Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, is quitting Elon Musk‘s X social media platform over the billionaire tech oligarch’s political alliance with Donald Trump.
In an editorial posted in French and English on Tuesday, Le Monde‘s editor-in-chief Jérôme Fenoglio said the move to leave X was driven by “social platform bosses” like Musk and Meta CEO’s Mark Zuckerberg cozying up with Trump, which Fenoglio said is “a global threat to free access to reliable information.”
In recent months, Le Monde had an automated feed on X, Fenoglio said, but the paper, which boasts 11 million followers on its French language account, has now stopped posting entirely on the platform. Fenoglio said that the company will recommend it journalists to do the same. The newspaper is posting regularly on fast-growing X rival Bluesky.
“We will also increase our vigilance on several other platforms, notably TikTok and Meta, following Mark Zuckerberg’s worrying statements,” Fenoglio added.
In the lengthy editorial explaining the reasons behind the move, Fenoglio writes that “[Musk] has transformed [X] into an extension of his political cause, a form of libertarianism increasingly close to the far right. He has turned it into an instrument of the pressure he wants to put on his competitors or on Europe’s social-democrat governments.”
“This mix of ideology and business has continued to make Le Monde, like most other traditional media, increasingly invisible. This has prompted us to reduce our publications on X to a bare minimum – an automated feed,” Fenoglio writes. “Today, however, the intensification of Musk’s activism, the formalization of his position within the Trump power apparatus and the increasing toxicity of the exchanges led us to come to the conclusion that the usefulness of our presence weighs less than the many suffered side-effects.”
Musk’s attacks on the leadership of European countries such as the U.K., France, German and Ireland, as well as meddling in their domestic affairs has created a fierce backlash against the billionaire in many of these countries.
Le Monde joins U.K. newspaper of record The Guardian is quitting X. The London-based news organization said it would stop posting to any of its official editorial accounts on X in November, and promptly set up accounts on Bluesky.
In December, the European Federation of Journalists, which represents almost 300,000 journalists worldwide, quit X due to Musk’s ownership. The organization said it would “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has transformed into a machine of disinformation and propaganda.”
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