We’re leaving X

A platform's freedom to operate is not a right to your attention.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter back in 2022, we told CBC news Canadians should give him the chance to prove his commitment to his principles. At the time, he was talking about the need to rein in the bots and child abuse content that plagued parts of Twitter. He called himself a fighter for the absolute right to freedom of expression.

If you’ve watched Twitter, now X, degrade since 2022, you know none of this proved true. Bots have not disappeared; they’ve multiplied. Elon Musk forced Twitter engineers to massively amplify his own posts, while the organic visibility for users who don’t pay for a checkmark has fallen off a cliff. And in the last few weeks, Musk dropped the guardrails on Grok, X’s AI bot, allowing it to produce and share on-demand sexualized deepfakes of children and women directly in their mentions. After a wave of global outcry, X is now promising to turn off this feature in countries where sexual deepfakes are illegal– while Grok continues to advertise the feature as a benefit of paid membership.

Some of this content is likely illegal in many states; some may be “lawful but awful”—difficult to target in the narrow definitions of any well-written law. As a freedom of expression community at our core, we are always balancing the social need to reduce harms on the Internet with every user’s right to access information and to express themselves. Many millions of people people continue to use X to assert those basic rights, which makes calls for a government ban of the entire platform a disproportionate approach.

But a platform’s right to exist is not a right to your time or your business. X can flood itself with AI-generated harassment if Musk wishes it to be so. He can refuse to moderate or manage the results. But none of us are obliged to pretend X is an effective online space for serious conversation if he does. It’s time to vote with our feet and take serious conversation elsewhere.

We know that’s not going to be easy for lots of people. Every major online network holds its users hostage through the power of the network effect; it is very hard to walk away from the connections you’ve formed on any service, no matter what you think of how that service is managed. That’s exactly why we’re fighting for platform data portability—letting you easily export your contacts if you leave a service—and interoperability, a technical standard that would let you message and see content from users you follow on platforms you’re not on.

So if you can’t leave X yet, we get it. You can keep sharing our work on X if it still makes sense for your personal network today. You will find us posting ourselves on Linkedin, Mastodon, Instagram, and Bluesky. And we’ll continue to explore other platforms to best serve you– we see you, Gander! 

Our X account will be archive-only starting from Jan 19, 2026.