The case for staying on Twitter

Against a politics of hygiene

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John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced. Source: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Twitter is a cesspool. I hold Elon Musk, the site’s owner, personally responsible for the deaths of nearly 300,000 children. And yet, I visit his website every day. I tweet, I respond to posts, I scroll. (I will also always call it Twitter).

I read people admonishing me for remaining on the site (including from people who are still posting themselves …) and sometimes feel a twinge of concern: “Am I doing something wrong?”

My former colleague, the brilliant Charlie Warzel, wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled “What Are People Still Doing on X?” Even before Musk decided to push the “make Grok Mecha-Hitler” button, Warzel deemed the site a “Russian nesting doll of irony-poisoned, loud-and-proud racism.”

The piece is framed around a viral story about a Baltimore bartender who refuses service to a punk patron. Michael, our storyteller, inquires why the man has been unceremoniously thrown out of the establishment, and the bartender explains that the patron had Nazi iconography on his jacket, and no matter how polite, you cannot allow even a single openly fascist patron in your bar.

“You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” he tells Michael. “These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene.” And before you know it, you’ve found yourself the proprietor of Baltimore’s premier Nazi bar.

The Twitter account that popularized this story is now named “Michael B. Tager has left the Nazi Bar.”

To those of us still sipping our beers uncomfortably, Warzel contends that by remaining at the digital Nazi bar, we are lending it “credibility.”

But Twitter isn’t a bar.

Twitter is — without question — the most influential public square we have. At one point, in 2021, a Pew Research poll indicated that Twitter served nearly one in four Americans. By 2024, two years after Musk had bought the platform, 21% of people reported using it.

More anecdotally, no other venue sees elected officials mingling with academics, Fortune 500 CEOs, and celebrities. In Washington, Twitter is still one of the best places for a young think tanker or journalist to gain attention for their work. The posting-to-policy pipeline is alive and well — just look at Stephen Smith’s one-man, years-long crusade to make single-stair apartments a reality. I’ve also found sources and new voices on the website and have had new perspectives surfaced that I would not otherwise have encountered.

And yes, it is now teeming with Nazis.

I am not one of those dogmatic marketplace-of-ideas people who believes deplatforming is always wrong. On the contrary, deplatforming can be extremely effective. Just look at Milo Yiannopoulos. He was once a Twitter main character. But then he was banned from the platform in July 2016, prevented from giving a talk at Berkeley, and that very same month, both Simon & Schuster and CPAC dropped him after some, uh, concerning comments came to light.¹

But leaving Twitter in 2025 is not deplatforming Nazis, it is deplatforming yourself. The Nazis have already taken over the bar. The question is who will come to take it back.

These are the main two reasons I commonly hear for abandoning Twitter:

1. By remaining on Twitter we are enriching Elon Musk.

2. By remaining on Twitter we are lending the platform credibility, without which it would not have its power to command influence.

I’ll start with the first one because it’s easy to quickly dispatch: None of you are giving Elon Musk any kind of money that would affect his power. I just cannot imagine caring that Elon Musk is .00000001% richer.

This argument can also lead you to some fairly strange places. If someone has more followers, are they then less culpable for staying on Twitter because they’re probably making money off the creator fund?

The second argument is stronger and worth grappling with.

Persuasion vs. the politics of hygiene

For a hot second, it seemed like if enough people migrated to a Twitter clone, the old site would collapse and we could all build a new Nazi-free platform. Like many, I joined Threads and Mastodon and Bluesky, filled with hope that entire networks could reform on a new platform. But Mastodon was clunky, Meta banned news and politics, and Bluesky turned into a boring progressive echo chamber (unsurprisingly, usage is falling off).

So, for Twitter refugees, the question is not whether you leave for another public square — it’s whether you participate in one at all.

Is it possible to change people’s minds through argument? Among those of us who worry about the rise of the postliberal right, our answer to this question is the dividing line: If you are pessimistic about the value of public debate, then staying on Twitter is worthless.² All that matters is that Musk is in control of the algorithm, he has removed the cordon sanitaire, and the Nazis are now free to roam.

