Before we get started, follow me on Bluesky here.

Now, onto business:

Elon Musk’s modus operandi has been to take credit for the work of others, and position himself as an eccentric super genius. His scheme, like his hair plugs, has largely worked and untold millions credulously admire him and have made him the wealthiest human in history.

Twitter is the rare case in which a business is widely known to have been founded and made successful by someone else (Jack Dorsey) that Musk then acquired, ruined, and drained of value. At least from a dollars and cents perspective.

I should say “ruined” by a reasonable person’s standards. I’m sure our Big White South African Genius — Apartheid Clyde — believes the social media app is a resounding success after he refashioned it in his grotesque image and openly used it to help elevate Donald Trump back to the White House. It worked in that sense, but at a gargantuan cost.

Twitter has been overrun with arrogant slur-slinging right-wing clods since Musk bought the app — forced to by a court after he tried to back out of his $44 billion impulse buy — in October 2022. Lucrative big-brand advertisers abandoned the platform wholesale and left behind are only the likes of Temu, obscure crypto peddles, microtransaction app games, porn, gambling sites, right-wing politicians, and Vedantic astrologists. And in between those strange ads is an ugly litany of racist white nationalists, nativists, Nazis, neo-Confederates, weird Libertarians, anti-vaxxers, obscure cranks, and Russian propagandists.

Musk, who grew up as the privileged scion of a wealthy apartheid-era South African family, has made all sorts of dumb honking noises about being a free speech absolutist when the stark reality is that under his ownership, Twitter has muzzled former verified accounts that opted not to buy the current “verification” badge. Even a modest verified account like mine occasionally had dumb tweets get a million views.

I put “verification” in quotes above because under the old regime, you actually had to fit particular criteria to have the little blue and white badge. It took me several years and something like a dozen tries to get verified, a stupid and frustrating misadventure — newsroom colleagues similar to me in online notoriety were being verified immediately, to my chagrin and exasperation, as were French porn accounts and minor government officials from the island of Malta. I’m not kidding.

That’s not to say I’m more important than Gaullist smut or the Maltese deputy minister of agriculture. I’m not. But I was a journalist for a notable outlet at a time when far more obscure accounts where getting verified. It was both a point of pride and of utility: As a journalist pushing news on Twitter, the badge helped users know the information was coming from an established journalist at a reputable news outlet. Reporters want their work to be read.

When I finally got verified, my colleagues decorated my cubicle and I even got a little blue and white check cake. They were mostly celebrating me shutting the fuck up about it. I’d been an annoying dickhead whining about it, just like now. But my bitchiness was righteous.

The iconic Twitter verification cake in 2017, after years of trying and being rejected while far more obscure, smaller accounts (and French hardcore gay porn accounts) got the checkmark. Now, all gone and the violent inmates run the asylum.

Musk did away with that admittedly imperfect verification system and replaced it with a paid scheme in which anyone willing to fork over $11 a month to him could have the verification badge, regardless of who they were.

What that meant was chaos. No one had any idea who was who anymore on Twitter. Musk stripped legacy badges like mine and those of hundreds of thousands of others, and left behind were “verified” legions of vicious trolls, bots, schemers, grifters, and 190-proof assholes whose caustic responses to everything are algorithmically elevated above all other replies. Meaning every tweet from a news organization, reporter, business, politician, organization, is dripping with shitheads tweeting misspelled insults and slurs, conspiracy theories, lies, etc., in the replies.

This isn’t free speech. This is a Babylon of Bullshit. And Twitter — I’m not calling it X because that’s a fucking stupid name — has been rendered useless and frustrating for people like me. But castrating its effectiveness for delivering mainstream news certainly was part of Musk’s strategy to use the app to bolster his stature among his new friends on the far right.

If I had more wealth than that all of the gods of Mount Olympus, I still would not give a cent to Elon Musk. Fuck him.

Since election day, the user experience on Twitter has gotten demonstrably worse as the reactionary trolls have been doing victory laps by being extra racist and nasty. And really, that’s what the free speech absolutism is to Musk and these oafs — the freedom to use the N word and other slurs without consequences, the freedom to insult and hurt and threaten others, and the freedom to peddle misinformation and lies without pushback.

