X Marks The Spot. And The Spot Is A Miss.

“We recently terminated our contract with X due to nonpayment. And that was after months and months of outreach, flexibility, trying to make it work. And ultimately we had to stop the contract.” [1]

— Cassie Coccaro, Head of Communications, Thorn, NBC News, June 2025

Thorn is a nonprofit whose entire mission is defending children from sexual abuse. When Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022 he publicly declared that addressing child sexual abuse material on the platform was his top priority. Three years later the organization he relied on to detect and remove that content walked away because X stopped paying its bills.

Let’s dig deeper.

The Child Safety Problem

X has allowed adult content on the platform in ways that create documented child safety concerns. Age verification on X is essentially nonexistent. That means explicit content is available to anyone regardless of age with almost no friction standing in the way. [2]

But the adult content problem is only part of the story.

Following Musk’s mass layoffs of content moderation staff a Stanford Internet Observatory investigation reported a lapse in basic enforcement against child sexual abuse material on the platform. Staff reductions left one full-time staffer responsible for handling all child sexual abuse material across the entire Asia-Pacific region. [3]

In August 2025 BBC News discovered a network of more than 100 accounts openly selling child pornography on X. A victim of child sexual abuse publicly begged Elon Musk to stop links offering images of her abuse from being posted on his platform. [4]

Additional research found that self harm content associated with a specific hashtag community on the platform increased 500 percent between October 2021 and August 2022 with an average of 20,000 posts per month. Only 8.3 percent of that content was blocked by content moderation. [5]

Children are being exposed to explicit content, self harm communities, and documented child sexual abuse material on a platform that has made it easier not harder for all of it to happen. Whatever you believe about how social media should be regulated that is a problem.

Let’s look at the data on other areas where the platform fails you.

Designed For Outrage

A 2024 study published in Communications Psychology tracked 252 real Twitter users five times a day for seven days. The finding was consistent across every demographic and every political leaning. Twitter use decreased wellbeing and increased outrage and political polarization within thirty minutes of use. Every single time. [6]

The platform is not designed to inform you. It is designed to keep you scrolling. And the most reliable way to keep people scrolling is outrage. Outrage triggers an emotional response. Emotional responses drive engagement. Engagement is what the algorithm is optimizing for. Your wellbeing does not matter.

X has been engineered in a way that makes genuine conversation psychologically exhausting. The algorithm does not surface the most honest take. It surfaces the most inflammatory one every time.

It’s impossible to have a real conversation on a platform that is designed for outrage.

Too Little Too Late

X has become a place where finding something true or useful requires enormous effort and the algorithm is working against you the entire time. Part of the problem starts with how misinformation is handled.

X replaced its structured fact checking system with Community Notes a crowdsourced system where a diverse group of contributors have to reach consensus before a correction appears on a post. In theory it prevents any single political or ideological group from controlling what gets labeled as false. [7]

The problem is speed. Misinformation spreads fastest in the first hour after a post goes live. Community Notes requires consensus among contributors before a note appears which means the process is slow by design. By the time a correction shows up on a misleading post that post has often already been seen and shared millions of times. The damage is done before the note ever appears. [7]

A European Commission study found that disinformation was most prevalent and received the highest relative engagement on X compared to every other major social network. The findings were serious enough that the EU warned X of a potential ban or significant fines for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act. [8]

The most polarizing voices go viral while the most thoughtful voices get buried. We spend all this time on a platform that leaves us more confused and less certain about what is real and what is propaganda. This can’t be the answer.

Your Data Is Not Safe

Lastly in early 2025 a dataset containing information on approximately 2.8 billion Twitter/X user profiles was posted on a hacking marketplace. The data included email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, account creation dates, and other personal metadata. Security researchers noted that the dataset made it significantly easier to link pseudonymous X accounts back to real identities putting journalists, activists, and everyday users at risk. [9]

This is what happens when you layoff the engineering and security teams that were responsible for protecting user data. When you hand over your phone number and email address to a platform you are trusting that platform to protect it. X has shown it cannot be trusted to do that.

Why Leaving Feels Like Relief

Most people who leave X describe the same experience. They felt better almost immediately. In addition you won’t be supporting a company that doesn’t prioritize child safety.

The news still happens without X. Your real relationships do not require X. The conversations worth having are not happening inside an algorithm that is specifically designed to keep you on edge and scrolling.

Leaving is a decision that your time and your mental health are worth more than another hour of doomscrolling through a platform that the research says is making you feel worse every single time you open it. [6]

Real conversation happens in real places with real people. That is what we are building at Disconnectd. See you out there at disconnectd.com.

How To Delete Your X Account

Before you delete make sure to download your data first. Go to Settings then Your Account then Download an archive of your data. X will email you a link when it is ready.

To delete on desktop: Go to x.com and log in. Click More in the left sidebar. Click Settings and Support then Settings. Click Your Account then Deactivate your account. Follow the prompts and confirm with your password.

To delete on mobile: Open the X app. Tap your profile icon. Tap Settings and Support then Settings. Tap Your Account then Deactivate your account. Follow the prompts and confirm with your password.

The 30 day grace period: After deactivating X gives you 30 days before the account is permanently deleted. If you log back in during that period the deletion is cancelled. After 30 days everything is gone permanently.

Thirty days from now it will all be gone. And you will be better off for it. This X misses the spot entirely.

See you out there at disconnectd.com.

Sources

[1] Coccaro, Cassie. Head of Communications, Thorn. Quoted in NBC News. June 2025. nbcnews.com

[2] X New Adult Content Policy Raises Safeguarding Concerns. Fight the New Drug. 2024. fightthenewdrug.org

[3] Stanford Internet Observatory. Investigation into child sexual abuse material enforcement on Twitter. June 2023. Referenced in Wikipedia: Twitter under Elon Musk.

[4] BBC News. Network of accounts selling child pornography discovered on X. August 2025. Referenced in Wikipedia: Twitter under Elon Musk.

[5] Atauri-Mezquida, D., Nogales-González, C. and Martínez-Pastor, E. “Exploring self-harm on Twitter (X): Content moderation and its psychological effects on adolescents.” Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies 15, no. 1 (2025): e202503. ojcmt.net

[6] Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Cheung, F. and Inzlicht, M. “Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage.” Communications Psychology 2, no. 15 (2024). nature.com

[7] Twitter under Elon Musk. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

[8] Criticism of X. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

[9] OneRep. X/Twitter Data Breach: Timeline, Risks and What To Do. 2025. onerep.com