Richard Hermer's Attorney General's office has directed staff to stop posting on X, citing concerns about disinformation on the platform, according to The Guardian. The office made its final post on the Friday before the decision took effect.

Hermer, a Labour peer appointed Attorney General on 5 July 2024, attends Cabinet — meaning the withdrawal carries the weight of a senior government law officer, not a peripheral departmental account. The move makes the Attorney General's office one of the more prominent arms of UK central government to formally exit the platform.

The stated rationale is disinformation. That is a notably precise word choice: not "toxicity", not "harassment", not the vaguer "platform safety" framing that has circulated in institutional departures from X over the past two years. Disinformation, in this context, implies a concern about the integrity of information environment itself — whether content encountered on the platform can be relied upon as a basis for public communication by a law officer's department.

The timing matters here. X's moderation posture has shifted substantially since Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform in late 2022. Community Notes replaced much of the editorial moderation infrastructure; third-party fact-checking partnerships were wound down; and a series of policy changes reduced restrictions on content that had previously been labelled or demoted. For a department whose public communications carry legal and political weight, those structural changes create a genuine risk calculus: posting into an environment where misleading replies, quote-tweets, or synthetic amplification can attach to official content without reliable counter-labelling is a different proposition than it was five years ago.

Worth flagging: the Attorney General's framing implicitly challenges one of Musk's central arguments for the platform's reformed approach — that "free speech" and reduced moderation produce a healthier information environment. A senior law officer concluding that the environment is defined primarily by disinformation is a direct institutional rebuke, even if no names are named.

The UK government's relationship with X has been uneven. Several departments and ministers remain active on the platform; others have quietly reduced posting cadence without formal announcements. A formal cessation by the Attorney General's office, made on stated grounds rather than simply letting activity trail off, sets a different precedent. It documents the reasoning, which means it can be cited by other departments weighing the same calculation.

This is not the first time public institutions have staged exits from social platforms on information-quality grounds. The experience with Facebook in the early 2020s — when a wave of local councils, health bodies, and eventually some national agencies pulled back from the platform citing misinformation spread during the pandemic — produced a recognisable playbook: announce with a rationale, archive existing content, redirect audiences to owned channels. Whether the Attorney General's office follows a similar migration path to an alternative platform, or simply absorbs the reduction in reach, has not been reported.

The practical consequences for the office are limited. Government legal communications of genuine public significance are covered through Hansard, press offices, and the official GOV.UK infrastructure. X was, for most departments, a secondary amplification channel rather than a primary record. Losing it narrows reach but does not impair the legal or administrative function.

What the decision does is place a formal institutional marker on the record. In the broader debate about whether X's current moderation architecture is compatible with responsible government communication, the Attorney General of England and Wales has now staked a position — not in testimony or a policy paper, but through operational behaviour.