Two years ago, I was the victim of a peculiarly postmodern version of left-wing cancel culture. After joking on Twitter about the Tory government being a ‘coconut cabinet’, I was given the boot by the Herald, a newspaper where I had worked for 20 years. My downfall was swift. People I trusted turned on me ruthlessly. But I don’t think my tweet – whipped up by a handful of performative offence-takers – would have led to my cancellation had it happened in 2024. Why? Because Twitter/X has changed beyond all recognition. It no longer has a chokehold on political culture. Elon Musk has done the world a favour, even if the verdict is out on what X has turned into under his watch. With his intemperate tweets, most recently over the Magdeburg massacre and the AfD, Musk has horrified the progressives who used to populate the platform and hang on its every word.
Whether you think the way X has changed is good or bad, one thing is clear: no one takes Twitterstorms seriously anymore. Editors and corporate elites no longer leap to endorse whatever is roiling the anger junkies who populate it. Cancel culture is over. Musk has killed it. Thank goodness for that.
This story isn’t, of course, just about me. To take a much more important phenomenon, could #MeToo have emerged in 2024 as it did so explosively in 2017? I’m not convinced. It was a uniquely Twitter moment when women took to anonymously outing misogynistic male behaviour. #MeToo had repercussions throughout the media and politics. Something similar might conceivably get off the ground today over on Bluesky or Threads or Mastodon, but the very proliferation of social media platforms would deprive #MeToo 2.0 of critical mass. There would also now be significant pushback from the increased number of what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call conservatives active on X. Harvey Weinstein would still have gone down. But there would’ve been less tolerance of attempts to destroy the careers of lesser, innocent individuals by what the US lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, called “guilt by accusation”.
Spurious accusations of racism are similarly less likely to gain traction today on X. My particular offence arose in response to an academic who tweeted that just because the Tory cabinet had a lot of black and brown people in it, it didn’t mean it was “diverse”. I quote-tweeted sardonically: “A coconut cabinet?”. Cue outrage from Twitter folk who clearly didn’t know what they were objecting to.
“Coconut” has, of course, been used by black activists from Marcus Garvey to Benjamin Zephaniah to refer to people who collaborate with their racial oppressors. It is therefore almost the polar opposite of racism, especially when used satirically to poke fun at those accusing black politicians of not being properly black. That “coconut,” is not necessarily a racist term was confirmed (again) in September; a teacher, Marieha Hussain, was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence after she held a a banner depicting members of the Tory cabinet as coconuts during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in London earlier this year.
As for me, the Herald accepted there was “no racist intent” in my tweet but that wasn’t enough to save my skin. My real crime, as they freely admitted, was not racism as such but using “unacceptable” language online. In other words, people on Twitter were upset. What they were upset about – or whether that was anyone else’s problem but their own – was irrelevant.
My fate illustrates the astonishing importance accorded to these transient Twitter storms only two years ago. Things have changed. What happened to me would not have happened today.
In 2022, when Musk bought Twitter, the site underwent a kind of brain transplant. Instead of being dominated by progressive scolds looking for every opportunity to denounce someone as racist, the site became almost the opposite: a vehicle for (mostly) conservative advocates of free speech who attack with equal venom anyone who attempts to use the hate playbook to denounce their political opponents.
Just look at how former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf was taken to task when he claimed earlier this year that Elon Musk was a “race baiter”. X was immediately plastered with edited versions of Yousaf’s “white, white, white” speech in Holyrood in 2020, when he spoke out about the number of white people in public life in Scotland; a country, as many of his critics pointed out, that is 93 per cent white.
X no longer has a chokehold on political culture
The Twitter progressives who used to police language so rigorously have not disappeared. They are still there, but their influence has waned. Time was, if someone made a joke about the so-called ‘alphabet people’, or joked that non-binary is not a new gender but an affectation by people who want it both ways, they would be monstered. If someone disputed that trans women are women or misgendered someone, they risked being expelled from Twitter. Comedy writer Graham Linehan found this out the hard way when he was kicked off Twitter in 2020 after comments he made about transgender people. J.K. Rowling, who continues to bravely speak out about gender, was always too big to ban, but there were allegations that her tweets were suppressed, or “shadow-banned,” to limit their reach and prevent them from trending. Under Musk, she is now the queen of X.
