17 February 2025
Today we are signing out of Twitter for the last time.
We have deleted all our previous posts and unfollowed everyone on the platform. The account remains up, to discourage impersonation, but it will no longer be monitored. If anyone contacts you as Canongate on Twitter, please know that it is not us. It is important to be wary of scams on social media, particularly when they are poorly moderated and maintained.
Canongate had already reduced our interactions with Twitter because of the direction the platform has taken in recent years. We had, however, stayed marginally engaged and continued to repost content on the site because we did not want to completely abandon the audience we had built, or to leave behind our authors, for many of whom it has been a vital means of communication and promotion.
However, we believe that the only ethical option available to us now is to remove ourselves from a platform which is being used to promote fascism across the world.
Elon Musk has made clear his affinity for extremist right-wing politics. He has been public in his efforts to use the site, which he acquired, for what we feel is for the benefit of fascism in US politics and internationally. We can’t tolerate being a part of that effort.
While we’re leaving because of the abhorrent politics now at the heart of Twitter’s existence, it is worth noting that the management of Twitter under Musk has been incompetent as well as hateful. Even if it wasn’t being run for a specific, hideous political agenda, it would still be a shadow of its previous self simply as a result of ineptitude.
Twitter was in the past a useful tool for us, and we had successfully built an audience of 65,000 readers there, which, for an independent publisher, has been a great resource. We found a community that we enjoyed and tried to help foster a friendly, funny, personable, bookish space. It brought with it new access to a delightful and vast range of voices and perspectives.
It’s sad that the collective creative output of millions of people can be undermined when gross wealth is deployed by one individual to influence their behaviour towards a political agenda.
Thank you to those of you (and there are many of you) who made our time on Twitter so worthwhile and rewarding. Twitter’s collapse has made us – like many others – keenly aware of the vulnerability of social media companies to bad pressures. For example, although we continue to be on Meta-run sites Facebook, Instagram and Threads, we are aware that many people are also leaving those platforms because of Meta’s own failings, and we’re going to keep actively thinking about every space that we engage in.
Still, we mean to experiment and find pockets of productivity and community elsewhere. Please come and join us. We have a newsletter. We are also on Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok.
See you there.