Should media outlets leave social media platform X (formerly Twitter)? This question would have seemed far-fetched a few years ago, but it is a dilemma many newsrooms are now facing, since the election of Donald Trump on November 5, two years after billionaire Elon Musk bought the microblogging platform.

In recent months, Musk – also the CEO of Space X and Tesla – has been heavily invested in the US presidential campaign, turning himself into a propaganda machine on his own platform. When, on November 12, the tycoon was appointed by Trump to head a department of "government efficiency," tasked with cutting federal spending, it was the last straw for some media companies.

The day after this announcement, British daily The Guardian, with 10.8 million subscribers on X, announced that it was suspending its publications' accounts, calling the platform "toxic" and saying that "its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use his influence to shape political discourse" during the US presidential campaign. On November 14, Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and Spanish daily La Vanguardia followed suit, with French regional press groups Ouest-France and Sud Ouest doing the same the following week. All have said their journalists are free to continue to use X as a monitoring tool.

"It's become a lawless zone because of the lack of moderation," said the president of the Ouest-France management board, François-Xavier Lefranc. "Our voice had become inaudible in the chaos," echoed Nicolas Sterckx, Sud Ouest's director-general. "It was like fighting a tsunami of false information". This "ethical" strategic choice was facilitated by the fact that only 0.1% of Sud Ouest's website traffic comes from X.

The young French environmentalist outlet Vert has also chosen to dispense with its nearly 18,000 followers on the platform as a "commitment," explained its president Juliette Quef, although she conceded that Vert was "not very dependent" on X, in comparison with its 200,000 followers on Instagram and its newsletter which is sent to 90,000 people.

'Answer is not obvious'

This decision to slam the door has been far from unanimous in France. Among the media managers interviewed, several mentioned that while the announcement of the departure from X by the infotainment show Quotidien in December 2023 had certainly been followed through, many of the show's staff still share excerpts from the program on their own X accounts.

You have 64.61% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.