Get The Hell Off Twitter
It’s well past time.
Elon Musk, the nation’s unelected corporate despot, has gutted the United States Agency for International Development, the independent agency that administers civilian foreign aid and development assistance. The longterm damage is hard to fully calculate, and the immediate human impact is horrific. Thousands of people have lost their jobs with barely any notice. Foreign Service officers received just 30 days to leave their posts and return to the U.S. That’s hardly much time to relocate families, and people will have to pull their children out of school almost immediately, a disruption without justification. Consider also that employees in the late stage of pregnancy can’t even safely travel during the limited period demanded.
Musk doesn’t possess the integrity to at least own up to his monstrous actions. Honesty is yet another of the redeeming qualities he lacks, so he’s set out to smear USAID and the loyal, hardworking Americans whose honorable service provided humanitarian aid to those who needed it most and fostered good will toward the nation. Musk has called USAID a “criminal organization” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
He’s accused USAID of “money laundering” and claimed that the agency paid celebrities to visit Ukraine. He’s promoted the crackpot conspiracy theory that USAID funded bioweapon research that resulted in COVID-19. These are just a few of the lies he’s spread to millions of people on the social media platform he owns. He calls it “X.” We call it “Twitter.” I say we call the whole thing off. We’re long past the point where decent people can remain on Musk’s severed floor. If you’re on Twitter now, you’re enabling Musk’s assault on our democracy and his sick attacks on our fellow citizens.
The new Fox News?
Musk buying Twitter was like the storylines when Lex Luthor buys The Daily Planet. We knew no good would come of it. (The clip below is from the 1990s Lois & Clark series, but despite the actor’s politics, I still acknowledge that Dean Cain was Superman.)
Patrick Dillon, a Democratic strategist and former Biden administration official who bailed after the election, told Politico, “There’s no pretend at this point. This is a vehicle to support [Musk’s] political views and his candidates.”
Dillon also correctly noted that the platform sucks now, subjecting users to a gross barrage of “trash ads and scammy replies and porn bots.” He points out that journalists in particular have no reason to trust that Musk wouldn’t violate the privacy of direct message communications.
Amazingly, though, there is still a debate in liberal circles over whether non-Nazis should patronize a Nazi safe space. Rep. Maxwell Frost from Florida said last November, “If we leave X, it will help Elon with his goal of making the platform void of any progressive ideology or the way we think about the world, and leave it to the Charlie Kirks and Tim Pools of the world to fill it up with what they believe.”
This is similar to the “Democrats must go on Fox News” narrative. Liberals concede that a critical mass of voters are reachable only on an obvious right-wing propaganda outlet. The reality, though, is that while Democrats were howling in the wind on Fox and legitimizing the network in the process, they were absent in the online spaces where the party’s key demographics receive their news.
Fox News viewers are predominately older and white, which is true of cable news in general. Frost is correct that Democrats can’t stand by while the next generation of voters is radicalized on social media, but the answer isn’t enabling Musk’s platform. Instead, we can learn from liberal passivity during Fox’s early rise and act now to undercut Musk. He bought Twitter and gutted the remains, even renaming it like “Toby” from Roots. He didn’t create anything new. He’s a parasite, leeching off what others built and the product they continue to provide.
Twitter was once a great place to connect with public figures. Celebrities ranging from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to childless cat lady Taylor Swift would directly engage with fans on the site. Movie trailers would often drop first on Twitter.
Of course, Musk is not responsible for any of this, and he’s actively hostile to most of Hollywood. Celebrities have started migrating to Bluesky or Threads, and most importantly, they are no longer posting on Musk’s site.
Critics have argued that Bluesky in particular risks becoming a “bubble” or “echo chamber.” Journalist
, an early Bluesky adopter, explained why that argument makes little sense:I think that our default view of social media has become one where insults have become the default, where interactions are a form of combat, and there’s an expectation that being online means bracing yourself for hostility at every turn. Bluesky challenges that norm, not by shutting out opposing views, but by creating a space where conversations aren’t immediately derailed by harassment or bad-faith arguments. It’s not about avoiding disagreement—it’s about fostering an environment where disagreements can actually happen productively.
