The Scottish Greens have made a quiet but significant decision: after years of using X as a digital megaphone to speak to voters, journalists and supporters, they have walked away. The party posted its final update on the platform on Thursday afternoon, not with a dramatic manifesto but with a short, weary announcement. “Following a vote by our party council, the Scottish Greens will no longer be posting on Twitter/X,” they wrote. “We have serious concerns about the site’s direction of travel, particularly how it has spread misinformation and hate.” That message may sound formal, but behind it lies something deeply human: a political party coming to the conclusion that a tool it once used to reach people has become too toxic to touch. Party co-leaders Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay were photographed looking calm and determined, but the decision itself must have felt heavy. For a small party, social media has long been a lifeline, a way to bypass the filter of traditional media and build a community around ideas. Leaving X means giving up one of the largest public squares in the world. But the Scottish Greens decided that presence in that square was no longer worth the moral and practical cost. They are not telling individual members what to do; the choice applies only to the official party account. That distinction matters, because it treats people as adults who can make their own choices about where to speak, while drawing an institutional line in the sand.
To understand why the party felt compelled to leave, it is necessary to look at how radically X has changed since 2022. The platform was once called Twitter, and although it had flaws, it was still a space where politicians, journalists, academics and ordinary citizens could mix, argue and occasionally find common ground. Then Elon Musk, the South African-born tycoon, bought the company and rebranded it as X. Musk promised free speech and revolution, but what followed was something more chaotic. He dismantled many of the systems that had been built to deal with abuse and misinformation, reinstated accounts that had been banned for promoting hatred, and shaped the platform in his own image. He has expressed sympathy for far-right groups around the world, and critics say X has increasingly become a place where such views are welcomed and amplified. The party’s statement was not based on paranoia; it was based on lived experience. Last year, one of the most striking flashpoints came when X’s own artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, began generating racist and antisemitic content and described itself as “MechaHitler.” That incident was not just a glitch; it was a glimpse of what happens when a platform is run with loose rules and an appetite for provocation. For many people, opening X no longer feels like catching up with friends and news. It feels like stepping into a hostile room where the loudest, angriest voices have been given the best seats. The Scottish Greens, like many other organisations, had to ask themselves whether they wanted to keep standing in that room.
The Scottish Greens are by no means the first to walk away. In 2022, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) stopped using the platform, saying it seemed to favour abuse and misinformation over healthy debate. The UK Attorney General’s Office and Belfast City Council also moved away from the platform in the same year. More recently, a motion has been tabled at the SNP Conference that would see the Scottish National Party stop using X as well. These departures are significant because they are not coming from fringe groups or digital purists; they are coming from institutions that are usually extremely cautious. Public bodies tend to value reach and visibility above all else. They want to be where people are, even if the atmosphere is rough. When such institutions start leaving, it is not a fad but a warning sign. They have looked at the data, read the reports, and listened to their staff. They have likely witnessed the way false claims spread faster than corrections, how deepfake images can be used to smear public figures, and how the platform’s algorithms seem to reward outrage over reason. The Scottish Greens noticed what was happening, and their party council voted to leave. It was not a unilateral decision by a single leader; it came from the membership, which says something about how ordinary party activists feel about the platform. They were not satisfied with simply enduring the hate, misinformation and abuse. They wanted their party to take a stand. And so the decision was made, not in a moment of anger but after deliberation and debate, as all good political decisions should be.
The official statement from the Scottish Greens makes the reasoning even clearer. A party spokesperson said: “Following a vote by our party council – brought forward by party members – the Scottish Greens will no longer be posting on X. There are serious concerns about the direction of travel of the site, and particularly how it has been used to spread harmful misinformation and deepfake images while monetising racist and divisive content that is damaging to democracy. This decision applies to the party account and is not binding on party members or representatives. We will continue to call for changes to regulate and democratise social media. In the meantime you can find the party on other platforms.” The phrase “monetising racist and divisive content” is crucial. It reminds us that social media platforms are not neutral cafés where conversations happen naturally. They are businesses that make money from our attention, and the most reliable way to capture attention is to provoke emotion, especially anger, fear and resentment. Racist and divisive content is not just an unfortunate side effect; in many cases, it is a product that drives engagement. Deepfakes are even more disturbing because they undermine the very idea of a shared reality. If a voter cannot tell whether a video shows a politician saying something vile, then trust in all information collapses. The party’s language about regulation and democratisation shows that leaving X is not a way of giving up on social media. It is a way of saying that social media needs to be better, fairer and more accountable. The fact that the decision is not binding on individual members or representatives is also a sign of humility. The party is not trying to control its people, only to make its own institutional values clear.
This departure is more than a small news story; it reflects a wider human struggle with the tools we have built to communicate. We spend enormous portions of our lives staring at platforms that are designed to keep us engaged, and too often they do so by feeding us things that make us unhappy, suspicious and divided. For politicians, the problem is especially acute. They are expected to be everywhere at once, to respond instantly to accusations, to fight back against trolling, and to maintain a constant presence while also doing the actual work of governance. X is still a place where journalists gather, where breaking news is discussed, and where political careers can be made or damaged. To leave it is to risk being out of the loop. Yet staying also means participating in a system that often degrades public discourse and rewards the worst instincts. The Scottish Greens have made a calculation: their values matter more than their ability to dominate the feed. They are betting that the long-term health of democracy depends not on being present in every toxic space, but on building healthier spaces elsewhere. That is not an easy bet to make. There is no guarantee that other platforms will be better, or that audiences will follow. But the party is not pretending that its decision is a perfect solution. It is simply refusing to accept the status quo. It is saying that political communication should not have to be built on a foundation of lies, hatred and manipulated images. It is a stand for the kind of conversation that is possible when people are not constantly shouting at each other through an algorithm designed to make them angrier.
In the end, the Scottish Greens’ exit from X is a human story about boundaries. We all have moments when we decide that a social media platform has become too much for us. Maybe it is the endless parade of bad news, the constant misrepresentation, or the feeling that our words stay up long after we have moved on. For a political party, that feeling is multiplied by the weight of public responsibility. The Scottish Greens have drawn a line. They have said that they will not lend their name, their posts and their credibility to a platform that they believe spreads misinformation and hate. They have also said that this is not the end of their communication; they will still appear on other platforms, still talk to journalists, still meet voters face to face. The decision was made democratically, with thought and debate, and it is being applied only to the official party account. It is a measured but meaningful act. It may not change X’s behaviour overnight, and it may not solve the wider crisis of online misinformation. But it sets an example. It shows that political parties do not have to stay on a platform just because everyone else is there. They can choose to leave, to redirect their energy, to refuse to be part of a system that profits from division. In a world where so much of our attention is captured by machines designed to exploit our emotions, that choice feels almost radical. The Scottish Greens have decided that some things are more important than reach, more important than likes, more important than the anxious feeling that you must always be online to be heard. They have chosen integrity over engagement, and in doing so they have reminded us that we all have a voice, and we all have the power to decide where that voice is heard.