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Major Media Reform Group Says Goodbye to Musk's 'Toxic Twitter'
"It's clear that X will not correct course under Musk's leadership, and it's time for Free Press to exit."
Nov 15, 2024
Media watchdog Free Press announced on Thursday that it would leave the social media platform formerly known as Twitter over concerns about owner Elon Musk's platforming of hateful speech, fostering an increase of disinformation, and his intensifying harassment of critics
In doing so, the advocacy group joined the more than 100,000 U.S. users who have abandoned Musk's X following Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election last week. Musk aggressively used the site to boost Trump and his campaign, promoting him with tweets worth $24 million and spreading disinformation about the Democratic Party and the integrity of U.S. voting infrastructure.
"For years, Free Press has sought to hold social-media companies accountable for amplifying hate and lies that undermine public health, safety, and democracy. We have pushed for meaningful reforms that would protect users and have extensively documented the platforms' failures. None of these companies has fallen so low as X under Elon Musk's ownership," the group wrote in their departure announcement.
"Musk has turned X into a propaganda machine for racists, misogynists, xenophobes, antisemites, and transphobes."
"Free Press will no longer be posting on X, effective immediately, and we invite you to join us in ceasing activity on Musk's platform," they continued. "We refuse to give X any legitimacy."
When Musk took control of Twitter over two years ago, he reinstated the accounts of white supremancists and conspiracy theorists. About a month into his tenure, he made his the first social media platform to allow Trump to post again following the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
"Free Press is committed to ensuring that people have a voice in the decisions that shape our media system. Musk, quite simply, only wants to amplify himself and others who share his far-right, bigoted values," Free Press co-CEO Jessica J. González said in a statement. "Musk has turned X into a propaganda machine for racists, misogynists, xenophobes, antisemites, and transphobes. His continued mismanagement of the platform has endangered people on the receiving end of his abuse and threatened our democracy."
When Musk first took the reins at Twitter, Free Press and other groups met with him to discuss how to protect users from harassment. When it became clear that Musk was not taking the problem seriously, Free Press joined with other organizations in mobilizing an advertising boycott via the #StopToxicTwitter campaign. Ultimately, the site's value dipped by $35 billion. Musk responded by suing or threatening to sue scholars and advocates who criticized the platform's direction.
"Through our research, organizing, and reporting, Free Press has fought to reform X," González said. "We remember the potential that it once had, giving ordinary people the means to speak directly to power and build community. But it's clear that X will not correct course under Musk's leadership, and it's time for Free Press to exit."
Independent research found that X's U.s. usership had declined prior to Trump's win, with the segment of the population who reported using the site dropping by nearly one-third between 2023 and 2024. The site saw its largest single-day post-Musk drop in U.S. users on the day immediately after the election, with over 115,000 million people deactivating their accounts. The platform also lost over 281,600 users worldwide. At the same time, competitor Bluesky gained 1 million users in the week after the election.
X also saw its highest U.S. traffic for the year on November 6, at 46.5 million. How these two trends will balance each other out in the coming months remains to be seen, as Similarweb's David Carr recently wrote:
Some users swearing off the X service will presumably stop using it, or use it less, without necessarily deactivating their accounts. Whether there will be a measurable decrease in the audience for X as the result of politics remains to be seen. By the weekend, X usage had tapered off to a more typical level over the past year.
On the other hand, X's recent daily peak in U.S. traffic doesn't make up for the erosion in audience the service has seen over the past couple of years since Musk took ownership of the service.
In the week following the election, several prominent journalists, activists, and authors have also announced their departure from X, including climate advocate Bill McKibben, historian Heather Cox Richardson, novelist Stephen King, journalism professor Jay Rosen, and media outlet The Guardian.
"This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism," The Guardianexplained on Wednesday. "The U.S. presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse."
Journalist Don Lemon gave an extra reason for his decision to abandon the platform: new terms of service taking effect on Friday that require all lawsuits brought against the company be heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas rather than the Western District.
"As The Washington Post recently reported on X's decision to change the terms, this 'ensures that such lawsuits will be heard in courthouses that are a hub for conservatives, which experts say could make it easier for X to shield itself from litigation and punish critics,'" Lemon said.
