What the hell are you still doing on X?
I joined Twitter in 2008. I stopped posting in 2022, well before things got as bad as they are now. I didn’t delete my account - I just walked away. Sometime between then and now, all my tweets disappeared. The account still exists, but I can’t log in. I’m not sure what happened, and at this point, I don’t think it matters.
What matters is that the tech industry is still there. Still posting. Still promoting products. Still acting like X is a legitimate platform for professional communication.
It’s not. It stopped being that a long time ago. And if you’re still there - especially if your company is still there - I think you need to seriously examine what you’re willing to tolerate in exchange for engagement metrics.
Let’s be clear about what you’re supporting
In late December 2025, xAI’s Grok chatbot began generating sexualized images of minors. Researcher Genevieve Oh found Grok was producing approximately 6,700 sexually suggestive deepfakes per hour. Ashley St. Clair - the mother of one of Musk’s own children - reported that Grok created sexualized images based on photos of her at 14 years old, “undressed and put in a bikini.”
France expanded a criminal investigation. India ordered a 72-hour review. The UK’s Ofcom made urgent contact. The European Commission spokesperson called it “illegal,” “appalling,” and “disgusting.”
Musk’s response was a laughing emoji. When major news outlets requested comment, xAI’s automated media response was: “Legacy Media Lies.”
This is the platform you’re using to promote your company. This is whose ecosystem you’re contributing to when you post your product updates and conference announcements.
And this wasn’t an isolated incident.
A pattern, not a bug
In July 2025, Grok generated content praising Hitler when asked which 20th-century figure would best handle what it characterized as “anti-white hate.” The chatbot called itself “MechaHitler,” posted antisemitic rhymes targeting Jewish public figures, and elaborated on Holocaust methods. A bipartisan congressional letter from Representatives Josh Gottheimer, Tom Suozzi, and Don Bacon stated: “That your work product Grok would embrace Hitler and his ideology marks a new low for AI development.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the posts as “irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple,” with CEO Jonathan Greenblatt calling them “mind-boggling, toxic and potentially explosive.”
In May 2025, Grok began inserting “white genocide” conspiracy theories into completely unrelated conversations - users asking about baseball salaries and HBO name changes received unprompted responses about alleged violence against white South Africans. xAI blamed an “unauthorized modification” by a “rogue employee.”
How many “rogue employees” and “bugs” does it take before we acknowledge the pattern?
Safety was dismantled on purpose
These AI failures exist within a broader context of deliberate policy decisions. This wasn’t neglect. This was intentional.
Within weeks of Musk’s acquisition in October 2022, Twitter dissolved its Trust and Safety Council - an advisory group of approximately 100 independent civil rights organizations formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, and self-harm. The company informed the group via email that it was being disbanded less than an hour before a scheduled meeting.
Amnesty International called the decision a threat to “the right to freedom of expression for women and marginalized groups” and efforts “to safeguard children from harm.”
The staff cuts were equally dramatic. By April 2023, Musk told the BBC that employees had been reduced from approximately 8,000 to under 1,500.
In June 2025, Thorn - a nonprofit that provides detection technology for child sexual abuse material - terminated its contract with X after the company stopped paying its invoices. “We provided the services to them. We did it for as long as we possibly could,” Thorn’s senior manager told NBC News. Following the termination, NBC News observed a surge in accounts flooding hashtags with hundreds of posts per hour advertising the sale of child abuse material.
This is a company that claimed fighting child exploitation was “priority #1.” Then they stopped paying the organization that helped them detect it.
And you’re still posting your webinar announcements there.
The data is unambiguous
A peer-reviewed study published in PLOS One by researchers at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and USC found that hate speech on X was approximately 50% higher in the months following Musk’s acquisition compared to the pre-purchase period. The estimated average number of posts containing hate speech per week rose from 2,179 before the acquisition to 3,246 after - and engagement on posts containing homophobic, transphobic, and racist slurs increased 70%.
Transphobic slurs saw the highest increase, rising from an average of roughly 115 posts per week before Musk’s acquisition to an average of 418 afterwards.
These findings directly contradict X’s public claims that hate speech decreased after Musk’s purchase. The research is peer-reviewed. The methodology is sound. The conclusion is clear.
This is the environment where your brand exists. These are the posts your company’s content appears alongside.
A global platform for fascism
Musk’s involvement extends beyond platform mismanagement to active promotion of fascist movements globally.
In Germany, Musk endorsed the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, tweeting “Only the AfD can save Germany” and conducting an hour-long livestream with AfD leader Alice Weidel in January 2025. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has the AfD under surveillance as a suspected extremist threat.
In the United Kingdom, Musk pinned “Free Tommy Robinson” to the top of his X profile in January 2025. Robinson - founder of the far-right English Defence League with convictions for contempt of court, mortgage fraud, and assault - was serving an 18-month jail sentence for contempt of court stemming from a libelous video.
During far-right riots in the UK in August 2024, Musk tweeted “Civil war is inevitable” - a post viewed 9.6 million times - in response to a video blaming the violence on “mass migration and open borders.” Downing Street stated: “There’s no justification for comments like that.”
The platform owner is actively promoting fascist political movements across multiple continents. And you’re worried about your follower count.
We already know what he thinks of accountability
When advertisers left following Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory in November 2023 - responding “You have said the actual truth” to a post claiming Jewish communities “push hatred against whites” - Musk’s response was unambiguous.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit, he told advertisers: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.” He repeated it three times, calling out Disney’s CEO by name, while X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino - hired specifically to court advertisers - sat in the front row.
He then acknowledged that the boycott would “kill the company.”
