Years ago, feeling like I couldn’t stay behind, I created a Twitter account. My goal was to follow others and occasionally send out a tweet myself. To this day, I’ve never done the latter. Why not? Who knows. In the end, I suppose I just didn’t care enough about making my voice heard on this platform. Nor did I ever become an avid follower of other people’s accounts. There were always other priorities, and – helpfully – if anything significant happened on Twitter, I’d quickly hear about it from my colleagues anyway.
Hate speech
Around the same time, Observant set up a Twitter account. My colleagues managed it on behalf of the editorial team, posting tweets, retweeting posts and replying to others when necessary. However, our activity gradually dwindled after Elon Musk took over the platform two years ago and rebranded it to X. A few weeks ago, we decided to stop posting altogether, and last Monday, we deleted the account. In hindsight, we realised we should’ve done it much sooner. Twitter/X had been grating on us for quite some time, with abusive language, hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories drowning out any worthwhile content. But even more importantly, as the journalism news site Villamedia put it last week, “The core values of independent journalism and democratic decision making are (…) no longer compatible with the way X is managed, used and abused by its owner.”
Fact-checking
After Musk’s takeover, he fired most moderators (fact-checking is no longer a priority on the platform), welcomed back banned users like Donald Trump, and used X to further his own political agenda of helping Trump win the US presidential election and securing himself a new job in the process: heading the Department of Government Efficiency.
A breeze
Inspired by the editorial team’s decision, I decided it was time to delete my own long-inactive account. Unfortunately, I turned out to have forgotten both my username and password. Recovering them required some creative problem solving, but once I did, deleting the account – with a bit of help – was a breeze. Exit X.