However, not all critics of Musk and Trump are ready to abandon the site.
"I haven't left X/Twitter—at least not yet, anyway—despite its morally unconscionable management by Musk, because I believe that in this moment of national crisis those of us who want a better America need to stay connected any way we can, and a lot of friends are currently still there," wrotePhiladelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. "But building a new, engaged social network on Bluesky is going to bea major focus going into 2025 as we look to rebuild American democracy from the ashes of what just happened."
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How We Can Counter the Far-Right’s Dangerous ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theories
To mobilize people, we must have a compelling alternative vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice.
Oct 15, 2024
Lies and rumors about the federal hurricane response serve to build the far-right’s governing power. At the expense of human lives, the far-right—which nowadays includes the Republican party, the Trump campaign, billionaire donors, GOP governors, and the advocates behind Project 2025—deliberately sows distrust in government, specifically targeting federal public administration.
Federal agencies’ roles in a disaster are to issue warnings, provide rescue and relief, and support rebuilding. Across the spectrum of public administration, agencies’ regular jobs involve the things we rely on every single day: ensure our tap water is clean, our food and medicines are safe, our collective bargaining rights are protected, our retirement checks arrive on time, and much more. Yet the far-right peddles a dangerous narrative that casts public agencies and civil servants as the “deep state,” the enemy of the people. By delegitimizing our government, they pave the way for an authoritarian takeover.
As we knock on doors to mobilize voters, we must be prepared to address widespread distrust in government, whether it manifests in anger or apathy. If people give up on government—which we formed to solve problems together that we cannot tackle alone—they retreat or turn to strongmen for answers. How do we debunk the “deep state” conspiracy and shine a light on the essential role of government in delivering on our needs?
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This summer I worked on a new toolkit, recently released by Race Forward, to help shift the narrative and block the far-right’s assault on public administration. It offers ideas for talking about what public administration is, and what it can be. While we know that the federal government produced or maintained many of the inequities and injustices we see today, it can also be part of the solution. Throughout history, movements for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and many others taught us how to bend government towards justice.
We must begin by taking people’s affective responses to government seriously. Working class and poor people feel disaffected and disempowered because government hasn’t delivered for them. The class divide is real, the power and wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us is growing, racial injustice remains entrenched, misogyny is on the rise. Decades of neoliberal policies, pushing the commercialization of everything, have produced a full-blown crisis for working class people, disproportionately people of color. Privatization, disinvestment, and corporate capture have hollowed out public institutions and dismantled public goods. Our human rights are violated on a daily basis by unaffordable, commoditized housing and healthcare, food deserts, grocery price gauging, and hazardous workplaces, thereby shortening the lifespans of people pushed to the economic margins. Public administrative agencies are seen as bureaucratic barriers at best, and as controlling, coercing, and policing Black, brown, and poor people at worst.
This crisis has produced a fertile ground for a far-right plan, laid out by Project 2025, to capture the institutions of public administration. By delegitimizing government and setting it up to fail, authoritarians make it easier for themselves to take it over and turn government against communities.
Lying about federal disaster response fits neatly into this strategy. Rumors about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) seizing people’s property and spending aid dollars on migrants sow distrust, division, and hate and undercut the agency’s ability to deliver. This sets the stage for the far-right’s goal to end any government action to address the climate crisis. Project 2025 plans to drastically shrink federal disaster aid, shift costs to localities, privatize federal flood insurance, and terminate grants for community preparedness. Because climate research and planning are seen as harmful to what Project 2025 calls “prosperity,” the plan is to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including the National Weather Service that sends out hurricane warnings, and commercialize weather forecasting, likely putting warnings behind paywalls.
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This is particularly painful because it comes at a time when the Biden-Harris administration has taken some steps toward making federal agencies more responsive to people’s needs. This includes not only climate-related investments and jobs, but also new regulations that advance environmental justice, protect workers from heat exposure, increase overtime eligibility, ban non-compete clauses, and limit credit card penalty fees. But such agency actions often remain invisible, obscured by bureaucratic procedures, buried in the tax code, or held up in courts. We can surface these tangible efforts when we talk to potential voters and point to the purpose and possibilities of public administration.
