I’m finally leaving what was once Twitter. I guess most people who read this will question why I was still there in the first place. That is why I’m writing a short post about why I was there and why I won’t be there anymore.

I’m a researcher whose work focuses on political violence in West Asia and Latin America. As a Kurdish scholar who faces Turkish state persecution, I used Twitter frequently to interact with people and institutions within and outside Turkey in relation to topics such as state-sponsored violence and human rights violations. While I didn’t frequently use the platform after it became X, it is still important to remember that there is literally no Kurdish community on alternative platforms and other peoples of West Asia (Arabs, Armenians, Persians, Turks, etc.) are also mostly absent. Leaving X means withdrawing from the interaction. The situation is a bit better with Spanish-speaking audiences, but still the difference between X and alternatives is too great to ignore. Most institutions (NGOs, human rights organizations, media institutions, political parties, labor unions, universities, etc.) from Latin America and West Asia don’t have any presence on alternative platforms.

Moreover, I had been asked to stop writing on Twitter indirectly in a couple of occasions by Turkish state authorities during investigations against me. They didn’t like what I was writing there, so they were threatening me to make me stop writing. Leaving X felt like yielding to an authoritarian state, that was another reason to maintain the account. My Twitter posts are included in accusations made to the Office of Chief Prosecutor in Ankara. Nothing I wrote on Mastodon or Bluesky has been read by Turkish prosecutors as far as I know.

There is also a less important reason. As an early career researcher who is facing financial difficulties (mainly due to Turkish state persecution) I know that I should make my research visible to find a stable job. Even though I don’t like it, we live in the age of Altmetrics. Being on X meant more visibility.

Finally, I use Twitter data in my academic research. Being on X meant I can continue analyzing discourses on the platform.

Why am I finally leaving the platform then? All these reasons are still valid after all. Arabs, Kurds, and Turks continue to use X a lot more than other platforms. Accounts used by Turkish police still follow my tweets. My labor situation is still extremely precarious. I still work on social media discourses. So, what made me decide to finally leave the platform for good.

There are some relatively minor reasons such as how the algorithm functions, which seemingly works towards invisibilizing my posts. But the main reason is the rise of Musk, along with other right-wing Silicon Valley elites, to an unprecedented capability of exercising power. Trump’s win is very likely to make Musk an even more powerful individual than he already is. It’ll also make others like him more aggressive. Platforms like X are becoming more and more like traps, into which we enter to be heard by a wider audience and end up losing the audience we had in the first place. That is because centralized social media platforms now focus more on constructing audiences than addressing them. Staying on the platforms in the long term will disappear our voices because there will be nearly no one interested in hearing us anymore.

I think building alternative ways of mass communication/interaction became so important that it has to be prioritized over everything else I mentioned. Leaving platforms like X is a necessary step towards a radical transformation. Staying on there will make achieving the task a lot more difficult. I’m not deleting my account since the username has been involved in legal proceedings and if someone else takes it their posts can be attributed to me by Turkish legal authorities. But I’m leaving the platform for good. Hopefully more people will follow.