UPDATE Part 1: After learning from fellow Kossacks on this thread, I lean more toward discourage than prohibit, and encouraging folks to consider whether the info truly cannot be sourced elsewhere. See the end of the diary for a summary of some of those points from the Remain (or maybe Remain Cautiously) side.
A couple months back I deactivated my X account. (That’s the first step in deleting the account; deletion occurs automatically, 30 days after deactivation.)
I had joined what was then Twitter in 2009. I didn’t make much use of the platform until 2014, when it was the absolute best place to go to find out what was going on the protests in Ferguson in real time. Thereafter, I found it a great place to follow news organizations and journalists in general. And there were various humor and niche content providers that could really be a hoot. Didn’t tweet too often myself, but valued the platform.
Then came Musk.
And, after not too long, the site literally was no longer Twitter. The quality of the site degraded considerably, and the owner was such a nauseatingly smug, sociopathic weenie, that I deactivated my account a few months back. I haven’t missed it, and in fact a number of accounts I followed on X are now actively posting on Threads — many of which have cut the cord with X entirely. Threads is not nearly as good for news as Twitter was in its heydey, and it may never get there, but I don’t miss the sick feeling I got every time I visited X even a few months ago. And by all accounts, X has gotten exponentially worse from there.
So here’s the thing I need help with here. Maybe writing this diary will clarify aspects of it for me, but really I’m hoping community members and maybe even DKos staff, in their copious et cetera, weigh in. And it goes something like this:
Is there a point at which the communications and other behavior of X’s owner become so onerous that Daily Kos’s editorial policy is altered such that we no longer drive traffic and attention to the site? At what point do we implement X-it?
Where is that line? Is it deliberately enabling disinformation and dismantling policies and teams dedicated to curbing disinformation? Is it deliberately amplifying the voices of white nationalists, anti-semites, islamaphobes, and other racists? Is it espousing white nationalist, anti-semitic, islamaphobic, and other racist views himself? Because, guess what, of course he’s already done all of the above.
promoting antisemitism: www.rollingstone.com/…
hiring islamaphobe extremists: www.mediamatters.org/…
disinformation via paid-for verification: foreignpolicy.com/…
disinformation via paid-for verification: www.newsweek.com/…
white nationalism: www.motherjones.com/…
disbanding disinformation team: www.theguardian.com/...
Does he have to kill someone on 5th Avenue?
Or does the continued wide reach of his site supersede any of the above considerations? Is the true essence of the site that of a public space, whose (now plummeting) value was built from the content of its members? Maybe the site in the truest sense belong to its users, not its owner? Or does its high (albeit significantly diminished) volume of users, or the notoriety of the people and organizations still posting there, ipso facto make it newsworthy?
I’m doing my best to marshal arguments for both sides as best I can imagine them, though I could easily be missing some major arguments, particularly on the Remain side.. But it’s probably fairly obvious that as of right now which side I lean toward: it’s time to starve the beast. As amusing as some X posts can be, as “important” as some X posters can be, and as facile as it may be to support a DKos story around (or, hell, write a diary consisting of nothing but) X posts, we need to cut the cord.
Fwiw, here are a couple of items from one of my favorite follows, the historian Kevin Kruse who abandoned a huge account at X to go all in on Threads.
www.threads.net/...
kevinmkruse.substack.com/...
Not pretending to not already have a point of view here, but what do y’all think? And if anyone on staff is paying attention to this: I’m sure a version of this conversation must be going on up there in the great orange cockpit — what are some of the considerations being discussed there?
UPDATE Part 2: some of the compelling arguments from the Remain side in the comments include:
- Engagement of the Black community is much higher on X than elsewhere. Per Denise Oliver Perez: BlackTwitterati, most of whom are Democrats go, after racists, and fascists. They post Black History — as a counter to its censorship. They highlight issues — like Breonna Taylor's. Our Congresspeople are on TwitX.
- X is the only source of a lot of Ukraine info. Denise points out that this was true of Hurricane Maria in PR as well.
- Many other important news sources, journalists, organizations, and agencies still post there.