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The platform plays an important role in broadening debate and spreading accurate information, however much Gary Lineker may now dislike it
Gary Lineker may be the biggest whiner on the internet, but he’s right about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter – or ‘X’ as it’s now known. The app really has gone downhill since the billionaire bought it and introduced new features like monetisation, which sees popular accounts rewarded for their (over) use of the platform.
This profit-sharing scheme gives eligible users a cut of any revenue X makes on the adverts that appear alongside their posts.
The idea was to boost engagement – which it did – and encourage prolific users without a plum BBC job to spend more time on the app, which they have.
But the problem with monetisation is that to make a post go viral on X (and thus earn ad revenue), you have to mimic the sort of histrionics perfected by Lineker – who has amassed 8.8 million followers with his puddle-deep, attention-seeking takes on everything from immigration to Brexit.
Keen to cash in, the app has effectively been taken over by an army of users since monetisation, who are flooding X with hyperbolic, pearl-clutching demoralising posts on topics most Britons are rightly concerned about, like “two-tier policing” and the Government’s contempt for free speech.
These people are shameless. They’re the kind of doom-peddlers who told their followers that “there’s no point voting” just weeks ago, only to now try to exploit their followers’ fears about the Labour Government and its apparent lurch towards greater control.
But while they may have crowded out Lineker and the other Left-wingers who once dominated X (no loss there), they’ve also made it much harder for those of us on the pro-free-speech Right to find all the deep, insightful and nuanced discussions that once made the platform so addictive.
Fed up, I quietly deactivated my account last Saturday.
However, unlike when I deleted my original Twitter years ago, I find that this time I’m itching to reactivate my account before it is lost forever.
The app means a lot to me. Its users kept me sane during the gaslighting and government-sanctioned disinformation of the coronavirus era. In fact, I rejoined Twitter in 2020 specifically to hear alternative voices during the pandemic, having lost all confidence in the supposed experts, whose “facts” seemed to contradict much of what they’d previously claimed – and everything I was seeing in the real world.
On Twitter, I found an escape full of Nobel Prize winners, top statisticians and ex-World Health Organisation scientists who, free from the shackles of Ofcom censorship, were able to debunk every laughable claim made by Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Boris Johnson in real time.
Yes, the censorship and manipulation of the Covid period was unique – as this newspaper’s publication of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages revealed.
But X users also knew the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the fact that Russia likely didn’t bomb its own gas pipeline, years before Lineker’s employers confirmed there were doubts about those official narratives, let alone that the “conspiracy theories” were true.
And this is why I’m struggling to not rejoin.
X may have its cranks, and there may be plenty of easily verifiable nonsense on there. But I already feel strangely ill-informed without it.