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Racism, misogyny, lies: how did X become so full of hatred? And is it ethical to keep using it?

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I and many others have been looking for alternatives. Who wants to share a platform with the likes of Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson?

But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous. Those high-attention tweets go straight to the top of the For You feed, driven by a “black box algorithm designed to keep you scrolling”, as Rose Wang, COO of another rival, Bluesky, puts it, but the user experience is screeds of repetition on topics tailored to annoy you. The boxer, who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex, was subjected to libellous claims about her gender by numerous public figures – British politicians, JK Rowling, Donald Trump – all on X. Andrew Tate, meanwhile, may have been charged by the Romanian authorities with human trafficking and rape, but his online misogynist fantasies of women as a slave caste, which have immense global reach, have attracted no censure greater than de-platforming, by YouTube, Insta, TikTok and Facebook – while the impact of these bans was lessened, even undone, by his freedom to operate on X.

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