberate targeted misinformation, has caused Roth to take his family into hiding with police protection, after a barrage of death threats and accusations of “grooming” from homophobic and antisemitic followers of Musk.

Roth was sacked along with almost the entire safety team. Musk has in total fired around 80% of Twitter’s workforce, most of them just before Christmas 2022. The layoffs disproportionately impacted women, Black employees, and employees aged 50 and older. Hard working people with families to feed were given little notice and the legal minimum severance pay (and some not even that). Musk also ordered people working at home to return to the office, a move which discriminates against disabled employees and those with caring responsibilities, not to mention adding an environmental cost. Indeed, Musk tweeted baseless criticism of one particular disabled employee with muscular dystrophy in a tweet exchange that makes for painful reading.

And let’s not forget the rise in misogynistic content, with Musk welcoming back to the platform misogynists-in-chief Donald Trump and Andrew Tate. Musk recently joined Tate and the roster of right-wing outlet GB News in rallying to the defence of Russell Brand who stands accused of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault, although Brand denies the allegations. Violent rhetoric against women has escalated since Musk took over Twitter, with misogynistic accounts rising 69%.

All social media platforms have a duty of care to their users. We must feel reasonably safe interacting on the platform, including from scams, inappropriate content, threats of violence and hate speech. Twitter has sacked almost everyone responsible for this service, causing a rise in all problematic content. And Musk’s decision to change “blue tick” verification to a paid service available to everyone has removed a key safety feature: the ability to detect impersonation, and this change has caused a spike in phishing scams on the platform.

Some changes appear deliberate, perhaps to increase engagement at the cost of safety, and some accidental amid rapidly changing priorities. December 2022 saw the removal of the safety feature known as #ThereIsHelp, which promotes suicide prevention hotlines. We saw above how the T&Cs now no longer protect trans people, and we know about the blue tick fiasco. But a recent BBC investigation goes further and depicts a company “on fire” and “no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation.”

Academics are leaving the platform, unable to talk meaningfully about the climate crisis, politics, race or gender without inviting a litany of abuse. And recent changes to the privacy policy might actually make you unsafe in the real world, as the company plans to collect “biometric and employment data”, yet is known to release sensitive personal data to authoritarian regimes.

This blog cannot begin to capture the many, many problematic actions taken by the X CEO before and after his purchase of Twitter, but Vanity Fair made an attempt to document Musk’s problematic behaviour back in April 2022. Musk is possibly the worst person to trust with our personal details, online safety and everyday thoughts, and his chaotic “management” of the social media platform makes us all unsafe every day.

The implications

When I use social media (SM) in a personal capacity, that’s my own decision and barely affects anyone else. However we sometimes operate SM accounts on behalf of organisations, and as such we are aligning that organisation, to some extent, with the values of the SM platform. We are driving traffic to the platform, and hence doing two things:

• Adding value to the platform: as users we are the product and our views are being re-sold to advertisers and thus we make money for the company to spend on further problematic activity.
• Driving users to the platform: a platform where we know they are now unsafe, in the absence of a working safety team and the presence of a vast army of white supremacists, transphobes and misogynists, which is unethical.

I don’t want any part in supporting this man’s alt-right agenda, and I don’t wish to be responsible for exposing users to the risk of hateful abuse. So for that reason, X, I’m out.

I’m on Threads, Mastodon and LinkedIn, but mostly active on Threads. I’m well aware that all platforms have their ethical questions, and Threads being a Meta (formerly Facebook) product might raise an eyebrow. I get that, but at least Meta has a working moderation team and is not openly aligning itself to enemy tyrants, attacking people with protected characteristics and deliberately amplifying hate. I hope you will join me on Threads, it’s nice over there. See you soon.

Update 2025: I’m on BlueSky now at @httcs.online