Want to fight Donald Trump and Elon Musk? Delete your X accounts.

On By Littum

When Elon Musk closed his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, it largely helped of a mafia of big banks and reactionary hedge fund owners (and also by DiddyAlthough Musk would prefer you forget it), he had already made it abundantly clear what his new political project would be.

Only four months earlier, he had tweeted“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me and a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November.” He had promised to bring Donald Trump’s account back to the platform and restore the tweeting privileges he had lost after inciting an all-out riot at the Capitol. Throughout the year, he had been engulfed by a group of far-right influencers and yes-men who openly dreamed of promoting an outlet friendly to previously 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 isn’t even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against Trump. It’s better late than never, but it really is time to cut X loose.

Perhaps it once seemed that a spirited internal resistance could effectively limit Musk’s damage and preserve some of the former spirit of the microblogging platform that writers, government agencies and other creative types had come to depend on. I honestly can’t tell you exactly what my reasoning was for maintaining a Twitter/X presence, although I did explore other social media and publicly acknowledged that Musk’s regime was rejecting tons of tweeters, which increased easily debunked misinformationtrap all of X’s residual utility for journalistsbullying of transgender users, proliferation downright white-supremacist rhetoricand influence CEOs in all other fields to become as dominant and unapologetic as Musk is, regardless of 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 when copycats like Bluesky, Spill, and Threads were slower (at least at the time) to gain traction. There were all the people I had connected with solely on the platform and wanted to stay in touch with. Friends, colleagues, and writers I respected made, I thought, compelling cases to improve the experience—ignore Musk altogether, delete your old tweets—even as others insisted, convincingthat this was not just a fool, but a dangerous one.

It wasn’t long before there was nothing left. My beloved Rap Twitter is almost dead, taken over by fake blue checks and Trumpian propaganda. Musk preserved pushing himself and his insane friends into everyone’s feeds, regardless of user preferences. Trump was finally persuaded to tweet again, despite his Truth Social loyalties, and he brought back the demagoguery, hard. Musk put his money where his meme posts were, as my colleague Scott Nover put it, and became the ultimate successful mega-donor to the Trump cause. Kamala Harris’s campaign may have excited Trump’s lot, but the Republicans had a powerful propaganda machine on their hands that supposedly democracy-affected liberals (myself included) continued to bless with legitimacy simply by staying and writing.

It’s no secret that under a new Trump administration, Musk is likely to benefit significantly federal contracts for SpaceX and Tesla which already immunized him from much government responsibility. It’s possible that Trump and Musk, two egomaniacs with terrible business instincts but large collections of powerful friends, will often clash as they figure out ways to purge the bureaucracy. But it’s also likely that Trump will do whatever he can for his new friend — and that may well include bailing out X from its massive debt, as well as turning it into an even more direct government propaganda channel than it was during its peak -era of inflammatory President Donald Trump tweets. Trump already got major newspapers and cable outfits to bend the knee, and now he doesn’t even have to try that hard to dominate the text-based business full of super-online punch that turned out in impressive numbers this year for him and for him alone. (And no, don’t expect him to use the still-unviable Truth Social in any major way, as my colleague Alex Kirshner has explained.)

There is no reason to be a part of that. Two years after Musk’s takeover, we have a very different information ecosystem that has fully outlived the need for Twitter-as-it-was, and is also opening up new opportunities for liberals. Consider Bluesky and its related “fediverse” alternatives. These are emerging, decentralized, carefully curated platforms where you can easily blocks scabs like Catturdand where users have more options for customization and reach than ever before, thanks to a organically growing customer base. (I’d suggest you don’t go to Threads, run by a Trump-embracing Mark Zuckerberg, who continues to censor journalists and any “political content” while renouncing any concerted content moderation.)

Such newer platforms are still niche, of course—but remember that even the far-right ideologies that drove Trump to where he is were once relegated to niche internet corners. There is an accounting in the offing, as the mainstream media apparatus the Democrats adhered to are no longer sufficientand that it’s time the libs own a viable apparatus to take over the right wing’s dominance of their once preferred media. And frankly, there’s no need for any Trump opponents to be on X now for the same reasons they’re not on Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, or anywhere else: It’ll just be another version of the far-right sides, but larger and with more pre-built traction.

Also remember that what always made Twitter/X more potent and desirable to the right was the fact that there were libs on the platform they could appear on and present themselves to 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 information in case any friends want to catch me elsewhere) and never tweet from it again. The site I once loved is completely gone forever, it took me too long to come to terms with it, and it’s now way past time for something else – because we’re going to need something completely different to fend off the renewed threats a re-elected, re-emboldened Trump constitutes. Many people already understand this and are leaving, in large numbersone more time.

I’ll probably maintain a burner account there for research purposes (like I have on Truth Social, because every time I’m tasked with informing the libs about what the hell is going on there) but there’s no need to put any of us through exhausting liberal posturing, the glorious far-right backlash, and the all-but-inevitable algorithm changes that will smother dissenting users forever under a steaming pile of Trump attacks and artificial intelligence. We had a good run. Now it’s time to run somewhere other.