As The Citizen’s Social Media Manager, I have spent the last several months grappling with a question that has plagued media organizations in the run-up to, and since, the presidential election: Should we leave X (formerly Twitter)?
The argument for doing so was articulated well in November when The Guardian announced it would be the latest news organization to ditch the social media platform. In a statement online, The Guardian says their decision to abandon their 80 X accounts is because “X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
I don’t disagree with The Guardian’s assertion that X has become a toxic dumpster fire. I’ve seen it myself on The Citizen’s own profile. Just one example: On a post promoting our guide to celebrating Pride in Philly, an X user commented with a picture of a burning pride flag. That is not the kind of productive disagreement The Citizen is aiming for in any of its platforms.
I’d love to spend less of my working hours seeing moments like this. And it wouldn’t be a disaster for The Citizen to step away from X as it is not our primary traffic source, and it’s certainly not a revenue source.
In a sea of misinformation and bad faith arguments, we intend to be the beacon of truth that meets people where they are.
But my initial feeling of “Suck it, Musk,” was swiftly squashed when a chilling realization came over me. Abandoning ship — along with other reputable fact-based news organizations like The Guardian, NPR and PBS — means one thing: More destructive — and less honest — media organizations and individuals get to take control of the reins without opposition or accountability.
How is the answer to Musk’s influence in shaping political discourse leaving him to it? How does it help anyone to let X be even more of a toxic echo chamber than it already is?
Heading to dystopia
When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, there was some hope that he would cultivate an environment that at least honored some important American values. In a tweet following the purchase he stated, “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Free speech? Functioning democracy? Those are two things I can get behind.
But what does that free speech look like? Among other things, it looks like White nationalist Nick Fuentes tweeting, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Free speech? Sure. But it’s still deeply unsettling to open up the comment section of that tweet and see threats of sexual violence against users disagreeing with Fuentes, who was formerly banned from then-Twitter for repeatedly violating the site’s hate speech policy until Musk reinstated him last spring.
As someone who has been logging on to X every day since its early days, I can emphatically say: Yes, it’s true that the rhetoric on X has become uglier and uglier. It’s not unusual to see people sling pejoratives at the drop of a hat, or make baseless claims about the government and civil society and mislabel them as facts. The depravity people can reach when they are hidden behind an online profile is not just depressing, it’s a scary indicator that civil discourse is losing its footing in our society.
It is in line with human nature to want to cut and run when logging onto social media feels like setting your brain on fire. There is, after all, only so much of the steady stream of misinformation and verbal firefighting we can take before we want to disengage.
And so we do. Deeper into our echo-chambers we enshrine ourselves; more siloed we become, until every last one of the faces on our feeds thinks and feels as we do. We curate our perfect bubbles and ignore the damage that incubates when the duty towards facts takes off in a mass flight.
How does it help anyone to let X be even more of a toxic echo chamber than it already is?
Let’s look at this as if the news was being distributed as it was prior to the internet: Newspapers stop delivering papers to neighborhoods where detractors live. Network news cuts off broadcasting from a town that it does not agree with. Uh oh … starts to look pretty dystopian pretty fast there, doesn’t it?
We are not in the business of telling you what platforms to be on or where to get your fact-based news from. If being on X gives you a full-blown existential crisis, perhaps it is not the platform for you. But the fact of the matter is, for some, X is their primary source of news.
In a sea of misinformation and bad-faith arguments, we intend to be the beacon of truth that meets people where they are. Our mission remains the same: to ignite civic engagement in the American city where democracy was born.
And while, in these extremely politically polarized times, it may seem unlikely that people who don’t believe in fact-based news will suddenly change their attitudes, it is still our responsibility to reach as many people as we can with our solutions-based, well-researched and factual articles.
Our intention with social media is to make it easy to incorporate our solutions-based coverage into whichever social stream you feel best using. It’s why you can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and more recently, Bluesky and Threads. If social media isn’t your thing or you’ve recently gone cold turkey, our website is still free to peruse, our weekly newsletter is still free to subscribe to and most of our events are (almost) free to attend. As always, we don’t hide any of our content behind a paywall.
Bottom line: We are a non-partisan new organization. It’s not our job to gatekeep our content from those who choose to deny the facts. Our job as journalists remains the same no matter what social media we’re on: Seek truth and report on it … even on a platform where the truth is often scarce.
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