Just shy of a year ago, I decided I was done with X. (RIP Twitter, which used to be my favorite social network.) I don’t remember what specifically pushed me over the edge to quitting, but I’m sure it had something to do with Elon Musk. Nothing he’s done in the time since has made me regret leaving.

Back in December, I wrote a post suggesting that a resolution to “never tweet” would be a good start to 2024. From that post:

Musk insists on being the main character of X in ways that owners of other social media platforms do not. And what a character he is. A small sampling of his recent activity could note this endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, this weird racist meme, telling companies pulling their ads because of antisemitism to fuck themselves, and running a space with himself, Alex Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other lunatics and dumbasses.

It’s possible to use the site without endorsing this garbage, but this garbage is very much the face of the site now. And I’m hardly one to judge, since it took me long enough to leave, but it’s baffling to me that so many of you are still content implicitly saying, “Follow me on X, because this is the platform I choose as the place to share my work, exchange ideas, and present myself to the public.”

Over the past year, a lot of friends and other people I enjoy interacting with online have made the switch to Bluesky, which now numbers more than 10 million users and is genuinely more innovative than X. Others are unfortunately still on the old platform. There are undeniably some costs to switching, but I’m nonetheless surprised at what they’re willing to put up with. (Quick disclosure: I am personally working on a different social network app — see the end of this post — but it’s a very different format than Twitter/X/various clones.)

Lately I find myself thinking of decent people still using X in much the same way I think of supposedly principled Republicans still voting for Trump. X and the GOP are on parallel trajectories. Both institutions are notionally continuous but fundamentally changed for the worse; both have seen their racist and crankish fringes rise to the top; both have been taken over and degraded by repulsively megalomaniacal men.

Both also continue to be supported by people whom, respectfully, I believe really ought to know better. Trump notoriously bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any voters. An equivalent boast for Musk would be making flagrantly bigoted posts on X and not losing users. Except the latter is a thing that’s actually happening, and while Musk has driven a lot of people (and advertisers) away, plenty remain.

The metaphor that’s often used by critics to describe X is that of a Nazi bar. As in, if you frequent a bar that welcomes everyone with open arms, including Nazis, then you’re effectively in a Nazi bar and ought to leave. I think the usefulness of that metaphor is complicated in debates about content moderation, which have all kinds of nuances around speech vs. reach, protocols vs. platforms, etc. But the metaphor is a little more useful if you’re talking about the owner of a platform rather than its users. In that narrower sense, X is like a bar where the owner is always onsite and holding court, which lately includes recommending a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist, joking about why no one is assassinating the liberal candidates for president and VP, and ranting about how immigrants are destroying American society, stealing elections, and eating people’s pets. Which, when you put it that way, does sound a bit like what you’d hear in a Nazi bar.

Let’s drop the Nazi bar metaphor and be literal. Musk is the owner of a large and influential social media platform. He has nearly 200 million followers on X, he is X’s main character by a longshot, and he uses X to boost his presence and his favored political views. And those views are, to be blunt, pretty damn racist.

A few examples of his recent posts, starting with this account from Thomas Chatterton Williams, who notes that “the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness”:

With his nearly 200 million followers—a sizable portion of whom amount to cultists—he is responsible for tuning X’s digital culture into a gratuitously repulsive frequency. Astonishingly active and available on the platform that he so bombastically controls, he not only enables bad actors; he also personally praises and promotes them.

Just a week before the presidential debate, Musk wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” about a conversation between Tucker Carlson and the amateur historian and Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper. In that talk, Cooper claimed that Hitler had killed millions of Jews unintentionally, and that Winston Churchill was the real villain of the Second World War. Musk has since deleted the post, but such an endorsement from X’s apex user makes the spread of anti-Semitism not just likely but inevitable.

Or as Charlie Warzel summarized Musk’s posts from a single recent weekend:

  • amplified a conspiracy theory that ABC had leaked sample debate questions to the Harris campaign
  • falsely claimed that “the Dems want to take your kids”
  • fueled racist lies about immigrants eating pets
  • shared with his nearly 200 million followers on X that “Trump must win” to “preserve freedom and meritocracy in America”
  • insinuated that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” adding a thinking-face emoji. He subsequently deleted the post and argued that it was a joke that had been well received in private. “Turns out jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he wrote in a follow-up on X.

This past weekend, Musk posted, “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” He want on to explain a version of the Great Replacement theory, accusing Democrats of flying illegal immigrants into swing states to “fast-track” them into citizenship and create one-party rule. As Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post, none of this makes sense.

This is all bad enough coming from the site’s owner and most-followed user, but it’s also worth looking into how it seeps into the experience of everyone else. As noted above, racism is now rampant in replies and quote-posts. It’s also financially rewarded thanks to X’s ad revenue sharing program, which paid users can opt into. This pays posters on the basis of ads displayed in replies to their posts. Predictably, this creates perverse incentives to make incendiary statements. I was interested to see these figures from one of the site’s more notorious racists, whose payments peaked over a period in which he was focused on derogatorily posting about Haitians:

In other words, Musk has created a machine that turns racist shitposts into about $1,000/month, and you keep it running by using the app.

