The Purpose of Twitter and the case for leaving

Wheat Field, the iconic image (Creative Commons, Theaucitron, Flickr)

I have decided to no longer post any new, substantive content on X (formerly Twitter). From now on, I will only post links or retweets of things that I find worth amplifying.

If you want to read substantive threads and posts on my philosophical interests (currently, Wang Yangming and Spinoza) you can find them here or on Bluesky. How both of these very new platforms will evolve, and how long they can resist enshittification remains an open question. But I want to give them a try. I've moved platform before and am willing to do so again, because I use social media for very specific purposes that do not depend on raw numbers.

The moral problems with Twitter (even before, and now especially) in spreading disinformation and in spreading especially anti-semitic, anti-trans, and white supremacist content are known and explained well in this piece.

Here, I want to focus purely on the utility of staying on the platform to fulfill one's own ends.

Some people wonder if it is a good idea to leave X, a platform where I previously had 34k followers. Does it make a difference? NPR, an account with millions of followers, only noticed a 1% drop in traffic to their site after they left X/Twitter. If an account with so many followers feels so little impact, what sort of impact can small players like me hope to get by remaining?

In any case, I am not interested in raw numbers but in building relationships. I use social media to think together about ideas I'm excited about, and coordinating action, such as my current work for the American Philosophical Association to make an all-virtual large conference to reduce our carbon footprint. Through Bluesky (tiny though it still is) I have already recruited three people for my scientific committee, all people worried about climate change and committed to put deeds behind our words and conference more sustainably.

I left FB a while ago (which I used for this same purpose) because I felt the interface somehow pushed through a kind of ideological homogeneity that I do not like. I liked the prickliness of Twitter, the fact that you can disagree. I think freedom of expression and ideological diversity are vital for social media, and for society at large. That is another reason why I think X is no longer worth engaging with. Making an uneven platform that enables and allows right-wing people to bully minorities and to spread misinformation is not creating ideological diversity. It reduces it.

Another worry I sometimes hear is that by leaving X we would cede the territory to fascists.

Here's where I think this argument goes wrong. There is an asymmetry between the far-right and the people on the left, obscured by years of bothsideism. We can do without them, but they cannot do without us. They're parasitic on the left, which they bully and try to mislead with fake news and misinformation. So, rather than ceding the platform to them, we are depriving them of the means to further their ends. By contrast, it is possible to make a thriving, intellectually healthy social media platform mainly composed of people in the political left, center, and center-right. There is plenty of ideological diversity there. You don't lose anything by cutting out the far right.

Recall when Trump was finally banned from Twitter (after violating their terms consistently for such a long time). This began an exodus of far-right accounts to platforms such as Truth Social and Parler. But as this article notes, the platforms have been failures. They've been described as ghost towns. As Alex Shepard notes:

right-wing shitposters don’t actually need or want a safe space to play together. They want to be a part of a battlefield. This isn’t a thing that a right-wing version of Twitter can provide, so there just isn’t a point for any of these sites to exist.

A lot of right-wing discourse consists of nothing more than bullying people of color, trans people and other minorities. If these people leave, there's little left to do for these account holders, because they cannot create substantive engagement. For one thing, the far-right, like the rest of the right wing in the US, has diverged from established science since the 1970s, to the point that it is now common on the right to be denialist about science.

If you oppose yourself to science, which represents our best collective effort to gain knowledge, what do you have left to say? You will find yourself inevitably backed into a corner of untruths.

The few substantive points right-wingers make are mired in contradictions and not based in fact. Think of grifters such as David Brooks who take kernels of worries that are shared more broadly, but twist this into an incoherent vision of non-existing social categories of educated metropolitan elites on the one hand and white, authentic, working-class rural folk on the other (for an excellent takedown see here), by

M L Clark

How to Choose the Right Focus for Discourse

This discourse is not rooted in facts, and so it can never get properly going. It only gets a platform in places like the New York Times because of bothsideism. Indeed, far-right sentiment is not rooted in economic anxiety, as

Noah Berlatsky

argues. The white working class as a social category is a mirage, not only because the working class is so ethnically and racially diverse, but because of systematic cherry-picking and distortion in the data, as this in-depth analysis (of France) shows. As Cagé and Piketty write:

not only is this working-class switch away from the left not the case, but it has never been the case. When we examined every legislative and presidential election since 1848 (nearly 50 elections), we found that the richest communes have always, and systemically, voted much less for leftwing parties (historically the Communist party and the Socialist party, increasingly today La France Insoumise) than for the right, the centre right and the far right.

The right wing is not interested in a true public sphere and vigorous debate.

Already before Musk took over, Twitter's previous owners admitted they had introduced systemic algorithmic bias to boost right-wing politicians and content. These posters cannot compete on fair terms and need a specially twisted algorithm to get the audience they need. And even then, Musk thought that there was too much “wokeness” on the platform (together with his enduring worries about bots, the main reason to purchase it).

The inability to compete on fair terms is also why the far-right seek to dismantle what remains of true public space: public libraries, public schools, and even public transport. Because there, you genuinely can have people interact of diverse persuasions and ideas, and they prefer to go into debates with odds heavily stacked in their favor.

We tend to think of social media platforms as having a natural lifespan that comes to an end. But often the demise is facilitated by disastrous decisions of the leadership, or a series of small bad decisions that worsen user experience in order to squeeze out as much as possible from users. We can see it now.

Much as Musk dislikes users like me, small fish that hardly make a blip on the website, we collectively constitute the life blood of a social media platforms. Ultimately, Musk cannot do without users like me. Social media platforms thrive by people being able to share information, coordinate action, discover new ideas, keep abreast of trends. A platform dominated by misinformation and bullying cannot survive.

So, by leaving X to the bots, bullies and fake news sharers we are not ceding the ground, but depriving the platform of the oxygen it needs to survive long-term.