Users
Delete Your Account. For Real This Time.
On X. On Threads. Maybe even beyond that.
Illustration by Slate
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,