Why Are People Leaving Xitter En Masse?

The exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over. That’s the headline for a piece in today’s Guardian newspaper. People and corporations are turning to other social media platforms because of what Xitter has become since Musk bought it and started using it as his own platform to spread racist hatred, lies, disinformation, and AI fakes, while enabling the far-right extremists to spread their own propaganda. Anyone surprised that users and advertisers are fed up with the toxic, angry, anti-democracy, pro-fascist quagmire that Xitter has become? Me, either.

Xitter has been accelerating into a far-right echo chamber ever since Musk bought it. Almost as soon as he took it over, Musk was posting his support for Putin and has been in regular contact with the Russian dictator ever since. As the Associated Press noted:

Musk, the world’s richest man who also owns Tesla and the social platform X, has emerged as a leading voice on the American right. He’s poured millions of dollars into Trump’s presidential bid and turned the platform once known as Twitter into a site popular with Trump supporters, as well as conspiracy theorists, extremists and Russian propagandists.

The New Republic also recently reported that Musk has been negotiating with America’s enemy, Iran, saying “The tech billionaire and Trump ally is everywhere suddenly—even places he has no business being,”

The tech mogul and world’s richest man met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York on Monday, The New York Times reports, citing two anonymous Iranian officials. The meeting, held in a secret location, reportedly focused on how to defuse tensions between the two countries and lasted for over an hour.

Trump’s election and the irreparable damage he plans to do to democracy and the USA finally made a lot of users and advertisers awaken to realize just how truly awful a person Musk is, and how bad Xitter has become since he bought it. And many are leaving, albeit too late to undo the damage.*

In the piece noted at the start of this post, Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff writes:

…the future of social media looks increasingly segregated for users’ safety, like rival fans at football. X for the rightwing and the raging; centrists and policy nerds on Bluesky; people who hate politics on Threads or Instagram; Gen Z on TikTok; boomers on Facebook.
Like most journalists, I’m still listening to different conversations on all of them. But for active posting, I switched to Bluesky back in August when Musk used the Southport riots to promote the idea of civil war in Britain. So far, it feels like swapping stilettos for trainers: initially you worry about wimping out, then you wonder why you ever put up with crippled feet for so long.

Two days before this column was published, The Guardian itself announced it was no longer posting on Xitter. According to the BBC:

British newspaper group the Guardian has announced it will no longer post on X, formerly Twitter, saying it has become a “a toxic media platform”.
In a message to readers, it said the US presidential election “underlined” its concerns that its owner, Elon Musk, had been able to use X to “shape political discourse.”
Mr Musk strongly backed Donald Trump and has now been given a role cutting government spending in his incoming administration.

An article in Forbes Magazine adds more names to those leaving Xitter for saner, less toxic platforms:

Accounts on X with large followings—such as actress Jamie Lee Curtis, journalist Don Lemon and The Guardian’s official news accounts—have decided to leave the platform after Donald Trump’s election to a second term, saying X, formerly known as Twitter, promotes the far-right and raising concerns about owner Elon Musk’s relationship with the president-elect.

The Evening Standard published a list of brands leaving Xitter following Trump’s election, including “luxury fashion house Balenciaga to American retailer Best Buy” plus 3M, Target, UnitedHealth Group, and Magers & Quinn Booksellers. The article notes, “Several have echoed similar concerns over brand safety, content moderation, and the platform’s increasingly polarising environment.” It adds:

One of the most prominent departures, and the one that arguably made other media brands sit up and take notice, was NPR.
Last year, the US public broadcaster declared it was leaving the platform due to concerns over X’s new “state-affiliated media” label, which it argued misrepresented its independence and credibility.

Numerous celebrities have also abandoned Xitter since Trump’s election. In another article in The Evening Standard, it notes

Dozens of celebrities have left X since Mr Musk acquired the platform in 2022, including Elton John, Gigi Hadid, White Stripes lead artist Jack White, and Whoopi Goldberg.

That list now includes recent departures of Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Lemon, Bette Midler, Greg Davies, and George Monbiot. More are expected to follow as the exodus snowballs.

Musk has been pumping out the hatred since he bought Twitter. In late 2022, he was under fire for posting a double-barrelled shot against Dr. Fauci and vaccinations, and against transgender people when he posted “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” MSNBC exec Kyle Griffin then tweeted in response, “The man who shared disinformation about Paul Pelosi, allowed hate speech to flourish on his platform, and endorsed Ron DeSantis in 2024 is now calling for the prosecution of a public health professional (and denigrating the trans community at the same time).”

