This Is a Simple and Satisfying Way to Fight Trump and Musk

By the time Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October 2022, aided in large part by a mafia of big banks and reactionary hedge fund owners (and also by Diddy, though Musk would prefer that you forget that), he’d already made quite clear what his new political project was going to be.

Just four months earlier, he’d tweeted, “Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November.” He’d promised to bring Donald Trump’s account back to the platform and restore the tweeting privileges he’d lost after inciting a whole insurrection at the Capitol. He’d been egged on throughout the year by a coterie of far-right influencers and yes-men who openly dreamed of fostering an outlet friendly to formerly banned manosphere types, rabid conspiracists, and neo-Nazis, under the guise of “free-speech absolutism.”

Now that Trump is headed back to the White House, with X’s Elon Musk in tow, there is not even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against Trump. It’s better late than never, but it’s well and truly time to cut X loose.

Maybe it seemed, once, that a spirited internal resistance could effectively limit Musk’s damage and preserve some of the prior spirit of the microblogging platform that writers, public agencies, and other creative types had come to depend upon. I honestly cannot tell you what exactly was my justification for maintaining a Twitter/X presence, even as I explored other social media outfits and publicly acknowledged that Musk’s regime was repelling masses of tweeters, boosting easily debunkable disinformation, shedding all of X’s remaining utility for journalists, bullying transgender users, spreading straight-up white-supremacist rhetoric, and influencing CEOs in every other field to become as domineering and unapologetic as Musk is, whatever the backlash.

There was obviously the fact of my job title, as a “business and tech” reporter following a social media outlet. There was also X’s first-mover advantage in the microblogging space, a position it held as copycats, like Bluesky, Spill, and Threads, were slower (at least, at the time) in gaining traction. There were all the people I’d connected with on the platform exclusively, and with whom I wished to stay in touch. Friends, colleagues, and writers I respected made, I thought, persuasive cases for improving the experience—ignoring Musk altogether, deleting your old tweets—even as others insisted, convincingly, that this was not just a fool’s errand but a dangerous one.

It didn’t take long until there was nothing left. My beloved Rap Twitter is all but dead, taken over by fake blue checks and Trumpian propaganda. Musk kept pushing himself and his deranged friends into everyone’s feeds, no matter users’ preferences. Trump was finally persuaded to tweet again, in spite of his Truth Social loyalty, and he brought the demagoguery back, hard. Musk put his money where his memeposts were, as my colleague Scott Nover put it, and became an ultimately successful megadonor for the Trump cause. Kamala Harris’ campaign may have outraised Trump’s by a lot, but the Republicans had a powerful propaganda machine on their hands that supposedly democracy-concerned liberals (including myself) continued to bless with legitimacy, simply by staying and posting on there.

It’s no secret that under a new Trump administration, Musk will likely benefit significantly from the federal contracts for SpaceX and Tesla that already immunized him from much governmental accountability. It’s possible that Trump and Musk, two egomaniacs with horrific business instincts but great collections of powerful friends, will clash with each other, frequently, while working out ways to purge the civil service. But it’s also likely that Trump will do anything and everything he can for his new friend—and that may well include bailing out X from its massive debts, as well as fashioning it into even more of a straight government propaganda channel than it was during the peak era of inflammatory President Donald Trump tweets. Trump already made major newspapers and cable outfits bend the knee, and now he doesn’t even have to try that hard to dominate the text-based outlet full of the super-online stans who turned out in impressive numbers this year for him, and for him alone. (And no, don’t expect him to employ the still-unviable Truth Social in any great regard, as my colleague Alex Kirshner has explained.)

There’s no need to be a part of that. Two years after Musk’s takeover, we have a very different information ecosystem that’s fully passed the need for Twitter-as-it-was and that also presents new opportunities for liberals. Consider Bluesky and its related “fediverse” alternatives. These are burgeoning, decentralized, carefully mediated platforms where you can easily block turds like Catturd, and where users have more opportunities for customization and reach than ever before, thanks to an organically swelling customer base. (I would suggest you don’t go to Threads, run by a Trump-embracing Mark Zuckerberg who continues to censor journalists and any form of “political content” while forgoing any concerted content moderation.)

Such newer platforms are still niche, of course—but remember, even the far-right ideologies that propelled Trump to where he is were once relegated to niche internet corners. There is a reckoning brewing that the mainstream media apparatuses Democrats stuck to are no longer sufficient, and that it’s time for the libs to own a durable apparatus to take on the right wing’s domination of their once-favorite mediums. And frankly, there’s no need for any Trump opponents now to be on X for the same reasons that they’re not on Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, or wherever else: It will be just another version of those far-right sites, but bigger, and with more prebuilt traction.

Remember, too, that what always made Twitter/X more potent and desirable to those right-wingers was the fact that there were libs on the platform they could dunk on and to whom they could present themselves in opposition. Why continue to give them that satisfaction?

As soon as I share this piece, I plan to lock my old Twitter account (with some info in case any friends wanna catch me elsewhere) and never tweet from it again. The site I once loved is well and truly gone for good, it took me too long to come to terms with that, and it’s now far past time for something different—because we’re going to need something way, way different to fend off the renewed threats a reelected, re-emboldened Trump poses. Plenty of folks already understand this and are leaving, in large numbers, yet again.

I’ll probably maintain a burner account there for research purposes (like I have on Truth Social, for whenever I’m assigned to inform libs on what the hell is going on there), but there’s no need to put any of us through the exhausting liberal takes, the gloating far-right responses, and the all-but-inevitable algorithm changes that will smother dissenting users for good, under a steaming pile of Trump rants and A.I. slop. We had a good run. Now it’s time to run somewhere else.