The Wilton Democratic Town Committee announced Sunday (Nov. 19) that it will leave X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. A press release issued by the DTC said the organization will no longer use the platform “in response to X owner Elon Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
Musk commented on a recent post by a user that said Jews had brought antisemitism on themselves after promoting “dialectical hatred against whites” by supporting immigration of “hordes of minorities” who don’t like Jews. Musk agreed with the post, writing, “You have said the actual truth.”
The post has been widely regarded as perpetuating an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews promote the replacement of White people by encouraging immigration — a theory that motivated the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 in which 11 Jewish worshipers were murdered, and was asserted by Neo-Nazis that marched in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic content on X has risen dramatically since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel — by more than 900%.
Musk’s comment has been criticized by advertisers, several of which have paused advertising on the platform, including Apple, IBM, Disney anymore. It has also been condemned by the White House.
The DTC said it was joining “others, including Connecticut Attorney General Tong, in taking this step.”
Wilton DTC Chair Tom Dubin acknowledged that the group is “small fish leaving Twitter” but hopes the DTC’s move will inspire others to do the same.
“We recognize that social media companies face challenges in balancing free expression versus hate speech that cripples free expression. But when a site’s owner trumpets his anti-semitism and demonstrates that he is not committed to achieving such balance, it does not deserve support,” Dubin said.
This is good, and I’d note that many other Wilton organizations are quietly doing the same thing – GMW doesn’t appear to have posted anything to their Twitter account since April, and according to the Miller-Driscoll Twitter account, the school district’s Twitter CMS integration broke in late October and they’re “actively seeking alternatives.”
Also, as far as those alternatives go: Threads seems to be the most logical choice for most local organizations, since it’s about the only one likely to have a meaningful number of Wilton residents on it in the near future, it favors algorithmic over timeline feeds (so you don’t have to tediously cultivate a list of follows to find it useful), and it’s very easy for people to join, since it piggybacks off of your Instagram account. And whatever your concerns with Meta/Facebook, they do, for the most part, behave like grown-ups.
Bluesky is probably the most similar to early Twitter in terms of vibes / interface (though it’s gotten a little more crowded and troll-y the last few weeks), but is currently invitation-only, and only has like 2 million users on it – even statewide organizations have little reason to be on there yet. They also need to get much more serious about content moderation, they’ve been kind of leaning heavily on the invite system for that so far. But there’s definitely the potential for it to take off next year with federation + public feeds, and it’s frankly a lot better designed and more pleasant to use than Threads is.
Mastodon is intriguingly open, anyone can run their own server and federate with the others, and it has a lot more users than Bluesky, but most of them seem to be of the Extremely Online variety, and they’re allergic enough to algorithmic feeds / searches that finding people to follow is very difficult, so I don’t see it taking off with regular users in the near future.
Thanks for noticing. We have backed away from Twitter/X. Not such a GOOD place anymore!
Smart move, DTC. The RTC has been concerned about the tone of the discourse on X(Twitter) and not been on it at all.
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Thank you DTC. I left Twitter shortly after Musk acquired it due to his right-wing and biased tendencies, which were evident at that time, but these recent comments are truly frightening.