With Elon Musk firing much of his staff, restoring Donald Trump after an unscientific Twitter poll (and after promising to set up a content moderation council to consider the issue and then abandoning that promise and deleting the tweet), restoring groups that spew election lies like Project Veritas, and not policing hate speech and other vile things, I decided I cannot at this time be producing free content for Elon Musk on Twitter. I’ll still have automatic posts go up that link to ELB content, but I don’t plan on writing commentary at Twitter directly unless and until things approve. (I’m hoping that the rush of advertisers away from the platform will lead to Twitter’s financial collapse, and then a new management group can restore things the way they are.). And just to be clear, given my earlier writings on the question: I believe Elon Musk has an absolute First Amendment right as owner of Twitter to decide whether or not to replatform Trump, even though I think the responsible thing to do is not to replatform Trump. But I also have the right not to be complicit in what Musk is doing.

The problem is that there is no good substitute now for short commentary and for the news aggregation function that was second to none on Twitter.

I’ll put more commentaries here at Election Law Blog. I’ve also sent up a Mastodon account: @[email protected]. The platform is really not ready for prime time, but it seems like it may be improving. It’s very user unfriendly to get things started. So we’ll see how long I last there.

I’m on the waiting list to join Post, and that seems like it could be hopeful. But I’ll keep an eye out for the best Twitter substitute in the meantime.

Thanks for reading! (Wherever you read our commentary)