When Musk bought Twitter, some people speculated that he would bring in positive innovations and make it a haven for free speech. (If you believe that Musk is a genuine champion of unfettered speech, I have a bridge to sell you.) Instead he has driven away thoughtful users, created a toxic environment, and generally raised the acceptability of racism in American discourse. X is now best understood as Musk’s personal propaganda machine for his anti-woke and anti-immigrant political views with a vestigial, decaying social network attached.

So, what the hell are you still doing there? I know some of you are doing good work and feel like it’s important to continue sharing it on X, and I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about how that moral calculus shakes out. It’s not easy being a journalist or writer and we’re all trying to get our work out there; if you specialize in, say, more fact-based immigration policy, you might make a case that it’s worth being on X to counter the dominant narrative. On the other hand, if you’re just using the app to kill time and mess around online (this is most of you), you should absolutely quit and go elsewhere, and I don’t think that’s remotely a hard call at this point.

But even if you are on X as a writer or public intellectual, I would encourage you to think critically about whether being active there is really the best use of your time and whether it’s really making a positive difference. My impression from checking in occasionally is that many of you are drawn into responding to (and thereby elevating) cranks, bigots, and morons. I’m sure you can come up with some justification for remaining on the platform, but at least consider the possibility that X has become a fundamentally racist and anti-immigrant enterprise that is making America worse, and that the best decision for you is to no longer be part of it.

Will that involve some loss of influence? Yeah, possibly, but if sacrificing a bit of influence is the cost of no longer associating with racists, that can still be the right thing to do. Lots of smart people with large followings on X have walked away without regret.

On an anecdotal level, I’ve also noticed that X no longer even functions as a useful way of getting my writing into the world. I stopped promoting my own pieces there a long time ago, but other accounts do link to them. Some combination of the algorithm favoring paid users or disfavoring posts with external links has made their posts irrelevant. For example, Slate has 1.6 million followers on X. Slate’s posts linking to my most recent article there have fewer than 8,000 views each. Not clicks, views! Another respected journalist with 37,000 followers also linked to my article; his post got 820 views. These are terrible rates, but they’re pretty typical if you’re not paying to play. In the good old days of Twitter, posts from prominent accounts could bring my work to a much larger audience, but on algorithmically opaque X they’re often completely worthless.

Finally, as Aaron Ross Powell argued recently, being active on X is ethically questionable not only for the ways it implicitly elevates Musk’s political project, but also for the ways it can skew your own view of the world:

That the broader conversation on X is functionally indistinguishable, both in its content and the character of many of its participants, from Truth Social interacts in troubling ways with the perception, by those still-active journalists and thought leaders, that X remains what Twitter once was: a more or less representative picture of the wider discourse.

First, there’s an internal, deleterious impact. Who you associate with matters, not just because the people you associate with is a reflection of your own character, but also because the people you associate with shape your character. We cultivate our ethical perspective in collaboration with others, and if those we collaborate with are unethical, we’ll shift in that direction, too. Thus if our thought leadership is mostly interacting with the kind of hard-right and profoundly immoral perspectives of the community Elon Musk has cultivated and promoted, and is reflected in electoral politics by people like JD Vance, then this is bad for those thought leaders, because to the extent it makes them increasingly unethical, in both values and the way they see the world, it makes their own lives worse. You can’t lead a good life as a bad person.

So again, what are you still doing there? Is it just inertia? X is never going back to what Twitter used to be and it’s most likely to keep getting worse. The near-future of social networks is smaller, more fragmented communities rather than a global town square. You can lament that, but you can also embrace it and find excitement in building new communities. And it’s easier to build your network when you join as an early adopter than as a latecomer. I hope you’ll give it a shot, because while I do want to read your work and see your photos and joke around with you online, I don’t want to meet you at a racist hellsite to do it.

A brief pitch for Bluesky

The social network that most closely replicates the feel of the good days of Twitter is, for me, Bluesky. There are now enough users on the site, including journalists and academics, to make it a great place for finding good things to read, keeping up with breaking news, and making jokes. It’s thoroughly replaced X for me, and at any given time a dip into my Bluesky timeline is much more worthwhile than what I find on X. I’ve also built up my network there such that when I post or write something, it has a chance of being picked up by much more influential accounts and actually seen by a lot of people. The total userbase is still smaller and less diverse than old Twitter, but the quality of engagement and discourse is leaps and bounds better than what’s currently on X.

As I mentioned above, Bluesky is also more innovative than X, not just for its open protocol but for rolling out new features too. One of these is “starter packs,” a smart feature that makes it easier to get started on the site by offering users a way to make lists of recommended people to follow. You can find mine here, so if you’re new to Bluesky or haven’t checked in for a while, it’ll give you a solid list of people to enliven your feed.

An even briefer pitch for Seabird

Unlike a lot of new social networks, Seabird (the platform I’m working on) is not anything like a Twitter clone. It offers a chronological feed but it’s designed exclusively for sharing links, encouraging discourse through blog posts, articles, and writing rather than debates on social media. We’re wrapping up work on a brand new build before we shift our focus to expanding our userbase, but we are welcoming new users. It’s the other platform where I’m most active these days and we have a small but enthusiastic community. Sign up here if you’re curious to check it out.