We Are Leaving Twitter — Here’s Why and Where You Can Find Us

Twitter was a crucial part of Double Sided Media’s founding and became an integral tool for what we do — especially with live-tweeting during the George Floyd protests in the Eugene-area during 2020-2021. 

But then it was purchased by a multi-billionaire with paper-thin skin and far-right sympathies — if not outright allegiances.

Due to Twitter’s instability, the prohibition on live-tweeting, and the generalized toleration of the most hateful and dangerous sections of the far-right, DSM is ceasing our engagement on the site. 

Now, under the totalitarian reign of Elon Musk, Twitter’s ecosystem has gone from being a crucial tool for journalists—mainstream or not—and antifascist researchers to what could only be described as a normalized 4chan.  

Here’s a few of the many objectively stupid things Musk has done to Twitter since spending $44 billion to buy the platform:

• He laid off at least half of the employees and many who have stayed are trapped in their employment or will lose their visa status. 
• He dismantled the Twitter Blue service and then brought it back with instant “blue checkmark” verification—if that’s what we can even call it now—for a monthly fee. And now there’s at least two different colors. 
• He dissolved the platform’s Trust and Safety Council.
• He reinstated a plethora of suspended accounts, including that of Donald Trump and Charlottesville organizer and avowed white supremacistRichard Spencer, just to name a couple. 
• He gave a few like-minded “independent” journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss—seemingly unfettered access to private employee chats to release as the “Twitter Files.” Following the digital harassment received with these “files,” the former head of the Trust and Safety Council Yoel Roth was forced to flee his home. 
• Musk, the “free speech absolutist,” suspended the personal account of Jack Sweeney and the bot accounts—specifically @ElonJet—created by him to track the jets of billionaires claiming that they amounted to “doxxing.” (Note: the ADS-B data used is publicly available.)
• He suspended the accounts of journalists who reported on Musk and @ElonJet. 
• He suspended, and has yet to reinstate, the accounts of antifascist organizations  and media. These included the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, which provides armed security for LGTBQIA+ events in Texas; antifascist researcher and journalist Chad Loder, anarchist publisher CrimethInc.; and antifascist news organization It’s Going Down.  
• He changed the platform’s Terms of Service so that any live-time tweeting of a person’s location and events—think protests—is now prohibited and considered “doxxing.” 
• He has also prohibited—and then reinstated—the tweeting of links to competitor social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon—who’s Twitter account was previously suspended—Reddit, and even Trump’s own Truth Social.

Okay, here’s a few of the things he’s done on Twitter in that same time: 

• Soon after acquiring the platform, he retweeted (and then deleted) a completely baseless conspiracy theory relating the attack on Paul Pelosi to some sort of homoerotic BDSM act gone wrong. 
• He has cozied-up and openly communicated with conspiracy theorists and other far-right-aligned individuals.
• He has, with one tweet, simultaneously translated a mockery of trans identity into a weapon of the state by calling for the arrest and prosecution of Dr.Anthony Fauci.
• He has, with another tweet, dog-whistled to QAnon — whose adherents had already been celebrating the acquisition. 
• He has, in violation of his own ToS changes, tweeted a video of a private individual while baselessly claiming that they followed his two-year-old son, X AE A-XII. According to the Los Angeles Times, no police report was, or has been, filed. 

This is only a brief list of Musk’s actions. 

Moving Forward

Here’s what DSM is planning to do. 

We will leave our Twitter account active—unless it’s suspended for something we previously tweeted—but will cease to engage with the platform. We will not post future articles on the site or reply to comments and direct messages.

Instead, we have joined Mastodon and can be found at newsie.social/@doublesidedmedia.  

We will continue to use our Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. And we plan to be a lot more active on Instagram. We will also continue to use Patreon as a way of financially sustaining our work. They can be found at: 

• facebook.com/DoubleSidedMedia
• instagram.com/double.sided.media 
• linkedin.com/company/doublesided-media 
• patreon.com/doublesidedmedia 

And, of course, our website—doublesidedmedia.com—will be constantly updated with new articles and ongoing projects. If you’re thinking about supporting us or have been following us for a while, the single best thing you could do is bookmark our site or use an RSS feed reader. Increasing engagement with our site reduces the need to rely on social media sites to get our work out into the world, and the less power we give to the billionaires who run these sites, the more power we can reserve for our own communities and information sharing ecosystems. They need us more than we need them.

But most importantly, fuck Elon Musk.