The prolific Stephen King is known for his extra-long novels, but the exit message he posted Thursday on X was short and sweet. "I'm leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic," the horror author wrote, using the platform's former name, reports the Bangor Daily News. "Follow me on Threads, if you like." The 77-year-old King was referring, of course, to the rival social media platform owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.
King's defection comes shortly after he was forced to contend with a couple of online rumors, including that he'd been booted off of X for joking that site owner Elon Musk was President-elect Trump's "first lady" (he says he didn't do that, and his X account remained live as of Friday morning). Mashable reports that King has joined an "exodus" of sorts from the site, where he's been laying into Musk since the latter purchased Twitter in 2022.
That migration has seen hordes of users flee to Threads and Bluesky in the wake of the 2024 election and Musk's role in propelling Trump to victory, amid complaints that X has become a far-right echo chamber rife with conspiracy theories and misinformation, causing advertisers to ditch it. Meta has reported that Threads now has 275 million active users, while Bluesky lured 1 million new users in the week following the election. As for his first Threads post on Thursday, King stuck to his usual MO. "Trump's cabinet picks are ludicrous," he wrote. "The Klown Kar isn't absolutely full, but it's getting there." (More Stephen King stories.)
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