The UK Attorney General's office has stopped using X (the platform formerly called Twitter), saying the site has too much disinformation, or false and misleading posts. The office made its final post on a Friday before the new policy took effect.

The Attorney General is the UK's senior law officer and sits in Cabinet — the group of top government ministers. When a major government office like this one leaves a social media platform, it sends a signal about the platform's reliability.

The specific concern here is disinformation — that means false or misleading information. This is different from complaints about rudeness or harassment. The worry is whether posts on X can be trusted as factual information, especially when they come from a government department.

X has changed since Elon Musk bought it in late 2022. The platform used to have teams of editors who checked facts and labelled false claims. Musk removed those teams. He also ended partnerships with independent fact-checkers. Now, users themselves can add notes to disputed posts, but there's less official control over false information. For a government lawyer's office, these changes matter because misleading replies can attach themselves to official posts without being corrected.

This decision is worth thinking about in the context of what Elon Musk has claimed. He has said that loosening moderation rules and allowing more "free speech" makes social media healthier. The UK Attorney General's decision suggests the opposite — that X's current approach has created a space where disinformation thrives.

Other parts of the UK government still use X, while some have quietly posted less without making an announcement. The Attorney General's office did something different: it made a public statement explaining why it was leaving. This gives other government departments a clear reason they can point to when deciding whether to leave too.

Other institutions have made similar exits before. Local councils and health bodies left Facebook in the early 2020s because of pandemic-related false claims. When they left, they announced their reasons, saved their old posts, and told people how to follow their news through other channels. It is not yet known whether the Attorney General's office will do the same.

Losing X does not really harm the Attorney General's ability to do its job. Important legal news goes through Parliament's official record and through GOV.UK, the government's main website. X was mainly useful for spreading news to more people — not for making announcements that legally matter.

What the exit does signal is this: the UK's top law officer has decided that X is no longer trustworthy as a place for government to communicate. That message might persuade other departments to do the same.