Why Twitter is Unethical

Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with research and graduate school applications, but I thought to work on a blog post that I’ve been thinking about for awhile.

Doubtless, dear reader, you have likely seen that news headlines for Twitter’s new management have been less than flattering over the past few months. Elon Musk has floundered significantly.

However, I would like to make the ethical case for why remaining an active Twitter user is no longer ethical.

1. Twitter is Elon’s plaything. Any user who stays essentially assents to being his plaything. This is likely to become more and more obvious as arbitrary policies come into force or are abandoned at a moment’s notice, as seen by Elon’s previous “no other social platform rule”.

2. Content moderation is now essentially impossible. Twitter’s teams were always smaller than other social media networks even before Elon’s massive layoffs. Whatever content moderation capabilities Twitter had are obviously gone.

3. Elon’s awful treatment of tech workers and others sets a bad example for tech companies. It’s short-sighted, entirely evil, and clearly idiotic by any rational metric. Breaking contracts and setting fire to previous agreements is not how a proper member of society should live.

4. Twitter’s growth remains stagnant in all areas except for two. Research has suggested that only tweets about crypto and pornography are the only growing categories of content on Twitter. Crypto remains an unregulated hellscape of fraudsters and snakeoil salesmen (salesbros?). I actually do not care much about pornography on Twitter except that it is entirely unregulated. Abuse, underage folks, and nonconsensual material (“revenge porn”) has apparently always been an issue on Twitter, according to news reports.

Old Twitter before Elon’s takeover had a chance to possibly solve these problems, given time. New Twitter is simply too evil to care.