Every day you stay on X, you’re making a choice. Not a passive one — an active one. You’re feeding a machine that has been deliberately engineered to amplify rage, reward bad actors, and hand a billionaire with a political agenda direct access to your attention.
Jonathan Liew over at The Guardian put it plainly in a piece that should make every remaining X user genuinely uncomfortable: if you’re still on this platform, you owe yourself an honest answer about why. Not a rationalised one. An honest one.
Because the rationalised answers are everywhere. “I’m only there for the news.” “I’ve got an audience I can’t abandon.” “It’s the only place where real conversation still happens.” These are the same things people said about staying in a bad relationship. Familiarity dressed up as logic.
What X Has Become
Let’s be direct about what the platform actually is right now. X is a misinformation engine with a search bar attached. Elon Musk gutted the trust and safety teams, reinstated accounts that had been banned for harassment and hate speech, and then — with a straight face — told advertisers it was a safe brand environment. Advertisers left anyway. Most of them haven’t come back.
The algorithm now explicitly favours Musk’s own posts and the posts of people who pay for verification. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s documented. The company admitted it. So when you open X and scroll, you’re not seeing what’s interesting or relevant or true. You’re seeing what Musk and whoever writes him a monthly cheque wants you to see.
And the content moderation? Practically non-existent in any meaningful sense. Bot networks operate openly. State-sponsored influence campaigns run with minimal interference. The kinds of malign actors that took years to identify and remove under the old Twitter structure now operate with something close to impunity.
The Sunk Cost Trap
Here’s what keeps people locked in: sunk cost. Years of tweets. Thousands of followers. A handle they’ve had since 2009. It feels like abandoning a house you built with your own hands. But that house is on fire. And Elon Musk is holding the matches.
The media industry — journalists especially — has been the worst at this. There’s a professional class of writers and reporters who know, intellectually, that X is broken beyond repair, and yet they post there three times a day because “that’s where the sources are” or “that’s where the discourse is.” But discourse follows people, not platforms. When journalists left MySpace, the discourse didn’t stay behind.
Bluesky has grown significantly. Threads has a billion-plus user base. Mastodon exists for the truly decentralisation-minded. The infrastructure for a post-X internet is already there. What’s missing is the collective will to make the jump all at once — and the cynical awareness that a critical mass of smart, interesting people leaving simultaneously would be the only thing that actually kills X’s cultural relevance.
The Hot Take
Staying on X at this point isn’t neutral. It’s complicity. Every post you make, every impression you generate, every minute of engagement you contribute goes directly into Musk’s pitch deck when he’s talking to investors or trying to convince advertisers to come back. You are, functionally, unpaid labour for a platform run by someone actively involved in dismantling democratic institutions across multiple continents. The “I’m just here to keep an eye on things” excuse has an expiry date, and it passed about two years ago.
What Actually Happens If You Leave
Not much, immediately. That’s the honest answer. Your follower count won’t transfer. Some people won’t follow you to wherever you go next. A few conversations will go dark. It’ll feel like a loss.
But here’s what also happens: you stop being complicit in the daily machinery of a platform that is provably, measurably making public discourse worse. You stop boosting X’s engagement numbers. You stop generating the data that gets sold. And you free up the mental bandwidth that X — by design — colonises.
The tech world is full of people making harder bets than this. People are launching satellites into orbit and rethinking how we generate energy from the ground up — literally beneath our feet. Leaving a social media app should not be the hardest decision anyone makes this decade.
The Real Question
Liew’s original question is the right one, and it deserves a real answer: why are you still there? Not a rationalised one. Not a “well it’s complicated” one. A real one.
If the answer is genuine — you’re a researcher studying the platform, you’re monitoring it professionally, you have no other way to reach a specific community — fine. That’s defensible. But if the answer is habit, inertia, or a vague sense that leaving would mean losing something, that’s worth sitting with. Because what you’re actually losing by staying is harder to quantify and far more expensive than a follower count.
X is not going to fix itself. Musk is not going to have a change of heart. The platform will keep degrading, keep amplifying the worst voices, and keep converting your attention into political capital for someone who has made it very clear what he intends to do with it. The exit is right there. Use it.
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