Archived link

When men go to pee in a public toilet they spend a minute gazing at the wall in front of them, in what many advertisers have seized upon as an opportunity to put up posters of their products above the stinking urinals.

But in terms of framing, you’d better ask yourself: is this really what I want my brand to be associated with?

You might well think twice if you were selling ice cream or toothpaste, so what if your poster was Ursula von der Leyen’s face selling EU values?

Because that’s the kind of environment in which the European Commission president, other top EU officials, and national EU leaders are posting their images and comments every day when they use X to communicate with press and the EU public.

Even the toilet analogy is too kind.

There was already lots of toxic crap on X before the summer of 2024.

**Racist, antisemitic, and homophobic content had “surged”, according to a January study by US universities. **

**X had more Russian propaganda than any other big social media, an EU report warned in 2023. **

**Porn was 13 percent of X in late 2022, according to internal documents seen by Reuters. **

But this summer, with the failed assassination of Donald Trump in the US and the UK race riots, X’s CEO Elon Musk turbocharged his platform into an overflowing sewer of bigotry, nihilism, and greed.

As I tried to follow the UK riots from Brussels using X, time and again, I saw von der Leyen’s carefully-coiffed Christian Democrat torso issuing some polite EU statement, while sandwiched on my laptop screen between video-clips getting off on anti-migrant violence, pro-Russian bots, and OnlyFans links.

Musk’s algorithms pushed pro-riot content so hard down users’ throats it prompted a transatlantic UK government rebuke and talk of legal sanctions.

Tommy Robinson, a leading British racist, got over 430 million views for his X posts, for instance.

Andrew Tate, Britain’s top misogynist, got 15 million views for one X post inciting rioters.

And the biggest turd in the cesspit - Musk’s own avatar - also kept appearing next to von der Leyen and other EU leaders on my screen, as the US tech baron ranted about “civil war” in the UK, pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories, or told EU commissioner Thierry Breton to “literally fuck your own face”.

Musk’s summer coincided with France’s arrest of a Russian tech CEO, Pavel Durov, in August on suspicion he condoned the sale of child pornography and drugs on his Telegram platform.

The European Commission also started legal proceedings against X in July over misleading and illegal content, in a process that could see Musk fined hundreds of millions of euros.

But aside from the grand issues of how to regulate social media without stymying free speech or privacy, EU leaders could do something a lot simpler and closer to home for the sake of public mental health - just switch to any other less sleazy platform instead.

You could do it tomorrow with one email to your tech staff and for all the stupid content on Instagram, for example, at least your face won’t keep flashing up next to racist glee and naked tits on your constituents’ screens.

Von der Leyen has 1.5 million X followers, French president Emmanuel Macron has 9.8 million, while Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and Polish prime minister Donald Tusk have 1.9 million each.

EU leaders could also do something a lot simpler and closer to home for the sake of public mental health - just switch to any other less sleazy platform instead

But please don’t worry, not all journalists or the general public are that dumb yet, most of us will find you and follow you because politics is genuinely important.

And we will thank you for giving us one more reason to get off X ourselves, because so long as you use it as your main outlet for news updates you are dragging us along with you.

My initial analogy of advertising in a public toilet was designed to show the importance of semiotics in political PR - it matters where you speak, not just what you say.

The analogy also holds good for those who worry that if normal leaders and media abandoned toxic platforms, then extremism would grow in its own exclusive online world.

It’s just good public hygiene to bury our sewage pipes, instead of letting people empty their buckets out of the window onto our heads.

But if you prefer to hold your nose and stay on X, consider also that you are damaging not just your own brand but also causing financial and political harm in real life.

Financial hurt, because if you help make people reliant on X for news, then greater use of Musk’s platform makes people like him, Robinson, and Tate ever richer via X’s monetisation schemes for viral content.

Political injury, because to the extent that von der Leyen, Macron, or Sánchez possess real importance, they help to aggrandise Musk, Tate, and Robinson by continuously appearing alongside them in X’s hyper-curated online space.

And so if you should worry that urinals below your face might put people off, then the situation is actually worse than that.

Your presence on X is also helping to pay for the muck to flow and the toilet owner is using you to sell it to the world.