X-odus…fight or flighty

Recent weeks have seen a dramatic flight from the X platform, with many dissatisfied users seeking an alternative.  Perhaps, by more than any other factor, the ‘X-odus’ is to be explained by what Alexander A. Schuessler wrote about in his 2000 book A Logic of Expressive Choice.

In chapter two, Schuessler set out what he called a ‘jukebox model of participation’ describing how customers at an Italian-American café in Boston very often chose the Frank Sinatra song New York, New York on the café’s jukebox. It’s a classic song about ‘making it’, about being successful in life. Customers chose the song ”as a way to establish, reaffirm, demonstrate, and express (their) Frank Sinatraness to the rest of the world, as well as to (themselves).’’

I argue that those people now leaving X are demonstrating their ‘anti-Muskness’ and, by extension, their ‘anti-Trumpness’. Many social media users – particularly well-educated, left/liberal-leaning individuals – strongly dislike both Musk and Trump and do not wish to be associated with either.

What better way to demonstrate this than by metaphorically shaking the dust off their shoes and leaving the X platform. In a concrete way, they are ‘voting’ against Musk and Trump.

A brilliant entrepreneurial bet

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, eyebrows were raised at the very high premium he paid to get control of the company.  Sir Martin Sorrell, writing in The Times (London), commented that, for Musk, Twitter was ‘’a platform to promote his agenda and his values – it’s a lot more useful than a mega-yacht.’’

Musk soon introduced a subscription model which affected who could have a ‘blue check’ and this undoubtedly rankled some people – many of them on the liberal-left – who felt ‘dispossessed’. What they had previously enjoyed on a ‘grace and favour’ basis they would now have to pay for, and hey presto a badge of status became in their eyes a cause of scorn.

Musk culled a lot of the company’s employees and renamed the company ‘X’.  He has moved its headquarters out of San Francisco to Texas.

Opposition to X has reached new heights in recent weeks and months, having much to do with the outcome of the 5 November US presidential elections and the very active role that Musk played in supporting Republican Party candidate Donald Trump during his ultimately victorious campaign. Leaving X has become a kind of ‘move to Canada’ moment – viz., the declaration by some anti-Trump supporters that they’d be so disgusted by a Trump win that they’d leave the country and head to its neighbour to the north.

Flurry of articles

There has been a flurry of articles in liberal-leaning media critical of X.  For example, the article in The Atlantic by Charlie Wurzel.  Another piece on the same platform which led off by stating that since ‘’Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving it once and for all’’ and arguing that ‘’The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling.’’

The Huffington Post asked Is The Great X Migration Finally Happening ? stating that ‘’Users are exiting the Elon Musk-owned platform in droves and seeking alternatives over concerns that the app has become too ‘toxic’ to use.’’

The Guardian announced in mid-November that it would ‘’no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.’’

The ‘common denominator’ to help us understand the rationale of the people and companies leaving X is to be found in what I outlined above re Schuessler’s book.

Twitter wasn’t perfect

Those leading the ‘X-odus’ would have one believe that it has been all downhill since Musk took over the platform, compared to the ‘halcyon days’ of Twitter.  But does this stand up to scrutiny?   Powerful testimony to the contrary was given during a recent interview on Newstalk’s drive-time show The Hard Shoulder by David Quinn, columnist and CEO of the think tank The Iona Institute. Quinn pointed out that Twitter had never been the gentle place some people seem to imagine. Quinn said that when he set up an account in 2010, he was immediately and regularly subjected to vitriolic abuse for his unfashionable views – he is a prominent pro-life Catholic. He added that, in his early days on Twitter, his very presence on the platform gave rise to adverse comments, in the sense of how dare he – a person of the right of the political spectrum – intrude on what was then at least something of a liberal ‘echo chamber’. He is still subjected to lots of vitriol on X and so are many others who share similar views.

In a piece entitled Why we need an insufferable liberal elite, the journalist and author Ed West wrote that Twitter was ‘’never exactly Eden.’’   He mused about Twitter as follows: ‘’Remember when the site was used by a model to tell a 16-year-old to kill themselves? Or when a reality TV star was driven to suicide by online bullying?  Or how an unknown woman became the most hated person on earth because of one silly tweet?’’

Fight or flighty

Competition is ‘a good thing,’ as American entrepreneur and TV personality Martha Stewart might say, so the emergence of alternative platforms to X is welcome. Individuals and organisations should be – and are – free to leave X if they want to, but the motivations of some definitely seem to be bound up with short-term emotions.

The Guardian’s decision on X influenced many, yet that newspaper has itself come in for strong criticism in a recent article by Sunday Times columnist Hadley Freeman. Freeman wrote that the shift on the left from class-based socialism to identity-led progressivism has been ‘’flat-out disastrous for The Guardian …… because this is no longer about left-wing values versus centrist ones. It’s about not having any values at all.’’

Writing in POLITICO magazine, Nancy Scola cited a former Biden administration official who said that quitting X might feel good for a time – comparing it to quitting the gym – but ultimately it would lead to painful outcomes, adding that ‘’You can’t disengage if you’re losing the popular vote.’’ Scola also quoted a Democratic consultant who said ‘’it’s critical to inject scepticism and alternative ideas in spaces where conventional wisdom skews right’’. Yet another Democratic source described leaving X because of Elon as a form of ‘purity politics’.

X and the European University Institute (EUI)

Like many academic organisations, the EUI has been reflecting about its presence on X and about the merits of staying with the platform or not. Leaving seems, to me, like a case of ‘virtue signaling’. It has been suggested that a drawback of posting research on X is that, on either side, there could be totally un-related posts by ordinary people (or worse) with no special ‘expertise’ – what is this, if not elitism?

Also, where does the logic for leaving end? After all, parts of the internet are very reprehensible and exploitative, especially of women – e.g. pornography sites, so should one leave the internet altogether? Should the EUI not have links with countries of an authoritarian bent – e.g., China, Egypt – or is it not better to keep channels of communication open?

Ultimately the EUI decided that, effective 11 December, it would disengage from its main institutional account on X, as would two of its academic units, the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG).

It’s worth noting in this context that the former Director of the STG, Alexander Stubb, who earlier this year was elected President of Finland, remains highly active on X, with over half a million followers.

Photo credits: Doug Mills/The New York Times, Butler, Pennsylvania, 5 October 2024.

Tags: Social Media, Twitter