Heard it on the X?

Since they don't control him, the Left wants to get away from Elon Musk.

While Twitter had its bird, I gotta admit I’m partial to this symbol.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Let me say right up front I’ve never been what you call a Twitter aficionado, not even now that it’s just X. I couldn’t get by the onetime limit of 140 characters, although that’s been long gone and people have figured out how to do elaborate threads there. I just prefer the longer forms of Substack and Facebook, so I rarely remember to promote anything on Elon Musk’s site. (Never mind X and Substack haven’t always seemed to get along.)

Yet, as we found thanks to the Twitter Files, prior to Musk’s acquisition the Left liked to use Twitter as its personal playground and censor the living you-know-what out of the conservative voice. Once Elon bought the site, we learned more about the suppression of the Right and, of course, the Left has had a collective cow that they have to share and compete now.

Some on the Left are trying to figure out how to combat Musk, so I received this little tidbit in my e-mail the other day, titled “Elon Musk would prefer that you didn't open this e-mail.” I’m sure Elon Musk really doesn’t care what I do, but let’s read on.

A month ago, we emailed to let you know that we were stepping back from X (formerly Twitter) because the site is increasingly hateful, decreasingly functional, and absolutely chockablock with conspiracy theories and misinformation. 

If you missed that email, we go into a lot more detail on the what and why here but in short: X sucks, we feel icky using it, and it’s quickly becoming less useful anyway.  

Yeah, this is from the left-leaning grifters of Indivisible, the ones who are in a snit because they don’t have the sandbox to themselves anymore. Their solution: move on to the information silos and echo chambers of Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, and break news there instead of X. The theory, they explain, is that fewer people will go to X if news doesn’t break there.

Yet these outlets have a long way to go: between them Bluesky and Mastodon have fewer than 5 million users, and while Threads is claimed to have over 140 million users, that number has leveled off after a promising start as people become less engaged with the website. Combined they’re still less than a third of what X has, so the boycott has some work to do - particularly as the newsmakers on the Right readopt X.

But here’s the theory, as told by our loony friends:

The first thing that would happen is X would no longer be the place where news breaks first and where conversations happen first. And really, that’s X’s only remaining selling point. That’s what pulls journalists, elected officials, high-profile individuals, and organizations back to the platform.

The second thing that would happen is users would start joining alternative platforms where the news and analysis WAS starting to appear first. We'd start seeing our favorite people on those social networks instead of Musk's.

From there, momentum would build. X users would see their followers and engagement growing on alternative platforms, and stepping back from X wouldn’t seem so scary. If done right, every individual, every elected official, every organization that adopted this strategy would be part of building a self-perpetuating wave of exits from X. 

Trust me, they’ll do it wrong. In the meantime, maybe I’ll find a more receptive audience for my common sense on X.

To be honest, most of what I use social media for anyway is to promote my writing to specific groups. (Caveats: once in awhile I’ll put up a “purty sunrise” or “purty sunset” alert, and I always share my photos when I’m at the Shorebirds game.) I don’t have a huge following (about 1,500 people) but I have found that I have the most success when people share my posts there. If I had my way, though. I would have enough following on Substack Notes to succeed. I’ve found that, more and more often, I just like reading those posts instead of the massive time suck that social media has become with its promoted and “suggested for you” posts.

It’s not that I do much in the way of breaking news anyway, like I occasionally did back in my monoblogue days when I would do “on the spot” coverage. But if X is going to become a bastion of free speech it might not be a bad idea for me to participate more.

Until next time, remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.