In late 2023, there was an exodus of users and businesses after Musk posted a reply affirming an anti-Semitic tweet from another user. As Newsweek reported then:

Several major companies have pulled their advertising from X, formerly Twitter, after its owner Elon Musk promoted a post that accused Jewish people of pushing hatred before he took aim at antisemitism watchdog the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Then Media Matters, “a progressive watchdog,” reported that corporate ads on Xitter were being placed beside posts with antisemitic conspiracies and far-right hate speech. Companies like Apple, Disney, IBM, Comcast and other corporations quickly pulled their advertising. In response, instead of apologizing and fixing the problem, Musk launched a lawsuit against Media Matters.

And just to make sure advertisers knew exactly where he stood, the unrepentant Musk then publicly told advertisers to go fuck themselves. As Time Magazine reported:

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, says the advertisers that have stopped spending on the platform due to his endorsement of an antisemitic post can “f——” themselves.
“What it’s going to do is it’s going to kill the company, and the whole world will know the advertisers killed the company,” Musk said at the New York Times DealBook conference on Wednesday. “Go f—- yourself.”

In mid-2024, the billionaire bully Musk sued another non-profit group, “The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a nonprofit coalition of major advertisers led by the World Federation of Advertisers,” accusing it of organizing a boycott against Xitter. As the New York Times reported,

The lawsuit claimed that the group, known as GARM, had violated antitrust laws by coordinating with brands to dissuade them from spending money on the social media platform.
While the World Federation of Advertisers denied that GARM’s work had run afoul of the law, it said that the nonprofit did not have the financial resources to continue operating while it fights X in court.

The closure of GARM was, of course, celebrated by MAGA cultists who believe capitalists like Musk should be able to do what they want without any dissent or opposition, a position that will be reinforced under Trump’s fascist regime:

GARM’s decision to close was also praised by the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio. The committee published a report in July that said GARM had tried to influence online discourse by “starving disfavored content, or even entire platforms, of advertising dollars needed to survive.”**

Well, the exodus is not entirely because Musk is a racist, Trump-supporting asshole who has enabled the extremists on his platform and helped fascism defeat democracy in the 2024 US election. It’s also because Xitter has decided they, not the users, own everything posted. As a CNN story reported in October, “X changed its terms of service to let its AI train on everyone’s posts. Now users are up in arms.” The story noted:

“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to make your Content available to the rest of the world,” the terms of service said, which includes the right to analyze any of that content “including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
Basically, by continuing to use the platform, users will agree that X can use their data to train its AI models.

So, basically, Xitter owns your content, and anyone who calls on copyright laws or intellectual property agreements can, as Musk told advertisers, go fuck yourself.

This week, NBC News reported, “X sees largest user exodus since Elon Musk takeover. X users are weighing the decision to keep their followings or build them back up on alternative platforms after the election.” It added:

On the day after the election, Nov. 6, X experienced its largest user exodus since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. And now, users are flooding to alternative text-based social media apps like Bluesky and Instagram’s Threads.
Those numbers appear to be climbing, as users and brands like The Guardian and Don Lemon continue to announce their departures from the platform.
More than 1 million people joined Bluesky in the past week, the platform said, bringing its user base to over 15 million people, while head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced Nov. 3 that Threads had surpassed 275 million monthly active users.
According to data from Similarweb, a third-party company that tracks social media analytics, daily traffic to Bluesky jumped above that of Threads on Nov. 6. Bluesky is currently the no. 1 free app on Apple’s App Store, directly ahead of Threads.

Newsweek also noted that,

Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in November 2022, the social media landscape has experienced a significant shift. Users dissatisfied with changes on the platform—rebranded as X—have been migrating to explore alternatives.
Threads, owned by Meta, has reached more than 275 million monthly users this month.
In the last week, following the U.S. presidential election, Bluesky confirmed that it gained over 700,000 new users, with more than 14.5 million users globally. Mastodon, meanwhile, has expanded from 3.5 million users in November 2022 to almost 9 million this month.

This week, Popular Information published a guide to social media alternatives for anyone who wanted to find a less vitriolic, less extremist, less hate-filled platform than Xitter. The article noted:

In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, many people are reconsidering how they follow the news. A lot of this has to do with X, which was once a lively platform to follow and comment on current events. Elon Musk bought the site formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and has transformed the site into a megaphone for right-wing misinformation. With Musk formally joining the Trump administration, the site will become little more than a vehicle for government propaganda.
The number of people who use X has dropped precipitously since Musk took over, losing one-fifth of its daily active users over the last year.

