Remember when Elon Musk was just your friendly neighbourhood rocket-launching, electric-car-making billionaire? Or even further back to when Twitter offered a revolutionary and democratic free flow of news and ideas?
Me too. But ever since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X, he appears to have embraced his alter-ego as the dark lord of thought control. Devoted X users soon noticed a spike in disinformation and far-right rage farming. Over time, Musk purportedly rigged X’s algorithms in his own favour, amassing over 217 million followers, about a third of X users. He now has the platform’s largest account, exceeding second-place rival Barack Obama by a whopping 65 percent.
Musk’s relationship to power grew even more worrying last year when he donated US$277 million to help re-elect Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency and to boost other Republican candidates. Over the fall, Musk treated his X followers to a daily barrage of pro-Trump posts. After his re-election, Trump rewarded the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, making Musk co-leader of a new Department of Government Efficiency.
This means that a member of Trump’s administration — now dubbed the president’s “first buddy” — also holds one of the world’s biggest megaphones.
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We’re alarmed, but are we surprised? This is Trump’s America. It’s also Nazi-saluting Musk’s. If you’re rich enough, you can bend the rules in your own favour and wield unprecedented power — even unelected. Or as Black American author and theologian Danté Stewart writes in his soul-searching cover story, “What Can a Broken Heart Do?”, “We live in a country of bullies, American bullies…who can only feel powerful when someone is less than them, who can only feel free when another person is bound.”
Post-election despair runs deep and wide. At Broadview, we received an outpouring of letters from readers grieving the results and trying to make sense of a chaotic world. But we also heard strong encouragement for our commitment to authentic, ethical, fact-based journalism. So as a very small stand against the tide of propaganda, Broadview is leaving Twitter and joining the “X-odus” to a newer platform called Bluesky.
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Started in 2019 and now owned by American software engineer Jay Graber, Bluesky saw a huge influx of new users after the U.S. election, many of them journalists, actors, artists, academics and liberal progressives. With about 30 million users, Bluesky is still small compared to X’s over 600 million. But it’s growing in popularity as it offers better control of what appears in users’ feeds and improved mechanisms to reduce toxicity.
I don’t pretend that our departure from X is a grand political statement or constitutes meaningful activism. It won’t change the next four years or heal the hearts of those who believe America has lost its humanity.
It does allow us to exit the echo chambers of hate and fear mongering, and to align our online presence with our values of compassion and equity. It’s where we need to be. If you’d like to join us on Bluesky, we’re at @broadviewmedia.bsky.social.
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Jocelyn Bell is the editor and publisher of Broadview.
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