Politico published a fatuous piece today exhorting Democrats to stay with Elon’s hellhole because … well, I guess they think that hapless lefties battling an onslaught of Nazis and other assorted assholes all day will somehow convert people to their cause? Apparently, some Democrats I otherwise respect think this is true as well.
Two days after the election, Patrick Dillon, a longtime Democratic strategist and current Biden administration official, announced on X that he was leaving the platform… Dillon, who currently serves as adviser to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, is of course not alone. You may well have seen it in your timelines already: a growing drumbeat of Democrats and left-leaning types announcing why they’re leaving the platform. In just the few weeks since the election, that has included former CNN anchor Don Lemon, basketball star LeBron James, author Stephen King, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
But the situation is a bit more complicated for Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections. It might seem a trivial matter, but the trend has prompted a larger debate that encapsulates the many other conversations the liberal ecosystem — elected officials, Hill staffers, administration aides, activists, lobbyists, opinion-shapers and beyond — is having in the wake of Trump’s election win: Should left-leaning people and Democratic voters wall MAGA off as much as possible and hope that eventually it suffocates? Or try even harder to meet those voters where they are, or at least understand them?
The reasons the leavers are giving are plentiful.
“There’s no pretend at this point,” said Dillon when I called to ask him about his decision to quit X. “This is a vehicle to support [Musk’s] political views and his candidates.” He also pointed to what he saw as a decline in quality of the platform — “trash ads and scammy replies and porn bots” — and the fact that, as he saw it, one of its core functions, reaching out to journalists, has become suspect given questions over whether Musk might be willing to violate the privacy of the site’s direct-messaging tools.
But key, said Dillon, is Musk’s hijacking of the site to his own political ends.
In conversations with a wide range of other left-leaning insiders, his concerns were fairly typical. Among those who were leaving or contemplating it, the most prominent reasons included Musk’s push to not just rollback the platform’s once robust filtering of what it judged misinformation and bullying but to what some researchers have said is tilting the site to boost Donald Trump’s chances.
Others, though, argue that the statistically significant dip in Democratic users over time is a worrying trend and that the so-called self-deplatforming of progressives is ultimately self-defeating.
“If we leave X, it will help Elon with his goal of making the platform void of any progressive ideology or the way we think about the world,” Maxwell Frost, a 27-year-old member of Congress from Florida, told me, “and leave it to the Charlie Kirks and Tim Pools of the world to fill it up with what they believe.”
“Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections.”
How’s that working out for us?
If Democratic operatives and pugilistic types want to fight all day with creepy wingnuts and Russian bots, godspeed. But you cannot expect normal people to waste their time doing that when there is an alternative that instead provides actual information and respectful disagreement. (Believe me, there are plenty of the latter on Bluesky, it just isn’t with Trump cultists who are impervious to logic and fact.)
I mean, look at the bullshit that is crawling all over my twitter feed these days. And it’s endless. You can spend hours, days blocking it.
I’m not going to share the Nazi garbage. The engagement is non-existent except for Trumper jackasses screaming in the replies about how stupid and ugly I am. Life is short.
I still go over there for the animals, which I love. And from time to time there’s something there that I can’t find on BS. But those times are getting more and more infrequent as more people migrate.
My Bluesky handle is @digby56.bsky.social