Of course, Elon Musk had to take Twitter private. If he had to answer to shareholders, he would have been ousted months ago for his systematic, single-minded destruction of the company’s value.
Pretty much every move he’s made has been some level of bad, ranging from confusing to annoying to infuriating to catastrophic. Alienating long-term users, chasing away advertisers, amplifying the voices of some the worst people in the world, kowtowing to foreign dictators Donald Trump considers to be great leaders, turning verification into pay-to-play, and generally just being an all-around asshole, Musk has managed to turn a social media pioneer into a toxic dumpster fire in record time.
It’s not just advertisers fleeing the platform. It’s also the public sector. Government agencies also use services like Twitter to reach constituents and they’re beginning to see why it might be a bad idea to send out their messages via a service awash in a sea of hate, misinformation, extremism, and grifting.
Even entities that often align themselves with the sort of authoritarians Musk and his Trump-loving fanboys dig the most are finding ExTwitter to have moved a bit too far to the extremist side of the spectrum to continue doing (government) business with the platform. Here are Andy Bruce and Muvija M reporting for Reuters about the latest collateral damage produced by the Musk regime:
Reuters contacted all 45 territorial police forces and British Transport Police by email. Of the 33 to give details about their policy, 10 forces who collectively police nearly 13 million people said they were actively reviewing their presence on X, while 13 said they frequently reviewed all their social media platforms.
[…]
Yet of these 23 forces, six said they were cutting their presence to just one or two X accounts. One, North Wales Police, serving nearly 700,000 residents, stopped using X completely in August.
“We … felt that the platform was no longer consistent with our values and therefore we have withdrawn our use of it,” Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman said, adding that they would continue to monitor and review alternative platforms.
The quote in bold could be applied to a large number of former Twitter users, many of which began leaving the platform after Musk made it clear he’d prefer to be surrounded by conspiracy theorists, domestic extremists, far-right racists, and people willing to turn to violence rather than respect a peaceful transition of power. Then there are the Nazis. Lots of them. And all of this is surrounded by the non-stop gibbering of blue-checked asshats either trying to foist their bigotry on others or simply cluttering up threats with auto-generated replies pushing whatever crypto scam they happen to be participating in.
North Wales pulled the plug. It looks like another police agency may soon be headed for the exit door as well.
Gwent Police said they were reviewing X because of questions about “the tone of the platform and whether that is the right place to reach our communities”. All Gwent’s individual officer accounts have been removed.
It’s not just cops no longer seeing the value in maintaining ExTwitter accounts, although it’s always a surprise to see law enforcement agencies exit a platform that caters to so many of their biggest fans: bigots, white nationalists, and others who will lick any boot they see so long as it’s someone they hate being pinned under the heel.
Interacting and informing the public is an important feature of social media services. But other government agencies are now deciding it’s not worth wading through a cesspool just to hand out a few extra digital pamphlets.
Of 32 ambulance and fire services surveyed by Reuters, nine said they had actively reviewed their presence on X. England’s North East Ambulance Service announced in July that it had stopped posting there.
[…]
In recent months, some British charities, and health, and educational establishments have said they will no longer post to X.
Every day brings more news like this. Soon, ExTwitter will be of interest to no one but cultural anthropologists. Even those demanding the resurrection of banned accounts are bound to get bored with seeing nothing but their own bigotry and stupidity reflected back at them by a bunch of blue checks with similar interests and a similar lack of anything actually interesting to say.
For public services that seek to serve the entirety of their public, exiting X is the smart move, even if it means temporarily losing a little bit of reach. There’s nothing to be gained by being one of the last rational voices on a service that is pretty much just 4chan but with a more attractive UI.