Bye bye Twitter... the Nazi salute really seals it for me

I joined Twitter in 2007 when it was tiny and no one knew what it was for. Over the last eighteen years it's provided me with lots of interesting friends, countless fascinating facts and threads, free advice from helpful strangers and the odd nutcase who needed to be blocked. In short, it was an odd and incredibly useful source of information and worthwhile engagements with people I'd never have met in any other way.

No more. I've tried to convince myself that there's a point in putting up with Elon Musk's vile transformation of a useful, open, largely responsible social medium into its present highly controlled and biased outlet for his ego and political ambitions. And there is an argument that it's best to stay and keep a foot in the door of something so influential – I'd never condemn people for taking that route. Anyone who wants to make the case that sticking with X is tantamount to support for Musk's exceedingly poisonous personality is, I think, wrong. If you want to stay and fight it out, good luck.

But I won't be with you. I watched that blatantly Nazi salute I suspect most of us have seen and that's the end of it. Maybe he'll now come back and say it wasn't a Nazi salute at all. I don't care. No thinking, decent person would behave like that in public. The richest – and he thinks smartest - man on the planet ought to know that.

So very shortly, after eighteen mostly happy years, I'm gone. Account deleted, and all my data removed from them too. There are lots of people and posts from unknown strangers I'll miss. But I can no longer stomach being a part of something run by someone so crass, so ignorant, so obviously unfeeling.

From now on Bluesky is my main daily social media home, though you will also find me on Instagram and sporadically on Facebook too. And you can always get me through davidhewson.com too.

By tomorrow I'll be gone. It'll feel very odd after all these years. But I no longer feel I can stay around anything to do with Elon Musk. Not that he'll care for a moment, but the man is the enemy of everything I think of as good, decent, honest and worthwhile. He can lord it over his own stinking gutter without me watching horrified from the sidelines.