Massachusetts needs to get off Twitter/X
I am happy to campaign anyplace except Twitter.
You may have seen that yesterday racist riots broke out in Northern Ireland, reportedly stoked by Elon Musk and his platform. From an article in Politico:
Labour Party Chair Anna Turley tore into Musk’s posts Wednesday, saying the tech boss doesn’t have to live with the consequences far away from Northern Ireland.
“It’s appalling. Anyone that is seeking to drive and exploit a situation like this to drive their own political agenda is grievously wrong and doing damage,” she told LBC Wednesday. “We’ve seen children, families having to flee their homes on the streets of Belfast last night.”
She added: “We do not want to see this kind of disruption, damage, thuggery, violence on our streets, and anyone that is seeking to whip that up should be condemned.”
And it’s not just this week that the platform has been used for political purposes. There have been many studies that Musk has used the site to push his own agenda and tweets. One that was published in Nature found that:
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine.
So that raises the question: why are Democrats still posting on the site?
I do not find it useful at all for following local news. The #mapoli world has largely vanished from it compared to the thriving scene that it was in 2012-2021.
But the Massachusetts Democratic Party, the Governor’s Office, and other Democratic groups are still on the platform, adding to its validity and userbase.
I get the arguments for why they are. People are on the site and so they want to reach them with their messages. If Democrats leave, the argument goes, then the audience only consumes conservative content and we lose more.
That idea of going into any forum to bring a message there resonates with me, especially now that I’m running for office. A vote from a person on Twitter counts just as much as a vote of a newspaper reader.
But there are limits.
MassDems are not on 4chan (I assume). They don’t post in neo-Nazi group chats. There are limits to where they are willing to go with their message.
I would argue that since Elon Musk’s takeover, that limit has been reached.
For some, it was early when it was clear he was boosting his own posts. For others it was after the 2024 election when he was President Trump’s largest funder. For many it was when Musk became the head of DOGE and gutted USAID. But wherever you drew the red line, it should have happened by now.
That’s why I’m asking for all elected Democratic officials in Massachusetts, party organizations, and liberal and progressive organization to make it clear that we won’t continue to support a social media site that degrades our civic life. I hope they join me in that.
