A lot of changes were made to Twitter after being purchased by Elon Musk in Oct. 2022, most notably its name. Since being bought two years ago the value of the app has decreased by 80%.
One of the reasons the app’s value decreased is the withdrawl of paid partnerships in Nov., 2023, involving companies such as Disney, Apple, Coca-Cola and many more. These companies withdrew their partnership because of an antisemetic commentabout Jewish communities pushing “hatred on whites.”
In 2022, about 13% of content on X was NSFW (Not Suitable For Work). Though this content has always found a way to hold a spot on the platform, in June, 2024, Musk officially allowed the content on the platform.
This makes X an unsafe platform for a school organization like the Owl Post to operate on.
Following his purchase of the app, Musk posted on Twitter stating “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
In July, 2024, Musk endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Since this endorsement, Musk has been extremely vocal in his support of Trump’s campaign.
It was then revealed that Musk was working with the Trump campaign to keep information about future vice president JD Vance from circulating on the app. In addition to keeping the information off the app, the journalist who revealed the information was banned from the app.
According to the Society of Professional Journalists, “Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.”
As an organization Owl Post has concluded that X is not a platform that encourages accurate, fair and thorough information. Therefore, we have made the decision to remove ourselves from the platform and move to a less known social media platform called Bluesky.
Since the election two weeks ago, over one million users have been welcomed to Bluesky in what is being nicknamed, “The X-odus”.
In 2019, Bluesky was created to be an internal project within Twitter. Originally being a private project, in Feb., 2024, the app was officially opened to the public. In addition to Bluesky, Threads is another social platform that is rising in popularity.
Threads is a social media platform that has been open to the public since July, 2023, and in the past two years they have grown to have 275 million users. Its popularity has been steadily increasing since its release and the Owl Post is officially joining the app.
Threads was created by Instagram as a competitor for X, and it seems to be doing well with it’s 275 million users rivaling X’s estimated 250 million users daily as of Sept., 2024.
Effective immediately Owl Post will be deleting its X account and be moving over to Bluesky and Threads. We suggest students and staff do as well.
