Left-leaning users on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, are calling time on the platform following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections. The once and future king secured his second term with the enthusiastic support of platform owner Elon Musk, and between that and the sustained gloating of right-wing X users, many are announcing — sometimes in almost messianic terms — their return to a simpler, more censorious time on Jack Dorsey’s brainchild Bluesky. 

This retreat is probably bad for liberals, in the American sense of the term, insofar as it will leave them even more badly out of touch with a public that is increasingly sick of them on both sides of the Atlantic. Certainly, it indicates they are not heeding Bill Maher’s characteristically patronising advice to “take the clothes pins off your noses and actually converse with the other half of the country.”

This is unlikely to have electorally positive outcomes. But I don’t care about the consequences of this nascent mass migration for the left. I care about the consequences for the right — and I suspect they will not be positive. 

Twitter’s main selling point for right-wingers — stay with me — is access to high-profile liberals

It is tempting to greet the exodus with (granted, richly deserved) mockery. “Bye, Felicia,” “This isn’t an airport, you don’t have to announce your departure,” and other 2016 era jeers are pelting the refugees on their way out the door. I confess I was personally eager to hit Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander with a “George is getting upset!” when he announced his self-imposed exile from the platform. 

This is short-sighted, because Twitter’s main selling point for right-wingers — stay with me — is access to high-profile liberals. 

Of course, this sounds ludicrous. The smug, supercilious sneers of The Secret Barrister, Jolyon Maugham, and James O’Brien — James O’Brien! — are what makes going on X worthwhile?

Yes, at least if your purpose there is to have any influence on politics. 

This is not because their takes are insightful — far from it. Instead, people like this are the glue that holds together a wider community of politicians, journalists, think tankers, and other so-called tastemakers — a term I resort to with immense regret — who set the agenda on both sides of the Atlantic. 

These are the people rightists need to influence, to pressure, if they are to soften, slow down, or even reverse leftist trends, by convincing policymakers the political atmosphere is against them.

There is nowhere to do this but X. Emails, for the most part, are discarded by underlings before the MP they are addressed to even sees them. Petitions, even if they are signed by 100,000 people, can also be safely ignored. Not one parliamentary e-petition has moved the needle on any issue, as far as I remember, since Cameron and Clegg introduced them over a decade ago. 

But a hundred thousand people ratioing a government minister? That’s the sort of thing our political masters pay attention to, partly because they (or the people working directly underneath them) actually look at their X notifications, and partly because journalists have for years turned such episodes into easy content. 

For all the sage nodding at the aphorism that “Twitter is not real life,” to a great extent it is, actually, not least because so many politicians, and the pundits they pay attention to, spend a decent chunk of their lives checking their timelines. 

Take the American XL Bully ban. American bullies had been maiming children and savaging smaller dogs for years before they came into the zeitgeist — a term I use with even greater regret than “tastemakers” — but politicians had no interest in the issue. Nasty business, far less glamorous than jetting to COP2X to hang out with Obama and Leonardo DiCaprio. That changed last September largely because Dr Lawrence Newport and Bully Watch, accounts with fewer than 10,000 followers between them, got a few viral posts in front of Rishi Sunak — or the people he listens to — and made him feel it was worth his time to do something about the problem. 

Perception, as the saying goes, is reality, and decision-makers perceive only certain things as mattering

Contrast this with, say, the content produced by Paul Joseph Watson. Like it or not, he is among the biggest British political pundits in the business in terms of reach and audience — but he has less influence over how his country runs than some Sky News morning show with a relative handful of viewers, or a columnist at some low-circulation political magazine. That’s because the people running Britain don’t subscribe to Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube channel — but they do watch the TV news shows and read the low-circulation political magazines. Perception, as the saying goes, is reality, and decision-makers perceive only certain things as mattering. X is one of them — and the only one where you can reach out and touch them directly, without needing to go through an unhelpful diary secretary or work in broadcast or print media to do so. 

What happens if they up sticks and leave the platform? They become even more out of touch — and the right loses what access and influence it had over most of them. Look at the right-wing havens from the platform’s Dorsey era censorship: Parler and Gab were digital isolation wards, where even the most viral post was only encountered by a mainstream journalist if they were dredging for material to turn into negative coverage. Truth Social was much the same during Trump’s Twitter exile; possibly the big man may have seen some of the very biggest posts, but no one else did — unless they were reposted as a screenshot on Twitter. 

X without Marianna Spring’s “libtards” is just another Truth Social. Sure, an increasingly right-leaning user base would still be able to crack jokes and share ideas — although I suspect the cut and thrust would lose a lot of its keenness without its most aggravating liberal foils — but you won’t be squeezing any concessions out of Beltway power brokers or BBC executives if they and the people they listen to are no longer there, deaf to your quips and your concerns.

Every hero needs a villain against which to prove his worth. You can’t ratio without someone to be ratioed. We might end up missing the libs after all.