Since November 5, the declarations have been piling up: I'm leaving X/Twitter/this platform that's become toxic. They have come from ordinary people, celebrities (the very active Stephen King, Barbra Streisand, Alyssa Milano, who had helped launch the #MeToo movement), companies (Best Buy, Target) and the media (American radio network NPR, The Guardian, Ouest-France). Some went to Threads, others to Mastodon, or even to Bluesky. The latter, developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, seems to be the main beneficiary of this digital migration. The platform racked up over 7 million new users in the two weeks following the US presidential election and now boasts over 22 million – the count is kept here in real time.

Since he bought the social media platform in 2022, billionaire Elon Musk has exploited its operations to serve his own interests and opinions, and violent content and fake news have been propagated there. It has been repeatedly documented that hate messages were liked and shared more than others there, and that fake news circulated more and faster than factual messages.

He made verification, which allows posts to have higher status, into a paid feature, then modified the content moderation policies, allowing the reinstatement of previously banned accounts – including the most notorious, that of Donald Trump.

In August 2023, Musk announced that the platform would no longer allow users to block accounts. His own posts, meanwhile, benefit from a multiplier of 1,000, making exposure to his tweets and sharing of often unreliable content almost inevitable. "X is a machine for creating fragmentation and bipolarization within society," said David Chavalarias, director of research at CNRS and author of Toxic Data (Flammarion, 2022). In other words, its effects aren't only measured on X.

Would we have signed up for this platform if it had been presented to us in this way? Probably not. Unless you're enchanted by the picture, the moral dilemma is quickly resolved: To be on X is to give an audience, and therefore weight, to a toxic platform that aims to destroy traditional media.

So why are we reluctant to leave? "Because it's impossible," said a former journalist still stuck in his old ways. "Twitter still dictates the news. We don't know how to think anymore other than by looking at what topics are coming up, and who's reacting to what." He did set up an account on Bluesky, where he's found "good people, with whom [he] got along well on Twitter. It's like being in a neighborhood bar." His impression, in a nutshell? "It's dull." He's not the only one with a guilty taste for X.

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