The article notes that Mastodon (a personal favourite) “…allows users to post up to 500-characters, along with pictures, links, and videos. The site, which was launched in 2016, had a surge of users in 2022 after Musk bought X, and now has almost “9 million users and around 880,000 active users.””

The Evening Standard also published an article on Bluesky that explained, “Bluesky is a social media platform where people can interact much as they do on X, posting, replying, as well as messaging one another on a vertical user interface.”***

PS: My Bluesky profile so you can follow me: bsky.app/profile/cdncurmudgeon.bsky.social

Notes:

* Twitter was bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022, much of its staff fired, its internal groups to moderate threats and hate speech disbanded. He renamed it X and turned it into a money-losing rightwing cesspool and pro-Trump disinformation platform. Today it is known by many outsiders and account holders as Xitter, a far more suitable name given what it has become. The value of Xitter has fallen dramatically from the original $44 billion to a mere $9.4 billion under Musk’s ownership and active participation, as advertisers and users flee. CNN reported in October 2024:

A recent global survey by Kantar found that a net 26% of marketers plan to decrease their spending on X next year, the steepest pullback from any major global ad platform. Just 4% of advertisers said they think X ads provide “brand safety” (certainty that their ads won’t appear near extreme content), compared with 39% at Google.
X had 73.5 million monthly active users on iOS and Android combined in the United States in August, according to Similarweb data shared with CNN. That represents a drop of nearly 11% year over year and a 20% decline from October 2022.

And as recent headlines have suggested, after the fascists won the US election, in part thanks to Musk’s help, people and companies are leaving Xitter en masse. The Evening Standard reported:

After Mr Musk’s takeover of the platform, he immediately fired the teams tasked with battling misinformation. He subsequently implemented a “general amnesty” to thousands of accounts that had received permanent bans, including neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and far-right activist Tommy Robinson. A few months later, he changed the verification system to allow users to pay for a blue verification tick, allowing subscribers to enjoy more visibility, and simultaneously making it harder to verify accounts of genuine public figures.
Mr Musk himself, who is X’s most followed user, has also amplified misinformation to his audience of almost 200 million.

** As the NYT article continues:

The suit against GARM is part of a broader attempt at X to push back against efforts to study and curtail toxic discourse online. In March, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or C.C.D.H., over its research documenting the rise of hate speech on the platform. X later filed an appeal.
After X sued Media Matters over similar analyses late last year, several employees of the advocacy group said the legal pressure led to layoffs. A trial in the Media Matters case is set for next year.
The ripple effects of X’s lawsuits against nonprofits have contributed to problems for researchers looking into extremism, disinformation and other malicious online content. Researchers say those lawsuits have helped to amplify a coordinated right-wing campaign to paint their work as a deep-state conspiracy to censor free speech, which has chilled academic work on the subject and led to some projects being dissolved entirely.
While the bulk of X’s revenue comes from advertising, Mr. Musk said he would wage war against brands that boycotted the platform.
“We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Mr. Musk wrote Tuesday in a post on X. “Now, it is war.”

The New Republic has a piece titled, “Trump’s New Oligarchy Is About to Unleash Unimaginable Corruption. The elevation of Elon Musk to a key role suggests that right-wing elites are set to embark on a spree of sordid self-dealing.” It adds:

“Republican control of the Senate will unfortunately undermine congressional efforts to hold Trump and executives accountable for wreaking havoc on our planet and selling out American families and U.S. energy policy to the highest bidder,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, chair of the Budget Committee, told me in a statement.

*** The article adds that Bluesky, was co-created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. It began in 2019 as a Twitter initiative to develop “an open-source, decentralized standard for social media networks… Bluesky became an incorporated business in 2021 before completely cutting ties with Twitter in 2022.” Bluesky was,

…spun out of Twitter, now known as X, after its chief executive Jack Dorsey announced in 2019 that the giant would fund developers to create an “open and decentralised standard for social media..” Compared to X, Bluesky offers users the chance to more heavily moderate their experience.
This includes the ability to select the algorithm that powers your experience, helping create custom feeds, for example a feed for mutual followers, a feed for cat photos or one for your special interest.

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