Every single excuse is fake. No you aren't getting breaking news, you are getting literal propaganda and explicitly rage inducing lies, precisely because the blue check and payment system enforces it.
You are an addict.
What's really needed is better social media tools that allow you to follow specific creators regardless of what platforms they use. There's some ongoing work being done for that with video creators, but I'd love a generalized version for other media.
I also follow artists on alternative sites when they make an account available, but it's clear that for many creators the primary platform where they make big announcements is on Twitter.
Millions of us never used it and never missed out on anything. Stop falling for FOMO. It's insane to me how many of the people who say "but I can't get what I get on twitter anywhere else" are objectively just "always online" style people, who have no life other than posting on twitter. People like Hank Green who I consider a good person and worthy of respect but who won't get his ass off twitter because he's addicted. He mostly admits this, but it's just silly.
Getting rid of social media addiction isn't trivial. When I was 16 I had to block all of reddit from our firewall so I could self-intervene in a burgeoning reddit addiction. I'm very lucky that worked. But I didn't go around telling people "but where else will I get my techsupport horror stories?!", I just had to suck up and admit that not reading tech support horror stories for 4 hours a night wasn't going to hurt me.
Like, imagine someone claiming that they can't stop using Linkedin. There is objectively content on there that doesn't happen anywhere else, but using that as an excuse to not stop reading Linkedin posts I would hope would be seen for the nonsense that it is.
IMO "short form blogging" is a harmful medium full stop, but that just doesn't matter because twitter doesn't own a monopoly on short form blogging and never did.
No one will be hurt by missing a tweet. Especially not nowadays, when government entities all over are transitioning to bluesky. If something is so damn important that you need to see it, it WILL escape twitter. If you want to stop seeing Elon, priority number one should be to reduce the effectiveness of twitter as a platform by getting the hell off it.