Why it’s time to flee man-child Musk’s toxic site

Alan Rusbridger, The Independent

Let’s not kid ourselves. Twitter/X was never exactly the Garden of Eden: there were always weeds, wild animals and marshy bits where you could sink in up to your waist. But now that it’s somewhere between a swamp, a jungle and a cesspool it may soon be time to quietly tiptoe away and leave it to fester into toxic irrelevance.

I’ve been there since January 2009, when Elon Musk was still messing around with an electric sports car called the Tesla Roadster. When he got round to joining Twitter six months later he would, like most of us, have doubtless taken delight in so much that was to be found in this new digital forum of ideas and conversation.

Gone — for better or worse — were the old gatekeepers of information and connection. Here was somewhere we could gather to talk to each other; as well as amuse, provoke, tease and entertain. At its best it was a bran tub of discovery and education, as well as a kaleidoscope of news. Conventional hierarchies mattered less. What you said counted as much, if not more, than who you were. You could tune it to be an echo chamber if that’s what you wanted. Equally, you could calibrate it to challenge, surprise and even irritate you. Yes, there were bots, trolls and the occasional sock puppet. But it felt like a space that was at least semi-tended. There was an attempt at meaningful verification of the most prominent users. There was a trust and safety team looking out for bad, misleading and harmful information, along with a curation team which sought to amplify the good.

In time, the better users developed a kind of etiquette, or best practice. One-way conversations were less rewarding than two-way ones: less a megaphone, more a discussion. If you got something wrong, and it was pointed out to you, it was considered good form to clarify or correct it. That was how you built trust. And, for lots of people in this new arena, trust mattered. Well, we know what happened next. A strange billionaire man-child bought it, whether by design or accident. He sacked all the gardeners, the groundskeepers and the park managers. He invited back in all the bullies, yobs, liars and crooks who had been kept out by the previous park managers.

That was bad enough — but then the strange man-child decided his opinion on everything mattered so much that he flooded everyone’s timeline with a stream of his own fact-free ruminations, conspiracy theories, boasts and insults. He amplified hate, incitement to hate and outright misinformation. After the recent riots the writer George Monbiot pondered aloud why he was staying put “now that Musk has turned this platform into an incubator for fascism”. His answer: “Because of this solid political principle: never let the far right drive you out of any space.”

That’s fair enough, but I suspect that, for most of us, there are more pragmatic reasons. It’s taken me 15 years to hand-pick a community of 5,000 diverse and fascinating people to follow. Eighteen and a half thousand tweets later I have a following of close to a quarter of a million — the equivalent of a big town. Over at Threads I’m part of a small village, and at BlueSky no more than a hamlet. Partly, it feels daunting to have to start all over again. Then there’s the reality that, for a journalist at least, Twitter remains an incredibly useful tool because of its sheer scale: it’s a gushing fire hose of commentary, agitation, jokes and news — some of it even true.

Then there’s the question of — if not Twitter, then where? Mastodon was a nice idea, but too fiddly. Threads is lively and simple enough if Meta doesn’t bring you out in spots. Bluesky seems to be a congenial kind of space where many refugees are beginning to congregate: but is it billionaire-proof, and what guarantees can it offer that they will hire enough gardeners and park managers?

In a perfect world this is what I think should happen. A brilliant campaigning group — you know who you are — should do the spade work and audit the alternatives to Twitter/X. Tell us who can offer the most reliable, decent, honest, well-tended platform that can never be taken over by a billionaire man-child.

Then give us a date. Let’s call it “X-odus Day”. The day when all of us who no longer want to wake up finding our timeline choked with white supremacists and ranting bigots hold hands and jump. We’ll all jump at the same time to the same place — and we’ll rebuild something worth having. One almighty X-it.

Can you imagine how incandescent the man-child would be? If he erupts in fury at recalcitrant advertisers or vigilant regulators, can you even begin to predict his impotent rage when all the most interesting and discerning people on his platform up sticks and move elsewhere?

Elite journalists will sermonise about cancelling speech. But no one’s being cancelled here. Man-child has freely chosen what sort of space he wants — and many of us (hopefully of left, right and centre) may freely choose we don’t want to be there.