This post was inspired by something that has been bothering me about the exodus from Twitter: the moral pressure to leave that is being exerted on those who – for now – out of necessity still remain there.
While, of course, I see the danger of autocratic plutocrats controlling our global communication infrastructure, and yes, we should move toward publicly owned social media platforms, we face a practical dilemma. Ideally, we’d instantly switch to a smooth, decentralized, user-friendly Fediverse-like infrastructure that prevents dictatorial control while maintaining effective global reach for mass emancipatory movements. Sadly, we don’t live in that ideal world. In reality, Twitter (which I refuse to call X, as Twitter is the community, while X is the hijacked technical platform) remains a powerful global network for climate action, Gaza advocacy, COVID research, and many other similar, often fragile social movements.
So we face a choice: leave en masse abruptly, considerably weakening these forces for common good. Or we can continue limited advocating via Twitter in a targeted, sensible manner, while actively working toward platforms that operate seamlessly across global, user-friendly networks (unlike Mastodon now) and are not vulnerable to potential future venture capitalist takeover (unlike Bluesky…).
Let’s develop and effectively scale new global public communications infrastructures, but not abruptly destroy fragile advocacy networks that currently have no other effective channels. Self-defeating by throwing out existing advocacy network babies with the trolls’ bathwater, instead of resisting and re-organizing with care, only further strengthens the rise of autocracy and fascism. At minimum, let’s avoid judging those who need their current, imperfect but vital global technical network, while helping them transition smoothly to alternatives.
