Social media exodus may make us all calmer

J ournalists are chronically prone to overestimating the world-historical importance of Twitter/X, so I should begin by acknowledging that as schisms go, this one is hardly Rome v Constantinople in 1054. It is nevertheless worthy of our attention: in the aftermath of the site’s acquisition by Elon Musk, and now with more urgency since the election of Donald Trump, liberal users have been abandoning it for more congenial — ie liberal-filled — alternatives. Users of Musk’s site are reportedly declining at a rate of 14 per cent a month. The population of a left-leaning alternative, Bluesky, has been growing at the rate of a million a day.

I have been absorbing my fellow X users’ grandiose statements of leave-taking with amusement. There seems to be a widespread misapprehension that switching the website you use to air your banal political opinions makes you a veritable Rosa Parks of cyberspace. And yet, even if these much self-publicised defections are meaningless on an individual level, in aggregate they are a symptom of an important larger trend. The internet is becoming more fragmented. The age of the pullulating and rambunctious “digital town square” is over. In the future, liberals and conservatives will congregate in different places.

There has inevitably been much fretting about political “echo chambers”. I am more sanguine. One of the great underexamined fallacies of what we may come to look back on as the first age of internet history is that it is beneficial for us all to be “connected”. Mark Zuckerberg’s mission was “to connect every person in the world”. Most social media founders have repeated versions of the same platitude. LinkedIn assails me daily with requests from people who want to connect. But ours is a world that could do with much less connection, not more.

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