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Time for other news organizations to abandon Twitter

The Guardian has announced that they will no longer cite Twitter.

We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.

Exactly right. Musk has destroyed the utility of the social media site he spent so much money on. You should flee the hellhole, too.

Now we just have to get the Guardian to quit putting up with transphobes…

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Comments

  6. raven says

    I left Twitter before it even became X.
    Does that make me an ‘influencer”?

    Twitter was useful. X is just toxic garbage.

    So far no replacement for Twitter has shown up.
    This should be easy. Just copy Twitter and change the name to something like
    Twitter II, Child of Twitter, Chirp, NotMuskTwitter, Classic Twitter, etc..

    Maybe it will be Bluesky.

    It won’t be Mastodon.
    Mastodon is decentralized and doesn’t have the capacity to be a Twitter replacement.
    It won’t be Threads. Wrong format and besides it is part of another toxic internet company, Facebook/Meta.

  8. robro says

    PZ @ #7 — Congrats. I closed my Twitter account when Musk bought it. That was no big deal because I rarely opened Twitter anyway.

    However, my addiction is to Facebook, and mainly Instagram reels which I view on Facebook. Although I feel like I should drop it for various reasons, I’m loathe to do so because that’s where I connect with a handful of my old friends…true tot he platform, a bunch of aging boomers. In a few years, we’ll all be gone.

  10. Reginald Selkirk says

    Landmark Bridge Quits X

    An account dedicated to a bridge in Southwest England said it would stop posting on X, formerly Twitter, due to the rise of “inappropriate content” on the platform, prompting a wave of jokes and memes.

    Clifton Suspension Bridge is a 160-year-old structure which links Bristol to North Somerset. Since 2009, the bridge has maintained its own account on X, sharing updates about the crossing, highlights from its history and general news about the area…

  11. Reginald Selkirk says

    St Pauli become 1st major football club to leave X, claiming Elon Musk has turned site into ‘hate machine’

    German football club FC St Pauli became one of the first sports franchises to withdraw from social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). The club announced that it was withdrawing from the social media platform because its owner Elon Musk had “turned a space for debate into an amplifier of hate that was capable of influencing the German parliamentary election campaign.”

    The Hamburg-based Bundesliga club has never made any bones about its left-leaning ideological influences. The club statement was accompanied by a photo of a sticker showing a fist smashing a swastika, beside the club’s emblem and a slogan saying its fans are against right-wing politics.

    St Pauli joined the platform in 2013, and currently has 2,50,000 followers. The club also called on its followers on Musk’s X to switch to BlueSky while stating that St Pauli’s English account will also move to BlueSky…

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