“Good GOD,” says New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings.” She refers to her departure from twitter, now known as X, and arrival at alternative social media outlet Bluesky. twitter/X, as we all know, is owned by multibillionaire Elon Musk and is rapidly turning his site into a home for hate, twisting the algorithms and encouraging the cranks and fascists to join him in what is becoming a very ugly place in Cyberspace. 700,000 new members have joined us on Bluesky since last week’s US Presidential election. I am there already. It’s just a matter of time until I abandon twitter for good.
I was always concerned at Musk’s acquisition of twitter, even before he transformed into a card-carrying Trumpite. Once he lurched to the far right fringes of politics, it was only a matter of time until he turned the platform, his new plaything, into a place that fits in with both his and Trump’s ugly politics.
I am still invested in twitter in a defensive kind of way. As I stuck with Labour when it was captured by the hard left in the 1980s (though not, it must be said, in the lates 2010s when it was taken over by the Corbynistas) and I feel a similar hold today. I’ve enjoyed the edgier side of twitter much more than increasing decadence and exhibitionism that has taken over Facebook (“look at what I’ve got, look at where I am” etc) but there is no question that Musk has made it an uglier place. These days, it is swarming with anonymous bots and trolls, many of whom seem to foreign-state sponsored and as soon as he took over Musk restored the chief hate figures to the platform, people like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, and Donald Trump to name but two. Part of me feels I need to fight the good fight in order to keep twitter sane but in my heart of hearts, whatever the fuck that means, I know that it won’t be a fight at all.
I turned twitter into my own echo chamber, taking steps to avoid the more hateful users, but that is getting harder. Some days you feel swamped by anonymous users and, thanks to Musk’s latest twist to the platform, people I have blocked, almost always the purveyors of hate speech, can once again see my account. Our desire to retain a degree of privacy no longer matters in Musk’s eyes. When I finally conclude that there is no hope, I shall leave twitter once and for all.
You would have a point if you were to ask, “Why do you need to be on a platform like twitter in the first place? Wouldn’t life be immeasurably easier if you simply did without it?” Well, yes. It’s hard to argue with that. I have pretty well set in my ways politically and I do not particularly want to engage with actual fascists, or even extreme Tories for that matter. But for all that, my place on the centre left is not necessarily right – or should that be correct? – on everything. There are undoubtedly other ideas out there which I should not completely rule out. The only problem I see is that I may have to wade through an awful lot of fascist shit in order to see it.
Not only that, Musk is likely to be a big player in Trump’s second term in the White House and that in itself brings with it certain dangers. An enormous worldwide social platform run by an unelected far right multibillionaire, at a time when the political far right is in the ascendence. Maybe, I keep wondering, that’s a reason to stay but then I realise that I am not a voter on twitter. I am someone to be persuaded of Musk’s ways and beliefs.
Social media isn’t going to go away now but neither will it stay the same. Where Facebook has become a make believe alternative world for older people to share parts of their diaries and holiday snaps, other sites have emerged, like Bluesky and Threads. As the years go by, we will have far more sites, not less because we are still in the stone age of technology. As Bachman Turner Overdrive so astutely put it, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
