Opinion

Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to preserve it as a communications tool. He bought it and stripped it for parts, rebranding it with a single letter and an adolescent sneer, and in the process turning a flawed but functional medium into a machine designed to amplify the loudest, most destructive voices. Twitter’s collapse into “X” isn’t an accident or an unfortunate side-effect of corporate turnover. It is the predictable consequence of having a single owner who thrives on outrage, who uses his personal account as the platform’s true editorial line, and who sees destabilisation not as a risk but as proof that his project is working. When that owner is willing to appear at a Tommy Robinson rally, via video, and tell the crowd that “violence is coming” and Parliament should be dissolved, the game is no longer about eccentricity or “free speech absolutism.” It’s about whether a sovereign state should continue to funnel official health guidance, budget announcements, and counter-terror alerts into a feed explicitly shaped to favour disinformation and provocation.

The mechanics of Musk’s redesign make the danger obvious. Verification—once the simple checkmark to distinguish institutions from imitators—was put up for sale, letting any troll with £8 impersonate government officials and news outlets. Within days, fake accounts posing as government departments were spreading false announcements and being taken seriously because actors could buy authenticity. Moderation was gutted. Accounts removed for hate speech and extremist agitation were restored, not quietly but triumphantly, advertised by Musk as proof of his personal vision. Then came the algorithm changes: external links were throttled and sometimes blocked entirely; Musk’s own posts force-fed into timelines regardless of who users chose to follow and there were arbitrary limits on how many posts could be read in a day, imposed without warning. Each change wasn’t simply disruptive—it made the platform structurally unreliable. A flood warning, a police alert, or a vaccination drive could be buried, throttled, or misrepresented by impersonators before it reached the people who needed it. And the man in charge treated those risks as little more than a punchline.

It isn’t just theory. The consequences have already been visible. Amnesty International documented how Musk’s “X” was central in spreading misinformation that fuelled racially charged riots across Britain in 2024. Police forces saw firsthand how quickly rumours metastasised on the platform, and many began quietly withdrawing. West Midlands Police cut its activity by around 95 per cent. Lancashire Police reduced posting by three-quarters. North Wales Police went further still, shutting down its account completely, later reporting no loss in its ability to keep communities informed through other channels. These were not abstract decisions about digital policy. They were responses to a tool that had begun to endanger the very people it claimed to connect.

Other institutions abroad have drawn the same conclusion. In January 2024, the city council of Barcelona deleted its official account, bluntly stating that providing accurate public information was no longer compatible with staying on Musk’s platform. NPR in the United States stopped posting entirely after Musk tried to smear it with false labels about government funding. PBS and CBC followed. These were not reckless stunts. They were pragmatic decisions: organisations with long-established reputations refusing to be props in Musk’s circus. And the results were clear. NPR’s audience shifted seamlessly to its app, newsletters and other platforms. Barcelona’s residents continued to receive information through official websites, local media, and alternative networks. Life went on—without the distortions, the impersonations, and the background noise of a platform calibrated to reward the most extreme voices.

Contrast that with Britain’s national accounts. @10DowningStreet still pumps out Prime Ministerial statements, as if the words of government carry any authority when they’re sandwiched between deepfake videos, fascist sloganeering, and the latest conspiracy Musk has decided to algorithmically boost.  @NHSEngland continues to use X for vaccination campaigns, knowing those messages are displayed alongside—and undermined by—anti-vax conspiracies Musk personally encouraged. The Home Office tweets public safety alerts that land between his declarations that Britain is a “tyrannical police state.” This is not communication. It is contamination. The institutions of a democratic state are being forced to share space with narratives designed to weaken them.

And it is not as if the government lacks options. Emergency SMS alerts already exist for life-threatening incidents. GOV.UK carries every major announcement, unmediated by algorithms. The BBC and other broadcasters remain national distribution systems for information. Alternative platforms like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, while smaller, are growing, and can be seeded with the audience that wants information without the background of trolls and provocateurs. YouTube streams can carry live briefings, backed by official channels. Email subscriptions can deliver guidance directly. None of these are perfect substitutes for the speed of Twitter in its prime, but they are reliable, controlled, and not dependent on the moods of a billionaire who tweaks the system on a whim.

What’s at stake is not convenience but sovereignty. Relying on Musk’s infrastructure means accepting that government messaging lives or dies according to his personal impulses. It means tolerating that a Prime Minister’s statement may be demoted, throttled, or mocked by algorithmic design. It means gambling that during the next national emergency, citizens will be able to read the alerts at all. That is not a serious position for a state that claims to take security, stability and democratic legitimacy seriously. And it is not a position Britain needs to be in.

At some point, the question also stops being whether the government should keep posting and starts being whether the government should keep allowing X to operate unchecked at all. Like the United States moving to restrict TikTok on national security grounds; Britain could just as legitimately ask whether a platform run by a foreign billionaire who amplifies domestic extremists and undermines public institutions deserves the same scrutiny. Musk has turned X into a geopolitical liability, not a communication tool — and treating it as anything less is wilful blindness.

Musk wants the government there because it grants him what he cannot buy: legitimacy. Every tweet from an official account says, implicitly, that X still matters, that it remains a space where serious discourse belongs. Without that, he presides over an audience of bots, trolls, and the extremists he reinstated. Britain does not need him to speak to its citizens. He needs Britain to pretend his site is still a platform worth using. Walking away would not only remove the risk of entanglement in Musk’s chaos—it would reveal him for what he is: a destabiliser shouting into a hollow chamber, desperately trying to hold the attention of institutions that have already moved on.

The UK government does not have to plead with citizens to follow it elsewhere. It does not have to apologise for leaving. It has to state, clearly, that it will no longer be a tenant in Musk’s wreckage, and then show people where the real channels are. A pinned message, an archive for transparency, and a redirect to GOV.UK and other platforms would be enough. The point is not to debate whether Musk’s empire is salvageable. It is to stop pretending it remains anything other than a liability. Britain has the tools to communicate without him. The only thing keeping it there is inertia. And inertia is not a defence when the cost is credibility.

The longer Britain remains on Musk’s X, the more it props up a platform openly hostile to democratic institutions. Leaving is not a gamble. It is an act of self-respect. It is a government choosing to speak on its own terms, rather than through the mouthpiece of a man who treats disinformation as entertainment and constitutional stability as a punchline. Leaving isn’t losing reach. It’s denying Musk the oxygen his chaos feeds on — and right now, no one craves Britain’s air more than he does.

Time to Extinguish Elon Musk’s Bonfire of Nonsense

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