Legendary Tech Writer Deactivates Twitter Account, Pens Brutal Takedown of Elon Musk’s Leadership

Patrick Pleul/Pool Photo via AP, File

Walt Mossberg, one of the most respected veteran tech writers in the U.S., announced on Tuesday he was leaving Twitter, now known as X. Mossberg, who retired in 2017, made the announcement on Meta’s Threads and offered a scorching takedown of Elon Musk’s latest foray into boosting the far-right – his attacks on the Anti-Defamation League.

“I have deactivated my account on Twitter (X), which began in 2007,” Mossberg, 76, announced, adding:

Under Elon Musk, Twitter has not only decided to stop blocking bigots and liars and pro- insurrectionists, it has actively welcomed them, with apparent support from Mr. Musk. I had already cut my participation there by 90%. But Musk’s latest move, to threaten to ban and sue the ADL – to the delight of antisemites and other haters – is the last straw for me.

Mossberg, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter who co-founded Recode with Kara Swisher in 2014, noted where else he remains online and listed those platforms. “They have their own drawbacks. (I even boycotted Meta for awhile pre-pandemic over privacy issues). But none comes close to the cesspool of Twitter under Musk, which, IMO, is steadily approaching the level of Truth Social,” he concluded.

Musk sparked a firestorm of controversy over the weekend by boosting calls from Irish white nationalist Keith O’Brien, who goes by Keith Woods online, to ban the ADL from Twitter. O’Brien, who self-identifies as a “raging antisemite,” joined other far-right agitators, many of whom were previously banned from Twitter and had their accounts restored under Musk’s leadership, to get the #BanTheADL to trend globally in recent days.

Musk then publicly accused the ADL of being one of “the biggest generators of anti-Semitism” on Twitter and threatened to sue the civil rights organization for defamation.