Glasgow School of Art is right, X is no place for art or artists

Musk’s public provocations and bizarre executive decisions over one of the most popular channels of modern communication has even led to him, directly and indirectly, using X to stoke the recent far-right riots. During this time figures like Britain First co-leader Paul Golding were free to post such things as an AI-generated image of policemen clapping for machete-wielding ISIS terrorists in the middle of Leeds town centre, attempting to pass it off as a real scenario playing out amongst the chaos.

It’s the kind of low-effort misinformation campaign that would be laughable if enough people didn’t believe it to be real. If the responses and engagement even come from real people and not the bot farms that have entered through the backdoor. There seem to be no concerns about X's placement as the new flashpoint for the dead internet theory.

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Glasgow School of Art announces that it will 'no longer be posting' on X

Musk in his takeover has gutted the company and its staff and with that, the site’s moderation is almost non-existent. It is now his fiefdom, free to align the wind to his own whims and beliefs, and it’s clear where the intentions lie. Often moderation is done to his unique version of free speech, even declaring the useful, differentiating, and contextualising word ‘cisgender’ as a slur that must be restricted on the platform. He has allowed back in the fringe right who were once pushed out to the echo chamber pastures of right-wing alternatives Gab and Parler, and even worse, has bolstered and incentivised their activity on X. Many far-right commentators now make a living from X, while their presence remains blacklisted elsewhere.

An internationally renowned institution like Glasgow School of Art choosing to dismiss X completely is significant. All it takes is one for others to follow suit. The domino effect is a likely outcome given how useless X has become as a place for sharing general information and, critically for an art school, the promotion of arts learning. The direction of X is antithetical to the values of a modern, inclusive learning environment, and the acceptance of students regardless of their personal identities is crucial to that. Is it really a loss for the art school to rid themselves of the Hitler-loving sycophants that stalk the replies of any inclusivity-leaning sentiment?

X as a promotional and communal space for the arts is long over if it was ever the most appropriate place for it. Out of all social media sites, it is the easiest cut to make for an art school. The text-based back-and-forth nature of Twitter and X has never lent itself well to the art world, naturally catering more to the world of politics. The multimedia-focussed approach of Instagram and TikTok is much more suited to purpose, and the social media tastes of students have shifted in that direction anyway. The downsides to relinquishing the duty of maintaining an X account get fewer and fewer.

There is most likely a questioning of complicity happening around the continued use of X among any entity that wants to project a level of seriousness or professionalism. When is it simply contributing to the problem by hanging around? That’s a question that will be asked as users evaluate what they actually get out of the platform at this current stage of its life. For learning institutions, students, artists, and anyone who doesn’t want to surround themselves with the discourse of extremist rabbit holes, it has long outlived its purpose. For Glasgow School of Art, quitting is a no-brainer decision. No real loss has occurred.

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Under Musk, X can never be a place for arts and culture to develop and be nurtured. It’s not possible when the site is now a mirror of the man himself, a man who is clearly fundamentally incapable of understanding and appreciating an artistic temperament, whose mask has dropped as his reputation as a world-leading genius fades. He is to be trusted with the arts as much as politicians, who are possibly the least likely people to understand what the arts need, who sorely lack the comprehension or ambition to envision what a culturally rich society could look like. The same lack of imagination, the same systematic traps that art seeks to look beyond, infects the very same tech billionaires that control our modern communication channels.

How long can the poorly rebranded Twitter continue like this? It now runs on an unsustainable model. Problems and controversies will continue to mount and apply pressure as it falls further into financial holes. It could be the case that Musk gets bored, pulls the plug on the whole thing, and walks away intact as we're left to comprehend how we all just watched a major social platform be used and discarded like a toy simply because someone had the money and power to do so. Oh, the fun the other 1% get to have.