What to Do With Your X Account
Big changes have been happening on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X. In this video, I explain the slap-in-the-face conundrum he’s created for content creators and brands through his new, no-opt-out policy on AI.
Your options essentially are:
- Keep your X account to maintain a simple, chronological record of your work in the place of a formal, comprehensive portfolio, but allow Musk full license to use ALL of your content to train his AI, thereby surrendering your creative control and contributing to the problems of piracy and increased noise/competition for audience attention.
- Delete your X account to protect your content, but eliminate the only comprehensive portfolio you might have and run the risk of someone stealing your old handle and committing identity theft.
Not every social media platform is going to be this…well, I’ll let you fill in whatever word you’d like. But the situation reveals some truths about how we lean on social media within our careers.
In many cases, accounts can become a shorthand way for others to get to know not only what our capabilities are, but also who we are as individuals. They have become a path to vetting, with the majority of hiring managers or company decision-makers using social media as part of the candidate evaluation process. In my industry, for example, there’s a tool called QueryManager. Agents can create forms for writers to use to submit their manuscripts. Although some agents don’t ask for a social media link, most do, and many specifically ask for a link to X due to its dominance in the market. Musk’s treatment of AI and content demonstrates that we rely on a horribly unstable source of data, and that we currently don’t have a plan for how to address the potential deterioration or collapse of large platforms.
I mentioned in the video that I’d think about how to handle situations like the QueryManager dilemma above, and my recommendation is to delete the account, immediately reclaim your handle, and then pin a single post that redirects the audience to a site you control where they can access the zip file of your previous X data. If anyone can come up with a better solution, I’d love to let others know about it!
Are you struggling to decide how to handle your X account? Let me know in the comments on LinkedIn.
[Transcript summary]
If you have been following what has been going on over at X, the social media platform, then you know that Elon Musk, who owns that platform, he has been making a ton of changes, and the most recent one involves AI. And basically, the policy change means that any content that you have on that site, doesn’t matter, you know, really, what’s there, he can use that to train his AI.
Now, there are some creators like me, I don’t want that. And you might be one of them. But what’s irritating about this new policy is that there’s no opt out. You have to allow it if you want to keep that account.
So, the dilemma for me as a creator — for a regular user, it might not be such an issue — but for a creator, if you don’t have an author website, that platform essentially becomes your portfolio. It shows the continuity of your creation, of what you’ve been posting and making. Now, you can opt to let AI use the content, but then, it’s like, are you kind of cheating your industry? Because now you’re kind of contributing to a problem where artists aren’t creating the content that we have. I don’t support that.
Now, if you delete your account, which is the other option, if you don’t want him to have that AI option, the problem then is somebody then can take your old handle — like, my name, right, like, that’s what I use — they can take your name, your handle, and basically start impersonating you. So, if you delete your account, there’s that risk that now you have an identity problem. So, do you want to deal with that?
So, he’s kind of backed creators into a corner, and I don’t, I don’t agree with it. But the question is, how do we address it? How do we solve it? So, my recommendation to you is, if you don’t want to deal with the AI and have this problem, if you want to delete your account, my recommendation is, go and get all of your data off that platform. There’s lots of things on Google now that you can find out exactly how to do that. It’s pretty simple. But you download the zip file. And my recommendation is, find some way to get that zip file then accessible somewhere else where you can give somebody a link or whatever, because then you can still say this is everything I’ve been making.
Now I’m not quite sure how it’s going to pan out, Like, in my industry, people are still asking for your Twitter links to show what you’ve been making. So, I’m not real sure how to handle that yet. I’ll keep thinking on that one. But even if you can have it up somewhere on a secure location so that you can have that to share, that’s the quickest solution that I can think of.
Now, if you have an author website, you can include that on your website. Now, if you don’t have one, I highly recommend that this is the time to create one. You can do it for free. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You get up, get it up in five minutes with a template or something. But just something so that your data is no longer on a third party, that you control your site. And I’ve been advocating for this for a while now.
But this is an example of what can happen when you don’t control your data. So, I — whatever you can do to just kind of take that back, whether it’s a website or whatever you can think of, I recommend doing that. So, that’s my message for today. Get out there, make the website, whatever you got to do get that zip file, do what you gotta do. Take care. Bye.