The Guardian, an influential British news organization, has said it would stop posting from their official editorial accounts on X, a social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
Regular social media users have begun migrating from X, a platform Musk has extensively used for promoting right-wing causes after purchasing it in 2022, to other ecosystems. Now, major news organizations are following suit.
The New York Times, for example, is already quite active in Bluesky, a platform that has attracted millions of new users in the days after Donald Trump, supported by Musk, won the US presidential election.
The biggest American daily, however, is still on X. However, The Guardian, a large progressive British news outlet, has now officially joined the X-odus – for good.
In a short statement, The Guardian said that the benefits of being on X were now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting their journalism elsewhere.
“The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse,” said The Guardian.
It added that X users would still be able to share the organization’s articles. The nature of live news reporting also means that The Guardian’s journalists will still sometimes embed content from X within news stories.
Finally, the declaration doesn’t mean that the outlet’s journalists will stop using X. For news-gathering purposes, the platform is still useful, just like other social networks in which The Guardian doesn’t officially engage, said the organization.
“Social media can be an important tool for news organizations and help us to reach new audiences but, at this point, X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work,” The Guardian explained.
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