Why York City Council is right to make its Twitter account as redundant as a town crier - David Behrens

At York City Council they have realised at last that using X as an official notice board is asking for trouble. So they’ve decided to fall back on alternatives. The expansive document they produced to justify that conclusion expressed in 4,000 words what I’ve just said in eleven.

It’s the right decision, of course. Every other public body should follow suit. A few have done so already, in the manner of sheep changing direction when someone waves a stick at them.

Yet even in falling over themselves to tick boxes and appear transparent, the York officials have failed to appreciate the potential consequences of the ticking time bomb that X had placed under them.

Oh, they identified the presence of extremist content, the absence of any coherent fact-checking and cited the behaviour of the owner, Elon Musk, as incompatible with their values. That goes without saying. Musk’s incapacity to filter what he says is damaging even to his own brand, let alone anyone else’s. He is a Gerald Ratner for the 21st century (And if you don’t remember Ratner, his was the name on every British high street until he rubbished the cheap jewellery he sold in what he thought was a witty speech and rendered his business as worthless as the trinkets within it).

But York’s report dismisses in one sentence the issue that should have been its concern all along. There are, it says, “no direct HR implications”. No impact, in other words, on the council staff whose job description required them to tweet on the firm’s time.

Nothing could be more wrong and for the life of me I cannot understand how the ‘human resources’ community, a sector that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion sometimes at the expense of common sense, managed to close its mind to the house of cards that would have collapsed around it if an employee exposed to abuse on X had decided to sue for damages.

A test case, aimed not at Musk but at an employer for failing in its duty of care to protect the mental health of its staff, would have seen every HR manager in the land pulling up the drawbridge as a defence against expensive copycat lawsuits and declaring tweeting off limits in company time.

York and all the other public authorities can count their blessings that this did not happen before Musk turned his own product toxic.

How toxic? Consider the general tenor of the messages sent to the Scottish campaigners who precipitated last week’s Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman. Taste and decorum prevent me from repeating them here but words like disgusting, murderers, death and vomit are peppered through them like bullets. No-one should have to suffer vilification like that for any reason and certainly not as part of their job.

The debate on transgender rights was played out almost exclusively on X and platforms like it and for that reason sucked more oxygen from the national discourse than was proportionate to the number of people actually affected. Few politicians were prepared to nail their colours to any mast for fear of attracting the kind of abuse that social media has made its own.

When the verdict was in, HR departments went into reverse gear, striking out previous advice on protected spaces, personal pronouns and other mechanisms that had brooked no argument since they were appropriated in the rush to appear tolerant. Our Prime Minister also followed the sheep and turned tail on his earlier vacillations.

And now comes the decision in York to effectively de-recognise X. Not before time. It gained traction in the first place on an Emperor’s New Clothes principle of not criticising something you don’t understand. That has been replaced by a realisation that as a communications tool it is as indiscriminate as spraying graffiti on the city walls.

So as York’s Twitter account becomes as redundant as its town crier, I sense another report coming on – this time on the money it saved in legal costs by finally stopping shooting itself in the foot.