Why the establishment hates X

Who remembers Odeo? That’s right: no one. Why would you? The early podcasting website was a total flop.

Often, though, you have to start multiple projects before something works. In the mid-2000s, Odeo employees helped a young programmer named Jack Dorsey to create what was conceived as an SMS service for communicating with small groups. The service, which they called “Twttr”, was released on July 15 2006.

An old TechCrunch report is fun to read today. People started using Twttr, we learn, to send messages like “Hungry” and “Cleaning my apartment”. Riveting stuff! It must have been pretty obvious that history was being made.

Of course, we all know what Twttr — which was renamed “Twitter”, and then renamed “X” — became: a bubbling swamp of coal-black cynicism, absurdist jokes, nudes, war footage and cat videos. How we’ve loved it.

But now some feel differently. Twenty years after its release, ministers are leaving the platform because, in the words of Lisa Nandy MP:

A platform originally designed for free speech and expression now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate. 

It isn’t healthy for our democracy or our communities and I don’t want to support it.

Some campaigners, like Amnesty International, are calling for more regulation to be imposed on the platform. (Amnesty International, lest we forget, was established to protect people whose opinions had offended governments.)

It would be obtuse to behave as if there are no legitimate grounds on which governments could object to X. Its CEO, after all, is posting about how people should “deal with traitors … then invaders”. You don’t have to support X being curbed — and I do not — to admit that Elon Musk is practically begging regulators to curb his product. His behaviour would alarm far less censorious governments than the UK’s.

But a functioning nose must rankle when it comes to a government minister holding forth on what is “healthy for our democracy or our communities”. One need not defend Elon Musk to snort at the hypocrisy on display here.

It is posters on X, indeed, who have drawn attention to many instances in which the government and other state institutions have undermined the health of Britain. It was posters on X who diagnosed and raised awareness around the unprecedented spike in immigration that they called the “Boriswave” — a spike which the Conservatives (so we can acquit Ms Nandy of blame for this one) might have thought would pass unnoticed after Brexit had, in their minds, depoliticised the issue. It was posters on X who beat the drum for reforms of the Motability system, which could save up to a billion pounds. It was posters on X who have drawn attention to scandals like the Henry Novak case, which state institutions appear to have been all too happy to cover up. It was posters on X — as well as columnists like The Critic’s Sam Bidwell — who raised awareness around the grooming gangs scandal, and it is tempting to wonder if the scandal would have come to light earlier than it did, and with more urgency than it did, if X had existed in the early noughties.

Yes, it is also undeniable that X has enabled the promotion of insane levels of misinformation and abuse. But I’m not sure that politicians — or left-leaning journalists and activists — dislike the platform solely because of these pathologies. I think it is because when it is used well it can also draw attention to inconvenient realities.

The political and media classes are also intolerant to criticism and disrespect. To be clear, I’m not trying to make light of the harms of death threats and truly venomous abuse. This really sucks and really shouldn’t be tolerated. But this kind of thing has been a problem on Twitter since Justine Sacco was being mobbed over a silly joke in 2013. Political and cultural insiders loved Twitter back then because their followings were smaller, more approving, and more clubbish. As the platform grew, it attracted more critical voices — and while I’m sure that many politicians, journalists et cetera really have been disturbed by the most aggressive forms of harassment, I think there is also a significant extent to which the political and media classes are offended that their safe space was taken over by the little people. (Truly venomous abuse appears not to trouble them over on Bluesky because it is directed against the right targets.)

You can’t trust a government to tell you how to communicate

It is difficult to reach a neat conclusion here. X, like all forms of social media, encourages various kinds of pathological behaviour. Elon Musk — from calling for the imprisonment of random people to spreading blatant falsehoods in defence of U.S. government policies — is very much encouraging pathological behaviour. But to stand with the establishment against his platform would be to mistakenly assume that is the healthy alternative. X has been used to expose its pathologies for anyone to justifiably do this.

I’ll admit it: I have a great bias towards Twitter. I’ve had so much fun there in my years on the platform, and I probably would not have a career without it. But I’ve found myself posting less on X in the past few years. The falsehoods and the nastiness — and I don’t mean nastiness towards me — get tiring, and encourage the thought that the dynamics of social media enable more dishonest, mean-spirited thinking.

Perhaps we’ll all find a different means of communication in the future. For now, though, you can’t trust a government to tell you how to communicate.