A Trump presidency would reverse both recent progress and systemic protections embedded in the work of federal agencies. Project 2025 is not shy about terminating the enforcement of hard-won civil rights laws and privileging the narrow interests of corporations that price gauge, pollute, and exploit our communities. It would staff agencies with white Christian nationalists who seek to divide and dominate us.
These threats cannot be averted through a merely defensive stance. By calling on people to defend “democracy,” establishment politicians ignore popular anger, rooted in persistent experiences of inequity and injustice. Promoting an “opportunity economy” that relinquishes the goal of equitable outcomes simply doesn’t cut it. We can only block a far-right power grab if we tackle the injustices that fuel resentment. To mobilize people, we must have a compelling vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice. The job of public agencies is to protect our rights and deliver on our needs, and we can make them do just that—as long as we stand together, united.
In this election and beyond, we must contest the far-right narrative that undermines government and public administration. When people are reluctant to engage because the system is not working for them, let’s raise their expectations of government as a protector of rights, a provider of public goods and services, and a site for exercising our collective power.
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Democratic Leaders Are Repressing Their People to Protect the Status Quo
The same Western democracies who claim to represent the “free world” have seen dangerous backsliding on the right to protest on issues ranging from Palestine to the climate emergency.
Oct 08, 2024
Much of the world looks bleak in the fall of 2024.
Israel’s assault on Gaza, the world’s first live-streamed genocide, goes on unchecked, with material and diplomatic support from powerful countries. Emboldened by this support, Israel is now attacking Lebanon as well.
Large numbers of people in countries abetting the genocide are appalled at their own governments’ position, and are using a multitude of tactics to demand their governments stop supporting genocide, but their governments are stubbornly sticking to their position.
Even as the world heads towards climate catastrophe, governments of wealthy nations most responsible for the crisis are criminalizing resistance against fossil fuels.
This is also likely to be the hottest year ever recorded, with life-threatening heatwaves in Mexico and South Asia, devastating hurricanes hitting the Caribbean and the U.S. South, and unprecedented wildfires in Canada.
Governments of powerful countries are on the wrong side of this issue as well. They continue recklessly issuing permits for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Confronting fossil fuel barons is politically popular, but governments of self-proclaimed democracies ignore public opinion.
As with the Gaza genocide, people in these countries—and worldwide—are using creative protests to challenge the fossil fuel industry and its government and financial backers.
When governments ignore popular demands, people protest. In a democracy, they have a right to do so. Even when these protests break laws (for example, by blocking access to government offices), evolving norms of democratic rights recognize civil disobedience as a form of free speech that can lead to legal consequences but that should not be criminalized.
But the same Western democracies who claim to represent the “free world” have seen dangerous backsliding on the right to protest.
Erasing Palestine
Governments in Western democracies violate core protections for free expression when it comes to solidarity with Palestine. In Germany, this has included blanket bans on Palestine solidarity demonstrations (subsequently lifted after political pressure and legal challenges), and censorship and retaliation directed at critical voices.
Germany is not unique in this regard. Amnesty International notes a concerning trend of restrictions on Palestine solidarity activism across Europe.
In the U.S., Palestine solidarity encampments on college campuses in the spring of 2024 were met with a heavy-handed response from university officials and law enforcement. Students faced suspension, evictions from university housing, violence from police and vigilantes, arrests, and serious criminal charges for actions such as sit-ins and building occupations, which have a long history in U.S. student protests.
Many U.S. colleges adopted highly restrictive policies to prevent protests before reopening for the fall semester, raising serious concerns about their respect for their students’ free speech rights.
Criminalizing Climate Protection
Even as the world heads towards climate catastrophe, governments of wealthy nations most responsible for the crisis are criminalizing resistance against fossil fuels.
Few examples are as egregious (and blatantly racist) as the Canadian states’ response to Indigenous Wet’suwet’en peoples protecting their traditional territories from a polluting gas pipeline they didn’t consent to. Protesters have faced harassment, surveillance, and militarized raids by law enforcement and the pipeline company’s private security force.
