It’s not enough for some journalists and influencers to boycott the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Everyone needs to bail on it at once.
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Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.
He has made over 50 false election claims so far this year, and amplified countless posts of misinformation, conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism. He’s done nothing to stop Russian use of the platform to sow misinformation (and, we now know, the targeting of left-leaning American Jews) in support of Trump. He has complied with censorship requests from authoritarian-led Turkey while defying democratic Brazil and the European Union. He has filed frivolous SLAPP lawsuits against those who have pushed for a boycott. He has boosted nationalists in India, China and Argentina and received business favors from each. He helped foment violence in the United Kingdom, spreading misinformation and predicting “civil war.” And so on.
Yet, for all the actions that have been proposed — demanding advertisers boycott the service, going after SpaceX or Tesla or Starlink — the most obvious one often goes unsaid: we should stop using X.
If anyone’s interested in helping break twatter’s stranglehold on brief discussion content encourage your organization (school, company, nonprofit, lab or other org) to host their own Mastodon instance in addition to email. This is how we get people on federated platforms and off of Musk’s nazi-friendly platform, by making it easy to use and ubiquitous.