Dump Your Toxic Ex

This Valentine's Day, choose love instead of hate.

Please welcome back, guest contributor, Evan Sutton.

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One year ago, I asked you to help make Tesla toxic. Now, I want to help you end a toxic relationship. (And if you already ended this toxic relationship, I hope this helps you help others do the same.)

Let’s try a thought experiment. I’d ask you to close your eyes and visualize this, but you probably need them to keep reading.

Imagine there’s a physical place you love. A coffee shop. A bookstore. You name it. You see friends there. You meet interesting people. Sometimes a celebrity comes in.

Then a new owner takes over. He creeps some of your friends out, but you decide to just ignore him.

One day, a guy runs up to your group whispering that Jews are bringing immigrants into America to “replace the white race.” The owner comes over… and hands him a microphone.

More of your friends leave, but others stay. Lots of important people stay, so it can’t be that big a deal, right? There are weirdos everywhere.

Soon, the owner starts screaming conspiracy theories about vaccines, hurricanes, voting...

More people leave. But a lot of important people are still there, so it can’t be that bad, can it? If they’re not worried, why should you be?

One day, the owner locks the doors while the place is full. He hands cameras out to some creepy dudes. He says, “These are X-ray vision cameras. They can see through anyone’s clothes.”

They take a picture of you, and when it prints, you’re naked. There’s nothing you can do to stop them. They do it over and over and over.

The cameras can add things to the pictures, too. The guys tell the camera, “Cover her in white fluid.” They make a naked picture of a 12-year-old and say, “tie her up.” The camera does, and the owner tapes the pictures in the window.

People get really mad. The owner says, “OK, I’m taking away the magic camera. Now you can only use it if you buy a subscription.”

When he finally unlocks the door, would you stay?

Obviously, this is about Elon Musk and X. But don’t think of X as an app. Think about it as a physical place. Would you ever go back to a bar or a bookstore where this happened?

Elon Musk turned X into a digital island where he gives creeps the tools that can turn a photo of any person into an explicit image of sexual abuse...for a small fee. And he did it while the world was learning that he emailed Jeffrey Epstein asking when he could visit the island for “the wildest party.”

Deepfakes aren’t the same as trafficking human bodies, but experts say they’re a form of sexual harassment and assault, abuse that’s caused deep trauma and even pushed people to suicide.

And it was probably all planned. The Washington Post covered Elon’s long quest to hook users on explicit content (just before Bezos threw the newsroom in a wood chipper). Elon started with “adult” chatbot conversations, then X-rated Waifu “companions.” He egged on the deepfake crisis. And when he put it behind a paywall, Grok’s subscription numbers exploded.

If you ever post a photograph on X, it can easily and quickly be turned into a deepfake. And thanks to the new terms of service, holding him accountable is nearly impossible.

I spent the last year deeply involved in #TeslaTakedown because I believe Elon Musk is a unique threat to democracy. He will flood every election with money and flood our society with lies unless we do what we can to stop him.

A grassroots movement led by everyday people put the world’s greediest man on defense. It created stress between Trump and Musk. That stress led to a big fight, and Elon tweeting that Trump is covering up the Epstein files because he’s in them.

Tesla is limping along. Elon’s all but given up on cars because he can’t sell them anymore. We’re going to keep putting pressure on Tesla. Musk’s empire is a house of cards, but we need more people to help blow it down.

X is a critical part of his empire. It gives him legitimacy, and it gives him a platform to feed lies into millions of brains—lies that reach more people and seem more credible because credible people still use his platform.

Using X is not harmless. Just by logging in, you pad Elon’s metrics. He gets paid every time you scroll past an ad. And you normalize him just by staying. Because if what he’s done isn’t a dealbreaker for you, why should it be for anyone else?

The best time to leave was the moment he made his intentions clear. The next best time is now.

Millions of people have chosen to leave. The Onion (10.6 million followers) quit. So did The Guardian (10.3m). Rachel Maddow (9.2m), Bruce Springsteen (1.2m), Spain’s Yolanda Diaz (625k), Jamelle Bouie (389k), AFT and President Randi Weingarten (190k combined), and millions more. Some made an announcement. Others ghosted. But they all chose to leave their toxic X.

We need more leaders to take this step. More leaders to draw a line and say “I won’t be part of that.” Sometimes we all need a push to end a toxic relationship, so we created an easy way for you to help them. Please take a minute to email your elected representatives and ask them to make a clean break from Elon’s abuse and disinformation vortex.

My wish for everyone this Valentine’s Day is simple: choose love. Love for a world that desperately needs leadership. Love for people who are still using X because leaders are still there. Love for your own sanity, which is being poisoned by the firehose of propaganda he’s force-feeding users with a rigged algorithm.

If you’re still on X, you’re in a toxic relationship. But you can do something about it. Dump your toxic X.

P.S., if you want to share a video version of this, you can find it on Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok.

Evan Sutton is a campaigns and communications specialist who focuses on helping working people find solidarity through unions, and fighting technofascist billionaires who are trying to destroy democracy and build a techno-feudal society.