Opinion | Elon Musk’s X is a poison. We don’t need to keep taking it.
www.msnbc.com
It's not enough for some journalists and influencers to boycott the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Everyone needs to bail on it at once.

It’s not enough for some journalists and influencers to boycott the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Everyone needs to bail on it at once.

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Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.

He has made over 50 false election claims so far this year, and amplified countless posts of misinformation, conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism. He’s done nothing to stop Russian use of the platform to sow misinformation (and, we now know, the targeting of left-leaning American Jews) in support of Trump. He has complied with censorship requests from authoritarian-led Turkey while defying democratic Brazil and the European Union. He has filed frivolous SLAPP lawsuits against those who have pushed for a boycott. He has boosted nationalists in India, China and Argentina and received business favors from each. He helped foment violence in the United Kingdom, spreading misinformation and predicting “civil war.” And so on.

Yet, for all the actions that have been proposed — demanding advertisers boycott the service, going after SpaceX or Tesla or Starlink — the most obvious one often goes unsaid: we should stop using X.

  • CrisEnglish
    51•4 months ago

    We even have real alternatives. Mastodon and bluesky are both right there, just go make an account and post a link for folks.

    • @makyoEnglish
      15•4 months ago

      I keep thinking Bluesky might be reaching a tipping point where enough of the influential users at least have an account there and on Twitter - but somehow it just won’t come

    • nocturne
      13•4 months ago

      I never much got the appeal of twitter. But I had a personal account and one for my business. Hardly used either, most recently to share images from my switch. I deleted both accounts when musky bought it.

      • @[email protected]
        5•4 months ago

        Thanks for reminding me about my Switch account. I had deactivated my primary account years ago but forgot about that one. It felt good to be able to deactivate another account! I noticed they didn’t have the usual feedback options asking why you are leaving. Probably tired of all the feedback being some form of “Fuck Musk”.

    • @[email protected]
      13•4 months ago

      I love how my general disinterest and lack of participation is a virtue from time to time. Just like when I refused to watch that sport event in the middle east.

      • borari
        2•4 months ago

        I feel you. Like 10 years ago I was trying to figure out the best way to let some friends know when pirated media hit the share i gave them access to. Some had discord, some didn’t, some had slack, some didn’t. Everyone could view tweets back then, even without an account, and the application I was using had twitter webhooks built in.

        I made an account and used it solely for webhooks tweeting out what movies and shows hit the server, and what format/resolution they were. Everything was fine for a few months, then I upgraded servers and didn’t bother transferring over my media collection bc I was broke back then and needed to reuse the drives, and didn’t have enough extra space to back the media content up to anywhere. I figured that since I had something like 7Gbps symmetrical (technically shared with an apartment building but I had my own queue) I’d just redownload my terabytes of shit ezpz.

        Welp, it was ezpz, all except getting banned by twitter because I was posting at some insane rate, as every download of individual episodes of random tv shows from the 90s completed.

  • @seaQueue
    21•4 months ago

    If anyone’s interested in helping break twatter’s stranglehold on brief discussion content encourage your organization (school, company, nonprofit, lab or other org) to host their own Mastodon instance in addition to email. This is how we get people on federated platforms and off of Musk’s nazi-friendly platform, by making it easy to use and ubiquitous.

    • cabbageEnglish
      15•4 months ago

      Also, consider making an effort to positively interact with organisations that have done/are attempting to do the migration, assuming you care about them being here.

      Chances are they will count the number of interactions they receive in order to assess whether or not it’s worth staying around. Pressing the like/upvote/favourite button costs very little, and gives a strong signal that they should stick around. Commenting something positive and relevant or boosting their content is also great, but it takes a bit more commitment.

  • @[email protected]English
    15•4 months ago

    people are addicted to their fake “likes” from their fake “friends” validating the looks-great-on-paper snippets of their fake “lives”

    how many people would have legit mental breakdowns if twitter disappeared tomorrow…

  • @Rageagainstbelief
    9•4 months ago

    I deactivated my accounts just the other day. I haven’t been active for years so it was an easy decision. I could see why if you have a ton of followers it would be harder to do.

  • Stopthatgirl7
    5•4 months ago

    I’m replacing my phone soon, and I’ve anyway decided that when I get a new phone, I’m not installing that cursed app on it. That’s how I’m finally going to cut myself off from it and be done.

    • @FrostyTheDoo
      6•4 months ago

      Just pretend you got a new phone today and uninstall it, curse removed!