Why TidBITS Will No Longer Post to X/Twitter or Facebook

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Originally published at: Why TidBITS Will No Longer Post to X/Twitter or Facebook - TidBITS

While covering our recent anniversary (see “Staying the Course After 35 Years of TidBITS,” 18 April 2025), I wrote:

Like many, I find it difficult not to obsess about current events, and I encourage you to align your actions with your values in a way that feels right to you. When the path forward seems unclear, I believe we can best contribute by modeling the behavior we want to see in the world.

A moment of reflection made me realize that I had an opportunity to model more of that behavior. TidBITS has been sounding the alarm about social media for many years, and the hope I expressed a few years ago in “Elon Musk Buys Twitter (Really) for $44 Billion” (28 October 2022) now seems tragically naive:

We aren’t going to weigh in on whether Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is good, bad, or frogtwaddle—there’s no predicting what the man will do. We can only hope that he doesn’t make social media even more of a civil society-destroying hellstew than it currently is.

The toxic hellstew that once simmered behind our screens has now boiled over into the real world. X/Twitter has become a tool for market manipulation and conspiracy theories, while Facebook cynically dismantles safeguards against disinformation in pursuit of engagement metrics and political favor. What began as digital dysfunction has metastasized into tangible societal harm.

Thus, this article marks our final post to X/Twitter and Facebook. I can no longer ethically provide material support to platforms whose leadership so actively undermines civil society. The TidBITS accounts will remain, but they will stand silent, bearing a note that they are deliberately inactive in protest.

My apologies to any TidBITS readers who are inconvenienced by this move, and I hope you’ll take advantage of one of the many other ways to read TidBITS, including directly via our website, email newsletter, or RSS feed. You can also find TidBITS in Matt Neuburg’s TidBITS News iPhone app, Apple News, Mastodon, and now on Bluesky.

This is a purely symbolic statement—the loss of TidBITS will neither dent the revenues of these platforms nor change the actions of their leadership. But symbols have power, and even small actions accumulate. Every individual refusal, every quiet stand, every principled choice makes it a little easier for others to do the same.

Let us all model the world we hope to see.

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You didn’t ask for it but I just donated to TidBITS just to support you.

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Ten characters required by your system, but all I have to say is a four-letter word: Amen.

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A sound, ethical, rational, and decent choice. Absolutely the right thing to do. Thank you.

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Honestly the specific politics bother me less than the damage social media has done to society as a whole over the last decade+. If this is what it takes to finally break free of the strangehold, I’m all for it.

Politics aside, Musk and Zuckerberg have objectively destroyed any value Twitter and Facebook used to have.

I read this site via RSS and I am very grateful that you provide access via this highly underrated technology. It’s only underrated because it’s not as easily monetized via surveillance.

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Adam, you had to do this. Everything TidBITS has stood for is contradicted by X and Facebook. This resolve of yours can only be wholeheartedly supported. Good work!

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I don’t agree as in the current climate it appears political but it’s your publication and your choice. However, RSS is fine for me.

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Precisely. We try to remind ourselves of this everyday.

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Adam, it’s, definitely, a right step.
FWIW, I’ve deleted my Twitter account I had since 2009 after Musk has expressed his genuine essence via nazi salutation. As for Facebook, a few days ago it has denied my name based login and password (no phone or email!), and after digging around I was able to rectify this, but only for just a few more days. And then it denied me to enter again with a reasoning that my account actions are suspicious and I need to confirm that I am a human with a video. So long, I said. Luckily, there are still plenty of resources like Tidbits, where I can find everything I am interested in, and communicate to single minded people.

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This long-term member supports you wholeheartedly.

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" I need to confirm that I am a human with a video…" seems like a challenge for deepfake AI! What would Alan Turing have said?

As it happens I very occasionally log into Facebook and haven’t come across your obstacles (yet).

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Exactly, just yet. As it happened out of the blue for me, because I did not post any comments at all, set aside offensive or harmful, just liked some occasional posts in nature related groups and whatnot.

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I never had a TwiXXer account, and I gave up on Facebook late last year when it reached a threshold of intolerability. I have been following TidBITS via RSS for years, and just added it to my Bluesky account. Keep up the good work.

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I deleted my Twitter account a while ago, and took the additional step of blocking Twitter in my hosts file so that I can never accidentally click through to it from another site.

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Like others here, I deleted my Twitter account when Musk took over. I was considering it beforehand but that was the clincher for me. I still have a Facebook account but posting is a rarity. I fully support Adam’s move off Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve not really used RSS but would definitely consider it for TidBits. Can someone suggest a good reader for desktop?

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@trilo , Succinctly, I can recommend Reeder Classic and Feedbin.
Backgroundly, I dabbled a bit in Twitter and maybe FB roughly early 2000s but didn’t find much use for them and deleted the accounts. Been ‘social-media-free’ since. Tried out Mastodon briefly after the Twitter takeover but I couldn’t see its value for my use case.
Not sure when I discovered it but RSS has been a very useful discovery for me, allowing me to consume more web content and faster without distractions. I used Google Reader back when it existed (am now nearly ‘google-free’), then exported the feeds to maybe NetNewsWire or maybe used Safari.
At some point I switched to Reeder (feed reader) and Feedbin (feed manager), which have been reliable (Reeder customer support very underwhelming in my experience) and I find valuable.
Reeder recently created a new version that consolidates more sources and something to do with AI, so I am sticking with their Reeder Classic version (am ‘ai-free’ afaik).
There was also a nice clean ‘read later’ App that allowed saving contents of webpages for offline reading or saving. It was sold and changed and I stopped using it.

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As for Mac, old but gold, – NetNewWire. Also, try Vienna.
As for iOS, I am using feeed.

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After having tried all of them in the last 20 years, I now use News Explorer for both macOS and iOS, since it is the only one implementing correctly offline caching, it syncs over iCloud (so no need of an external provider), and it has a splendid GUI.

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I quit Twitter shortly after Musk took over and made it clear he was going to recreate it into his own image. For now BlueSky is the best fit for me, with the Deck Blue interface replacing Tweetdeck. I tried Mastodon, but that was too fractured, although I liked the thinking behind it. Couldn’t make it work, so I quit there too.
On BlueSky my old Twitter connections are appearing. Hopefully its defences remain strong enough to prevent destruction by corporate greed and politics.

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Personally I agree…this looks political to me as well. But…his site and company…so his decision.

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