By Amelia Isaacs on Thursday 15 December 2022
The bank made the decision to leave the app after Elon Musk tweeted about Dr Anthony Fauci.
Atom Bank has ‘hit stop’ on its Twitter account.
The neobank made the decision to leave the social media app earlier this week following a message from Twitter owner Elon Musk about Dr Anthony Fauci.
Atom Bank’s chief customer officer Edward Twiddy took to the company’s blog to explain the decision.
“Not everything on Twitter is ok. And, some of the time poison has been allowed to linger in the well. We all have to live with being offended at times. That’s ok,” Twiddy wrote.
“But while enough hasn’t been done over the years to stop some forms of offence turning into vindictive attack, at least the owner of the platform itself was not the source of the bile.”
He said that something changed for the bank over the weekend when Musk posted about Fauci.
Twiddy referred to Fauci’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, 50 years of service in public health care and extensive work on AIDS.
Musk posted on Twitter saying “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” in a tweet that now has more than 1.2 million likes.
“In our opinion, it is not ok to use de-facto editorial and proprietorial power in this way. It damages free speech, and it creates hate and fear when what we need right now is love and science,” Twiddy wrote.
“And so we’re leaving Twitter.”
The app-based bank took to the platform one final time to share the news, and within 30 days all three of its accounts will be deleted from the site.
21 March 2023
Daniel Lanyon
