The new year can bring a variety of good resolutions: Maintain confidence. Keep a clear head. Consume less and better media. And: To hell with X. Because the social network doesn’t fulfil essential standards for freedom of speech.
Yet, according to Elon Musk, this is exactly what the platform was supposed to stand for since he bought it: the freedom to finally say anything. Unfortunately this bullshit from the outset, as the paid ‘blue tick’ quickly proved, that stood for purchased reach. Instead, the platform became more and more blatantly Musk’s personal tool of political manipulation*, a powerful algorithmic opinion machine. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the world has a problem — when the richest business boss in the world also holds a central US government office and, in addition, has such a powerful propaganda channel at his personal disposal.
- * Note: This article is written from a German perspective. That’s why all links in the original text are given in German. You find them as endnotes anyway.
So, what’s it all about? X, formerly Twitter, the favorite network of the opinionated man over 50, is currently still visited by 7% of Germans at least once a week. Before the Twitter takeover, the figure was 10%. However, as a kind of customary right from Twitter times, it has a unique position when it comes to politically relevant statements, quotes and press presence. Not on Bluesky (2 %), Threads (4 %) or even Instagram (38 % in Germany), but on X, political bombshells are being dropped, terms are being coined and the struggle for the dominant narration takes place. Musk himself is both an actor and an unfair referee in this game. He is known for getting his executives out of bed at 3 a.m. because his own post got less likes than that of Joe Biden. And in general, an algorithmic imbalance soon became apparent at X, often hand tailored and by personal commission of Elon Musk.
The master himself fiddles with the algorithm. A man who increasingly embraces conspiracy myths and fascist fairy tales. Who sometimes just writes weird things, when in the mood and intoxicated with power. E.g., just recently: “Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose“. Unthinkable for normal managers, unspeakable for normal politicians and unacceptable for normal reasonable people. There is just nothing normal about Musk and that’s precisely what fascinates his fans. They see him as Emperor Nero, a jack-of-all-trades who loves taking risks, who succeeds at a lot and who on the other hand is incredibly easy to manipulate. He supports the “AfD” (a German populist and partly extremist right wing party) by hearsay and without a single valid argument, but with complete conviction. He contradicts his own statements. You can watch him thinking and follow the process of his personal radicalization in detail. He is vain, embarrassing and dangerous — but who will tell him?
Elon Musk, a tragic hero? Hopefully.
The opposite of a tactical survivalist who muddles along without any strategic foresight is the visionary who gets stuck in the concrete. Once upon a time, there was a tech billionaire who made cars — 100 years ago: His name was Henry Ford. His assembly lines and the mass spread of combustion engines had a profound impact on our world. What’s less well known is that his book ”The International Jew” had a significant influence on the formation of the German nazi party NSDAP. As a member of the “America First Committee”, Ford tried to prevent the USA from entering the Second World War in 1940/41, without which fascism would probably have triumphed in Europe.
Henry Ford was an unconventional and strategic thinker and ready to take great risks. His failure with the artificial industrial city “Fordlandia” in Brazil is legend, but this has not affected Ford being one of the top 10 car manufacturers today. Leaders such as Ford, Musk, Trump or Putin fascinate those around them, but they constantly send others to the slaughter to iron out their misjudgements. Reality seems to roll off their backs without consequence.
Bringing Twitter under his control was — it has to be said — a strategic master stroke by Musk. Whether we let him get away with the self-satisfied clumsiness of this nice try or even reward it is up to us. But even if his plans fail at one point or another, Musk is learning fast and becoming more and more dangerous. In addition to X, he not only owns a technologically leading motor company, but also companies that work with AI or neural machine-human interfaces, unrivaled cheap access to space and a uniquely dense satellite network that connects crisis areas to the internet. And whenever he thinks he is doing the right thing, he will occasionally switch off the internet, as seen in Ukraine.
The big picture becomes recognisable: influencing opinions, selling lies as half-truths, removing obstacles, making a lot of money become even much more money. And then: Feeling himself being the centre of the world, an erratic universal genius, a cool dressed godfather judging of what is good, true and beautiful. The question is whether we let it come to that, or whether we boycott it. Whether we go on strike. And whether a critical mass of Americans will wake up. Who, even as convinced Republicans, have not legitimized Trump and Musk to be a duo of absolutist monarchs for their lifetime.
Time to quit this cult
We have seen all of this emerge in recent years, and yet the impulse to go somewhere else, to leave X, was never strong enough for many. Biased by the number of their followers, which is hard to build up elsewhere, they stayed and waited. It would have been high time and a duty for decision-makers to use other networks when they had something important to say, and not just from the point of view of market concentration. But now at the latest, with the renewed Trump election and the appointment of Elon Musk as his rabble-rouser for budget cuts, it should be clear that X is not a neutral or even acceptable platform. Even Twitter in it’s time had an algorithmic tendency towards anger and outrage. But today, X is merely a hysteria machine that occupies, incites and polarizes minds.
So if you haven’t yet looked around for alternatives, you should seize the opportunity and meet your friends somewhere better — most likely on BlueSky, Mastodon or elsewhere. Before deleting your profile, you should make a note of particularly valued handles. Here at the EFF is a practical proposal on how to do it. And maybe it’s not even necessary to delete your account. A lot can be gained if you simply ignore it or visit it much less frequently than other networks. Not commenting on topics on X. Quote and disseminate important statements elsewhere.
See what’s positive
Stepping out of X — or keeping your distance from it — has a whole range of beneficial effects:
- It promotes your own mental health and mental hygiene (‘Be kind to your mind’). Your own news addiction and fear-of-missing-out diminishes noticeably. And with a little distance, sober judgement increases.
. - Other platforms are upgraded and enter into a new competition for seriousness and responsible content moderation.
. - X is finally losing the nimbus of an opinion barometer that it still (unjustifiably) had for many. Fraud and bought influence on elections shall be named and no longer whitewashed and legitimized by a precisely doseable diversity of opinion.
. - X is already only worth less than a quarter of the purchase price paid by Musk. A failure that brings more than just schadenfreude: Polarisation as a business model doesn’t pay off economically, at least in this case.
. - Musk’s political disturbances also affect his other brand values. Who can still buy a Tesla today without feeling responsible for the corresponding ideology? Who will pay for Musk’s vision of a colonised Mars when it’s obviously just childish enthusiasm for a questionable goal?
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My advice, summarised in a hashtag: #leaveXtoday
Let’s all have a good 2025!
_________
Links:
https://www.schieb.de/blocktheblue-widerstand-gegen-blaue-haken-auf-twitter
https://apnews.com/article/musk-putin-x-trump-tesla-election-russia-9cecb7cb0f23ccce49336771280ae179
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Henry_Ford_und_der_Nationalsozialismus
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/save-your-twitter-account