Politicians and press should abandon Twitter as Elon Musk turns bird brand into dead parrot: David Behrens

Fame, or in this case infamy, is possible only when people notice you – and today it’s very easy to get noticed. You don’t need a Lew Grade to put you on TV; you simply sign up for free to a social media platform. No experience or talent is necessary and if you stand out from the crowd you’ll have an instant audience. But for how much longer?

The part played by social media in inflaming and escalating the riots was a turning point. Twitter especially allowed itself to be used as a recruiting tool for impressionable people. It chose to amplify and republish messages from high priests of hate like the rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, putting them in front of people who had not previously heard of him. Its new owner, the billionaire political activist Elon Musk went so far as to quash a permanent ban on Yaxley-Lennon for propagating bigotry in the guise of ‘Tommy Robinson’, the fictitious character he inhabits.

All this was clear to the Hull MP and policing minister Dame Diana Johnson, who demanded this week that Twitter and its rivals do more to tackle disinformation.

But they won’t. In fact, Musk has gone in the other direction, picking fights with the prime minister as indiscriminately as a rioter with a broken bottle.

Twitter is not the only malevolent platform out there but is the one that gets noticed and that’s because politicians and the media use it, too. The moment they leave is the moment it becomes irrelevant. So what’s stopping them?

Well, the conventional wisdom is that to get your message across you must put it in front of as many people as possible and Twitter undeniably does that. But an even more fundamental rule of marketing is to keep control of the message – and when your posts are being mendaciously misrepresented in a thousand ways, that becomes impossible.

Bulk tweeters like the BBC have argued that it’s important for their correspondents to wade in as voices of reason – and while that argument just about held water when Twitter could claim to be impartial, it’s now as hopeless a cause as herding cats. The continued presence of genuine publishers serves only to legitimise the myth that it’s a valid source of news and information.

For individuals who tweet, the motivation very often goes back to that yearning for fame. The frisson of being ‘liked’ and retweeted by a kindred spirit is infectious and affirming and who doesn’t want that?

Others in the media see it as a vital tool for selling tickets, books or indeed themselves but no-one is really making money out of it – not even Twitter itself, which under Musk’s stewardship has become a no-go zone for advertisers terrified of associating their brands with it.

The BBC and other publishers should take the hint. ‘We’re not on Twitter’ should become a new badge of honour. Out with the blue hummingbird logo; in with a dead parrot.

Labour has already moved in that direction. Several of its MPs announced in the wake of the riots that they had deleted or suspended their Twitter accounts – not only because of the far right bias but also the vitriol the platform has long harboured. The two are not unconnected.

The party could go further by formally advising its MPs not to tweet at all. That’s a policy Diana Johnson could institute today; the Conservatives and Lib Dems likewise.

The effect would be liberating, certainly not censorious, for the best way to separate the facts from the fiction on Twitter is to remove facts from the equation altogether; to abandon the whole platform to the lunatic fringe so that no-one makes the mistake of taking it seriously.

That won’t kill it but it will neutralise it to the point where it becomes just an echo chamber for people on the margins of society to shout at each other. When they realise no-one is listening and they’re not getting famous they may see the futility.

And before you tell me this (don’t bother to tweet; I saw the bird poop on the wall years ago) I do know it’s called X now, not Twitter. It stands for X-pired.