In the months after Elon Musk took over Twitter, I was adamant. No matter what the billionaire whose businesses and actions I’d been critically analyzing for years did with the platform, I’d be going down with the ship. I had Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads accounts just in case, but there was nothing I could imagine would push me to replace Twitter.
I had never been a Musk fan or fallen for the image he sold to the public over so many years. But even with that said, I could scarcely imagine what he was on course to become and how he would use his new plaything to help make his increasingly far-right and anti-woke fantasies a reality.
When he took over the platform, many users took to laughing at his incompetence, while feeling bad for the thousands of workers who now found themselves out of work. From the loss of advertisers to the frequent outages, it felt like the platform was in a spiral. As much as Musk would talk about creating the “everything app,” it was clear the janky microblogging app he’d purchased was not on its way to becoming the Western WeChat.
Disconnect relies on the support of readers like you. Subscribe today!
But there was another dimension to the transformation, one that became clearer over time and has now shaped X, the platform Twitter has been morphed into. Musk had his minions rejig the algorithm to boost his posts, and allowed a flood of white nationalists and far-right users to return to the platform — even to the extent of facing off against the Brazilian Supreme Court for some time to defend them.
Paired with the upending of the verification feature and the introduction of a new monetization program, X became a space where right-wing engagement bait was not only encouraged, but compensated. That only went into overdrive as the platform jumped on the generative AI bandwagon.
Paris Marx
Now, more than four years into this experiment, much of what once made Twitter what it was has been eroded under X. The magic isn’t fully gone, but anyone still telling themselves it’s as useful or enjoyable a platform as it was a few years ago is fooling themselves. The feed is filled with right-wing bile and AI-generated engagement bait as the poster-in-chief surfaces some of the worst stuff on the platform on a daily basis. It’s not an enjoyable place to be, nor is it a platform that deserves to be saved.
The Grok chatbot that’s been grafted onto the social media platform regularly spits out the very same white nationalist and antisemitic talking points Musk favors. Musk has long promoted Grok as a virtual companion and as a tool his misogynist incel followers could use to churn out AI-generated simulations of hot girlfriends.
In late December, we were all witness to just how abusive and hostile the platform has become to its users. At Musk’s instruction, the team behind Grok rolled back the guardrails so users could prompt it to make scantily clad and nude images of whoever they wanted. Women ended up being the main victims of Musk’s followers, but the pedophiles who use his platform quickly found they could use it to make explicit images of children too.
xAI is now being sued over over allowing images to be generated of minors, not to mention the investigations that remain ongoing in countries around the world. I’ve previously argued the scandal should have been grounds to ban the platform. Over 3 million images were generated in just eleven days, affecting a enormous number of people — especially women — the world over. But if governments aren’t acting fast enough, that doesn’t mean individuals have no agency.
Paris Marx
In early 2025, I finally reached the point where I was reassessing my previous determination to stay on the platform until it died. Not only was I no longer enjoying using it in the way I used to, but it was harder and harder to justify using a platform owned by such a reprehensible man while he was actively using it to try to shape the public discourse. I pulled back in favor of Bluesky, and only really shared the articles I wrote and podcasts I published.
But as the year was winding down, I knew even that amount of posting was increasingly untenable. On top of no longer liking the platform, Musk’s war on links to content posted beyond the platform also made it that anything I was sharing tended to receive a lot more traction anyway. The benefits of Twitter for media and “creators” was always overstated, but the gulf between perception and reality had become immense.
As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a good reason to stay. I decided I would keep my accounts to avoid the usernames getting stolen, but otherwise I would stop posting by the end of the year and delete all my accounts. I won’t deny there were still some doubts in my mind — especially whether I’d lose a certain degree of influence by avoiding X. But when the Grok deepfake scandal hit right as I was posting my final tweets, I knew I’d made the right decision.
At this point, I remain a bit surprised when I see the number of people still posting on the platform, especially those who claim to hold similar progressive or left-wing values to my own. I hear a lot of excuses for why people remain on the platform, but it’s hard not to feel many of those people are putting assumed influence above their stated morals. Maybe I have taken a bit of a hit since leaving X, but I don’t find it’s very noticeable — and I don’t feel that’s worth staying on such a vile platform.
I’d make similar arguments for Substack, in light of its monetizing of Nazi newsletters and recent partnership with Polymarket. The same goes for Rumble and even Shopify, a platform I find Americans are more likely to leave out of their pressure campaigns because the negative political effects are felt in Canada rather than their own country.
I don’t think progressives or people on the left should abandon every space that comes under right-wing influence. There are good reasons to keep appearing on certain mainstream media platforms and even trying to reach people through online platforms that don’t align with our values. But there has to be a line — and for me, X has long since crossed it.
I’ve left the platform. I’d recommend you do too.
Disconnect relies on the support of readers like you. Subscribe today!
Paris Marx
Member discussion