MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Says She Deleted X After Trump Win As An ‘Act of Self Preservation’

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace revealed that she deleted her X app on Wednesday in an “act of self-preservation” following President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory.

Wallace was interviewing Rappler co-founder and former CNN correspondent Maria Ressa on the role of social media in society and on the electoral processes. Social media algorithms, she argued, spread “fear, anger, and hate” online in a way that had moved some “fringe” political leaders toward power.

During the interview, the host argued that she was no longer able “to find” content she was “interested in” on the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter but now owned by pro-Trump tech billionaire Elon Musk.

While Wallace’s account on X remains live, she told Ressa how she’d taken the step of deleting the app:

I have this sort of insatiable interest in every bit of wisdom you can impart, and as a journalist, I hear you about girding ourselves for this moment. As a human, I deleted Twitter today as an act of self-preservation and because I was no longer able to find the things I was interested in. I was seeing a lot of things that I’m not.

Ressa reflected on that by arguing that after Musk bought Twitter in 2021 “all the guardrails went off.”

She added: “Look what that brought us. He brought it down to the basement, fired 80% of the safety engineers, and the other social media companies, American social media companies, followed.

So those guardrails have to be put back in place.”