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The hypocrisy of the Guardian’s X exodus

Katharine Viner, Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian. Credit: Getty

November 14, 2024 - 12:00pm

The Guardian has had a flounce, of the grandstanding “I’m just too good for you!” kind, departing X with a post on X. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” the newspaper claims in the accompanying statement, “given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” This may come as a surprise from a newspaper whose writers have been accused of spreading conspiracy theories, and of expressing sympathy for Hamas.

A gaggle of celebs and pundits have done the very same flounce because of Donald Trump’s election win — and Elon Musk’s involvement in it — including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, comedian Greg Davies, journalist George Monbiot, and — bizarrely — the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Lewis Goodall of The News Agents podcast reacted to The Guardian exit with the headshaking, disappointed “You’ve let the school down” routine: “Don’t think Guardian will be the last. This place is basically Truth Social now. Such a shame.”

Yet these people said nothing as Musk’s predecessor Jack Dorsey muted conservatives, buried the Hunter Biden laptop story, and banned a sitting president from the platform. Their lost golden age of “non-toxic” Twitter saw thousands of women chucked off the site for pointing out — often with punctilious politeness — that there are two sexes and that men cannot become women. Until 2022 it was dangerous to “misgender” — i.e. to refer correctly to a person’s sex if they disputed it — on Twitter.

Then again, the departing tweeters view all disagreement or derision as “hate”. There is a lot of disagreement and derision in the world and online; there always has been. It’s rather like refusing to use the telephone because people are having conversations of which you don’t approve. Guardian employees may wail that it’s all become so toxic but, really, they prefer their kind of toxicity: that is, the polite, passive-aggressive, middle-class kind.

More sympathy should be extended to the people saying that “the fun has gone out of it”. Fair enough. But the trouble with this view is that the fun went out of everything in about 2014. Why single out X? The old Twitter of 2009 belongs to a lost world where we expected people not to take jokes literally, to engage in good faith, to shrug off other people’s bad takes with a chuckle. The end of all that was largely caused by Dorsey’s Twitter, with its cancellations and creepy thought control.

Many of the flouncers have flounced to rival site Bluesky, which has the air of Robespierre’s Committee Of Public Safety about it: while it sounds nice, it will probably end in suspicion and terror. This mini-exodus is, as usual, a signal of status. The low-status lower orders are angry, and vulgar Musk lets them express this anger. Hence the constant pleas for less polarisation, more light and less heat, coming from the very elites who created these febrile conditions in the first place. It’s like throwing a match into a petrol tank and being appalled by it having the sheer temerity, the appalling bad manners, to blow up in your face.

Taken by surprise by the Trump win, and the discovery that their political and social map bears no relation to the actual territory, these people’s solution is to run into a cupboard and stick their fingers in their ears.

It must be a new and scary experience for The Guardian’s staff to be faced with a big institution that does not automatically share its banal, state-sanctioned “values” and approved opinions, to be confronted on a regular basis with ideas that they detest. To them — and to Lewis Goodall, Don Lemon, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the rest — I say: welcome to my world. I’ve a feeling you might have to get used to it, wherever you run.


Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

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Mona Malnorowski
Mona Malnorowski
1 hour ago

Always look forward to anything written by Gareth, either here or on Spiked, where he regularly contributes. Well-deployed ridicule is a powerful weapon against the pompous and self-righteous farm machinery of the Guardian and their ilk, and Gareth wields it expertly. Well done once again

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
1 hour ago

Poor losers, these British backers of the woke Democratic aristocracy.

Adam Huntley
Adam Huntley
1 hour ago

GR may well be right in describing the Guardian’s exodus as hypocrisy. But when its levelled against a group who lack any self awareness, are fish that don’t know they’re wet, I’m afraid it’s unlikely to have much impact on them

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 hour ago

The thing which the Guardian needs to remember in this moment is: NO-ONE CARES.
NO. ONE. CARES.

Andy Sandford
Andy Sandford
1 hour ago

Congratulations to the picture editor too for that wonderfully sour photo of Viner.

Rosemary Throssell
Rosemary Throssell
1 hour ago

People have such short memories.
Thanks for this excellent article.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
39 minutes ago

of course, it’s hypocrisy but that’s the least of it. This is the Guardian saying it wants to control the flow of information and a place like X makes that impossible. Anyone recall how “do your own research” became a pejorative during Covid when we were supposed to blindly trust the experts instead? This is another version of that.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 hour ago

Hear hear!

Santiago Excilio
Santiago Excilio
1 hour ago

Viner; the living proof that right wing women are more attractive than lefty’s.

In any event it’s a pointless and petulant decision that will reduce the reach of the esteemed organ that she edits; a classic case of cutting off ones nose to spite ones face, or possibly like Robespierre eventually losing ones head.

I have often mused that the most effective way to kill the pernicious impact of social media would be to force them to remove the ‘news’ from peoples feeds. One could achieve this by the simple means of enforcing editorial responsibility (with the associated liabilities) on the platforms for any news they disseminate. Pretty quickly they would be back to sharing cat and holiday pictures rather than being disguised and easily manipulated news channels.

In a similar vein I would also ban established media providing their output free into any state funded entity, because again by doing so one runs the risk of exerting/creating undue influence. This would be bad news for the Grauniad as the majority of its circulation is mostly free giveaways into the various departments of the Blob and the BBC.

Last edited 1 hour ago by Santiago Excilio
Lennon Ó Náraigh
Lennon Ó Náraigh
1 hour ago

I have to say though, I think Twitter has gone boring. It’s now a right-wing echo chamber. It’s kind of funny but not very informative. And Reddit is the equivalent left-wing echo chamber. It’s a bit like how long ago, you would read the Guardian and the Telegraph, and the truth would be somewhere in the middle.

Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
43 minutes ago

Bluesky? That’s the first I have heard of it. And anyway, hasn’t there been another exodus in recent times? I seem to remember the non toxic platform was called Mastodon or something like that. Whatever happened to it?

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
12 minutes ago

Its bones were dug up in Siberia last year.

R S Foster
R S Foster
1 hour ago

I too love Mr Robert’s Journalism. But I wish he would return to Drama just once…ideally by writing a costume drama in his inimitable style about Britain’s role in abolishing the Slave Trade, taking the fight to the Slavers (both Black African and White European)…and founding Sierra Leone. It would be a popular and much-needed corrective to the nonsense currently propounded about those events…

Chipoko
Chipoko
25 minutes ago

Let The Guardian retreat into its own echo chamber. Good riddance!

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
15 minutes ago

Of course Katharine Viner is Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian. I mean, look at that face. Who else would have her?