Credit: James Duncan Davidson
After lengthy discussions among our editorial team, we have decided to leave X, i.e. Twitter. It will probably come as no big surprise to our readers, but I wanted to let you know why. Last week I wrote an article about racism riots that garnered a fair number of views and comments, and one thing I regret a little is that I collectively described the rioters as “stupid as pig turds”. I wrote this out of anger, as I had seen scenes from my city that are now widely etched in people’s minds, such as shops being vandalised because they had a foreign-sounding name over their door. I can’t stop thinking about an article I read in The Guardian last week about a woman called Stacey Vint, who went viral after pushing a burning bin into a police line. She was apparently “a homeless mother of five who had left her Middlesbrough hotel room and run to a nearby shop”. The judge found that Vint was not racist or ideologically motivated in her crimes… The court heard that Vint’s life had been blighted by drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence, and that she had become homeless after fleeing an abusive relationship and having all five of her children placed in care.’ She is now serving a 20-month prison sentence, but as much as many of the thugs are truly responsible, it occurred to me that some of the people involved in the incident, many more powerful and influential than Stacey Vint, have got away with it.
And then of course we come to Elon Musk. It’s hard to say anything new about Musk other than what’s already been said a thousand times, but for reference, here are some thoughts. Musk is a cancer eating away at the whole world, but his impact on the UK in recent weeks has been particularly destructive. He has the uncanny ability to be the most brazen and the most neurotic human being alive at the same time. He’s not actually that similar to Trump. They’re both hailed (in some places) as business geniuses, but actually have a real talent for screwing things up. Even the rebranding to X since he bought Twitter two years ago was an expression of his great anxiety that anything new had to be obviously his in some way, and it was basically a vanity project to get rid of anyone who didn’t fit his worldview, whether it was the people using it or the advertisers he’s now shamefully suing. His commitment to free speech would be laughable if its effects weren’t so harmful. Irrefutable racist abuse, such as the everyday use of the word “nigger,” is common, while anyone involved in supporting Palestinians through the ongoing genocide in Gaza is ruthlessly censored. The word that’s commonly used to describe Twitter now is that it’s a cesspit, and there’s probably no better word for it. While social media platforms as a whole have their issues, spending any length of time on Twitter can make you feel, well, filthy. It generates a deep sense of depression, like a continent-wide message board that collects all the worst examples of human behavior.
So why now? Given the direction things are heading, I think many are just waiting to see. One day he’ll get tired of it, and one day we’ll get our “Global Town Square” back. That’s a reasonable position. But for us, the environment has become so toxic, the timeline is filled with hateful extremism, and the entire platform is so politically biased to the far right that we no longer want to be a part of it. Musk’s tweets alone during the riots should be enough for an arrest warrant to be issued if he ever sets foot in the UK, if our laws have any meaning. Musk is in no small part responsible for a vulnerable individual like Stacey Vint being put in prison, and it feels inherently wrong given the amount of power he wields through his platform and wealth. It’s hard to think of a more egregious individual causing such ongoing harm to society at this point. As such, we feel that AUK can no longer continue to have a comfortable presence on the platform.
We have a Twitter following of over 10,000 people that we’ve built up over the years. This is a tiny fraction of other media, but by no means small. We’re moving to Threads, a platform that’s not perfect, but at least it’s not full of racist spite, and we’ll remain active on Facebook and Instagram. Apologies to those who primarily follow AUK on Twitter. We may return in the future, perhaps when Musk has fled and started looking for his next victim (or when the revolution happens and all social media is nationalized!). In the meantime, thank you for your patience. This too shall pass.
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