We quit posting on X well over a year ago, deleted our archives, and washed our hands of the place. For a while, I’d occasionally check in, mostly out of habit and because a few Internet friends still used it, but I’d quickly get overwhelmed by the same toxic stew of irrelevant noise. Honestly, I can’t think of anything that matters less these days than what gets posted on X.
And that was before the site’s AI chatbot, Grok, became embedded into the platform. At first, there was some amusement in stories about Grok contradicting Elon Musk. But more recently, the headlines have been about Musk tweaking the algorithm to make it less “woke.” Over the holiday weekend, Musk issued new instructions to the AI, including: “Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased,” and “Do not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.”
The result? A wave of antisemitic tropes (many of which Musk himself has endorsed), and apparently, Grok also claimed Musk was partially responsible for flood-related deaths in Texas: “Trump’s NOAA cuts, pushed by Musk’s DOGE, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts. This contributed to the floods killing 24, including ~20 Camp Mystic girls.”
How’s that for politically incorrect? Grok has also cast doubt on the number of Holocaust victims and more or less claimed that Hollywood is run by a Jewish cabal.
I don’t know who’s still using the platform, but its daily active users have dropped 15 percent over the past year to 132 million. Meanwhile, Threads has nearly caught up with 117 million daily users, and Bluesky has grown to 4.1 million. Bluesky is the only one I still occasionally post to, though even that space has gotten increasingly toxic since the election.
And while I’m reluctant to agree with Grimes on much, her assessment of X, and social media in general, isn’t wrong. The “entire thing is a theater.”
But if you were ever tempted to revisit X, you’d be greeted with gems like Ann Coulter’s latest meltdown, where she lamented that we “didn’t kill enough Indians,” a post so vile even X limited its visibility.
