You might have noticed in the last month or so another round of users leaving X/Twitter. This has to do with another Elon Musk moment.
If you are still monitoring X/Twitter, you might have noticed a raft of users a while back saying that they have finally had enough and leave the platform. As a result, alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky got a huge influx of users as people leave the platform.
(Yes, I am a little late to the party in reporting it, but I finally got a moment to write about it.)
To be clear, there really isn’t much to look at on X/Twitter anymore. The platform has, for over a year now, devolved into a platform that contains little more than porn bots, drop shipping scams, crypto scams, hate, and rage farming. If you are seriously still daily driving that platform for your social media needs, you really only have yourself to blame for the horrid stuff that comes your way on that platform. Everyone knows what a cesspool that platform has become and this has been known for over a year now. You really should stop using the platform altogether unless you want to subject yourself to mental health problems.
… and it was precisely that decision what a lot of users ended up doing over the last few months. A whole bunch of users did leave the platform or started migrating to other platforms altogether. The reason why so many people have left the platform has to do with yet another Musk event. Specifically, he changed the Terms of Service (ToS) to allow for your content to be used to train his awful AI, Grok. From Social Media Today:
You may have seen a pop-up on X this week informing you of a change to its Terms of Service, which you have to agree to in order to continue using the app. The main change here relates to granting permission for X to use your data in its AI training, and by tapping through, and continuing to use the app, you’ve effectively given it permission to do so moving forward.
Congratulations, you’re now a contributor to xAI.
You can view the current and coming X Terms of Service for clarity, but the main change is in the “Your Rights and Grant of Rights in the Content” section of the document, which now includes more specific wording around your agreement to letting X use your posts to train its AI models.
A new element added to this section notes that:
“You agree that this license includes the right for us to analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
So, effectively, by agreeing to these terms, which, again, you’re doing by using the app, you’re granting X legal permission to use whatever you post to the platform to train its AI models.
As word spread, a number of users either left the platform altogether or announced that they are creating an alternate account on other platforms and started test driving their new accounts. It’s kind of odd that the constant vile hatred, scams, rage bating, and the overall state of X/Twitter wasn’t enough, but the moment that their information was being used to train their AI, well, that was the straw that broke the camels back for those users. Hey, fewer reasonable users on X/Twitter is a good thing, really.
Indeed, much of the engagement driven on the platform has been bot activity. I’ve lost track of how many times in the past I got a whole bunch of likes on a post only to find out that those likes came from porn bots spamming my account like crazy. Users, however, will only see 23 likes on the post and assume that it was real people liking my stuff when, in fact, it is fake engagement to, in part, drive up numbers. That alone should have been plenty of reason to ditch the platform altogether because the engagement on platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are generated by far more real users. That’s ultimately the engagement you want. 5,000 likes means nothing if none of them are from real people. It just puts a number on a screen.
At any rate, if you are still using X/Twitter as your main social media platform, for the love of God, stop. You are actually harming everyone involved including yourself. There’s literally no reason outside of being a far right extremist to use that platform in the first place. I wholly support the users decision to leave, regardless of the reason. Whether it is the knowledge that you are training an AI, the knowledge that you are helping Elon Musk destroy the country, or actually value your own well being and decided to get away from the cesspool of hate, all of these are perfectly valid reasons.
