Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as ‘too toxic’
Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”.
In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”
This week, the Guardian said it would stop posting on X, citing concerns over toxic content on the platform. The German football club St Pauli, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis, the US TV journalist Don Lemon and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have also announced they will no longer post on the site.
On Wednesday, King denied he had called X’s owner, Elon Musk, “Trump’s new first lady” or that the world’s richest person, a staunch Donald Trump supporter, had kicked him off the platform – drawing a reply of “Hi Steve!” from Musk’s own account.
King, 77, has clashed with Musk before over his ownership of the platform. Shortly after Musk completed the $44bn (£35bn) takeover of the sitein 2022, when it was known as Twitter, King threatened to quit the platform after a report that it would charge users $20 to keep their blue verification tick.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” he wrote.
King also rebuked Musk during the presidential election campaign, throughout which the Tesla chief executive used his account to back Trump’s candidacy. Responding to a Musk claim on X that the Democratic party candidate, Kamala Harris, “wants to break the constitution”, King wrote: “That’s ridiculous. As usual.”
On Wednesday, the Guardian said it would no longer post from its official accounts because the benefits of being on the site were outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it.
St Pauli, a team in Germany’s Bundesliga top division, announced on Thursday it would no longer use the site, describing the social media site as a “hate machine”. La Vanguardia, Spain’s fourth most-read newspaper for general news, also said it would stop posting on X because it had become an “echo chamber” for disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Announcing her departure on Instagram, Lee Curtis wrote: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.” Lemon said X was no longer a place for “honest debate and discussion, transparency and free speech”.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate also quit X this week, citing changes to the site’s terms and conditions that say all legal disputes relating to the platform’s new rules will be heard in the state of Texas, which CCDH believes will be beneficial to Musk.
X rival Bluesky has added more than 1 million new users since the US election and has nearly 15 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company has said.
X has been contacted for comment.
