Tech minister Peter Kyle does not rule out ditching Elon Musk’s X – ‘I do not know what future holds’
A Cabinet Minister has not ruled out ditching tech billionaire Elon Musk‘s social media platform X, saying: “I don’t know what the future holds”.
The Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle suggested it had become less enjoyable and said he no longer scrolls through the site – formerly known as Twitter.
It comes amid a flurry of MPs leaving X and joining Bluesky, an alternative platform, which now has more than 20 million users.
Mr Kyle praised the “incredible achievement” of Mr Musk after the latest test launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket – alongside the president-elect Donald Trump.
But quizzed on whether his ” world on X had got better” since the billionaire took over the platform in 2022, Mr Kyle told LBC: “No, it hasn’t. In fact I don’t scroll through X anymore. I use it because I know there’s an audience I really want to communicate with.
“Me and my team both have access to my account now and post things on it. But I have to say in the past I really enjoyed interacting on X.”
He added: “That enjoyment isn’t there anymore. But I do realise there are people on that platform that I’m really, really keen to connect with and to communicate with and to share the information that comes out of the work I have as a Secretary of State.”
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Asked whether he would stop using X, he replied: “I can see the circumstances where I would. But again I’m open minded about this kind stuff going forward. At the moment I really strive to try and communicate with people from as many backgrounds and as many perspectives as possible.
“It would be a very big step for me to turn away from an audience even though it might be an audience I don’t agree with all the time, or are exchanging information in a way that I find difficult to deal with because I want civility in the way we disagree with each other both online and offline.
“It would be a very big thing for me to turn away from an audience but I don’t know what the future holds and I keep an open mind about these things.”
On Tuesday Keir Starmer told reporters at the G20 summit in Brazil that “at the moment” there were no plans for official UK government accounts on Bluesky. The PM said it is “important for a government” to be able to communicate with “as many people as possible”. He added: “We’re obviously still using Twitter (X).”
In the summer Mr Musk publicly clashed with Mr Starmer as riots spread across the UK. The PM’s official spokesman slapped down the billionaire after he had claimed civil war was “inevitable” in Britain amid scenes of violent disorder.
