Refusing to use Twitter
I’ve completely stopped using Twitter (now called X) and I wanted to post something explaining why.
I stopped posting or reading the feeds quite a while ago, but despite most people I know agreeing it’s a terrible place, friends persist in sharing X posts and I get lured in to reading them. But no more. If you send me a Twitter/X link, I’ll either ignore it or politely ask you to share the content another way; or flag my unhappiness by using an emoji like .
This isn’t really a boycott
I should be clear about what I’m doing here. This isn’t a traditional boycott where I hope that removing my business will cost them money. X has vast resources behind it - Musk’s wealth, the backing of the Trump administration - and I don’t expect it to go away. I don’t expect meaningful economic damage from people like me leaving, except perhaps in the very long term.
What I do expect is that reasonable, rational, human-oriented people will increasingly not want to have meaningful conversations there. The platform has become hostile to genuine conversation - with algorithms optimised for outrage, polluted with lying bots and engagement-bait, owned by someone who uses it as a weapon.
So yes, I hope my friends and the communities I participate in will move elsewhere too. Not because we’ll bankrupt Musk, but because I’d rather have real conversations somewhere that isn’t… this. And as long as you talk there, it’s perpetuating that somehow this is a valid place for conversation.
The problem with “just browsing”
People have used tracking blockers and screenshots of posts to avoid promoting the site - but the problem is not about boosting their metrics or making them money, it’s the fact that viewing keeps legitimising the place. Every view makes the platform seem more legitimate, more relevant, more “the place where we discuss things”. It’s similar to why I won’t read the Daily Mail - even sharing something genuinely good from there helps legitimise a platform that does tremendous harm, and it’s hard to distinguish the truth from the half-truth from the utter lies.
There’s a story that’s been circulating for years about a bartender who kicks out a polite, well-dressed Nazi before he’s done anything wrong. When asked why, the bartender explains: you serve one, they become a regular, they bring friends, the friends bring friends, and before you know it you’re running a Nazi bar. By then it’s too late - they’re entrenched and everyone else has left.
X has become the Nazi bar. The owner himself is boosting far-right content, doing salutes at rallies, and platforming fascists across the globe. Having a reasonable conversation there is like trying to have a quiet drink in a bar where the landlord is doing Nazi salutes behind the counter. Even if your particular corner seems fine, you’re still in the Nazi bar.
What X has become
I thought it was worth cataloguing a few of the worst examples of where things have gone
Destabilising democracies
In January 2025, Elon Musk launched an unprecedented attack on the UK government, posting over 100 times about UK politics with posts reaching more than 100 million views. He falsely accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of being “deeply complicit in mass rapes”, called a government minister a “rape genocide apologist”, demanded Starmer’s imprisonment, and ran a poll asking if America should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”
He has discussed strategies to oust Starmer before the next election and called for the release of Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist serving an 18-month prison sentence.
This isn’t just about the UK. Musk has endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party, telling Germans to move beyond “past guilt” over the Nazi era - a comment that drew condemnation from the chairman of Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He has boosted far-right movements in at least 18 countries.
A firehose of lies
Musk’s misleading election claims during the 2024 US election generated over 2 billion views. PolitiFact analysed 450+ of his posts over two weeks and found he promoted misleading or inaccurate content on most days. His misinformation travels hundreds of times further than fact-checks from officials, and Community Notes failed to display corrections on 74% of his misleading election posts.
Enabling fascism
At Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, Musk made a straight-arm gesture that was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute. While some defended it as awkward enthusiasm, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat called it “a Nazi salute - and a very belligerent one too.” Neo-Nazi groups celebrated it as such. The gesture is illegal in Germany.
Beyond the gestures, X itself has become a propaganda machine. Multiple studies show the algorithm systematically amplifies right-wing content - even politically neutral new accounts get twice as much right-wing content as left-wing. Research during the 2024 election found the algorithm amplifies hostile, emotionally aggressive political content - and when that content is pushed down, people actually warm up to the opposing side.
X has become the platform of choice for government propaganda. Internal ICE communications obtained by the Washington Post show officials coordinating with the White House to create viral arrest videos, debating which “hardcore” music to use as soundtracks, and asking “should we feed info to an influencer?” A former DHS press secretary called it “propaganda, creating fear” and “meme-ification of things that are life or death.”
Enabling sexual abuse through AI
Perhaps most disturbing is what happened with Grok, X’s AI chatbot. In late December 2025, users discovered that Grok could be prompted to “digitally undress” women in photos, creating non-consensual sexual deepfakes. This became what Reuters described as a “mass digital undressing spree” - at its peak, Grok was producing sexualized images at a rate of roughly one per minute.
Even worse, there were cases where Grok generated sexualized images of minors. Grok itself had to post an apology stating it had created “an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire.”
X’s response? Restrict the feature to paying users - meaning people could still create non-consensual imagery if they paid for the privilege. Indonesia and Malaysia have banned the chatbot entirely, and the UK’s Ofcom has launched a formal investigation. X have since apparently backed down … after much pressure, and only in this one area.
Why don’t I just ignore it?
Why post this at all? Why use emojis and other passive-agressive stuff? Aren’t I being rude and oppressing other people’s right to free speech?
Because this stuff is important; the world is in a terrible state and I think people have passively let things get worse and worse with minimal response. I’m not stopping your free speech - just pointing out that you are posting your free speech in a Nazi pub and I’m not going to listen, in fact I’m going to remind you that you are doing so. Feel free to ignore me - but if you value my conversation at all, consider finding another source of that information to share.
Where I’ll be instead
I’m still on Mastodon and Bluesky, and those are where I’d love to see more people. I’m also willing to tolerate Instagram and Threads - Facebook/Meta are certainly no paragons of virtue, but at least they aren’t as openly, gleefully horrible as what X has become. There’s a difference between “problematic tech company” and “actively working to destabilise democracies while enabling the creation of child sexual abuse material.” Or LinkedIn if you don’t mind the somewhat false corporate sheen over the whole place.
Mourning old Twitter
Just to be clear: I’m sad about this. Twitter was amazing when it was new - so much open debate and discussion and information. I read and posted huge amounts there in the 2010s and early 2020s and while I haven’t participated for a while, I still miss it.
But that Twitter is gone. What wears its skin is something else entirely - a platform optimised for engagement-bait, algorithmic amplification of outrage, and the political projects of its broligarch owner.
I can’t pretend otherwise anymore, and I can’t keep feeding it with my attention.
If you want to discuss this post, please reply to my post on Mastodon or my post on Bluesky (I’m doing both as one is more free, one is more convenient for many people)