My organization says goodbye to X

I made the decision long ago to personally leave Twitter. I started leaving in 2019 when it became clear that it was becoming a dumpster fire of epic proportions. As I wrote in 2020 as a guest column for the OER20 conference:

As we begin to frame our discussion about what it means to work openly in an age of surveillance, we need to consider deeply the dissonance many of us feel using platforms that do not reflect our values as open educators. It is a dissonance I know I feel daily.

It was a difficult decision for me to leave. I was a very early adopter of the platform, signing up when it was first introduced to me in 2007 at EDUCAUSE during a session by Bryan Alexander. In 2011 I wrote my Masters thesis on Twitter and Personal Learning Networks. So, my roots ran deep. I cut the ties permanently last August.

This week, the organization I work for, BCcampus, decided to cut ties with Twitter/X as well. I had raised the topic with our senior leadership team a few weeks ago after reading Martin’s blog post on why universities should leave X.

As I was the one who brought it up with the leadership team, and as someone who has had such a close relationship with the platform (see thesis above) I was asked by our communications people to write a rationale to our audience as to why we were leaving.

We believe that our digital spaces should reflect our values, and at BCcampus our core values include being inclusive, equitable, and anti-racist. From our values statement: 

We practice creating and sustaining environments and communities in which everyone feels welcomed, valued, respected, and empowered to participate fully and authentically in ways that work for them. 

Continuing to invest time and resources into a platform that feels like it no longer aligns with our values is inconsistent with our mission.  

In many ways it felt like writing yet another eulogy to a companion who long ago drifted into darkness.

I know many of us often pine for the past when it comes to Twitter – for what that platform meant to us and the lasting connections we made there, although, as my colleague Josie Gray was quick to remind me when I was writing the piece and speaking a bit too glowingly about the old Twitter, Twitter has often been a toxic place for many and not the utopia that my rear view mirror tells me it was. My lived experiences in those early days were very different from many who used the platform and faced racism, sexism, ableism, harassment, bullying and worse on a daily basis. But in the end, it should be yet another cautionary tale about outsourcing our connections to those whose only interest is the bottom line. As Chris Gilliard and Kishonna Gray write;

In truth, Twitter changed leadership from one mercurial billionaire to another, and in that regard it affirms that the site was never “ours,” and cements how dangerous it is to think of these systems as the “public square” no matter how many times people refer to it as such.

I am happy we’re leaving X in the dust.

ChatGPT image prompt: I want you to create an image for me. It is in the style of a 1950’s comic book. The scene is a romantic breakup where we see a woman crying and visibly upset. She has tears running down her cheek. A speech bubble above her head says “We are done!” In the background we see the object she is breaking up with which is a computer sitting on a desk. On the screen of the computer display there is a giant black X displayed.