Atom Bank, the United Kingdom’s first bank built for smartphones or tablets, without any branches, and the first digital-only challenger bank to be granted a full UK regulatory license, has decided to shut down all of its Twitter accounts over the increasingly unhinged behavior of new owner Elon Musk.
The bank says it decided after an Elon Musk tweet at the weekend calling for the prosecution of Doctor Anthony Fauci.
Fauci is the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who helped steer the country through the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For his part, Fauci responded by deriding Musk for overseeing a ‘cesspool of misinformation.’
In announcing its decision to pull out of the echo chamber, Edward Twiddy, chief customer officer at Atom Bank, says: “Not everything on Twitter is ok. And, sometimes, poison has been allowed to linger in the well. We all have to live with being offended at times. That’s ok. But while enough hasn’t been done over the years to stop some forms of offense from turning into vindictive attacks, at least the platform owner was not the source of the bile.
“In our opinion, it is not ok to use de-facto editorial and proprietorial power in this way. It damages free speech, and it creates hate and fear when what we need right now is love and science.”
As a result, the Bank will be deleting its main @Atom_bank account within 30 days, alongside its @DigitalMortgage and @AtomHelp accounts.
You can read the bank’s statement here.
