Jamie Lee Curtis and Don Lemon are among the big-name X (formerly Twitter) users leaving the social media site since President-elect Donald Trump announced the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, will have a role in his administration.
In a Wednesday Instagram post, “Halloween” actress Curtis shared a screenshot showing her X account’s successful deactivation. In her caption, she quoted the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Curtis for comment.
Around the same time, former CNN anchor Lemon posted an Instagram Reel and a statement on X detailing his reasons for leaving the Musk-owned platform, with which he’s had a contentious relationship. In August, Lemon sued Musk over a scrapped content partnership deal with X.
“I have loved connecting with all of you on Twitter and then on X for all of these years, but it’s time for me to leave the platform,” Lemon said in the Reel. “I once believed it was a place for honest debate and discussion, transparency, and free speech, but I now feel it does not serve that purpose.”
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Lemon also pointed to X’s new terms of service, which go into effect on Friday and direct all legal disputes to be “brought exclusively in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas.”
“As the Washington Post recently reported on X’s decision to change the terms, this ‘ensures that such lawsuits will be heard in courthouses that are a hub for conservatives, which experts say could make it easier for X to shield itself from litigation and punish critics,’” Lemon said. “I think that speaks for itself.”
UK news outlet The Guardian is also leaving ‘toxic’ Twitter
On Wednesday morning, the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, which also has offices in the U.S. and Australia, announced plans to stop sharing content with its 27 million followers across more than 80 accounts on X.
“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the outlet’s announcement reads.
“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
The message concludes: “Thankfully, we can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms – instead we’re funded directly by our readers.”
Musk quickly fired back a response: “They are irrelevant.” In a separate post, he wrote, “They are a dying publication.”
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Last April, NPR left X after its main account was labeled “state-affiliated media,” then later “government-funded media.” The designation was “falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” the nonprofit news company said in a statement to USA TODAY at the time.
A day later, PBS left the platform under the same circumstances.
Musk, who also owns SpaceX and Tesla, bought the social media site then known as Twitter in 2022 for a reported $44 billion.
On Tuesday, Trump announced Musk, who backed his return to the White House with public appearances and reportedly millions in donations, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a former rival for the Republican presidential ticket, as his picks to co-lead a so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The department would “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies,” Trump said in a statement. He has not offered further details about how the group would operate and whether it would be a government agency or an advisory board.
