Why Americana UK is leaving X aka Twitter

After a prolonged discussion within our editorial team, we’ve made the decision to leave X aka Twitter and just wanted to let you our readers know the reasons for this although they probably won’t come as much surprise.  I think when I wrote the piece about the racist riots the other week which got a fair number of views and comments, the one thing I do kind of regret is describing the rioters generically as “thick as pigshit” which was written more in anger than anything, having seen the city in which I live descend into some of the scenes which are now widely imprinted in people’s minds, including shops being smashed up because they had a foreign-sounding name above the door. I can not get out of my head a piece I read last week in The Guardian about that woman, Stacey Vint, who pushed the wheelie-bin on fire into the line of police which then went viral. She was apparently a “homeless mother-of-five who left her hotel room in Middlesbrough to nip to a nearby shop. The judge found that Vint had no racist or ideological motivation for her offence… The court heard that Vint’s life had been blighted by drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence, and that she had become homeless after fleeing an abusive relationship and seeing all five of her children taken into care.” She is now serving a 20-month prison sentence and it made me reflect that as much as there’s real culpability with many of the rioters, some people with a role in what happened are getting off Scott-free, people with much more power and influence than Stacey Vint.

And so we come of course to Elon Musk. It’s difficult to find anything new to say about Musk which hasn’t been said a thousand times already, but for what it’s worth, here are some thoughts. Musk is a cancer eating away at the world at large but given the last few weeks his impact on the UK is particularly destructive. He has a remarkable ability to be the most thick-skinned and thin-skinned human being alive at one and the same time. He’s actually not that dissimilar to Trump in that they are both hailed (in some quarters) as business geniuses when actually they have a real talent for driving things into the ground. Since taking over Twitter two years ago, even the rebranding to X was a sign of his substantial insecurity that somehow the new thing had to be discernibly his, a vanity project essentially of driving away anyone who doesn’t align with his worldview, whether that’s the people using it or advertisers some of whom he is embarrassingly now suing. His commitment to free speech would be laughable if its effects weren’t so damaging – there is frequent unchallenged racist abuse including regular use of the term “n*gger” but anyone involved in say supporting Palestinians through the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been censored relentlessly. The term that is commonly used about Twitter now is that it’s a cesspit, and there probably isn’t a better word. Social media platforms have collectively got issues but you just feel so kind of, well, dirty after being on Twitter for any length of time – it generates a kind of deep gloom, like a pan-continental notice-board for all the worst examples of human behaviour.

So why now? I think given the direction things are heading in, many people are just kind of waiting it out – at some point he’ll get bored, at some point we’ll get our “global town square” back. And that’s a reasonable position to hold. But for us, the environment has become so toxic, timelines filled with so much hate-filled extremism, and the whole platform being so politically skewed towards the far right that we just don’t want to be part of it any longer. The tweeting during the rioting from Musk alone should be enough for an arrest-warrant to be issued should he step foot in the UK if our laws mean anything. Musk is responsible in no small part for vulnerable individuals like Stacey Vint ending up behind bars and with the amount of power he wields through his platforms and wealth, that just feels intrinsically wrong. It’s difficult to think of a more malign figure around at the moment who has caused such harm to society on such an ongoing basis, and for that reason we just feel that AUK can no longer have a presence on the platform comfortably.

We have over 10k followers on Twitter built up over a number of years, which is a drop in the ocean compared to other outlets, but not nothing either. We will be jumping to the not perfect but at least not full of racist bile platform Threads and will continue to have a presence on Facebook and Instagram. We apologise to those of you who do mainly follow AUK through Twitter – and one day in the future, perhaps when Musk does bail and moves on to his next victim (or come the revolution when all social media is nationalised!) we may return. In the meantime, thanks for bearing with us. This too shall pass.

Please follow us on Threads or Instagram – we’re at americana_uk_ because someone stole the good usernames.