The college decided during the week of Nov. 7 to suspend Twitter use on the school's accounts, which include an account for the overall college and the athletics department, Edgewood College spokesperson Ed Taylor said.
Edgewood College's main Twitter account hasn't tweeted since Nov. 3, and its athletics account hasn't had any account activity since Nov. 7.
"Recent increases of negative and misinformative content at the channel do not align with the mission and values of Edgewood College," President Andrew Manion said in a Thursday statement. "We simply remove ourselves from that particular space and will not return until the content there is more consistent with our values of truth, compassion, community, partnership, and justice."
The suspension only applies to Edgewood College's accounts and does not prohibit employees or students from using personal accounts, the statement said.
Taylor said the college's decision to suspend use of Twitter was not linked to billionaire Elon Musk's purchase of the social media platform, which was finalized Oct. 27.
But Musk's purchase, including his support for reinstating former President Donald Trump's account and laying off thousands of employees, has thrown Twitter into turmoil.
Within hours of Musk taking over Twitter, instances of hate speech through the use of racial slurs increased by 4.7 times. Many of those tweets came from few hundred accounts Twitter previously had deemed to be robot or troll accounts.
Digital tracker Similarweb reported that more than 200,000 users quit Twitter the weekend after Musk's takeover, but about four times as many landed on the page to create a new account.
Half of Twitter's top advertisers seem to have ceased advertising.
Other efforts to raise revenue through a revamped Twitter Blue subscription were stalled after people used the new verification system — once a signifier that an account was legitimate and trustworthy — resulted in users impersonating companies. Some impersonated companies saw financial ramifications, as pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly lost millions in market capitalization after an impersonator tweeted that insulin would be made free.
Twitter's staffing has been slashed since Musk's takeover. Nearly half of its employees were laid off, and many who remained resigned en masse amid Musk's ultimatum for employees to commit to "extremely hardcore" working conditions.
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