So this is it. Cine Outsider is leaving Twitter (and as far as I and many, many others are concerned, Twitter it will always be), and I can’t imagine there are any long-time readers of this site who will be remotely surprised at this decision or our reasons. If you genuinely don’t know and can’t guess, then I have to presume you’ve been in self-imposed exile in a remote corner of the globe free of contaminating contact with the outside world. At this perilous moment in history, I rather envy you, in part because you may never have heard the two most tiresome and malevolent words of the last days of 2024: Elon Musk.
Now I’ll openly admit that there was a time, back in Twitter’s early days, when I genuinely couldn’t see the point of the platform, not because it didn’t have one but because of the frivolity of the majority of posts that I was seeing, people broadcasting to the world that they had just boarded a train or were consuming an egg and cress sandwich for lunch. Really? Wow! How interesting! I only started a Cine Outsider Twitter thread at all for the same reason I registered a Facebook page (and yes, I also had and still retain a strong dislike for Facebook as well), because I was pushed to do so by the far more social media savvy Tim Evans back when he was assistant editor of the site. And what do you know, after a while, his encouragement bore fruit, as our reviews and news stories were picked up, retweeted, and even discussed and critiqued by our followers, facilitating an interactivity that the home brew nature of our website itself simply could not offer. Distributors such as Arrow and Eureka would announce their upcoming releases on their Twitter feeds first, and it provided us with an easy way of informing distributors and site readers that we’d posted a new review or news story, to which we were also able to provide a clickable link.
It was all going so well, and then the richest man on the planet bought Twitter for a ridiculous and wildly overvalued $44 billion. That he had second thoughts and tried to back out of the deal but was legally prevented from doing so now seems like a missed opportunity for the platform to have dodged the biggest dumbass bullet in social media history. Leveraged into going through with the purchase, Musk set about firing whole swathes of the Twitter staff, telling those who remained to do “extremely hardcore” work or get out,1 and then making what has to be the dumbest corporate decision since new flavour Coke by dispensing with one of the most recognisable product names on the planet and rebranding it “X”. This immediately triggered widespread ridicule, with many suggesting that it made the app sound like a porn site and certainly cast a new light on Musk’s insistence that the company’s employees get hardcore. The move was further mocked when it was revealed that the “X” logo was not a new design but had simply been lifted from Monotype’s Special Alphabet 4.2 The amount the richest person on the planet paid this to licence this for use as the company logo is estimated to be about $30. Musk then reinstated a whole swathe of previously banned far right accounts, including several that had been shut down for extreme and even violently racist content, and claimed he was doing so in the name of free speech. This, of course, was quickly proved to be absolute bollocks when he began censoring the accounts of left leaning commentators, especially those openly critical of Musk himself.3 It didn’t stop there. As I write this, Musk has also nerfed the accounts of a whole slew of Trump-supporting MAGA-heads because they have taken issue with his stance on HB-1 immigration visas, sparking a right-wing civil war of words and prompting Musk to openly threaten the dissenters to “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”4
Having claimed that he wanted to curtail an overabundance of bots on the platform, Musk, of course, did nothing of the sort, and since his takeover the bot situation has got substantially worse. Porn bots in particular are now running riot throughout the platform, to the point where the oft-seen “Nude in Bio” or “Pussy in Bio” taglines5 have become internet memes. In his infinite lack of wisdom, he also dispensed with the verification required to obtain a blue checkmark, which had previously existed to confirm that an account assigned to a recognisable name was legitimate. Instead, Musk made the checkmark available for anyone willing to spend a few dollars a month to own it, in the process stripping it of its value and transforming it into a meaningless decoration to stick alongside whatever handle you desired. Then there were the ads that began flooding every timeline, ads you could disable by paying for a Premium+ subscription but could only really react to otherwise by blocking the individual ad posters in question. In response to this, a pop-up now appears every time you do so offering an ad-free timeline if you upgrade to Premium+, then presenting you with two choices, “Upgrade” or “Maybe later.” Yeah, how about, “When Hell freezes over.”
Increasingly under Musk’s ownership, Twitter has become a toxic place to visit unless you restrict yourself to tweets posted by individuals or organisations that you can be sure won’t post anything that might trigger the army of right-wing trolls that now seem to spend every waking hour on the platform. Studies by groups such as the Institute of Strategic Dialogue6 and The Centre for Countering Digital Hate,7 to name but two, have confirmed that hate speech on Twitter jumped massively after Musk reinstated the accounts of some of the most venomous and previously banned individuals and groups, and it’s only continued to worsen since. Post a racist tweet and you’ll trigger some argumentative and angry pushback and even abuse, but post an even passive progressive opinion and the attacks will be off the scale and include violent threats against you and you family, and if you’re female, gay or transgender,8 well, you can guess the hateful rhetoric that will be hurled in your direction. After Musk backed a vile antisemitic conspiracy theory,9 several high profile companies ceased advertising on the platform,10 to which Musk responded by publicly telling these companies to “Go fuck yourselves,”11 then had the gall to launch a law suit against them for choosing not to have their ads appear next to racist, sexist and homophobic tweets. A similar suit was filed against the non-profit Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which several commentators described as a SLAPP suit12 (a suit used by the rich and powerful to scare those without the financial resources to fight it into submission), one that had the intended effect when group was forced to disband just a few days later.
