If you're on Twitter/X, you may have noticed a sudden stream of high-profile accounts heading for the exits. And no, it's not (just) about the election.
This exodus is thanks to a new Terms of Service document, which takes effect on November 15. Although the company isn't talking about it, the new ToS gives owner Elon Musk the right to use your tweets, photos and videos to train his AI bot, Grok.
The option to opt out of Grok training, something users currently have, may still exist in your settings the following day. But it also may not matter, legally speaking. Nothing about opting out is mentioned in the document you are required to sign. And it doesn't appear to make a difference if your account is locked: So far as this ToS is concerned, Grok gets to feed on it anyway.
Oh yes, and following free speech is no longer free. You'll be on the hook for $15,000 in damages if your account accesses more than a million tweets a day. Not even the hardest of hardcore Twitter junkies will reach that number, but many researchers do. For anyone who tracks hate speech on X, this will have a chilling effect. The Knight Institute for the First Amendment at Columbia University calls it a "disturbing move" for a supposed free-speech advocate.
Disagree with anything in this document, or any other changes going forward? According to the ToS, your only legal recourse is to fight the world's richest man in one court in rural Texas, many miles from X HQ in Austin. This happens to be a court where a judge who may still own a pile of Tesla stock has already given Musk favorable rulings.
Don't want Elon Musk to feed your feed to his pet AI? There is, alas, only one way out of it now: delete your account.
That's a drastic and highly emotive step to take, given all the hundreds or thousands of tweets that may be in there. You can download an archive of your tweets by following these steps, but the final step involves waiting for X to prepare the archive. Some users with a long history of tweets, who have downloaded this archive before, are reporting that the preparation is taking longer this time.
This may not be a deliberate delay past the November 15 deadline, as some suggest; it may just be that the system is backed up with download requests.
You may have good reason for staying, of course — one being to ensure that no malicious actor grabs your handle and impersonates you. If you fear the removal of the block feature, which is also rolling out after November 15, you can lock your account down to ensure only your followers will see your tweets.
Bottom line — there's no one right way to leave. Jaime Lee Curtis posted a screenshot of her X deactivation on Instagram, along with the serenity prayer. Don Lemon left a simple statement on the service with his reasoning: the Terms of Service change. The Guardian wrote an article explaining that its decision to no longer post on X had been in the works for a while. And after the Center For Countering Digital Hate posted its final tweets, it deleted the account.
And if you don't think any of this matters and you're happy to stay on X? Well, good luck dealing with the increasingly controlling Musk regime.
For those about to Grok, we salute you.
