Should we call time on X/Twitter?
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Is there a mass exodus from Twitter/X to alternatives like Threads, and what are the implications of staying or leaving?
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In Brief:
- Recent events in the UK, including the spread of misinformation after a tragic stabbing in Southport, have intensified debate about the declining state of X under Elon Musk's ownership.
- Some users, including journalists and politicians, are considering leaving X for alternative platforms like Threads or Bluesky, citing concerns over the platform's toxicity, spread of misinformation, and changes to verification systems.
- The News Agents' Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall discuss the dilemma facing journalists: whether to abandon their large followings on X or stay to provide accurate information, despite the platform's issues.
If X, formerly Twitter, was created tomorrow, and functioned its current form, would you join it?
And with the state it is in now, do responsible journalists, media organisations, politicians, and so on, have a responsibility to leave it?
Those are the questions Jon and Lewis have been thinking about recently as events in the UK have unfolded over the past few weeks.
“I think it is worth considering whether or not it's still useful for us to be on there [X]” Lewis Goodall says on a recent episode of The News Agents. “Whether, almost morally, it's right to be on there”.
Why are people leaving Twitter?
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, there’s been significant changes that, for some, have worsened the user experience and beyond that, worsened society generally.
Some of those changes include reinstating previously suspended accounts in the name of ‘free speech’ (Tommy Robinson and Donald Trump to name a few) and changing how it functions so that, whereas previously trusted journalists and news sources would receive verification (a blue tick by their name), now, anyone can pay to have one. By having one, your tweets are often more prominent in news feeds.
“The people who pay for verification, blue ticks [now], are all the bots and the absolute weirdos and the misfits,” Lewis explains. “And so all you ever see when you post anything is their comments right at the top.. it just becomes less useful and interesting.”
"Twitter has normalised far-right views. They are being diffused down from the very top - Musk himself"
These changes have been playing out for a while, but it’s been only in recent weeks, since the atrocious stabbing in Southport which saw three young girls murdered, that the discourse on Twitter’s downfalls has really come into play.
Disinformation and misinformation spread like wildfire on the platform in the wake of the attack. First, wrong information about the identity of the killer spread across the social platform - that he was an asylum seeker, that he was muslim. He is in fact 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents.
Nevertheless, people ran with the false narrative and used it as an excuse to incite violence in towns and cities.
Beyond that, Musk inserted himself into the conversation, tweeting that there will be a “civil war” in the UK and calling Keir Starmer “two-tier Keir” in relation to claims of a two-tier policing system.
Jon discusses how events have unfolded on The News Agents: “If you take the last two or three weeks, Elon Musk using Twitter to say that civil war is inevitable, the return of Tommy Robinson with nearly a million followers to X to advance every conspiracy theory under the sun… And it's coming in your feeds, and it's becoming more and more prominent, and you think… what is happening?”
This string of events and resulting toxicity some now believe to be ingrained in the social network, has left some people ditching it altogether.
Where are people going?
Threads, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned platform that’s linked to Instagram and has a very similar interface to Twitter, is one option for some. A platform called Bluesky is another.
However, we should be clear that although it feels like a wave of people are leaving X, at the moment it is only anecdotal. There are no statistics to confirm whether drop-off on X or uptake elsewhere is substantial.
But logging into Threads, you will surely be flooded with users posting about their fleeing from X in favour of the alternative platform.
And Lewis, along with others, have noticed people saying their farewells on X.
“Given everything that's happened in the last week in Britain, at least, it does feel like there is a substantial shift. There’s Labour MPs in particular, saying they're not going to be on the platform anymore, or they're going to scale down their use of the platform”.
Is it time to stop using X/Twitter?
Will The News Agents leave Twitter?
“I'm sticking with it for the time being,” says Jon. “But am I enjoying using Twitter, or am I using it as much?… I'm not looking as much as I would, because I'm finding so little that is engaging me. Mainly, it's infuriating me.”
“We as journalists, why do we stay on it? Well, partly, it's because we've built up big, big followings we can still get, to some extent, our message and story out there.
“It is a real poisonous pill to swallow, to leave something that you've spent years and years and years building up a considerable following and starting all over again. It's sort of exhausting, and you can't quite bear the thought of it. That's the truth, right?” Lewis admits.
So what would cause Jon to leave the platform?
“I suppose, for me,” Jon says, “the red line is that it reaches a point where, actually, all you're getting back is an echo chamber of bots, of people who, you know, just want to be vile and that there is no merit.”
On the flip side, if all responsible journalists left the platform, what would it become?
“I suppose the problem is to abandon it altogether and to say there is this platform on which there are tens of millions of people, he adds.
“If all they're going to get from now on is crap, then we've given up the fight. Then we have surrendered that space to those sorts of people, and therefore, surely we play some role in maybe just putting a question mark in people's heads, which is, ‘are you sure that's true?’”
Listen to the full discussion on today's episode of The News Agents.
