Why is the government still using X?

As Elon Musk’s X continues to be used by the far right to stoke violence and division, its former users over on Bluesky have a reasonable question to ask: why are official UK government accounts still using the social network to put out official announcements?

That thought also occurred to Liberal Democrat president and peer Mark Pack, who used his parliamentary powers to ask the government this question officially – and the answer he got was at least superficially reassuring.

The government officially conducts “assessments of platforms” using a “single, comprehensive framework… providing thorough guidance and processes to ensure appropriate use”, Pack was told by cabinet office minister Ruth Smeeth. It does these “when there are significant platform updates”.

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Good to know – except for one thing. Smeeth added that the last time the government did an assessment of X was… April 2023, suggesting the UK doesn’t believe that there have been any “significant” updates to the platform for more than two years.

During that time Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump, helmed DOGE and gave what looked to many people across the world like a Nazi salute on inauguration day. Both Musk personally and the X platform played a role in inciting riots across the UK last summer, and X was used to boost openly racist and far right messages across the country.

More recently still, Musk launched an AI on X – owned by the same business – that described itself as “MechaHitler”, endorsed the Holocaust and wrote graphic rape fantasies about real users of X, but all of this is fine because the government has a “comprehensive framework”. At least all of this gives us a new question: is it worse if the government’s comms team haven’t noticed the changes on X, or if they have and think it’s all fine?