Musk himself began retweeting and passing positive comment on sexist and racist tweets,13 but in 2024 his intervention in the political landscape escalated worryingly, when he donated over $250 million to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign,14 used Twitter to heavily push Trump’s messaging and demonise his opponents, and appearing on stage at a Trump rally jumping up and down like the idiotic jackass he has in so many eyes become. All of this, of course, had the planned effect of buying him an unelected role in Trump’s upcoming government that will likely see thousands of federal employees made redundant and millions of taxpayer dollars funnelled into Musk businesses through the many government contracts that he already has and that will doubtless be thrown his way under the coming administration.15 But that’s not enough for Musk, who clearly also wants to exert a controlling hand on British politics as well, evidenced in his repeated attacks on Keir Starmer and open support for far-right shit-stirrer Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson),16 his claims that the right-wing summer riots meant that civil war in the UK was “inevitable,”17 and the rumour that he is planning to donate close to $100 million to Reform UK Ltd,18 a multi-millionaire-run moneymaking corporation masquerading as a far right political party. Most recently, he has expressed his open support for Alternative for Germany, or AfD, another far right party in a country whose last embracement of fascism resulted in a world war that claimed the lives of over half a billion people. So offended was Die Wel opinion editor Eva Marie Kogel by the piece Musk penned the paper in support of the Afd that she resigned from her post.19
Make no mistake, Musk is a very dangerous man, and one whose financial resources are almost unimaginably huge. He has the money to buy off corrupt politicians and has publicly threatened that he will fund candidates standing in electoral opposition to Republican politicians who do not fall in line.20 When he has such an insane level of power and money at his disposal, the knowledge that you as an ordinary individual can do nothing to effectively oppose the immeasurable harm that he is doing to democracy, freedom, and the individual pursuit of happiness can be deeply frustrating and frankly a little frightening. It long ago struck me that Musk is turning into a physical manifestation of a James Bond supervillain, so drunk on wealth and power that the only thing left for him to pursue is world domination, but in this story there is no obvious 007 waiting in the wings to bring him and his evil masterplan down. All that we as lowly individuals can morally do is refuse to cooperate or do anything to inadvertently support or enable him. In Trading Places, Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine says to Dan Aykroyd’s Louis Winthorpe III, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.” Musk is simply too wealthy and has too many influential friends and cult-like followers now for that to ever happen, but for a man for whom the acquisition of money is like a chronic heroin addiction, any loss of value of anything he owns needles him nonetheless, and thus must count as a minor victory for the huddled masses. In that respect, the tide is starting to turn, just a little: the MAGA cult members that he has recently upset have really turned against him and are very vocal in their anger; there are apparently stirrings in the Republican ranks amongst senators who are pissed off that this unelected South African has their inglorious leader’s ear; stories about electric car buyers boycotting Tesla in favour of the many other options now available to them are becoming increasingly common; and long-time Twitter users are leaving the platform in droves, resulting in the financial value of the platform dropping 80% since it was purchased by Musk. And after dithering for some time, I feel it’s our turn to do likewise.
I fully realise that, as a small and increasingly niche film review and news website, it’s taken us many years to build the small following we have on Twitter, but we can’t in all conscience continue to post on a platform that is so poisonous and potentially harmful to the vulnerable in society. I’ve never made a secret of my political views, and continuing to hold an account on Twitter means indirectly and unintentionally supporting a man whose views, actions and intentions I find abhorrent and more than a little terrifying. The overall readership of our site is relatively small, and any platform that helps bring someone to reviews that we devote a great deal of our free time to writing without a penny of pay is theoretically helpful, but the line in the sand when it comes to “X” has long since been crossed. And we’re not disappearing from social media as a whole. Despite my increasing dislike of Facebook, we do still have a Facebook page and all the news and review posts that appear on our Twitter feed are also posted there. Far better, at least for the present time, is Bluesky, which was created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and it’s to there that many of those who have abandoned Twitter have relocated. At present, it has the feel and the community of Twitter before it was overrun by the bigots, bots and hatemongers, and it’s also ad-free, though whether that will last will be a matter of future economics. Many, though not all, of the distributors whose releases we cover can also be found there, so they will still be notified when we post a review of one of their discs – as far as I’m aware, we’re just waiting now for Eureka to make the jump. Obviously, our relatively new Bluesky following is smaller than our long-standing Twitter one, but it’s growing every week, and engagement with our posts is already equal to that its Twitter equivalent. Whether the good vibe the platform has will last, only time will tell, but I was personally pleased to learn that the current owners have already taken steps to prevent a forced buyout by someone like Musk. That said, in his new, unelected and frankly made-up role in the Trump administration, what’s the betting that Musk tries to get regulations passed that favour “X” but impose restrictions on rival social media platforms? Only time – at least, what we have left of it – will tell.
But for now, on Twitter at least, it’s goodbye. A heartfelt thanks to all who have followed us on Twitter over the years, and particularly those who have liked, retweeted and commented on our posts. If you wish to keep doing so, you can thus follow us instead at:
https://bsky.app/cineoutsider.bsky.social and/or https://www.facebook.com/CineOutsider/
Oh, and Musk is also now attacking Wikipedia and would like to find a way to shut it down, so if you use it, as I regularly do, consider donating a few pounds or dollars for its upkeep if you can spare it:
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage&country=GB&uselang=en-gb&wmf_medium=portal&wmf_source=portalFooter&wmf_campaign=portalFooter
footnotes:
. https://beamdisinfo.org/deployments/antisemitism-on-twitter-before-and-after-elon-musks-acquisition/
20.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/trump-elon-musk-caused-congress-063538857.html |
