Universities need to leave X

[Update: I don’t think I made it clear enough that I’m talking about the official comms channels of universities here, not individual academics. They should have left X ages ago.]

I’m not the first person to advocate this, but the timing and the case for it now seems even stronger. UK universities (but all HEIs really), need to get off X/Twitter as an official platform now. I have a lot of respect for colleagues in Comms, and they are balancing many different factors. It’s easy for people like me to say it, but much more difficult to undertake as an institutional policy. I get it, but now is the time.

We have seen X/Twitter transform radically. It has gone through three phases with regards to dangerous behaviour I think:

1. There is unacceptable behaviour (bullying, abuse, misinformation, trolling) that it doesn’t do enough to police, but you can often operate apart from it. This was pretty much the case with old Twitter.
2. It actively encourages unacceptable behaviour by reinstating previously banned accounts, and the owner posting and encouraging such behaviour. This was the case when Musk took over.
3. A platform whose main purpose is to foment this behaviour and to actively interfere with the democratic process. This is where we’ve arrived at over the past few months and was particularly apparent in Musk’s behaviour in the weeks leading up to the election in the US.

The trade-off many of us made between the good stuff and the bad stuff was justifiable at stage 1. Lots of individual academics left at stage 2. You could justify staying at this stage by arguing to was to combat misinformation, to dilute the anger, that’s where your audience is or simply that it was irrelevant to your goal and brand. Stage 3 is a very different beast however, it is explicitly an ideological platform now. And unless your ideology aligns with that, then maintaining an account there is actively supporting it. I would hope that most university’s ideology does not align with that of Musk.

What’s more, now that Musk has more political power, it’s highly likely that he will enact that through X. This may be removal of words he doesn’t like (eg decreeing that cisgender is a slur), downgrading criticisms of people and causes he promotes, upgrading the views of those he does, etc. Timothy Snyder has 20 lessons from tyranny, and the first is “Don’t obey in advance”, stating:

Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

This applies to social media – don’t start curbing what you want to say in advance. And you can’t do that on X. So, I’m sorry comms colleagues, it’s time to get off that particular horse.

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