As of today (20th of January 2025), Ballot Box Scotland will no longer post on Twitter/”X”. Whilst I had intended on sticking around until the one year marker ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, Elon Musk’s spreading of far right conspiracy theories targeting the UK Government earlier this month made it impossible to continue.
I am two days short of it being seven whole years since I launched this project, but this is absolutely not the end of Ballot Box Scotland. This website will continue as before and, after months of parallel-posting, Bluesky @ballotbox.scot will continue as my sole shortform outlet, with the same content that used to go on Twitter.
Twitter Isn't Fun
I am honestly sad to finally chuck Twitter. I created my first account in 2008, and then had my longest running personal account starting 2009, before deleting it in the first half of 2024. Twitter was how I met my two closest friends, and we even had a nice little day out to celebrate ten years of friendship in 2023! I wouldn’t know or be friends with most of the people I am now without it.
Yet, simply put, Twitter isn’t fun or useful anymore. Even as it got more intense over the years it still had a lot of enjoyable absurdity. It also used to be the case that blue ticks were actual verified figures of some note, even if some were also roasters. Now, it’s an absolute hellscape, having gotten infinitely worse since Musk took over.
Hate speech against LGBTI+ folk like me is now particularly commonplace. Witness any queer person or ally with any public role being labelled as a “deviant”, “groomer” or “paedophile” by now functionally unblockable bigots – egged on, frankly, by some elected representatives who’ve decided there’s votes in treating us monstrously.
Blue ticks got misrepresented as an unearned mark of an elite, which was solved by making it available to any idiot with a few dollars. That bought them first-seen response to tweets privilege, despite their complete lack of anything useful to say. If that wasn’t enough, the platform has become unusable anyway, flooded by bots that Musk promised to delete and the last dregs of advertisements consisting of crypto scammers, dropshippers, pseudoscience fraudsters, and inane platitudes from airheaded tech bros.
"Please, somebody like me even though I'm terminally divorced, my kids hate me, and I'm hiring people to play games on my behalf so I can pretend to be a gamer"
In the most tragic case of wanting desperately to be liked and funny ever witnessed in human history, despite not being likeable or funny, Musk has gone all-in on pandering to the far right. That has obviously been a large part of the exodus, that massively exploded after the US election result last November.
Some on the right have taken the timing of this exodus as proof of bias against their side of the spectrum, seemingly forgetting that Musk’s whole schtick initially was that Twitter shouldn’t be biased. He felt it was too left (in the US context) leaning, and instead it should have been a “Global Town Square” that acted without fear or favour of either side.
Then he actively campaigned for, turned his algorithms towards boosting, and pathetically yet successfully angled for a job in Trump’s administration. He has spread the most outrageous bollocks about foreign leaders he opposes. He has platformed the German far-right as they peddle historically illiterate nonsense about the Nazis having been “communists” and on the left. Those are not the actions of a neutral person, running a neutral platform, to say nothing of how his changes to moderation and verification processes have been far from unbiased.
It was never a "Global Town Square" and if you thought it was, that's a problem
The worst thing about the “Global Town Square” notion though isn’t that it was weird phrasing Musk came up with only to immediately abandon, but instead it was genuinely how far too many people in positions of power and influence had come to view the site. The very important right to free speech has often lately been unhelpfully recast as the right to a platform and audience. Twitter has accordingly ended up at the forefront of the pushback against any idea that maybe people have an equal right not to be force-fed a constant stream of bile and hatred.
In reality, Twitter has always been a highly selective bubble. Only a minority of the population have (had) a Twitter account. Only a minority of those people post(ed) on a regular basis. And only a minority of those people do (did) so primarily about politics. Yet this minority of a minority of a minority included almost every single politician, journalist, academic, think tanker, charity/NGO, lobbyist and general political activist or obsessive.
Since everyone who actually “did politics” on a daily basis was there, far too many users mistook it, either consciously or subconsciously, for an accurate reflection of society. These users included all the people who actually hold varying levers of power. Yet it isn’t reflective. It never was. It never can be. Because those of us – myself included – who obsess over politics are fundamentally weirdos.
We don’t think and act like ordinary voters. That’s why things like trans rights have ended up so all-consuming, even as polling told us most voters don’t view it as important, and indeed that they think politicians are talking about it too much. Voters want action on things like energy bills, childcare and the NHS, but when half of your replies are howling about where trans women go to pee, it warps your perceptions about what matters to others.
Wringing your poor little hands about the damage that could be done to democracy by the left abandoning the site is trying to close the barn door after the barn was nuked from orbit. Large numbers of you let Twitter completely rot your brains and radicalise you into believing the most unhinged bollocks. Now the best you can come up with is some kind of social obligation for people to make themselves the targets on a website dedicated to putting others on that pipeline? No thanks.
Quitting won't fix things overnight, but it'll make a lot of people feel better
Even a mass ditching Twitter isn’t going to immediately solve anything in our politics. It isn’t going to fix the world. It isn’t going to eradicate hatred from our politics. It isn’t going to make politicians any more courageous. It isn’t going to make papers publish less utter nonsense.
What it will do in the short term is make a lot of people’s daily lives better, as we stop exposing ourselves to a constant stream of bile that our species simply didn’t evolve to handle. And in the longer term, if drop-off in Twitter use also leads to drop off in views and clicks, further eroding the social and economic value of being on the website and feeding its worst instincts, perhaps the door to an even marginally better political arena might open.
Elon Musk, true to past form, decided that instead of starting from scratch with his own oh-so-clever idea, he’d just buy someone else’s and try and change it to fit his whims. And so, Twitter was to become X, the Everything App. How it will attain that status when so many of the people that were its lifeblood for 15 years want nothing to do with it and have abandoned it, I have no idea. I’m certainly not sticking around to find out.
Zuckerberg is an equally contemptible little worm as well, by the way
Even in the couple of weeks between drafting this and publishing it, Facebook (/Meta) are following Twitter’s lead in capitulating to America’s renewed swing back to the far right. Increasingly, media platforms both traditional and social are being turned into pipelines for hatred, lies and conspiracy theorising, all partly so some of the wealthiest men on this earth, who have already caused serious harm to many, can suck up to Donald Trump. This is at best the most execrable cowardice on the part of some truly pathetic worms, and at worst a mask-off moment for where these new oligarchs always wanted to take things but felt unable.
Trump, today becoming President of the most powerful country on this earth, has openly talked about his wishes to annex NATO allies, in whole or in part, which even as a “joke” would once have been deemed completely beyond the pale for a world leader. America is descending into complete and utter unregulated idiocy, and the rest of the world apparently has to suffer the consequences thanks to the dominance of these media oligarchs in the global arena. There are senior politicians in this country falling over themselves to lick these people’s boots. Pathetic.
I rarely make explicit partisan points on Ballot Box Scotland, but I have never had less hope for the future of this planet and species as I do now. This is beyond simply “ah, well, my side of the divide isn’t in charge at the moment.” This isn’t the first time that’s been the case! I didn’t feel like this previously! We have absolutely completely and utterly, if you’ll excuse me, shat it as a species.
Gods, what a mess.
I'm still on Bluesky, until it also goes evil
As a reminder, Ballot Box Scotland can still be found on Bluesky @ballotbox.scot, where all the same content as used to go on Twitter will remain available. My old Twitter account will remain as an archive. This website will continue as normal.