The Joys And Perils Of Leaving Elon Musk’s X For Bluesky

Source: Gizmodo, Matthew Gault
Photo: SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk arrives on stage at an America PAC town hall on October 26, 2024. (© Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

The why and how of leaving X. The joy of Bluesky and the fear of what it might become.

Yesterday a friend of mine, a defense reporter in the Pacific, asked a simple question. “Do I have to actually start using Bluesky now?” I told him that I thought it was time. A lot of people seem to feel that way. I’ve gained thousands of followers on Bluesky in the past week and early reports indicate that some 700,000 people have flocked to the platform after the U.S. presidential election.

There was once a site called Twitter and its users loved it and hated it in equal measure. Then a tech billionaire bought it for $44 billion, turned it into X, and ran it into the ground. As X, it’s worth a quarter of its original value but making money was never the point. X is the billionaire’s plaything, a website that makes him feel good and amplifies his message to the world.

A short time later, the billionaire helped Donald Trump win a second term in the White House. He hasn’t left Trump’s side since. And X, the site he bought, is hemorrhaging real people and filling up with bots and 4chaners.

A lot of people stuck around on X long after it stopped being fun. I was one of them. I don’t doubt that many will continue to use it. But there are several reasons, beyond just the election, to finally pack it in. And if you leave, what should you do with your account? Is it enough to simply delete it?

The case for leaving

The biggest reason is that it’s not fun anymore. There was a battle for the soul of the site after Elon Musk purchased it in 2022 and he won. There is an evil and anarchic energy on the internet that flows through sites like 4chan and Gab. It’s a mix of overt racism, disgusting imagery, and grotesque conspiracy theory. Every day it feels like I see more of that on X.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed. As Charlie Warzel pointed out in The Atlantic, overtly racist and misogynistic content has exploded on X since Musk took it over. The most shocking thing, to me, in Warzel’s piece was the observation from an extremism researcher that anti-semitic content on 4chan has decreased as it’s risen on X, suggesting that users are migrating out of the dark and into a public space.

There are a couple of other more pragmatic reasons to flee. In October X changed its terms of service and those new terms take effect on November 15. After the middle of the month, anything you post on the site will be gobbled up by Grok—X’s AI system—and used for training data. There’s no way to opt out of it. It may also allow third-party apps to use your posts for training data. Again, there’s no way to opt-out.

“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type; and (ii) to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals, including, for example, for improving the Services and the syndication, broadcast, distribution, repost, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use,” the updated terms of service read.

November 15 is also the day Texas takes over legal disputes around the social media site. “The laws of the State of Texas, excluding its choice of law provisions, will govern these Terms and any dispute that arises between you and us, notwithstanding any other agreement between you and us to the contrary,” the site says.

Which court, specifically, will hear out the X disputes? According to the Terms, it’ll be the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Tarrant County. Home of Fort Worth, Tarrant County is pretty far away from Musk’s adopted Austin. It’s also overseen by Judge Reed O’Connor, who happens to own around $50,000 in Tesla stock.

How to leave

The simplest thing to do is deactivate or delete your account. Regardless of what you do, the first step is getting rid of the X app on your phone. Even if you stick around, for whatever reason, you should do that.

From the desktop site, click the three dots in the bottom left-hand corner. Click settings and privacy. From here you can download an archive of your data. Do that first to preserve anything you’d like to keep. After that, select “your account” and then “deactivate your account.” You’ll be prompted to give X your password and then the account will go dormant.

Once that’s done the account has 30 days. After that time has passed, the X account will go die and take its likes, posts, and replies with it. This is the nuclear option. It’s also not what I’m doing.

Instead, I’m locking down my account and throwing away the key. Thanks to work, I need to keep one foot in X’s door, unfortunately. I cover national security issues and a lot of that stuff still plays out on X. Sometimes CENTCOM will tweet out a picture of a nuclear submarine just to let everyone know it has nukes in the Middle East, for example. Diplomacy between foreign countries, annoyingly, still plays out on X. Politicians, especially Trump-aligned ones, love pumping out weird messages on the platform.

I also don’t want anyone to take over my old handle or username. I used my real name and though I’m not exactly a rockstar journalist with a personal brand, the thought of abandoning it to the wilds weirds me out.

But that doesn’t mean I have to participate in conversations or offer up my posts as training data for whatever fly-by-night AI company pays Musk for a glance at the timeline. As I write this I’m watching a service called Tweet Deleter scrub all my old posts and likes from the site. It isn’t free, but I only need to run it one time. I won’t be sticking around to make any more content here.

After that, I’ll follow the steps above but stop short of deactivating my account. Instead, I’ll just lock it down. To do this I’ll go to “settings and privacy,” “privacy and safety” and then “audience, media and tagging” in the settings. There’s a box there that says “Protect your posts.” After the deletions are done, I’ll click “protect your posts.” That’ll lock down my account. I’ll lurk, but never post and no one who isn’t already a follower can interact with me.

Where to go

Threads sucks. Sure, it has more than 200 million users but a lot of those are brand accounts pumping out safe and sterile content. Mastodon is an elephant graveyard. Bluesky is hopping. Will it thrive or get terrible like every other social media site? Probably.

But right now I’m having a lot of wonderful conversations over there. Nuclear Twitter moved to Bluesky early. More defense and tech reporters appear every day. Engagement on posts feels organic in a way that X hasn’t felt in years. People like and repost things I’m posting there. I feel like I’m interacting with a community again.

It may not last. It probably won’t. And the reality is that we shouldn’t put our faith in any social media site ever. Cory Doctorow articulated this well in an essay from November about why he hasn’t joined Bluesky. “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will,” Doctorow said.

When you invest time and energy into a platform and allow it to be the middleman between you and your audience, you give it power. That power has never not been abused. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber, invoking Doctor, has promised not to enshittify the site.

How long those promises will be kept remains to be seen. In a world where Trump can win a second term, I don’t have a lot of hope for the future.

Also, if you join Bluesky, don’t worry too much about the Alf hog. It will come to you in time.

https://gizmodo.com/the-joys-and-perils-of-leaving-elon-musks-x-for-bluesky