I have been on Twitter (now X) for a long time now. It is the platform where I had the largest reach, and also it was the platform where most political and activist discord was at. But ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter things have been changing.

While far from perfect, Twitter had algorithms and reviewers to remove hateful content including those that are racist, homophobic and transphobic. But Republicans claimed that this algorithm has been designed to de-platform Twitter accounts of Republicans and conservatives. Twitter has recently released the source code for the algorithm and I have taken some time to study it.

While not a full analysis of the entire algorithm, I did find parts of the algorithm that did filter out hateful content, lies, misleading information, violence and many other harmful things. What I have not saw in the algorithm though was in any way targeting Republicans and conservatives in any way. But what I did see was parts of the algorithm that was explicitly intended to check it’s results to see how it compares the impact of Democrats vs Republicans to ensure any changes in the ranking criteria wouldn’t proportionately impact either side.

If many Republicans are complaining that their accounts are not getting as much reach as they used to, I will let you come to your own conclusion as to why.

One of the goals that Elon Musk had when buying Twitter was to open it up for Freedom of Speech. While doing so he un-banned many accounts that were banned for hateful content which also signaled to many Racists, Homophobes, Transphobes, Islamophobes that they would be welcome on Twitter.

Since then, most of the employees have been laid off from Twitter or have voluntary left when given the option to do so. Twitter now has a fraction of their employees left from when Elon Musk took it over. Some people who have been laid off explicitly were asked back because they held critical responsibilities within the company.

I have been noticing a sharp rise of bugs of different functions of Twitter, or outages of the entire platform itself. This is when I decided that I needed to leave Twitter.

From various laws internationally almost all social platforms gives an option for users to download their data, and an option to delete their entire account. But I was concerned that because these are features that are not used regularly deep in the settings if they stopped working it could go unnoticed for a while or de-prioritized as they are very niche functionalities.

I believe that Twitter itself will continue to run for a very long time but while doing so it will slowly accumulate issues till one day it fails. I just had to leave while I was still able to control my content. I am sad to see the current state of Twitter and I will miss it.