Dear X,
Very few long-term relationships start off toxic, or at least as toxic as they end. The start is always fun. Short messages. Sharing an update or two on silly parts of your day – perhaps a meme which is a picture-perfect summary of the day you’ve had – good, bad or sad. You laugh together, congratulate each other on exciting personal news.
The sparkle begins to dim. It becomes habitual. Sharing updates not necessarily for the excitement, but because it’s just what we do. Worrying that any lack of engagement is a failing on your own part. The narcissistic, controlling behaviour that you try so hard to placate to achieve the relationship of the past escalates. But it’s no use, that feel good feeling has long since flown away, never to return.
Then the resentment. The name calling. Multiple red flags ignored. Before the toxicity becomes too much for any relationship to withstand, they become…
an X.
If our relationship with X was with a real person, close friends and relatives would have long-since staged an intervention. Its algorithms are increasingly designed for us to see only disagreement and division. X now feeds a hunger that only hatred can sustain.
Since Musk took over Twitter, no one can deny the change in tone, in content and users. Over a year ago, the change was so violent that I removed the app from my phone. I refused to have my day interrupted with pictures of dead children, far right hatred, racism and misogyny. If people were saying these things to my face, I’d have just walked away – but for some reasons, maybe the habitual nature of it, I couldn’t walk away entirely from X. So instead, I removed the app and turned the comments off my posts.
My team were clear: I’d be losing out on very little. Over the last year, there has been a surge of international bots and genuine engagement with constituents or journalists has plummeted. In the years following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we know the trust and safety team were gutted. His decision to sell blue tick verifications to anyone willing to pay chipped away another barrier to bots. Musk even faced criticism from our PM for using his platform to whip up disorder here in the UK over the Summer.
Global Witness monitored election hashtags leading up to our recent July General Election in the UK. They found that more than 610,000 of the posts were from a group of “bot-like accounts” that promoted conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and other divisive topics.
The problem Musk promised to eradicate when he took over Twitter seems to have only got worse. And who are at the sharp end of it? Unsurprisingly, women and people of colour bear the brutal brunt of the online abuse. The University of Sheffield found that between May 1st and July 30th, five politicians – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Diane Abbott, Suella Braverman and Sadiq Khan – were, between them, sent more than 85,000 clearly abusive messages. 20% of the abuse was explicitly sexist, misogynistic, or sexually explicit.
I’ve received my fair share of hate and misogyny on X, but it’s nothing compared to the likes of Diane Abbott, Stella Creasy or Dawn Butler (who regularly posts her ‘blocks of the week’).
As the new Chair of the Women & Equalities Committee, I’ve reflected on what use there is staying on a platform that’s gone from cat memes, to sharing wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion. My presence on X no longer benefits my role or the people I seek to serve. The only use is to Musk and those who gain airtime from the hatred typed by bots or like chasers agreeing with their own posts with their multiple accounts.
I hate ceding any space to use my voice, but I believe it’s now time to question if staying on X gives it the legitimacy it no longer deserves.
For me, it’s time to end this toxic relationship. And it’s definitely you, not me, X.