Both X (formerly Twitter) and all the Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) are owned by fawning Trump-loving oligarchs. These online platforms steal your personal information, resell it, and permit hate speech they approve while censoring political opinions they don’t like.
Even if you’ve been on these platforms a long time, it’s now time to leave. Immediately.
Pulling the Plug
One of the first things Elon Musk did after buying Twitter was to re-host far right groups and outright fascists. Some people gave him the benefit of the doubt. But when Musk was anointed Trump’s “efficiency” czar and then hosted Alice Weidel of the German neo-nazi Alternative für Deutschland Party on X, people realized that the grandson of a fascist and the son of a fascistic eugenics enthusiast is himself a fascist. And they are looking for instructions for deleting their accounts on X – advice like this and this.
Ach nein! Was meinst Du denn? Weder von uns ist ein Nazi!
And ever since Mark Zuckerberg made his supplicant’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, plunked down an easy $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and discontinued moderation of fascist hate speech on his now Führer-friendly platforms, people have been looking for instructions for leaving Meta too – instructions like this and this.
In general, it’s not a bad idea to stop helping these fascist-ready oligarchs make more money off you and gain an even greater foothold in government. You may not have as much power as they, but you DO have the power to get off their platforms.
Where else would I go?
If you worry that you won’t be able to find your friends online any longer, you might be pleasantly surprised to find some have already migrated to the far less toxic Mastodon and BlueSky Social networks, or found much more secure messaging in Signal as a replacement for WhatsApp.
But don’t stop with account deletion
Like the end of any toxic relationship, the breakup isn’t complete until you change the locks and block the calls and text messages.
Deleting accounts on X and Meta only ends your contributions to these toxic platforms. To completely pull the plug and cut the cord, you need to stop viewing content on them altogether and block their trackers and bots from continuing to access your devices through cookies, fingerprinting, and other forms of digital surveillance.
You can do this on a desktop (or laptop) by creating a hosts file that prevents your computer’s networking system from resolving the IP address of any X or Meta server. SwitchHosts is a host configuration program that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux and can be downloaded here. Once installed, you point SwitchHosts to collections of addresses of social networking servers you want to block. Several can be found here and here and here. You either download the lists and paste them into SwitchHosts or configure SwitchHosts to read and refresh the online lists automatically.
On both mobile devices and desktops you can accomplish the same objective by using a DNS server that will not resolve IP addresses for social networks you want to block. One such service is NextDNS.
Once you have created your own custom blocking profile with NextDNS, you then configure your mobile and desktop devices to use the profile. Your device will now resolve every IP address except for those of the services to be blocked.
The result is that, as far as your computer or mobile device is concerned, Twitter and Meta no longer exist.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
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