Amnesty International has declared Dsta’hyl, a clan chief of the Wet’suwet’en, to be the first prisoner of conscience in Canada because of his house arrest for resisting the pipeline. Canada attacks Indigenous peoples fighting for their futures (and all of our collective futures) even as it increases production of polluting tar sands oil.
South of the border in the United States, the world’s largest oil and gas producing country, environmental defenders have been targeted by laws criminalizing protest against fossil fuel infrastructure, now on the books in nearly half the states,
My former colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I found in a 2020 study that these laws were systematically pushed by fossil fuel industry interests, and introduced by legislators who were plied with campaign cash by the industry. We looked at case studies of three communities targeted by polluting infrastructure projects that benefited from these laws. They were Black, Indigenous, or poor white communities, with more widespread poverty than the national average. Clearly, these laws were intended to further restrict the ability of already marginalized communities to resist projects that would sacrifice their health and livelihoods yet again for corporate profit.
Meanwhile, in Australia, a major coal and oil producer, both the national and state governments are targeting peaceful climate activists with punitive laws. A recent study by Climate Rights International has documented this trend in eight countries (including the U.S. and Australia) in great detail.
What emerges is a chilling pattern of powerful, wealthy countries who have no intention of stopping their expansion of fossil fuel production, but are instead resorting to draconian crackdowns on growing public opposition. This bodes ill for the likely state response to popular desperation and anger in the not so distant future when heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and food scarcity reach catastrophic levels, which they inevitably will if these countries don’t reverse course on fossil fuels.
Framing Dissent as Conspiracy
In the U.S. in particular, in addition to solidarity with Palestine and resistance to fossil fuels, the abolitionist movement against racist, militarized policing also faces extraordinary repression. The state response to the fight against a militarized police training facility in Atlanta best exemplifies this.
Authorities have killed a movement activist, Manuel Paez Terán (also known as Tortuguita), in what looks suspiciously like a targeted assassination, or at best a “friendly fire” accident, followed by an official cover-up. They have used overbroad conspiracy charges to target operators of a community bail fund, and about 60 other activists. The evidence cited for conspiracy and intent to commit crimes includes distributing flyers, social media posts, recording the police, writing legal support numbers on their arms, and using encrypted messaging apps such as Signal.
More recently, the conspiracy charges against the community bail fund collective have been dropped. It’s likely the state knew all along that the charges were baseless, but prosecuted them anyway, with the goal of intimidating activists.
This is the real criminal conspiracy: the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are conspiring to thwart expression of the popular will through official channels, and to criminalize protests.
The police training center, dubbed “Cop City” by activists, is broadly unpopular in Atlanta. City Council hearings on the subject have generated hours of public testimony, overwhelmingly in opposition to the project. Opponents of the training center have collected twice as many signatures as required for a ballot initiative to stop public funding for the center, only to be stymied by bad-faith legal maneuvers by the city to keep the measure off the ballot.
This is the real criminal conspiracy: the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are conspiring to thwart expression of the popular will through official channels, and to criminalize protests, effectively closing off all avenues for the public to have a say in a project that impacts them.
Creeping Authoritarianism
Authoritarian governments are on the rise worldwide, in Russia, India, Hungary, and elsewhere.
But increasingly, authoritarianism isn’t a feature of overtly authoritarian governments alone. Nominally liberal democracies are turning to authoritarian methods to crush popular dissent against the status quo favored by the elite. This status quo includes support for a belligerent, lawless Israel to uphold Western geopolitical interests in the Middle East, and unwavering loyalty to the powerful, politically connected fossil fuel industry.
This is highly relevant to our organizing today. Keeping overtly far-right political parties out of power (as French voters did recently) is essential, but insufficient. Recent events in France, where President Emmanuel Macron is refusing to honor the election results, confirm the ongoing threats to democracy even when the far right is not in power.
Movements for democracy need to understand, name, and confront creeping authoritarianism in so-called free countries, regardless of who is in power.
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