Exclusive:Former Better Together chief Blair McDougall gives scathing verdict on Elon Musk as he quits X

The former chief of Better Together has revealed he has quit X as a response to Elon Musk’s stewardship of the social media site.

Blair McDougall, now a Scottish Labour MP for East Renfrewshire, criticised the tech billionaire, and claimed X, formerly known as Twitter, had now become a “poisonous” hotbed of misinformation.

Blair McDougall | Jane Barlow/TSPL

His comments came in a week that saw Mr Musk call the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”, as well as spread false claims about the grooming gangs.

Now on social media site Bluesky instead, Mr McDougall accused Mr Musk of driving X into the ground and spreading false information.

He said: “Anyone who's followed me on Twitter over the years, in terms of the buckets of excrement that are tipped over my head, by nationalist tweeters, can tell that it’s not simply about being a poisonous environment, it’s always been fairly poisonous.

“It’s about it now being a dangerous thing for our whole society and it's being directed by this guy who has a pretty ugly political agenda, but also just seems to want to spread chaos as much as he wants to spread any particular ideology.

“I also think having moved to Bluesky, though I'm conscious Bluesky is probably at the moment a less diverse political space, but I'm more confident of the things I'm seeing are actually written in reality in some way, there's more sharing of what is real journalism and narratives and stories that begin with objective truth, whereas I think more and more, on X, it just felt you weren't getting that at all.”

Explaining how this happened, Mr McDougall, who is also chair of Westminster’s Hong Kong & Uyghur APPGs, put it down to an “oligarch class” being in charge of tech, and a generation of politicians not knowing how to regulate social media sites.

He continued: “I think those two things are coming together in a really dangerous way. You cannot have democracy without objective truth. When you have someone who is so clearly disinterested in whether the narratives he pursues are based in truth or not, who's in control of a platform of the algorithm and is such an active participant in it, it erodes objective truth and makes democracy more difficult.

Elon Musk was accused of making X “poisonous”

“I also think it’s dangerous on a very simple level. The targeting of Jess Phillips, with the language that he targeted her with, is simply dangerous. It’s not like we don’t all know what the risks are, and it’s not like that we don’t understand that the offline spills over from the online.

“That for me was kind of the tipping point.”

Asked what the UK Government can do, Mr McDougall called for better regulation, but also the protection of the news media.

He said: “The crisis in traditional media, that has been a market failure that has gone on for more than 20 years that there hasn't been a government response to.

“If there is a market failure, in any other area that is of absolute critical importance to our national security, our democracy, our way of life, there is a reaction to it.

“At the moment, there is a lot of soul searching about our sovereign steel making capacity. There isn’t the same soul searching about can our society function without trained journalists who are there to shift through the bulls**t and work out what is true and what is not? There has to be a government response to that.”