It is becoming hard to remember just what Twitter was like in the pre-Musk era. Back then, its character was moulded principally by student activists, left-wing academics, and journalists. They all tended to occupy the same space on the ideological Venn diagram, so it’s not surprising that the centre of gravity was markedly to the doctrinaire left. Having come from that spectrum myself, it took a long time to realise just how myopic Twitter had become.
While some of us were blind to the fact, Twitter became almost a parody of the left, like something out of Monty Python. Some bearded men insisted that they were women; there was outrage over “micro aggressions”. People were accused of cultural appropriation for having corn rows or cooking West Indian food. The only thing you couldn’t do on Twitter was laugh at all this. That, more than anything, secured the site’s downfall. People hate that they can’t say things or joke about them. That intolerance was suicidal for progressives, yet they colluded with this nonsense, preparing the ground for their Nemesis: Donald Trump.
But if old Twitter had its faults, what about the new libertarian X? Has it become a sump of racism and antisemitism as critics claim, or has it been liberated from self-appointed ideological guardians? It’s a bit of both. X now resembles a kind of Jekyll and Hyde platform presenting the best and the worst of free speech. There is undoubtedly far more of what used to be called “hate speech” on X, much of it aimed at transgender people and Muslims. Indeed, it is arguable that Islamophobia has become normalised on X, if you take a narrow activist definition of it.
Elon Musk, who has 208 million followers and is a “free speech absolutist,” has clearly raised the bar on what can, and can’t, be said. Musk, an eccentric populist who tends not to think before he tweets, takes advantage of this freedom himself. The Tesla billionaire has recently become preoccupied with UK politics in a way his predecessor, Jack Dorsey, never was. Musk claims that “two-tier Keir” is turning Britain into a “police state”. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of the UK’s “woke” police, but it is obviously nonsensical to call the UK a police state. Yet Twitter’s moderation device, Community Notes, seems reluctant to hold its owner to task.
People used to complain of political bias on old Twitter, but under Musk the site has become overtly politicised in a way that was previously unthinkable. Alt-right conspiracy theories are freely promoted.
On issues like climate change and immigration, Twitter once spoke with a single, left-leaning voice. Questioning the viability of Net Zero was verboten; debating the disadvantages of mass immigration, was off limits. Now both subjects are fair game. Under Musk, there has been a radical shift on what can be said on these, and other, controversial issues.
Musk has shouldered the blame for X’s radical shift
Does this new found freedom mean that X is better than Twitter? Old Twitter was, in many ways, a disaster for the left because of the stifling atmosphere of wrong-think. At its worst, it was like Maoism without Mao: a demented playground populated by bands of hysterics denouncing everyone who didn’t agree with them. Careers were ruined. Academics allowed Twitter to impose an ideological straitjacket from which universities are yet to free themselves.
But intellectual zealotry aside, it’s hard to say that Musk’s ownership of Twitter has improved the quality of debate and information on the platform. The preponderance of what used to be called far-right views and memes on the site is disturbing and uncongenial. The apparent lurch to the right is mostly what happens when you do not try to control speech – and when progressive types abandon ship.
Musk has shouldered the blame for X’s radical shift, but perhaps instead we should point the finger at the left-leaning types who deleted their accounts. What were they thinking, giving up their treasured platform because they couldn’t bear to be criticised by conservatives? Did they so lack the courage of their convictions that they couldn’t take on those people they always denounced as stupid and uneducated? The X-odus has been an extraordinary act of censorship of progressive views on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world – by the progressives themselves.
All those furious, blue-haired, “be kind,” digital sans-culottes who attacked me so aggressively only two years ago are now presumably haunting Bluesky, trying to find deviationists from the true undiluted path of woke. This is the final irony of my own experience of cancel culture: my detractors ended up cancelling themselves.
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