Dear MPs, please leave Twitter. Now

There probably isn’t a lot which a grandfather from Redcar, in North Yorkshire, and a US senator from the Midwest have in common. They have never met and are unlikely to ever meet. Their lives couldn’t be more different. The former has almost certainly never heard of the latter, and the latter will definitely never hear of the former.

Still, today, each on their side of the Atlantic, there is something that unites them. It is August 20 and, if you opened the Guardian‘s website while drinking your morning coffee, you would have stumbled upon a story about Olajuwon Ayeni on its front page. Had you instead chosen to look at the landing page for the New York Times, you would have been able to click on an op-ed written by Amy Klobuchar.

Again, both stories are quite different. The first one started snowballing as Ayeni’s wife posted a video of her (Black) husband playing with their two (white) granddaughters on TikTok. Days later, the wholesome video was stolen from the platform and posted on X by Tommy Robinson, alongside the caption “Wtf is even going on here? Where are the parents?!”.

The far-right campaigner didn’t precisely spell out what he meant, but his 1.4 million followers got it. Ayeni and his wife now feel unable to leave the house, given the number of threats they’ve received. Someone went to their house and shouted “paedophile” outside the window; several people confronted them in the street before they decided to stay home.

“I feel unsafe, scared and sad”, Ayeni told the Guardian. “Someone said they will seek revenge and I’ll never walk again, all for just being in the park with the kids I love on a family day out”. Despite various pleas, the tweet remains online.

Halfway across the world, Klobuchar thankfully didn’t have to deal with such horrific real-life consequences, but the politician still had to get her head around something quite discombobulating. Earlier this summer, she scrolled past a video of her on X which had gone viral, having amassed over a million views. She didn’t recognise it, so clicked on it.

“That’s when I heard my voice – but certainly not me – spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney.”, she wrote. “The A.I. deepfake featured me using the phrase “perfect titties” and lamenting that Democrats were “too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside.” Though I could immediately tell that someone used footage [from a hearing] to make a deepfake, there was no getting around the fact that it looked and sounded very real.”

X refused to take down the video, or even mark it as “digitally altered content”. It didn’t matter that it was blatantly falsified, and that the person complaining was one of the most high-profile politicians in America. Twitter is a lawless place, and that was that.

Suggested Reading

Meeting a Rupert Lowe fan on the Piccadilly line

Marie Le Conte

Though there clearly is little any of us can do about Elon Musk’s platform encouraging harassment, bullying and mob rule, there is one step many people and organisations could – and should – take. They need to stop posting on X once and for all. The site has become an actively malignant force, and the playground of racists and fascists.

How can the government possibly justify still having accounts on there? How can members of Parliament? Prominent journalists? Of course, inertia is a powerful force, but can you imagine travelling a decade into the past and telling Labour politicians and BBC journalists that they would soon be happily using a platform which frequently encourages lynchings, and financially rewards violent xenophobia? They probably would have had a hard time believing you, yet there they are, unwilling to take a step in the right direction.

There isn’t much we, people who jumped ship some time ago can say that’s in any way novel or original, but we can and must repeat ourselves, endlessly and tediously, and remind those who are yet to move of what they’re enabling. Today it was Olajuwon Ayeni and Amy Klobuchar; tomorrow it will be a different Black person, and a different woman, and a different liberal politician. It will not stop. It will not get better.

It doesn’t even matter if the person being targeted is on Twitter or not, as I found out for myself this week. Former Reform MP Rupert Lowe posted something unpleasant about me, and I only found out about it because I was trying to understand why I’d been receiving abuse, seemingly out of nowhere, across the internet. Like toxic sludge, Twitter currently infects everything in its surrounding area.

If you’re still there, what are you waiting for? No, really, what more do you need? The best time for you to leave was last year; the second-best time is now. Do it now. Stop being complicit. Just leave. Please.