The “Charlie Kirks and Tim Pools of the world” thrive most on conflict and “owning the libs.” They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they couldn’t harass liberals (although I have some suggestions).
It’s worth noting that whenever liberals share clips of Pete Buttigieg or Jessica Tarlov on Fox News, we’re not learning anything about what passes for MAGA thought. We’re just applauding as Buttigieg and Tarlov assert basic truths against an avalanche of BS. It’s almost like a rhetorical Fight Club: “When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved.”
This sort of liberal salvation is just form without substance. We can do better.
Why we should all go
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was objectively a financial disaster. He paid $54.20 a share in 2022 for a total purchase price of $44 billion. A year later, the platform was valued at $19 billion, which is less. Last October, the company’s value was down to $9.4 billion.
Haunted houses don’t lose their value so quickly. The Overlook Hotel, once they cleaned out all the blood from the elevators, probably was down just 10 percent on Zillow. If a normal person’s home lost 80 percent of its value in two years, they’d consider arson, but Musk isn’t normal and only vaguely resembles a person. His Twitter purchase was part of his larger world domination scheme, and in that respect, it’s been quite successful.
In Citizen Kane, when the banker Mr. Thatcher (George Coulouris) tells Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) that the newspaper he bought lost a million dollars over the past year, Kane responds with smug self-assurance:
“You’re right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in ... 60 years.”
Kane might’ve made a big show about defending the common man and rooting out corruption, but he bought a newspaper specifically so he could manipulate his political and social environment. It’s the same with Musk, but without Kanye’s wit or Welles’s baritone.
“You provide the prose poems,” Kane tells a reporter stationed in Cuba. “I’ll provide the war.” Musk is using his platform to provide the “corruption” he claims justifies his personal war. Staying on Twitter just gives him ammunition.
I appreciate how hard it is for content creators to abandon the connections they’ve built on the site for more than a decade, but as far as personal sacrifices go, deleting your Twitter app is hardly the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
I suggest keeping your account active, as I will, so Musk’s online Nazis can’t steal your handle. We’ll take with us everything that was good about Twitter — ourselves — and leave Musk with a platform that has “no profit in it but the name,” which he already changed to something stupid.
Bravo for still calling it Twitter!
I left Twitter a few months after Musk bought it. In that short period of time, it was quite clear that he intended to trash the site, and it's a shame, because it was as close to a town square as 21st century America could get.
As for what he's done to USAID and its employees shows that he cares nothing for working people. And to point that out won't move him, because the cruelty is the point. Some, who are cheering his cruelty, may be moved by another fact - that closing USAID will hurt America in the long run, because it's a form of soft power, which forms friendships and coalitions. You never know when you will need a friend or an ally in any part of the world. He won't be moved by that, because he's not very bright, and no doubt thinks that we need no one. That has never been true, and we will find out the hard way, sooner or later.
thank you, Stephen. I wrestled for a while about getting off Twitter, but Elon made it easy for me last September when a totally anodyne comment ("he needs the strokes") supposedly broke some rule and got me suspended. all I had to do to get back on was delete the comment, but that would be admitting it violated the rules and that felt like a capitulation for access (in its micro way) I didn't feel like extending to the algorithm. so I went cold turkey. it was rough for a while. supposedly my appeal is still pending six months later. so now I'm on Bluesky and mostly relieved to be out of the swamp, though my account is still active, I suppose.
question for you, Stephen: do you think Musk is strategic, that is, did he buy Twitter with this goal in mind, or did he just end up wandering up this path as his politics rapidly exploded into radical madness? does he see around corners or is he just winging it, and at the moment Twitter is crucial in Musk's world domination plan? what if anything would it take for Twitter to actually come apart or sink under its own weight?
sorry, that was a bunch of questions, but youth wants to know...I'm just so sick of the Elons getting a free pass as designated geniuses when the more I see the guy, the more of a malignant dumbass he proves to be.