Why did I create this? I found myself watching the awful news story about the tragic attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market unfold on various live news channels and something struck me. Something actually deeply disturbing, if you take a step back and look at it. Not as obviously disturbing as the event in question, of course, but every single global and local politician was being quoted on X.com. All of them! The German chancellor, the British Prime Minister, the French president, the Saudi foreign ministry, the president of the European Commission, the list goes on and on. On every news channel, the BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera, again the list goes on... "...said on X..."
On X.com. Everything on X.com.
To understand why that shocked me, let's step back a second and consider what X.com is.
It's a privately owned American corporation that makes most of its money through online advertising. It is a closed platform operated entirely at the whim of its owner. It exists purely to make the person who operates it rich and powerful. And somehow, by pure accident, the world of politics and journalism has sleep-walked into considering a necessary channel of communication.
More concerning still is the person who operates it, Elon Musk. He is completely unapologetic with regard to his behaviour, so it's not hard to find examples of why this person is concerning. He regularly posts conspiracy theories, deliberately undermines democratic process in his own country and abroad, and routinely espouses racist, misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric.
It is against this backdrop that I find myself horrified that, while news of the Magdeburg attack was unfolding, all the politicians were taking to the very platform where just the day before Musk had 'tweeted' "Only the AfD can save Germany", to offer condemnation, condolences and support.
Do they not realise they contribute to his power every time they use X? Either they don't, or they do and they don't care. I hope it is ignorance in most cases, though I fear it may not be, as I find it hard to imagine the big brains in the various civil service departments of the various governments haven't already had this internal debate. And decided to keep X.
I cannot know what the thought process was behind closed doors when people discussed where senior politicians and government departments should hold their social media presence, or even if they should have one at all. I imagine though that "it's where everybody is" was one of the key arguments for having an X profile and communicating on that channel.
The problem with that is it was never true, and it's even less true now than it was a few years ago. At its peak Twitter had (maybe) 370 million 'active' users, but that's now down to around 250 million (if you believe X themselves) and falling. Instagram is reportedly five times bigger and their Threads offshoot is likely to surpass X any time now. Then there are the demographic problems with X, the countries where it is most active, gender split, and so on. It just isn't in any way a representative platform, and it's getting worse.
The biggest problem with X from a government messaging point of view, since Musk took over, is that it is no longer a public platform. When X was Twitter, and under very different management, and all these people and organisations started using it, their content was publicly available without people needing to sign in. For the last 18 months or so anyone wishing to see what is happening on X has to make an account and login.
And oh. Oh wow. Suddenly a privately held American corporation has basically closed off access to what was considered an important public mouthpiece of governments to 95% of the World's population!
And yet they still use it.
Anyway, the TL;DR for government is simple: you don't have to be on X. In fact, 8 billion people are not on X. If you represent a government body, you really REALLY shouldn't be using X, or any other privately owned social media organisation, for your public communication.
(Sidebar: I find it fascinating the USA actually considered banning TikTok and have banned it on government devices. I don't see them having any more control over the likes of Meta, Alphabet, X, and so on than they do over TikTok.)
There is. There really is. But it's categorically not to run over to Bluesky or Threads and start posting there. If you do that you've learned nothing.
In the EU we have laws coming out of our ears about data sovereignty, ensuring data security and so on. Apparently they all go in the toilet as soon as the scope is public communications! If we applied the same rules to public messaging as we do to citizen data then nobody would ever have allowed politicians to use Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or any other foreign, privately owned corporate social media tool.
Nowadays there's a wonderful thing called the Fediverse. It's essentially a bunch of software products clustered around the same open standards to provide an interoperable landscape of media platforms. The main one is ActivityPub and there are well over 10 million people using it. In fact, if you count the fact that Instagram's new Threads platform uses it, it's much bigger than X!
But user numbers aren't the point here. The point is most of the products based on ActivityPub are free and open source, which means governments can just run their own. The fact there are not many users in the Fediverse is a moot point, you can own your messaging platform, you can keep it public, you can decide who gets to use it. Not somebody else. Certainly not the CEO of an American corporation!
Some governments have started already. For example, here is France's government Fediverse server: https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/
Chapeau, les français. Now you just need to get Monsieur le Président and the Élysée to use it instead of X.
But seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's not beyond the wit of the digital departments of the various governments to choose one of the open source ActivityPub products out there, install it somewhere sensible and start using it. The sooner we start owning our messaging, the less vulnerable we will be to outside interference on so many levels.
If your public figures predominantly use one of the large social media companies for public messaging, ask them to stop. Or ask them at the very least to make it a secondary messaging platform over something else. That could be a self-hosted blog with an RSS feed, a newsletter, a Mastodon account, something ... anything actually public and preferably owned by them or the government they are working for.
If you live in a country with a petition platform, consider opening and publicising a petition to encourage your government to stop using mainstream (and predominantly American) social media platforms to dessimate government information and messaging.
It doesn't feel like it's a problem that's going to solve itself. But it feels to me that part of the reason our democracies are in danger is that our politicians themselves are hooked on social media. We need to wean off, in general, but most especially in our politics. It's harming our very processes of government.