X-ing out X

The power and promise of collective non-cooperation

Below, Waleed Shahid, the progressive strategist known to Ink readers for his visionary post-election manifesto, asks why powerful elected Democrats are still using X — and whether they can stop cooperating with power and take the necessary steps to break Elon Musk’s stranglehold on the attention economy.

Shahid has worked on campaigns for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Summer Lee, among others, and is a former Bernie Sanders staffer. He is currently the executive director of the progressive strategic communications/media creation/training hub, The Bloc. Click on the link below to subscribe to Shahid’s newsletter and follow along with his always insightful thinking on the future of progressive politics.

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By Waleed Shahid

If the opposition can’t leave the authoritarian’s propaganda platform, how exactly does it plan to stop authoritarianism?

That question points to the heart of a growing contradiction. Elon Musk’s X — formerly Twitter — has become an instrument of the Trump-aligned far right: a channel where misinformation is repackaged as news, ideological enemies are targeted, and legitimacy is shaped in real time by an algorithm rigged in favor of far-right voices. Yet despite this, Democrats, journalists, and liberal organizations continue to feed the platform — often using it to express outrage at the very power structure they’re reinforcing.

Elsewhere, the resistance looks a bit different. In Europe and South America, governments are taking concrete steps to constrain Musk’s influence: the European Union is preparing billion-dollar fines for Musk’s spread of disinformation and failure to protect users; Brazil’s judiciary is investigating Musk for interfering with its legal system and refusing to comply with court orders; Belgium’s public transport agency has deactivated all X accounts in protest; and Greece’s largest labor federation has formally exited the platform, citing its role in undermining democracy.

In the United States, however, anything close to that kind of coordinated withdrawal has yet to materialize. We continue to fuel X’s relevance while critiquing its influence. I’m no exception. Like many others, I justify staying on the platform because it's still where political information moves fastest. It’s where elected officials speak. It’s where journalists watch. It’s where pundits debate. That feedback loop between political elites and media is not just a feature of X — it’s the engine of its perceived indispensability.

Using X may now pose a greater risk than even fringe platforms like Truth Social — not because it’s more extreme, but because it’s becoming structurally embedded in the regime’s governance. The Social Security Administration’s decision to shift all public communications to X, while simultaneously gutting regional staffing, effectively turns a privately owned, algorithmically manipulated, and disinformation-prone platform into the sole gateway between the government and millions of vulnerable Americans. Where Truth Social is marginal and self-contained, X is still mainstream. That makes its capture by authoritarian interests much more dangerous.

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The economics of illusion

Since Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, the platform has hemorrhaged advertisers and alienated users. Content moderation has collapsed. And yet — astonishingly — X’s valuation has recently returned to $44 billion, the price Musk originally paid. This is not a business recovery. It’s a reputational illusion.

X’s value isn’t rooted in revenue or growth. It’s rooted in attention. Musk has preserved the illusion that X remains central to political life — and that illusion continues to attract investors, advertisers, and influence-seekers.

In truth, the value of Musk’s X isn’t something he built — it’s something we give. Withdraw our cooperation, and the whole illusion begins to collapse.

According to Pew, the top 10 percent of U.S. adult users produce 80 percent of all tweets. The platform’s relevance is sustained by a tiny elite — elected officials, influencers, and journalists — who drive the vast majority of content and engagement.

Only 12 of the top 50 political accounts on X are not right-wing — compared to more than 30 that lean conservative — highlighting just how lopsided the platform’s influence ecosystem has become. X has become not a balanced town square, but a platform where right-wing voices now dominate political reach and engagement.

But if, for example, just half of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s combined 28 million followers left X, it would immediately cut 14 million users — roughly 5 percent of the platform’s total active base. With an estimated $10–$15 in annual ad revenue per user, that alone would translate to a direct loss of $140–$210 million.

And because political users generate outsized engagement, the real economic hit could be far greater. If even 25 percent of political journalists exited — with their content setting the pace for news coverage and engagement — it could depress daily activity by another 5 percent, triggering an additional $250–$300 million in lost ad revenue. That kind of coordinated exit would break more than metrics; it would unravel the platform’s perceived political centrality. And once that illusion collapses, it’s not just X that suffers — it’s the entire mythology of Musk’s invincibility.

X’s power doesn’t come from revenue or users — it comes from perception. It still feels central because the people who define political discourse haven’t left. That’s why quiet, privatized departures to Bluesky change little. A coordinated boycott by elected officials, journalists, and cultural voices would do more than reduce engagement — it would break the spell. It would remind us, as every great movement has, that no system — no matter how powerful or well-financed — can function without our participation. Power, in the end, depends on consent. And consent can be withdrawn.

There’s already a playbook. Tesla — Musk’s most visible brand — was never valued on production alone. At its peak, it was worth nearly half the auto industry despite shipping a fraction of the cars. Its valuation ran on hype: the promise of future technological breakthroughs and Musk’s cult of personality.

The #TeslaTakedown campaign has begun to pierce the illusion of Musk’s invincibility by staging nonviolent protests at Tesla dealerships and pressuring public pension funds to divest from the company. These aren’t tactics on the scale of the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the United Farm Worker-led grape boycott campaigns of the 1960s — but even without that size or coordination, they’re already making an impact. Tesla stock is down 35 percent since January 2025.

Why a boycott hasn’t happened

Despite knowing the stakes — and having real leverage — no serious, coordinated boycott of X has taken off. Why? Because it’s a textbook collective action problem: everyone agrees something must change, but no one wants to go first or knows how.

First, we don’t want to target our own. The elected officials who give X its progressive relevance — figures like AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Murphy — are also some of the most effective voices against the Trump-Musk regime. Calling on them to leave can feel like weakening the front line and engaging in a circular firing squad.

