By Rob Gershon

For individuals, a decision about whether to leave Twitter (now known as X) or not is relatively straightforward compared to the motivations and responsibilities held by social housing providers. Nevertheless some landlords have taken a rapid decision to leave the platform in the wake of the spread of disinformation and misinformation around England’s racist riots over the last couple of weeks.

Apparent reinforcement given to outright lies by Elon Musk, Twitter/X’s CEO, has served as a reason for some housing providers’ accounts to rapidly depart the platform, risking removing one of the few channels residents have to hold landlords accountable. These decisions have been made in record time – much quicker than some landlords seem to be able to recognise when there’s damp and mould in the homes they are supposed to maintain.

More cynical observers of the housing sector might wonder if some of these decisions are of convenience rather than principle. Social media platforms were all the rage in the housing sector ten years ago, back when they were essentially tools for praising executive teams and board members for being able to use a computer or smartphone. There’s some sour irony in landlords departing Twitter because someone with more power in the dynamic doesn’t reflect their morals and isn’t doing the right thing. Many tenants and residents experience this exasperation with their landlords but have no choice to be on the wrong end of their power imbalance, let alone ‘leave’.

For a time Twitter made it possible to have conversations outside the usual well-guarded or paywalled channels within the housing sector. Tenants like me, who came to Twitter to highlight the human costs of the bedroom tax, found common cause with other tenants in and outside formal engagement structures. It was possible to compare notes on landlords and on policy. It was possible to find out the details and nuance of laws from Giles Peaker, who we only knew then as @nearlylegal, and to engage with councillors and MPs who hadn’t yet learned that repeating soundbites is the best way to avoid reasonable policy discussions.

Then the Grenfell Tower Fire happened and the whole dynamic between landlords and tenants on and offline changed. It became much more difficult for landlords to hold on to the idea that they’re unconditionally the good guys. Unbelievably caught off guard by the tragedy that was caused by dismissive and dysfunctional systems and cultures, many landlords began retreating back to comfortable impressions of themselves from within the sector. The Social Housing Green Paper, prompted by the fire, and an outpouring of grief and demands for improvement on, and far beyond, Twitter set the scene for systemic change in the sector.

But it didn’t happen.

Tenants and residents, a chastised Homes and Communities Agency (now the Regulator of Social Housing) the Housing Ombudsman and loads of community groups and tenant communities were united in explaining that landlords didn’t have to wait for legislation to improve the ways they talk to people or take on board complaints, but the sector broadly did nothing while it waited for legislation to finally arrive this year (2024).

Then came the ITV News investigations into squalor in social housing after Daniel Hewitt and his editorial team followed up on reports of Clarion’s appalling landlording on the Eastfields Estate and other stories from across the country and different landlords that highlighted not just a poor standard of service, but terrible or absent systems for dealing with residents raising complaints about them.

All the while, Twitter was an engine for sharing stories and asking entirely reasonable questions about what progress there had been on individual failures and wider national policy changes. Kwajo Tweneboa further normalised the debate about why landlords couldn’t get the basics right and how tenants are often still mistreated as part of the process of doing, or not doing that.

The reach of arguments about landlord competence and culture was made wider, but the arguments remained broadly the same. Landlords wanted to talk more about the good things they’ve done and do, but tenants and residents want to share poor practice because in many cases shaming landlords into taking action was the only way to get them to take any action.

What tenants, residents, campaigners, campaign groups, the ombudsman and the regulator, and even ITV news want is for landlords to learn lessons from their failures and make changes so they don’t happen again. Twitter has been and is an invaluable tool for all these groups in at least attempting to make landlords accountable for the things they’re supposed to do according to their code of governance, and a range rules and principles they’re supposed to abide by.

So, should social landlords be leaving Twitter? No, of course not. Individuals should feel free to leave, to make a point about the best way of driving change being to leave and go elsewhere, but organisations have different responsibilities. By all means they should stop paying for blue ticks or any advertising on the platform, but hardly any of them do that anyway.

One of the main outcomes from departing will be a sharp reduction in the already insufficient ways residents can communicate with and access landlords. Twitter has been one of the main tools for making it clear that many landlords are failing to communicate well, or at all, with tenants and hiding this away again behind a veil of silence isn’t progressive.

Where else can the notional rebalancing of tenant and landlord voices take place? Lots of individuals are headed off to Bluesky or Threads. If a time comes where a replacement platform allows tenants and campaigners to reach an equally wide audience, then landlords can think about moving. Until then, performatively moving out leaves tenants with less representation and fewer ways to be heard.

Many charities, 3rd sector and voluntary groups don’t have the luxury of choosing where to support and represent the people they’re supposed to serve, and will hold views opposed to the untruths and deliberately provocative ones held by the platform owner. The same should be true for housing associations and councils who provide housing. Their moral duty is to their residents and the wider resident community so that its unmatched route to accountability – however uncomfortable – is kept in place.

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This article first appeared on Rob’s site here.