One of the grimmest things about this election was watching news journalists performing their jocular cynicism and earnest triangulation on Elon Musk's website. That sort of thing has become suddenly more disreptuable (ahem). Coincidentally, The Guardian, based in the U.K., is calling it quits there.
We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere. … Thankfully, we can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants' algorithms – instead we're funded directly by our readers.
A good decision. Social media is addictive and offers many perverse incentives to let it become what you see, hear and understand about the world and other people. Twitter is infested with right-wing messaging and inauthentic content. It's the personal website of the incoming president's Brown Eminence. There are less compromising places to do whatever it is you do. And all this becomes weirder and more alarming when it's institutions doing it.
Meanwhile, Techcrunch reports that Bluesky and Threads are getting a lot of Twitter quitters piling in.
Bluesky's decentralized social media platform has steadily grown from 9+ million users as of September to 14.6+ million as of Tuesday, with the latest surge taking place over the weekend as U.S. users fled X.
The exodus briefly made Bluesky the No. 2 iPhone app in the U.S. App Store on Monday, up from No. 27 the day after the elections. Today, it's dropped slightly to No. 3, behind Meta's Threads and ChatGPT.
Stories like this tend to represent fleeting sentiments, not trends. While Twitter has declined sharply as a business, it still claims hundreds of millions of daily users.