Second, we fear invisibility. Exiting X risks retreating into smaller, fragmented platforms — Bluesky, Substack — where it feels like we’re speaking only to each other and not reaching anyone beyond the choir.

Third, the path to impact is unclear. Would electeds boycotting spark a journalist exodus? Would journalists ever leave, given that Republicans will certainly continue to use the platform? Do they even need to? What would tank the platform’s use in the attention economy? With no clear sequence of cause and effect, and no guarantee of success, the logic of departure feels uncertain — and so everyone waits.

And finally, no one believes they can pull the trigger. Many advocacy organizations don’t believe they have the power to move elected officials or journalists. So they hesitate.

In sum: the problem isn’t that we don’t see the danger. It’s that everyone is waiting for someone else with more power, more reach, or more visibility to act first. That’s what makes this moment so strategically fragile — and so politically ripe.

What the data actually shows

This paralysis has preserved the illusion that X is still the center of political life. But the numbers tell a different story. X is no longer a vibrant town square; it’s a curated wasteland, dominated by one voice and one algorithm. Elon Musk’s personal account alone received over 91 billion views in 2025 — more than every other top political account combined. Conservative influencers now crowd the top ranks, while progressive accounts are few and far between.

What used to be a chaotic but strangely functional public square is now a Potemkin village run by bots, trolls, and crypto grifters with anime avatars. You’re not debating real people — you’re yelling at ghosts while an algorithm ensures your posts go nowhere. The feed that once felt like democracy in motion is now a haunted funhouse: the audience is fake, the applause is fake, and the outrage is on autoplay. The longer we stay, the more we breathe life into a stage set for our own irrelevance. The longer we stay, the more we prop up a simulation run by a man building rockets — not to serve humanity, but to colonize Mars fast enough to stop hearing from humanity altogether. This isn’t a town square anymore. It’s occupied Martian territory. If Earth has any self-respect left, it needs to log off.

The case for strategic exit

A boycott doesn’t need to be massive. It needs to be done by key first movers. If even 10 major elected official accounts, 15 major journalists, and 20 influencers exited X on the same day — with a clear rationale and a migration plan — it would rupture the platform’s perceived legitimacy. The goal isn’t to delete X or even your account. It’s to break its monopoly on attention.

A mass user boycott of X without the participation of political elites, media figures, and influencers is unlikely to succeed — because X was never a mass product in the traditional sense. Like a dinner party where a few loud guests dominate the conversation, its perceived relevance comes not from the crowd, but from a small set of highly visible voices who shape the discourse. Without those hosts walking out, the room doesn’t empty — it just gets quieter, and Musk still holds the mic.

Here are three potential scenarios, divided by who likely needs to act first: organizations, elected officials, or journalists:

1. The coordinated pressure campaign (most likely)
Progressive advocacy groups, labor unions, and grassroots coalitions begin a strategic, coordinated boycott targeting X — not just as users, but by privately or publicly persuading the elected officials they endorse, support, or have access to. Using a mix of good cop/bad cop tactics, these groups combine public calls for exit with behind-the-scenes diplomacy and appeals to political credibility to nudge electeds toward leaving X together. The campaign is framed not as protest, but as a reaffirmation that we hold the power, not them. If 10–20 well-known electeds move, it creates enough media attention and narrative momentum to trigger wider journalist and influencer exits.

2. The maverick electeds scenario (unlikely)
A handful of high-profile elected officials decide to leave X together. While unlikely due to the personal risk of losing reach and visibility, if even a few electeds coordinate this move publicly, they could catalyze a broader rethinking within the Democratic caucus and media ecosystem. But electeds rarely take risks on their own without shifts in public mood nudging them in a new direction.

3. The journalistic ethics rebellion (least likely)
Mainstream and progressive journalists, alarmed by algorithmic manipulation, begin exiting X en masse. Newsrooms issue new guidelines discouraging dependence on X for reporting or sourcing. This would be the most powerful structural blow — but it’s also the least likely. Many journalists remain on X because it’s where electeds post, and fear being labeled partisan for exiting a platform still used by all Republican leaders. Unless major media institutions move together, individual journalists are unlikely to risk any sort of political action.

What breaks the cycle

A full-scale boycott doesn’t require everyone to delete their accounts or surrender their audiences overnight. The most visible users — elected officials, journalists, influencers — could simply change their bios, announce their departure, and direct followers to Bluesky, Substack, or elsewhere.

The power lies in making the exit public, legible, collective, and intentional. Just signaling that they no longer view X as central to political life begins to fracture its illusion of indispensability. By contrast, efforts to simply also post to Bluesky — where users keep their X accounts but post elsewhere first — have failed to shift the attention economy or narrative power away from the platform on the scale of a boycott.

There is another way. One rooted not in performance, but power.

What makes boycotts effective — whether in Montgomery, Delano, or today — is not just moral clarity, but strategic leverage of non-cooperation. Systems of power don’t collapse from absence alone; they falter when enough people withdraw their participation in a coordinated way that exposes their dependence on us. Musk’s X is no exception. Its influence relies on our attention, our content, and our daily cooperation. When we leave — together — we don’t just withhold consent. We weaken a platform built to undermine us, and in doing so, we build the collective strength needed to act at scale.

Musk’s most valuable asset isn’t a car or a rocket. It’s the myth that he is the future — and that his platforms are too central to abandon. We see far more Toyotas than Teslas, yet Tesla’s value remains wildly inflated because people still believe Musk matters more than he does. Break that illusion, and both his influence and his empire begin to wobble.

The power we have is the power to withhold. It’s time we used it.

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Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images