In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, many liberals have announced they are leaving X. Tired of all the “disinformation” they encounter on the platform, they are convinced the time has come to delete their accounts.
NBC News reported that the day after the election, “115,414 accounts were deactivated,” the biggest one-day exodus since Elon Musk bought the platform.
“Meanwhile, daily traffic to competitors Bluesky and Threads have jumped since the beginning of October.” NBC reporters spoke to six people who have left X for these platforms since Election Day. These individuals cited “growing issues on X, including bots, partisan ads, and harassment” as their reasons for leaving. Harassment likely means they were hit with a community note or someone on the platform disagreed with them.
Importantly, all six said the aforementioned issues “reached a tipping point when Trump won the election.”
In a separate article, NBC recounts the experience of former X user Kara Wurtz, a 39-year-old finance director in St. Louis. For Wurtz, “the day after the election was the ‘final straw.'” She claimed that, “under Musk’s leadership,” … X “became a place where I wasn’t really getting what I wanted out of it anymore.”
What she “wanted out of it” was validation of her own world view. Following Musk’s takeover, she was forced to hear opinions that differed from her own for the first time. That didn’t happen before Musk took over the platform.
“Every time I opened it up,” she said, “it would throw things at me that put me in a bad mood.”
Yes, the truth is like that.
Anyway, as the flight continues, some users are still on the fence. But there is one trait they all seem to share: their egos are the size of the Grand Canyon.
Michael Ian Black, whom I hadn’t heard of before today, wrote that he’s “pretty sure” he’s leaving the platform. He will “continue monitoring this account but it sucks here.”
To which one user replied: “I don’t have a clue who you are.”
Others, like Don Lemon just can’t seem to cut the chord.
Lemon is leaving. On Wednesday morning, he told followers he really means it this time.
Then, in a sign that he doesn’t take such a major decision lightly, Lemon put it in writing.
Seeing that his account was still active on Thursday morning, actress Justine Bateman noted, “First a video about leaving, and now a written statement? This is more notice than we got from Biden when he dropped out of the race.”
That’s very true.
One commenter wondered, “Is he hoping people will beg him to stay? Not gonna happen.” Actually, a lot of people said the same thing. Others simply said, “Good riddance!”
He needs to stop announcing it and just go. Like Joy Reid.
Poor Joy. She is so done with free speech that she finally deleted her account. Yes, shortly after midnight, to the delight of so many on the platform, she made good on her threat and took the plunge.
Jen Rubin, whose tweets have provided so much entertainment for us over the years, has been promising to leave forever. Although she just can’t seem to make a final break, she did, however, take her account private. “Only approved followers can see @JRubinBlogger’s posts.”
The Guardian, a daily British tabloid, also announced their departure from X. The editors find the “content promoted or found on the platform platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism, to be disturbing.
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.
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.
One X user reminded the tabloid, which touts itself as “the world’s leading liberal voice,” of some rather disturbing content of their own.
Rory Mir, an associate director of community organizing at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, told NBC, “X is really teaching everyone the importance of who owns the sites that we use and rely on to communicate online.”
“What people are seeing with X is that it has subjectively deteriorated in value,” he said. “People don’t feel like the right boxes are being heard or promoted on the site. They don’t feel safe using the site in many cases.”
Let them do as they must. The world’s richest man is currently having the time of his life and probably couldn’t care less.
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