French regional daily Ouest-France, the top-selling paper in the country, is the latest in a string of European publications to suspend posts on X, formerly Twitter. The social media platform is accused of enabling the spread of disinformation under its owner Elon Musk, an ally of US president-elect Donald Trump.
"We are not against social networks, we are simply asking for the application of the law" on X, Francois-Xavier Lefranc, chairman of the board of Ouest-France, told French news agency AFP on Tuesday.
He added that the decision was taken "fairly unanimously internally".
The daily, which is targeted at France's vast western region and still sells over 600,000 paper copies a day, is the first French daily to quit X after Britain's The Guardian, La Vanguardia in Spain and Dagens Nyheter in Sweden.
Sports clubs have also begun turning away from the platform.
On Tuesday, German football club Werder Bremen joined fellow Bundesliga side St Pauli in leaving X, citing an "incredible" increase in "hate speech" since it was bought by Musk in 2022.
Top French newspapers sue X for unpaid use of their content
Several users had already wondered back then whether they should remain on Twitter when Musk – a businessman best known for running car company Tesla and space company SpaceX – rebranded it as X, and drastically reduced content moderation in the name of free speech.
The question has flared up again since Donald Trump won this month's US presidential election, actively supported by Musk.
"Unless it becomes a regulated space that respects people", Ouest-France "will not return", Lefranc said. "This decision is final. We are not doing this just to change our minds in two weeks."
On its X account, Ouest-France posted what it said was a "last tweet, for the moment".
Harsh, extreme climate
Several news outlets have begun quitting X, once a favourite of global media but now accused of enabling the spread of disinformation under Musk.
Citing a "harsh and extreme" climate, Sweden's newspaper of reference, the left-liberal Dagens Nyheter (DN), last Friday became third major media outlet to stop publishing its articles on the social media platform.
"Since Elon Musk took over, the platform has increasingly merged with his and Donald Trump's political ambitions," said editor-in-chief Peter Wolodarski.
Last Wednesday, Britain's centre-left daily The Guardian announced it would no longer post content from its official accounts on X, which it called "toxic".
EU concerned by high disinformation rate on Musk's X platform
The Guardian has nearly 11 million followers on the platform, but it said "the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives".
It said "often disturbing content" was promoted or found on the platform, singling out "far-right conspiracy theories and racism".
Spain's Vanguardia said it would rather lose subscribers than remain on a "disinformation network".
Stephen Barnard, a specialist on media manipulation at Butler University in the US said he expected more publishers to part ways with X in the coming months.
"How many do so will likely depend on what actions X, Musk, and the Trump administration take with regard to media and journalism," he said.
Invent alternatives
Musk, who is the world's richest man, has been named by Trump's team to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency.
One beneficiary of disenchantment with X appears to be Bluesky, a decentralised social media service offering many of the same functions as X.
On Friday, it said it had added one million subscribers within 24 hours. But its 16 million subscribers are still dwarfed by those of X, estimated at several hundreds of millions.
"Strictly speaking, there are no alternatives to what X offers today," Vincent Berthier, head of the technology department at RSF (Reporters Without Borders) told AFP.
"But we may need to invent them."
Berthier called departures from X "a symptom of the failure of democracies to regulate platforms" across the board.
Musk may represent "the radical face of this informational nightmare", said Berthier. "But the problem goes much deeper."
(with AFP)
