Should the media abandon social network X (formerly Twitter) or stay there? The question would have seemed far-fetched a few years ago, but the dilemma currently worries many newsrooms, especially since the election of Donald Trump on November 5, two years after the purchase of the microblogging platform by billionaire Elon Musk.
In recent months, the CEO of Space X and Tesla and current owner of X, has invested in the US presidential campaign, becoming a propaganda machine on his own platform. The fact that the tycoon was appointed by Trump on Tuesday, November 12, to head a “government efficiency” department, responsible for cutting federal spending, was the last straw for some media outlets.
The day after this announcement, the British newspaper the guardian to the 10.8 million subscribers in “toxic and [que] its owner (…) [avait] “was able to use his influence to shape political discourse.” during the presidential campaign. In the process, on Thursday, November 14, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the Spanish newspaper The Vanguard did the same, before French regional press groups Ouest-France and Sud Ouest did the same the following week. They all leave their journalists free to use the Internet as a monitoring tool.
“It has become a lawless zone due to lack of moderation”justifies the president of the board of directors of Ouest-France, François-Xavier Lefranc. “Our voice had become inaudible in this mess.echoes his colleague Nicolas Sterckx, general director of Sud Ouest. “It was like fighting a tsunami of false information.” A strategic choice “ethical” This was facilitated by the fact that only 0.1% of the traffic to the Sud Ouest newspaper site came from X.
Young environmentalists Green has chosen to draw a line under its almost 18,000 subscribers on the platform “by commitment”, explains Juliette Quef, its president, although she recognizes that Green was in “not very dependent”compared to his 200,000 subscribers on Instagram and his newsletter sent to 90,000 people.
“The answer is not obvious”
However, the decision to close the door is far from unanimous in France. Among the media executives interviewed, several remember the announcement of the release of excerpts from broadcasts on their own.
You have 63.56% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
