Should we stay or should we go? Dilemmas arising from (new) corporate ownership of a digital public space

If a chauvinistic troll billionaire takes control of a digital platform, enabling hate speech and tailoring algorithms around their whims, how should higher education institutional accounts respond? To consider this question, our paper uses a collaborative listening approach to navigate diverse positionings and political imperatives: it presents both collective analysis and individual authored reflections from seven members (faculty and PhD students) of a social science school at an Australian public university resulting from their iterative discussions. We take two moments as reference points: 1) changes in Twitter/X's culture following its takeover, and 2) the centrality of Twitter/X to public deliberation over, and resistance to, Israel's bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attacks. We conclude that individual decisions about using digital platforms depend on the goals of engagement, that these goals are contingent, and that for-profit digital platforms are inherently paradoxical affective spaces. Resolving the tensions that users experience in these spaces may not be possible unless new digital platforms with different models of ownership and governance are created.