I'm glad I stopped posting on X

There was a time when I didn’t think I would ever stop tweeting, that I couldn’t stop if I tried. I thought the only way out would be if the platform got shut down or I died, probably while in the middle of composing another tweet. Not counting the tweets I deleted, I tweeted almost 25,000 times before I stopped, which was apparently about seven times a day on average. 

The decision to stop tweeting was mine, but it wasn’t one I wanted to make. I watched in horror as my favorite website was seized by people who wanted to destroy it and remake it in their own image, chief among them the richest and most embarrassing man in the world. Elon Musk resented Twitter, which is why he delighted in firing the people who made it what it was, giving it a stupid new name and an ugly logo, removing some of its best features, and installing terrible new ones. You can still type characters and hit “Post,” but it got to a point where Twitter was declarable as dead. A reanimated, bloated corpse had taken its place, driven by the greedy, careless, and bigoted whims of its new owner.  

Still, I kept tweeting. I was already used to vicious blowback and getting harassed on Twitter before Musk ever walked through the doors of its HQ. I wasn’t about to let a man as pathetic as him chase me away from the account I’d been growing for a decade. But a year ago, it started to sink in that staying and tweeting was what Musk wanted me to do, and leaving was the bigger protest. There’s one moment I can pinpoint, shortly before I tweeted in earnest for the last time, that severed the final string of a frayed cord. It was the morning after the election when I saw it.

Your body, my choice. Forever.

The proud Nazi admirer and influencer Nick Fuentes had tweeted it as Donald Trump pulled ahead of Kamala Harris the night before. I didn’t read it until after I had become numb to the fact that Trump would retake the White House. Those five words paled in comparison to what I was used to reading about women, especially as someone who reports on social media and sexual violence. But they struck me as a perfect slogan for what X, the everything app, had become. Musk had used it to help Trump get re-elected, which Fuentes celebrated as putting rape culture back in power. I could use X to register my discontent, and I did, but all it accomplished was creating more engagement for Musk’s platform—an incentivize for more Fuentes content, not less.

Fuentes had been banned from Twitter years earlier for hate speech. Under Musk, the platform restored and then banned his account again a day later after he insinuated that Jewish people engaged in mind control by owning media companies. But in May 2024, Musk brought Fuentes back a second time, posting that he would be “crushed by the comments and Community Notes” and “rebutted,” rather than “grow simmering in the darkness.” That did not happen, and I doubt that Musk really wanted it to happen. Musk himself has happily engaged with Neo-Nazis on his platform, which is a cesspool of Holocaust denial and antisemitic posts that rarely receive a community fact-check. Fuentes now has over a million followers, a nearly 700% increase since he was banned from Twitter for the first time. Just this weekend, he appeared in a fitness influencer’s aspirational gym bro content, the archetypal Nazi sympathizer next door. This is one of the flourishing centers of extremism on X, but it’s far from the only kind. Pro-anorexia content has soared under Musk, alongside disturbingly popular posts advocating for eugenics, pedophilia, genocide, and more.

The same month Musk reinstalled Fuentes, he also launched a PAC on his way to become the single largest campaign donor of the election year. He endorsed Trump in July and took over the handle “@america” in October to promote the PAC. That account is still active to this day to, among other things, spread racist propaganda and support Trump in office. It also has over a million followers. All the major social media platforms have capitulated to Trump’s second term in one way or another, but X is his administration’s primary tool of choice to share dehumanizing AI images, threaten violence against innocent people, and encourage ICE signups.

Your body, my choice.

Before it became an instrument of authoritarian rule, I first became obsessed with Twitter in college. I was studying to become a journalist and following every move of my favorite journalists on social media. I coveted their bylines, their ability to bring injustices to light, their writing, their humor, their empathy, the blue verification checkmarks next to their names, and their five and six-figure follower counts. Years later, when I got my own blue checkmark for my first full-time job at Business Insider, I bought a cake for me and my friends to celebrate. I drew a checkmark on it with blue icing. I was getting better at journalism and at tweeting. My tweets started getting dozens of likes, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually even hundreds of thousands. People seemed to read my tweets more than my articles, because they were shorter and funnier and more digestible. They came up to me in bars and at conferences because they recognized my hair from my Twitter profile picture. My early career was crystallized in threads that detailed my reporting and my analysis for a huge audience. I found sources on Twitter. I met some of my best friends on Twitter. I even met the love of my life on Twitter.

Forever.

Twitter was never a safe space. Some of my earliest memories of getting traction on a tweet were quickly followed by hecklers downplaying and excusing and partaking in the examples of misogyny I called out. The platform caused me lots of trouble, but I kept coming back. I had trained my brain to think in tweets, as instinctual as breathing. It was after last year’s election that I found the usual desire had evaporated. I retweeted other people for a few more weeks, then stopped that, too. Trump got sworn in, and a few days later, I was laid off. I used my X account one last time to support my fellow affected colleagues. Trolls swarmed with their usual taunts and slurs and invitations to get raped, which was a fitting goodbye from the platform overthrown by a man who hates women and journalists and especially both. And then it was over.

Well, not really. You might not be able to see me on X, but I’m still there. I kept reporting on the parts of it that are the most visibly rotten, like the AI chatbot Grok being used for automated sexual harassment, and I kept indulging in the parts I still love, the posts from people and communities who stayed behind.

But the incentives on X are broken now. So much of what goes viral there today is rage bait to make money from the zombified version of the blue checkmark system. So much of it is indistinguishable from 4chan, just on a larger, more influential scale than ever before. I worry what that’s doing to the brains of people who don’t realize how little of it reflects reality outside of X. You can see how it has warped some of their minds, including Musk’s. It has probably warped mine, too, just from reading it. But I’m no longer trying to reach an audience that has been ideologically captured, poisoned, and repurposed to kill. X helped select targets for DOGE and now it’s selecting targets for ICE raids. Its growing suite of AI functions is toxifying the air in predominantly Black Memphis. Every time my finger slips and I hit Grok, methane gas turbines exhale more smog into their lungs. I’m go from smiling at jokes written on a weapon of mass destruction to closing the app after I see something sociopathic with a hundred thousand likes.

Bluesky is my X alternative of choice, the obvious one for any journalist who still wants to reach an engaged audience. It’s ironic that it became so popular to say that Bluesky is an echo chamber after Twitter was sacrificed in the town square and turned into the ultimate example of one. Musk banned accounts belonging to journalists and leftists and only brought back some of them. He throttled links. He exiled anyone who opposed him or tried to make the platform safer for women and children and minorities. Two years later, he would repeat this cycle with 300,000 government employees in an unelected position of unconstitutional authority granted to him by a corrupt president he used X to help install. His slash-and-burn approach to foreign aid is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people so far. Bluesky is far from perfect, but it also doesn’t have a body count that fills multiple football stadiums.

Selfishly, one of the things that held me back from leaving X after Musk’s initial takeover was the fear that my career would stall without my largest audience. The opposite happened. Bluesky was exponentially more supportive of my independent journalism, and I’ve more than doubled my following since I abandoned my X account. More importantly, my reporting and analysis reaches more people than ever before, and I’ve largely avoided targeted harassment—something that felt inconceivable when I was active on X. I now know it doesn’t have to be that way.

I wish I had stopped posting on X even earlier. I am so much more welcome elsewhere. 

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