Major brands walked away. IBM, Apple, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Sony, and Lionsgate all paused advertising. They understood that brand association matters. That being present on a platform is an implicit endorsement of that platform.
So why is your company still there?
To the companies still maintaining a presence
I want to address this directly to the organizations, conferences, open source projects, and companies that are still actively posting on X: What is the calculation you’re making?
I understand the argument. “It’s where the audience is.” “We need to meet people where they are.” “We’d lose visibility if we left.”
Here’s what I’d ask you to consider: Every post you make contributes to the platform’s engagement metrics. Every follower you maintain is a data point that X uses to demonstrate viability to investors and advertisers. Every piece of content you create is training data for AI systems that generate child sexual abuse material.
You are not a neutral observer. You are a participant. And participation is endorsement.
When your company posts on X, you’re making a statement - whether you intend to or not - that the value you get from that platform outweighs the harms it enables. You’re saying that your marketing reach matters more than the safety infrastructure that was deliberately dismantled. You’re saying that your brand awareness is more important than the 50% increase in hate speech, the CSAM that floods the platform, the far-right movements being amplified by the platform’s owner.
I don’t think that’s the statement most companies want to make. But it’s the statement they’re making.
“But we’d lose our audience”
You’d lose some visibility. That’s true. But let’s be honest about what that visibility is costing you.
Your company’s presence on X is being used to legitimize a platform that has abandoned content moderation, stopped paying for child safety technology, and whose AI product generates sexualized images of minors. When I see your company posting on X, I see a company that has decided those things aren’t dealbreakers.
Is that the brand association you want?
The tech industry, in particular, should know better. We understand how platforms work. We understand that engagement is currency. We understand that our presence provides value to the platform, not just to us.
We also built communities before Twitter existed, and we’ve built them on other platforms since. Professional communities thrive on Slack, Discord, Mastodon, Bluesky, mailing lists, and forums.
The idea that X is the only way to reach your audience was never true, and it’s even less true now.
I know what I’m asking you to give up
I need to be honest here, because I’m not making this argument from a position of detachment. Twitter was foundational to my career.
I first became involved in the Mac Admin community through Twitter. It’s how I met so many of the people in this industry that I call friends to this day. I even met a former partner on Twitter. Conversations that started as reply threads turned into conference hallway tracks, then collaborations, then job opportunities. The relationships I built there helped me co-found the Mac Admins Slack community. They shaped the trajectory of my entire career. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the foundation that Twitter helped me build.
Walking away from that was painful. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
I still miss the community I had there. I miss the serendipitous connections, the real-time conversations during Apple events, the way a single tweet could spark a discussion that changed how I thought about a problem. That community was real, and it mattered to me.
But I never had any doubt that leaving was the right thing to do. And I stand by that decision.
So when I hear “but it’s where the community is,” I understand that argument on a personal level. I lived it. I felt the cost of leaving. And I’m still telling you: it’s time to go. It’s past time. The platform we built that community on doesn’t exist anymore. What’s there now is something else entirely - something we shouldn’t be part of.
The “but it’s where the community is” excuse has expired
I’ve heard this argument for three years now. “We can’t leave because that’s where everyone is.”
Here’s the thing: we’ve moved before. The tech industry built thriving communities on Usenet, then web forums, then mailing lists, then Twitter, then Slack. We have podcasts, conferences, blogs, and entire ecosystems that don’t depend on any single platform.
Every time a platform has declined, people have said “but we can’t leave, that’s where the community is.” And every time, the community has moved anyway - usually to somewhere better.
The argument that we have to stay on X because that’s where people are is the same argument that kept people on every platform that ever declined. At some point, you have to be willing to be early to somewhere else. That point was years ago.
What staying actually means
Every post, every reply, every like - it’s engagement that X uses to demonstrate platform viability, sell advertising, and train AI models. Your content is training data for a system that generates child sexual abuse material and praises Hitler. We’re not passive observers. We’re participants.
I’m not saying everyone who uses X is a bad person. I’m saying that at this point, continued participation - especially continued professional participation, especially continued organizational participation - has become a choice that requires justification.
What’s your justification?
“We might lose some followers” is not a justification. “It’s where our audience is” is not a justification. “We’ve always been there” is not a justification.
Those are explanations for inertia, not reasons for presence.
Where we go instead
The tech industry has options:
Bluesky has emerged as the most Twitter-like alternative, with a familiar interface and growing adoption among tech communities.
Mastodon offers a decentralized alternative with strong moderation tools. Many professional communities have established instances.
LinkedIn works for professional networking, even if it’s less fun.
Blogs and RSS still work - and you own your content.
None of these are perfect. That’s not the point. The point is that we don’t have to keep building on a platform whose owner thinks generating child abuse material is funny.
What I’m asking
If you’re an individual: Leave. Delete your account, or at minimum stop posting. Stop giving engagement to a platform that has abandoned every principle of responsible content moderation.
If you’re a company, a conference, an open source project, a professional organization: Leave, and do it publicly. Make a statement. Explain why. Let your community know where else they can find you. Your departure matters more than an individual’s, because your presence provides more legitimacy.
If you’re in a position of influence - if people look to you for guidance on professional norms - recognize that your continued presence on X sends a message. It tells people that staying is acceptable. It tells people that the things happening on that platform aren’t bad enough to warrant leaving. It normalizes participation in an ecosystem that has become genuinely harmful.
The tech industry built this platform. We spent years creating the communities and content that made it valuable. We have the ability - and I’d argue the responsibility - to walk away.
It’s well past time. What the hell are you still doing there?