From the moment I heard Elon Musk was considering buying Twitter, I knew things were going to go downhill. My husband had clued me in years earlier with his scathing criticisms of the tech billionaire’s behavior, and while I’m prone to try to see the best in people until absolutely proven otherwise, Liam turns out to be a pretty good judge of character the vast majority of the time.
When Musk first made his intentions to buy the platform clear, I tweeted in April 2022 that I was “not leaving Twitter because I have a responsibility to share news with my audience here” even as I predicted that Twitter was “going to tank in the coming years under Musk.”
So even after his takeover late that year began wreaking havoc on the platform, which he ultimately renamed X, I tried hard to hang on. I’d invested a lot in that platform over the past 15 years or so; it wasn’t easy for a Mississippi journalist to build a following of over 50,000 people on any social-media platform. Where else would I be able to share our Mississippi Free Press stories to such a wide audience?
Plus, I’d found many interesting people on there over the years. Leaving wouldn’t just mean leaving a platform and followers—it would mean leaving a community and friends. So even as the hordes of unmoderated and abusive trolls, porn bots and crypto bros flooded in, I clung on. “Your voice is needed there,” I’d tell myself, reflecting sentiments others had shared.
@media ( min-width: 300px ){.newspack_global_ad.scaip-1{min-height: 99px;}}@media ( min-width: 320px ){.newspack_global_ad.scaip-1{min-height: 99px;}}@media ( min-width: 728px ){.newspack_global_ad.scaip-1{min-height: 90px;}}
I signed up for and tried the alternatives that kept popping up. Mastodon, which was cumbersome with its requirement to pick a server when signing up; Post News, the now-defunct social platform that launched in November 2022 and shut down in April 2024 due to slow growth; Threads, Meta’s wannabe-Twitter-replacement that suppresses accounts that post about news and “politics” and where a third of the posts sound like a corporate committee drafted them; and BlueSky, which felt like
Read original article by clicking here.