If you believe in basic common decency, now is the time to click the X and leave Twitter… er, X. (CW: sexual assault, some coarse language.)

Let’s cut to the chase. The Social Media And Elon Musk Vanity Project Formerly Known As Twitter banned a user this week who had posted actual child sexual abuse material (CSAM)… and the site’s owner reinstated his account. Reinstated. After the image was blocked by Twitter’s moderation team (heavily gutted but apparently at least still on the job), but not before it was viewed potentially three million times according to Twitter’s own statistics.

What the actual fuck?

From the Washington Post:

“The image was taken from one of the most notorious child abuse videos in the world, made by Peter Gerard Scully, an Australian sentenced in 2022 to life in prison plus 129 years for rape, human trafficking and the sexual abuse of children as young as 18 months.”

Bloody hell.

“Such controversies could undermine Twitter’s ability to win back advertisers who have fled the social network due to concerns over Musk’s leadership and content moderation views. Earlier this month, Musk tweeted that the company’s advertising revenue had suffered a “50% drop.””

Gee. I wonder why. Who on earth wants to be associated with that? Why would you, as an advertiser, want to have your brand anywhere near Twitter when millions of people are exposed to that kind of material? And it’s not even the first time, after Twitter’s autocomplete search function was recommending pet torture videos to people back in May. (NBC report)

The user claimed they were ‘exposing’ the material (they apparently post a lot of conspiracy theories and accusations of paedophilia) and was reportedly reinstated despite Twitter’s own policy that states the rules apply “regardless of the intent”.

---

I really didn’t want to be doing another “OMG Twitter sucks” article immediately after the last one. Like a lot of people who start blogs, then abandon them, then refocus them, then pause writing because real life gets in the way but still have a notebook full of cool ideas, I just ended up at a point where I want to write other things, but this one issue keeps cropping up.

And I really didn’t want to be doing a post as miserable as this one. Twitter has been a community, a news source, a connection for so long that it really hurts to be abandoning it. I hoped that at least we could do some funny shitposting on the way out the door at least, remembering at least some of the good things that Twitter contributed to. Nonsense accounts like @dril, or bot accounts that insert daily weirdness into your life like Possum Every Hour, or Breaking Bad Frame By Frame, or The Same Picture Of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs Every Day.

We could have at least had an amusing source of fresh schadenfreude, listing all the other ways that Twitter/X owner, meme thief and part-time epidemiologist Elon Musk has been, to quote one Something Awful forums user:

“Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes except he also owns the rake factory and a company that exists solely to place rakes in his path”

And you know you’ve messed up, and badly, when Something Awful has the high moral ground.

---

Earlier in the week I had a draft of this post where we could just point at laugh at Musk’s ill-advised rebranding of Twitter as “X”. And there’s a lot of material there.

• That the rebrand seems to have been done on a whim in the middle of the night on Saturday, as evidenced by Musk soliciting logo ideas from his followers and settling on the new X mark in a matter of hours
• That the logo version of “X” is actually from a free Unicode font and will be extremely difficult to trademark, if possible at all (Ars Technica report)
• That there are already multiple apps in the App Store called “X”, making discoverability (and the potential for dodgy apps masquerading as the real thing) a huge problem
• That he can’t trademark some of the other potential uses for “X”, such as X itself (trademarked by Microsoft’s Xbox division and Facebook’s streaming arm), X Japan (a rock band), Xstream (in use in various parts of the world as a game, an XML conversion library and multiple streaming apps) and Xvideos (an… ahem, adult entertainment site)
• That the confusion between X/Twitter and Xvideos resulted in Twitter’s new X.com domain being blocked by the Indonesian government, locking out a nation of 270 million people (Al Jazeera report)
• Forcibly taking away the user accounts of “X” (owned by a San Francisco-based photographer, interviewed here by Mashable) and “xAI” (for use by Musk’s new artificial intelligence startup, previously the handle of a user in Japan, again interviewed by Mashable)
• Partially removing the Twitter signage at their San Francisco headquarters, only for police to stop the process due to not having street closure permits (BBC report)
• Starting to erect a two-storey-tall X logo on the roof of the building, and again being stopped by city officials for not having construction permits (Associated Press report)
• Going ahead with the sign and fitting it with obnoxious strobe lighting (Tweet by @itsmefrenchy123)

The San Francisco building, by the way, is the same one where Musk tried to hire unlicensed contractors to install more bathrooms, prompting his Lead Project Manager of Construction to resign in December (Business Insider report).

Sorry for linking to video, but this is what the monstrosity actually looks like (video is about 30 seconds):

I would be fucking LIVID. Imagine this fucking X sign right across from your bedroom. #x #twitter pic.twitter.com/FH4nqcS8oy

— kyle (still hates elon) (@itsmefrenchy123) July 29, 2023

In addition to the rebrand shenanigans, we had the usual run of the common-or-garden terrible management decisions that have been Musk’s trademark since taking over:

• At least temporarily falling foul of the Scunthorpe Problem, and banning any Japanese users with the ‘-shita’ suffix in their usernames despite that being a common feature in Japanese names… potentially including electronics giant Matsushita, which owns Panasonic. (Tweet by Japanese user highgai)

• Arbitrarily deciding to get rid of the ability to view the site on a white background, insisting that “dark mode is better in every way” because who cares about accessibility, right guys? (Tweet by Elon Musk)

• Backing down on that claim just hours later, but removing an option to dim the display in light mode (according to Gizmodo)
• Starting to make payments for shared ad revenue to select Twitter users- and by ‘select’ I mean ‘about 20 total’, including the aforementioned CSAM poster, YouTuber MrBeast (who could make more money picking his nose in a single 2-minute livestream than Twitter paid him in July), and accused rapist and human trafficker and all-around asshole Andrew Tate.
• Oh yeah, you can’t be considered for those payments for exposure unless you already pay USD$8 a month for Twitter Blue.
• Threatening corporate accounts with revocation of their ‘gold tick’ accredited status unless they meet a minimum advertising spend each month ($12,000 per year in ads, in addition to the $1,000 per year for the gold tick, according to the Wall Street Journal). (WSJ report, paywalled; The Verge report, not paywalled.)
• Placing those ads next to tweets from an Australian (sigh) neo-Nazi group on a verified account (Media Matters report)

At this point, Twitter (and yes, I’m deadnaming the service because ‘X’ is a stupid name) is brand and reputational poison. The ownership is not just allowing malicious conduct and questionable (if not outright) material, it is actively encouraging and rewarding it. And continuing to post there is passively rewarding the same behaviour.

There will be questions from people who want to leave- where to go next? BlueSky has significant moderation problems (as in, it has none), and Meta’s Threads is threadbare in terms of features and its content is heavily sanitised in favour of The Brands™ (not to mention Threads’ ownership is terrible and exploitative in its own, unique ways). There is always Mastodon, a collection of smaller communities (and part of the Fediverse, a group of open systems that can replace Instagram, YouTube and more); it’s subtly different to Twitter but has no ads and no algorithms. You can learn more here, and you can find me as @ozhoopsdrek@mastodon.social. Mastodon has its issues, but if you find yourself on a server with a terrible owner or dodgy moderation policies, you can just move your account somewhere else.

And at the moment, literally anywhere else is a better choice than Twitter. Elon Musk has made the site totally unusable from a brand and image standpoint; he’s rapidly trying to make the site unusable, fullstop. It’s time to click a different X; the one in the top right of the window, that closes the app for good.