When people imagine the process of persuasion, they often imagine a debate where one party leaves with their opinion entirely transformed. But persuadable people are usually not the die-hards, they’re the lurkers in the big online fights, the ones who might throw out a like or ask a question but rarely participate. Maybe you think it's impossible to persuade your intellectual enemies, but what about the bystanders? Will you abandon them to a platform where the only arguments they see are ones like this?

In the end, I don’t think people really believe that public argument is worthless. Here’s a helpful thought experiment: Imagine if Musk banned every prominent liberal and left commentator from Twitter — if he kicked off Ezra Klein and Jamelle Bouie and Mehdi Hasan. Would we view this as beneficial or harmful to the cause of liberalism? I feel fairly confident predicting that such an action would launch a thousand takes excoriating Musk for undermining freedom of speech and expression.

Even if you are pessimistic about the possibility of argument to change people’s minds, what is the alternative? I still think liberals can make this whole democracy thing work, but not if we keep denying the reality that we’ve lost, especially on social media.

We do not control the bar, we are not the proprietor or the landlord. We have no power to deplatform anybody. We are a small group of patrons, hoping we don’t get kicked out of the bar before we get the chance to grab the aux cord again.

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I don’t want to downplay the costs of remaining on Twitter. I don’t begrudge people who have simply given up, or who can’t be the version of themselves that would be helpful to the cause. The amount of cruelty on Twitter is not good for the mind, soul, or body politic. Anyone with more than a few thousand followers is used to receiving a flood of vitriol whenever they share an opinion less anodyne than “I love pizza.” I don’t think it’s great that I’ve desensitized myself to casual savagery. But if you’re going to keep posting on the internet, you can’t let a few N-words get you down.

What I take issue with is the idea that staying on the platform is somehow failing a purity test. What I take issue with is a politics of hygiene, of cleanliness, a politics where you are judged not by the ultimate impact of your actions but by your ability to demonstrate your total and complete separation from that which you deem evil.

There’s no end to the logic of hygiene. If I use electrons produced by natural gas to cool my home in the summer, am I lending legitimacy to fossil fuel production? If I take an Uber because I don’t own a car, is that meant to be a commentary on how I feel about Dara Khosrowshahi? If parts of my phone are made from rare-earth minerals mined by children in the DRC, am I lending that supply chain credence? The reason we’re responsible for the children mining rare-earth metals and the gig workers barely making ends meet through Uber is because they are people. If you have the wealth to extricate yourself from global supply chains, that doesn’t remove your responsibility for making the world a more equal place.

There is obviously a role for organized corporate boycotts, or just avoiding companies that you find truly repellent — Americans have a long and proud tradition of voting with our wallets. For instance, I try to buy humane eggs. I do this because I like eggs and I feel bad about how horrible we are to animals in pursuit of food. Extricating myself from the evils of Big Chicken is not about eliminating my guilt, it’s because I’ve decided that I’m comfortable spending more money in order to prove there’s demand for the humane treatment of animals.

But keeping off of Twitter isn’t the same as choosing not to shop at Hobby Lobby, or paying $10 for a dozen eggs. There’s really no civic cost if you buy your yarn at another store or if you let someone else buy the grocery-brand eggs. With Twitter, you’re taking yourself out of the fight on the platform with the most eyeballs. Further, boycotts are aimed at outcomes, not at purity. Those who leave Twitter are sacrificing their ability to advocate for the change they seek.³

I stay on Twitter not because I’ve done the math and decided that I’m not putting money into Elon’s pocket. Or because of some misguided obsession with talking with your enemies. I do it because I think persuasion is possible. The world is not divided into Nazis and the righteous. There are many people in between who are listening. If you decide all they should hear is that “racism’s not hate, it’s clarity,” then by all means, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

I’m not going anywhere.

1. And now I had to look up how to spell Yiannopoulos. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

2. You know, other than hanging out with your friends and yapping.

3. I also can’t help but wonder whether the people who are lecturing us to leave Twitter have similarly absconded from every other social media platform polluted by bad actors, like TikTok, or Instagram, or Facebook.