Social Security Will Exclusively Use X To Tell You That You're Too Dead To Get Benefits

Everyone go set up an account for your grandparents.

The wingnuts currently stripping all the wiring and fixtures from the federal government have found yet one more way to wreck the hell out of Social Security without having to push benefit cuts through Congress.

As we have noted, one does not need those benefit cuts to accomplish the longtime conservative goal of yeeting Social Security into the sun. One can simply fire lots of SSA employees, close lots of offices, and make communicating with the agency over the phone or through its website all but impossible.

Now add making the virtual pigsty formerly known as Twitter but now known as X the only way the Social Security Adminstration will communicate with the media and the public to the pile. The agency announced this week that X will be its exclusive communications platform from now until whenever sanity returns to our government. So probably in 2097 or so.

Wired reports that the SSA’s regional commissioner, Linda Kerr-Davis, broke the news to agency managers this week. Since the managers are closer to the agency’s customers and know their needs and abilities, this announcement led to sensible questions like What the fuck and No, seriously, what the fuck:

“Do they really expect senior citizens will join this platform?” asked one current employee. “Most managers aren’t even on it.”

Hey Grandma, want to keep abreast of all the latest SSA initiatives to help you access your benefits or avoid scammers? Great! We hope you don’t mind doomscrolling through page after page of Nazi slop from accounts with Roman statue avatars first!

Imagine trying to get information about Social Security while being bombarded with tweets about how awful Social Security is and why people who need it and other government services like Medicare and SNAP are a bunch of lazy freeloaders who are taking money away from you so they can buy iPhones and pot. Basically X is trying to indoctrinate you against the program that you have to go to X to find any information about.

It is a dumb and possibly illegal idea for many reasons, as the writer Anil Dash pointed out:

The answer to that SSA manager’s question is no, the Trump administration does not expect senior citizens to join X. It expects senior citizens who rely on Social Security so they don’t have to spend their golden years living in a hobo camp to become confused, then angry, then discouraged, then resigned to losing their benefits and dying so the government doesn’t have to pay them anymore.

Shoot, if communicating with seniors was a priority and the SSA had to pick a social media platform to do it on, it would post everything on Facebook. By one count, only 7 percent of X users are over the age of 50. And that count was conducted a year ago. The site has only lost users since then as it deteriorated under the what we guess you would call “leadership” of Elon Musk.

More from Wired:

Previously, the agency used dear colleague letters to engage with advocacy groups and third-party organizations that help people access social security benefits. Recent letters covered everything from the agency’s new identity verification procedures to updates on the accuracy of SSA death records.

This is especially important because the Trump administration also announced it will use the death index to start cancelling Social Security numbers of very much alive immigrants who obtained them lawfully when they came to America and began working.

The effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead.

That is a surprising new tactic indeed.

The idea is that these people, cut off from being able to access financial or government services without an SSN, will self-deport back to their home countries.

And if someone’s home country happens to be, say, engulfed in some sort of civil unrest that caused her to flee in the first place? Eh, tough luck. To slightly rewrite a phrase from closing time at your neighborhood bar, “You do have to go home and you can’t stay here.”

It seems inevitable that American citizens are going to have their SSNs cancelled by “accident.” That very occasionally has happened in the past, and that was before we turned the whole shooting match over to a bunch of Silicon Valley dipshits with no experience in handling government data. What could possibly go wrong here, besides everything.

Above all, this use of X is a massive gift to Elon Musk. He now gets millions of users for his dying site, elderly users who are more prone to fall for the sorts of scammers that proliferate unchecked on Twitter. He also gets massive numbers of new potential customers for companies that might want to buy advertising space on X.

It is a massive conflict of interest, given Musk’s position in the government plus the fact that he is the president’s biggest donor.

And indeed, late on Friday, either someone was seized by his first-ever ethical thought, or (more likely) as the senator says, someone noticed what the children at DOGE were doing and stepped in.

Your guess is as good as ours.

[Wired / NYT]

Wonkette only lives with support from our generous readers.