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Some wars can’t be won. It can be hard to come to terms with this fact when you’re still on the battlefield, but if somehow you manage to step out for a moment, then the truth will become obvious. You have lost, the people on your side have lost, the villains have won and, if anything, you should have run away a long time ago.
My own sad epiphany about Twitter, now known as X, came in the immediate aftermath of the US election in 2024. I’d spent a lot of that year lying to myself, ignoring the increasing volume of abuse I’d been receiving and the fact that no one ever read my linked pieces any more, but that week I realised I had to stop. I had to leave X for good.
Much of the British political sphere chose to stay put, both that November and in the year that followed. Everyone had their reasons: some felt their reach would be curtailed without it, others wanted to be on all available possible platforms. Some said they relished the intensity of the debates, others didn’t believe other platforms could ever be quite as thrilling or all encompassing.
Most of those justifications were, of course, nonsense. Humans are creatures of habit and ego. If there is an app you have used every day for years, it will be tough for you to quit it, especially if it provided you with both adrenaline and dopamine. If you have a number of followers on that app, and that makes you feel important, it will be hard for you to willingly leave.
I say this not to judge, but in recognition of my own behaviour. There were months and months when I kept lying to myself, pithily saying: “We’re not stuck in here with Elon Musk – he’s stuck in here with us!” when I knew I was just shuffling my feet. Being in Washington DC when Donald Trump won the election was such a shock to the system that I had no choice but to do something drastic. Would I have stayed if I hadn’t been in the thick of it on that one awful night? Maybe. It’s hard to say.
I did leave then, however, and since then I have watched, perpetually slack jawed, as Musk has kept poisoning the well further, and people I know, love and respect keep merrily drinking from it. Some of them left when Musk publicly endorsed Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, but many did not. Some of them realised they had to go when they saw neo-Nazi after neo-Nazi use and abuse the new monetised blue-tick system, but a lot of them stayed put.
Most recently, we Bluesky users have seen some arrivals to our little oasis, as Grok, X’s own AI assistant, began producing sexual abuse content of women and children. Still, many of them witnessed thousands and thousands of men requesting pictures of children in small bikinis, covered in “donut glaze”, and they didn’t move.
Some of them argued that people ought to stay and fight, and couldn’t just retreat to their own comfort zones – but they had it wrong. You may or may not choose to use Bluesky instead of X: as with everywhere else, it’s an app with upsides and downsides. You may head to Instagram instead, or give Threads an honest go, or start writing down your thoughts on smooth rocks then throwing them at various windows across your neighbourhood. It doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that X is drifting towards irrelevance, becoming a containment pen for jumped-up fascists. Government ministers cannot be making policy announcements in a space that hosts AI-generated, near-naked pictures of young girls. Journalists cannot share their work in a place that systematically promotes white supremacy. Regular people cannot be getting their brains slowly but surely warped by Maga propaganda.
We all love to think that we have power and agency, and that if we try hard enough we can manage to turn the tide – but X is long dead. The only winning move now is to step away from the chess board, and make our peace with it once and for all.
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Marie Le Conte is a French journalist living in London
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