This isn’t about free speech or a marketplace of ideas or a global town square. Twitter, at least my curated portion of it, is now a cesspool of toxic gutter slurry. Decent people do not want to visit what amounts to a Klan rally. So I am making my exit to Bluesky, an app with far better safety tools, including the ability to mass block MAGA dipshits and their fellow travelers in misanthropy, hate, bigotry, racism, misogyny, fascism, and other pathologies of failed third-rate minds.

I signed up earlier this year for Bluesky but didn’t do much with it. Since Trump’s victory, Bluesky has added millions of users, and many notable people that I follow on Twitter have begun to make the jump. I still use Twitter but only because I still have most of my audience there and not everyone I admire has exited yet. But Bluesky is now my go-to social media app, along with Instagram. Threads is useless. I’ll mothball but not delete my Twitter account when my Bluesky account reaches a comfortable critical mass for my own ends.

That’s why this is a social media Dunkirk to me: The fascist barbarians have us fenced us in, and now it’s time to evacuate to safer ground. Bluesky is the Little Ships today. We’re lucky it’s around, and hopefully it remains a polite place.

I’ve lost something like 500 Twitter followers since Nov. 5. Some of that was certainly bot accounts shutting down, but a big chunk is the ongoing Twitter exodus that shows no sign of slowing.

That mass exit may seem small, since Twitter had a reported 588 million users in September, but that figure is misleading. Not every user is of the same value. Millions of accounts are bots or otherwise not actually sentient humans using the app like a person. So what are leaving are the truly valuable accounts — the active real users who consume and create content on the site. That’s a genuine problem for a business that’s lost 80 percent of its value in two years because the owner is a fucking childish fascist buffoon-nerd. Musk is driving away the best customers — not the behavior of an alleged business genius.

Bluesky has a long way to go to replicate the best aspects of what’s left of Twitter. It has something like 20 million-plus users and is growing, but it doesn’t yet have a traditional verification system, and it doesn’t have the mass of sports, videos, celebs, and other content that’s critical to sustaining user interest. Hopefully, the good parts of what made Twitter useful and popular are in the works at Bluesky. They seem to understand.

(Click here for a fantastic video on how to find your Twitter pals already on Bluesky and other useful information for Bluesky beginners)

Musk bought (at an obscenely inflated price) a social media app that was gift-wrapped to become even more useful and powerful. He fucked it up. It’s rapidly becoming a corrosive echo chamber for bullies and trolls and grifters, and that’s unsustainable. Some of them are coming to Bluesky to cause trouble because they’re bored, they’re insecure, and because they’re empty husks without compassion. When they discover the app’s blocking tools are effective (including the ability to remove yourself from a quote-tweet), they become bitchy and frustrated. Hopefully, they return to Muskian Twitter or whatever dismal sewer from which they slithered.

The trolls are taunting people leaving Twitter, crowing that people like me are too weak and afraid to debate them and handle the heat. Bro, I’m not keen to constantly deal with execrable palookas, malicious dullards, repulsive blockheads, and spiteful dorks. The Third Reich celebrated Dunkirk, too.

Bluesky isn’t a progressive echo chamber. It’s simply not overrun with vicious brutes. And there are no ideas and philosophes from the dreary MAGA universe that I’m interested in debating with user accounts named @1776TRUMPTRAIN1488. There’s no there, there. Nothing to learn. It’s morally and intellectually bankrupt gibberish hawked by feeble-minded cranks, crooks, and bad-faith meatheads.

I’ll miss Twitter. I’ve posted nearly 123,000 times on the app since 2011, which is insane. I hope someone like Mark Cuban eventually buys Twitter and fixes Musk’s fuck-ups, but that seems unlikely. The brand damage and crippled user experience inflicted by Musk are costly own-goals that may leave the app beyond redemption. He’s certainly not going to do it himself because he cannot admit mistakes and ultimately, this appears to be what he wants.

But let’s not forget that Dunkirk was followed four years later by D-Day.

Again, you can find me on Bluesky here.

This dumb joke tweet from two years was viewed by more than a million users. Then Musk ruined everything. It was was always the silly shit that got the most views, likes, etc. I will try to be this funny and stupid on Bluesky, too.

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