Elon Musk has created a monster
It’s not entirely his fault.
Or at least, not just because he exists.
I wasn’t one of those who fled the day Twitter was bought, because I didn’t want to make decisions solely based on the fact that Musk had bought Twitter and I still wanted to see how things would evolve. Don’t get me wrong, I was never happy about Elon Musk acquiring Twitter. He’s not a character I particularly like — in fact, I openly despise him and consider him one of the most overrated figures in recent history. Just for the record, he didn’t create Tesla, he didn’t create SpaceX, he didn’t create PayPal, he didn’t create Neuralink, he didn’t create OpenAI. He just bought existing companies and rebranded them with his name. But that’s another story. I even stomached the ugliest rebrand in marketing history , with a horrendous logo, a name a 5-year-old could come up with, and an outdated UI.
So what broke? Why, after two years, did I finally decide to leave X.com?
To understand that, we need to look at Musk’s policy on X.com.
Musk's policy
Freedom of speech and the blue checkmark
I was never against Musk’s basic idea of wanting Twitter to be open to freedom of expression, yes, even in extreme cases. The problem arose from the mix of freedom of speech and the damned blue checkmark. Here’s the thing: on X.com anyone can get a blue checkmark, as long as they pay. It’s no longer a verification symbol, just a little star saying you have premium.
And you know what the main advantage of having the blue checkmark is? Your posts and replies are promoted over those without it. Especially for replies, they appear at the top of the list. Guess who the main users rushing to get subscriptions were? Obviously the extremists , the conspiracy theorists , the incels , and people who finally found someone to listen to them. In two years X.com has become a sewer. And this comes from someone who has always criticized, for example, the excessive moderation of Twitter’s Woke policies and other social networks. But every time I open X.com now, I feel like vomiting.
Fake news and conspiracy theories
Moreover, since there are no filters on what can be posted and the blue checkmark acts as a huge boost, fake news and conspiracy theories have skyrocketed.
Literally from February to today, my feed has been flooded with theories about how Pope Francis supposedly died on February 15th. Not to mention that for every single death from 2020 onwards (and for the next 50 years), there will always be someone saying it was because of the vaccine.
I even find chemtrail photos among the recommended posts.
Grok
Now I want to talk about something truly disturbing, which on the one hand shows the average intelligence level of X.com users, and on the other makes me feel like we already live inside Idiocracy. A while ago, Grok was launched — X.com’s AI — with an idealistic feature: you can mention it in threads to ask for an opinion on a topic.
Well, now you can open literally any post, even one where someone just opens a faucet and water comes out, and you’ll find dozens of people commenting:
@Grok, is it real?
@Grok, is it true?
@Grok, is it fake?
Now obviously it’s not the platform’s fault, but the level of people using X.com is truly embarrassing. It makes me realize that only the dumbest morons are left there.
The cult of Musk
Finally, I’ll close with the most nauseating thing of all: the cult of Musk.
X is full of ass-kissers who worship him like a god — and I’m not talking about random people; I’m talking about people with tens of thousands of followers writing delusional posts about how he’s the smartest person on Earth.
Literally, if you open any post like "Who is the most important person in history?" or anything similar, 90% of the answers are "Elon Musk."
A social network full of lobotomized people.
A thought on freedom of expression on social networks
Honestly, I still believe freedom of expression must be guaranteed — but not like this.
Is there a limit? Yes, that limit is truth. Spreading fake news in a completely unregulated way isn’t freedom of expression, it’s disinformation , and X.com is the lair of disinformation. There’s no moderation; you can even promote it, and one of the biggest spreaders of disinformation is the platform’s very own founder. Moreover, there’s another issue: if you want freedom of expression, you also have to guarantee that all opinions carry the same weight. And that’s impossible, because some opinions are more important than others. On X.com you just need to pay.
Where to go?
In the end, since I mostly used the platform for things related to open-source software development, I decided to move to Mastodon , so if you’d like to follow me, you can find me at @veeso_dev@hachyderm.io.
So far, I’m really enjoying it and no longer feel like a complete idiot.
Some others are considering BlueSky, but I don’t think it’s my vibe, so for now I’m sticking with Mastodon.