In case you haven’t heard, people are this close to leaving Twitter.

In the weeks since Elon Musk took over the platform, his erratic leadership and bewildering choices have alienated many of Twitter’s power users, a core crop of whom are part of the American political establishment. Musk has upended the service’s handling of verification, opening the door to fraud. And he’s fired many of the people, analysts argue, who kept spam, bots and hate speech from running rampant on the site. And so, some of Twitter’s best-known are promising to leave for the greener pastures of Mastodon, Instagram and TikTok.

But leaving a communications channel that’s become central to how Washington works won’t be easy.

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Twitter, too, has become a place where people with different politics like to spar, pressure-testing and refining ideas before they become a bill or new agency rule or campaign promise. Take Herbert Hovenkamp, a 70-something University of Pennsylvania professor regularly called the “dean” of American antitrust law, and Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, an influential progressive advocacy group whose ideas are dominant in Washington under President Joe Biden. The two regularly go at it on Twitter. Hovenkamp says he’s there to defend centrist thinking. Stoller says he likes to know how Hovenkamp’s camp is framing his and his allies’ arguments. Plus, says Stoller, “it’s fun.”

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