“Go touch grass” has become a popular way of telling people to get offline, go outside and experience the real world. For those of us who have spent an evening on social media getting het up over a particular news story this is undoubtedly good advice. There is nothing like spending time with people who are not as online as yourself to get some perspective.
No group of people needs to heed this advice more than those who populate Westminster.t
Britain’s political village is hooked on X. But can we any longer ignore mounting evidence that the platform is distorting our political debate and normalising views that previously were considered beyond the pale?
Take the recent row over Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s comments on TalkTV. She said she hated to see TV adverts full of black and Asian people. Her words were racist. Even Nigel Farage admitted they sounded racist.
square ZING TSJENG Reform's racism would be laughable if it wasn’t so frightening
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So, although she later apologised, how did she come to think it was okay to say them out loud? And why did Robert Peston’s ITV programme devote a segment to asking whether her comments were “racist or realist”?
A decade ago, nobody would have asked such a question. Even just three years ago, nobody would have. But three years ago, Elon Musk bought X. Since then the conversation in Britain – and across the world – has shifted in profound, and profoundly worrying, ways. Pochin’s comments and Peston’s segment are signs of that changing conversation.
Since X was bought by Elon Musk, the platform has become increasingly toxic, where hate and racism frequently go without challenge. But it’s a platform that does not – and never did – represent Britain.
Just yesterday, Musk declared “civil war in Britain is inevitable”. He picked out far right agitator Tommy Robinson as the “hard man” to lead this fight.
X’s payment system – which gives people a share of revenues based on engagement with their posts – has added a financial incentive for those who promote outrage or declare Britain broken. It has monetised division. Posters are paid off by a foreign billionaire who is no friend to our country.
Sunder Katwala of British Future has patiently recorded cases of racial abuse on the platform and the persistent failure of X to do anything about it. Musk himself has used his reach on X to boost dangerous conspiracy theories, fuel unrest during the riots last summer in the wake of the Southport stabbings, and promote violent overthrow of the British Government in summer 2025. Today’s X bears little resemblance to the platform which many of us once knew.
To be clear, X has never been representative of British society. People on the right used to like to say “Twitter isn’t Britain”, and this was undeniably true. For a long time, Twitter users leaned to the liberal-left and because of this were taken by surprise by events such as Brexit. Even after recent exoduses from X – to Bluesky and elsewhere – it would be unwise to assume that the user base now leans heavily to the right.
The content has, however, become unquestionably more toxic and extreme. X now shows us at our most angry, most divided and pushes a strong ideological agenda that reflects the views of its owner.
This is the context in which we find one significant group of users who remain on X. Britain’s politicians and journalists. Most surprisingly, the British Government is still on there, despite X’s owner calling for its overthrow. The Labour Party doesn’t even have an account on Bluesky – a platform where many of its natural supporters have migrated to. Of course, it is hard to quit a platform when you have spent years cultivating a large following, and when it offers a chance to talk to millions.
But this means that influential players in and commentators on Westminster are being exposed to extreme content that historically one would have had to search out in the darkest corners of the internet. In particular, things that were previously considered unacceptable on race have become open for debate. Because X has changed gradually, some people may not even realise how the content they are seeing has itself changed.
In just three years, we have watched Britain’s conversation about race become correspondingly more toxic and extreme. This doesn’t bear relation to public opinion – where the long-term trend is towards more liberal racial attitudes, even while concern about immigration is high.
What has changed is the norms about what can and can’t be said. It doesn’t have to be this way. While Keir Starmer and his party may not be able to influence Elon Musk, they can change the national conversation. Stepping back from X would be a major signal that its promotion of hate and disorder is not acceptable to the British Government. It’s time to think radically, because it seems unsustainable for those who care about British democracy to remain on a platform whose owner is fixated on its very destruction.
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