The social media X-odus: Not nothing but blue skies from now on

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I created a Twitter account on June 24, 2011. Between then and when Elon Musk acquired the service and later changed the name to X, I tweeted exactly zero times. Since then I’ve posted even less.

It’s not that I didn’t plan to at first. I’d figured it might be fun to be sarcastic in short sentences, and that I might even be good at it. Even in middle age, there’s still a teenage boy within me waiting to smart off. The impulse never goes away.

Then I thought about whether that really was what I wanted to be known for, assuming I could even stand out in the cacophony.

I also noticed that people on Twitter frequently seemed to get into disputes characterized by the competitive spray of amber-colored fluid. Yeah, OK, pissing matches. I’m never a fan of that prideful activity.

So I never tweeted. Though I did notice that many of my colleagues in journalism found constructive uses for Twitter.

But also nonconstructive ones. To each their own, but I think it’s better for newsroom journalists to maintain an aura of mystery in their public presentation, and for even opinion journalists to maintain an ecumenical sense of nuance and exploration. All journalists of course have a point of view. They’re people, and they have as much stake in our democracy as anyone else. We expect them to set their views aside as appropriate in their work, just as we expect a trip to an opinionated barber to produce a shapely trim free of blood. In my experience, most journalists — especially at the local and regional levels — are trying to be evenhanded in their work. Some let their hair down on social media, and it doesn’t help with perceptions.

Forgive my use of two tangential paragraphs in a row, but this is also where I’d like to say that I consider my primary field of opinion writing to be a supplemental form of journalism. By “supplemental” I certainly don’t mean lesser. I mean augmentative. Some people say they want just the facts from news organizations. But if researched and reported opinions add no value for you — nor even poetic or deliciously splenetic ones — you’re missing out on a full understanding of culture, of policy, of humanity. Opinion writing encompasses all of these. It’s why newspapers have long included it and should not now allow it to be diminished.

But to return to my main topic — Twitter and its saltire-symboled successor — the most beneficial contribution has been as a central public square. Posts are immediate, wide-reaching and democratic. To the extent social media fails this ideal, it’s because we — easily diverted users aided by algorithmically oriented administrators — have collectively squandered a tool.

And now we’re using it as another way to self-sort. Another way to talk at, but not with, one another.

There are several competitors with platforms similar to X, and all have had moments in the sun since Musk made the industry his mission. Right now the hot competitor is Bluesky. It describes itself as “social media as it should be.”

(Here, allow my inner teenager to come out. Is it “blue sky,” or is it meant to rhyme with “brewski?” Occam’s razor prevails, I suppose, but with Silicon Valley, it’s hard to know.)

Daily traffic on Bluesky was reportedly up 500% after the election of Donald Trump to a second term as president, while concurrently X users were deactivating their accounts in greater numbers than ever. You can guess who’s leaving and who’s staying.

It’s understandable. Not only did Musk encourage X to grow ever more toxic, he put his thumb on the scale during the campaign. And now he’s joining the government or something, appointed by Trump along with Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, which has the typically in-joke acronym of DOGE. People hoping to work for it are required to apply via direct message to the DOGE account on X, something that can only be done by premium members of that service paying $8 to $16 a month. If no one else makes money on government efficiency, Elon Musk will.

So is this X-odus a bad thing? Why shouldn’t there be competition for a short-form social media platform that offers the best experience? This country works because it values competition on all fronts. Though it fails to work when we splinter.

That’s what we need to reconcile. For my part, I’ll keep X and add Bluesky. But, still, post on neither.