Why The Hell Are You Still on Twitter?

It's Elon Musk's propaganda machine. It just helped him elect Donald Trump. Don't legitimize it.

Please fly away.

If you’re still on Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called, please tweet my latest New Republic piece. It argues that remaining on Twitter is morally indefensible now that the toxic multibillionaire Elon Musk has successfully bent its algorithms to help elect Donald Trump president (increasing his own net worth more than 10 percent in the bargain). Twitter is a propaganda machine for MAGA—a “white supremacist hellsite,” in the words of the tech journalist Farhad Manjoo, who knows this world far better than I—and liberals who remain there will only legitimize it. If my argument persuades you, and I hope it does, please delete your Twitter account after you post my piece. Or, if you prefer, delete it without posting my piece.

I direct this message not only to Backbencher readers but also to my employer, The New Republic, along with various other liberal publications, some of which I’ve written and/or worked for. For some reason they all remain on Twitter. It’s a bad neighborhood! Find another one: Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn … even Facebook is a better choice.

If you’re worried that deleting your Twitter account will make it harder to keep up with the news, then subscribe to one more newspaper. If you cancelled your Washington Post or Los Angeles Times or New York Times subscription, this is a good time to renew it, because you’ll need it. These are not perfect institutions, but they’re the best information sources we have, along with my former employers The Wall Street Journal (not the editorial page but the news columns) and Politico (whose main site is free). If none of these is your local newspaper, subscribe to that, too.

Also, I’d be thrilled if you’d subscribe to The New Republic. Some other good liberal publications worth your time are The Washington Monthly, The Nation, The American Prospect, Jacobin, Democracy Journal, Dissent, and Liberties. These magazines speak to different left-of-center points of view, some of which will likely drive you up the wall. But we’ll need to weigh all approaches as we figure out how to get through the next four years. This is no time for the eristic tribalism that social media (especially Twitter) has done so much to foster.

You can read my piece here.