X-Rated: Once a hub for sports fandom, the platform formerly known as Twitter reminds us why it's now a no-go zone for serious brands

With a controversial billionaire owner who favours and amplifies a certain kind of 'free speech', the risk now outweighs the reward for value-conscious organisations.

X, or the platform formally known as Twitter, has been intrinsic to my day-to-day working life for at least 16 years now.

As a journalist working for the London Evening Standard followed by the global football network, Goal.com, I was able to utilise the platform to report to my followers in real time, connect with sources, colleagues and research.

As it grew in popularity in the late 00s, Twitter was seen as an absolute godsend for many of us working in the media (who didn’t consider much the commercial implications). You could not devise a better platform for the swift and rapid dissemination of news.

Football, in particular, found a home very quickly on the platform. A brilliant second screen for watching live games while engaging with other fans. The transfer rumour mill and wider cultural discourse around the game served to super charge its growth giving rise to the 24/7 fan.

At Squawka, a start-up which helped popularise data driven discourse on social media and where I spent two years leading the content team, Twitter was our test and play sandpit. A thrilling ongoing challenge in which we would craft social posts based on likely in game scenarios and statistical landmarks, creating copy and graphics beforehand which would be ready to go seconds after they occurred on the pitch.

Each week, several would catch fire and feed the social discourse. We called this ‘pub ammunition’ and eventually brands came calling looking to sponsor these mega viral tweets and place themselves at the heart of the fan conversation.

As head of content at West Ham United, a Premier League club with more than two million followers on Twitter, I helped shape our strategy on it - connecting it more closely to the club’s wider comms and commercial objectives. I also learned about the importance of the channel to inform and engage with fans.

The thrill of pushing the button on a new transfer announcement and watching it become a trending topic, powered by thousands of retweets is quite something to behold.

Over the past five years my work has largely involved, building a content strategy for brands - essentially ensuring that their activations and content relating to their partnerships in sport reach the right audience - on the right platforms, through paid or organic means.

Twitter/ X was once at the centre of this strategy.

It’s now off the table - because it is well and truly broken.

Risk vs Reward

Even before the takeover of Twitter by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, it was a platform with its issues.

There was toxicity, bullying, fake news and Donald Trump - before his account was suspended after the United States Capitol attack.

For brands looking to enter the Twitterverse, it was always a game of risk vs reward.

Get it right and you are at the epicentre of social discourse.

Get it wrong and you go viral for all the wrong reasons. Some notable examples can be found here, here and here.

However the goalposts on this game shifted significantly after Musk’s takeover.

Opening the gates of hell

Firstly, Musk swiftly welcomed back some of the worst people in the world on to the platform.

From Katie Hopkins, who branded migrants ‘cockroaches’ and ‘feral humans’ to Andrew Tate, the poster boy of toxic masculinity, the South African tycoon signalled his intent to platform some truly awful humans under the guise of championing free speech.

Perhaps most damagingly, Musk rolled out the red carpet for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a criminal whose convictions include violence, stalking, financial and immigration frauds, drug possession, public disorder offences and contempt of court.

Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson is not just a serial criminal - he’s a prominent far-right extremist.

This week as violent riots engulfed the UK - triggered largely by false claims on X that an asylum seeker was behind the tragic murder of three young girls, Yaxley-Lennon continued stoking tensions on X, from the comfort of a five star hotel in Cyprus, while Musk (193m followers) helped amplify Yaxley-Lennon’s voice by replying to him and engaging with him.

Musk proceeded to engage in a war of words with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer after posting that civil war was ‘inevitable’ in the UK and repeating Yaxley-Lennon’s unsubstantiated claims of ‘two-tier policing’- the impression that police are more heavy handed when it comes to far right demos.

The ethical question

Taking a break from amplifying a white supremacist and stoking community divisions, Musk announced he was suing a group of advertisers including Unilever and Mars, accusing them of unlawful collusion in boycotting the platform.

Ad revenues have plummeted since Musk’s tenure began, with companies including Apple and CBS suspending advertising activity on X.

The appointment of advertising industry veteran Linda Yaccarino as CEO, has had little impact.

A senior decision maker involved in media buying for global brands amounting to millions each year, tells me “the brands I work with now deem it a cesspit, and there are far less toxic platforms where media dollars can be diverted.”

Meta, namely Instagram and Facebook (which remains comfortably the largest social network with more than three billion users), offers a far safer bet for digital media spend. Threads, the ‘Twitter killer’ app from Meta, has 200 million users and is growing by the day.

Similarly, TikTok, despite having its own issues around privacy, is now viewed as the home of virality with a number of big-spending global brands such as Pepsi, and Jaguar Land Rover focusing flagship sports sponsorship campaigns on the platform.

If X continues death-spiralling, sport’s stakeholders, such as governing bodies, leagues and major clubs, may need to make decisions about whether they can continue feeding the platform.

In the pursuit of new sponsors and the need to appeal to a socially-conscious generation of fans (two thirds of sports fans today say they are more likely to support companies and organisations that support equality), do sports’ most high profile and equality-focused organisations such as the FA and the IOC need to revisit their approach to the platform?

In April the NFL renewed its content partnership with X, hailed by Yaccarino as ‘a dream team of epic proportions’. The NFL made no statement or quotes regarding the renewal of the deal.

A few days later, Musk reinstated the account of - you guessed it - a white supremacist called Nick Fuentes.

With the United States presidential election fast approaching, and Musk pledging to back Trump who has already started to question the racial identity of his opponent Kamala Harris, the cesspit doesn’t look like it will get drained anytime soon.

The question for those of us who have played their part, through our professional lives, in validating this platform is how far does Musk have to go before civil society and mainstream commerce completely excommunicates X?