By Stuart Lambert, co-founder
With each passing day, remaining on an increasingly problematic and toxic X seems less defensible. As I write, police in France are raiding X’s offices in Paris as part of an investigation into suspected offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography.
The decision by brands and organisations to leave X is often framed as a moral one.
Since Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022, the ethical case for departure has grown steadily clearer. Content moderation has been hollowed out. Abuse has surged. Most recently, X’s own AI tools have been used to generate non-consensual, sexualised deepfake images of real people, including children.
For many organisations, that has been the final straw.
UK charities such as Women’s Aid have publicly condemned the platform and left. The Guardian no longer posts there at all. In the US, NPR exited after its journalism was labelled “state-affiliated media”. Consumer brands including Patagonia have stepped away on values grounds.
All of this matters. Ethics matter.
But focusing only on ethics misses the bigger point. Leaving X is not just a question of whether a platform aligns with your values. It is a test of whether your organisation understands where truth about it should live.
X is the symptom, not the disease
It is comforting to treat this as a story about one owner and one platform. The deeper issue exposed by the exodus from X is that too many brands have allowed social platforms to become de facto sources of truth about who they are, what they stand for and how they should be understood.
That was always a fragile position. In an age of misinformation, deepfakes and synthetic content at scale, it is now untenable.
Social platforms do not belong to you. They can change ownership overnight. They can change rules, incentives and values without consultation. They can decide, unilaterally, how visible you are or whether you exist at all.
When brands build their credibility on top of that infrastructure, they are outsourcing truth to someone else’s priorities. X did not create this problem. It merely made it impossible to ignore.
Deleting your account is not leadership
One of the most common mistakes organisations make when leaving a platform is to confuse exit with erasure. Deleting an account feels decisive. It signals disapproval. It looks clean. But it is also often irresponsible. On X, deleted handles become available for others to claim. For any brand with public recognition, that creates immediate risk of impersonation, confusion and misuse.
Last year, Center Parcs UK deleted its X account while still linking to it from its website and marketing materials. Another user claimed the handle. Customers then began sending booking enquiries and personal information to the wrong place. Those customers were not careless. They were behaving exactly as people do. They clicked the same icon they had clicked for years.
Leaving X without a plan ended up being a strategic error. Real leadership here might look less dramatic but is more nuanced, more competent. Keep the account. Mark it clearly as inactive. Pin a post that redirects. Update links elsewhere. Hold the handle. That’s not endorsement of the platform, it’s just basic control.
Being your own single source of truth is now non-negotiable
What the X debate is really forcing brands to confront is this: if you are not your own single source of truth, something else will be.
In an environment saturated with misinformation, AI-generated content and algorithmic synthesis, truth does not emerge organically. It is assembled. Increasingly, it is assembled by systems that do not care about your nuance, intent or context.
Brands that do not actively anchor where truth about them lives leave a vacuum. That vacuum will be filled by whatever content is most visible, most repeated or most easily machine-readable. That’s not a “future risk”; it’s already happening.
Owned channels alone are not enough
There is a naive version of the “single source of truth” argument that says brands should simply retreat to owned channels. But that’s insufficient. Your website declaring something does not, on its own, make it credible. Trust is not self-issued.
What works is triangulation. First, owned channels you fully control. Clear, current and authoritative. Second, credible thought leadership that demonstrates expertise, intent and consistency over time. Third, the legitimacy that still comes from appearing in trusted, independent third-party media.
When these three reinforce one another, a brand has resilience. When one is missing, trust becomes brittle. This is why decisions about leaving platforms like X cannot be taken in isolation. They must be considered as part of a wider architecture of credibility.
AI makes this unavoidable
The rise of generative search, AI answer overviews and GEO optimisation only raises the stakes. Increasingly, people will not encounter your organisation directly. They will encounter an AI-generated summary of it.
Those systems will decide what is “true” about you based on the signals they can find. Fragmented signals produce distorted summaries. Over-reliance on volatile platforms hands that judgement over entirely. In that context, leaving X is not about silence. It is about reasserting where truth about your organisation lives, and ensuring it is consistent, credible and legible to both humans and machines.
Leaving well is a leadership signal
Social platforms will continue to rise, fall and decay. Some will become unethical. Others will simply become irrelevant. Leaving X may well be the right decision. For many organisations, it probably is. But leadership is not demonstrated by flouncing or by performative deletion. It is demonstrated by clarity, control and consistency.
In an age defined by distortion and erosion of trust, the organisations that endure will be the ones that understand a simple reality. Ethics may prompt the decision to leave. But strategy determines whether leaving makes you stronger.
And if you are not your own single source of truth, something else will be.