| While shifting away from a platform owned by a COVID sceptic is a good thing, medical misinformation does not happen in a vacuum. Last week, Pamela Rendi-Wagner, director of the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), said social media was a "breeding ground for misinformation," that “everybody is leaving X,” and the ECDC was thinking of following suit. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation, said that the world was fighting a second pandemic: an infodemic. He doubled down on the sentiment when Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X, and publicly clashed with him over the WHO’s pandemic treaty. Talk about leaving X for another platform – be it Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads – has dominated the scientific community since Musk’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition in 2022. For a good reason: Musk and his management have helped push views against life-saving vaccines to the fore, fired entire content moderation teams, and stopped enforcing its policy on misleading information about COVID – all under the pretence of defending free speech. According to a Nature article released last year, this has led to a hostile environment for the online medical community, who originally joined the platform to promote their papers and connect with other academics. This seems especially relevant for global health, as crucial news from the Global South, such as dengue surges in Brazil this year, would not be as visible without X. | 