Pallade Veneta - End of a love affair: news media quit X over 'disinformation'

Citing a "harsh and extreme" climate, Sweden's newspaper of reference, the left-liberal Dagens Nyheter (DN), on 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.

Already on Wednesday, Britain's centre-left daily The Guardian had announced it would no longer post content from its official accounts on X, which it called "toxic".

A day later, Spain's Vanguardia did the same, saying it would rather lose subscribers than remain on a "disinformation network".

Several users had already wondered back in 2022 whether they should remain on Twitter when Musk -- a businessman best known for running car company Tesla and space company SpaceX -- bought the platform and drastically reduced content moderation in the name of free speech.

The question has flared up again since Trump won this month's presidential election, actively supported by Musk.

- 'Disturbing content' -

"I would expect more publishers to part ways with X," said Stephen Barnard, a specialist on media manipulation at Butler University in the US.

"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.

Musk, who is the world's richest man, has been tapped by Trump's team to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency.

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".

This falling-out stands in stark contrast to the enthusiasm sparked by Twitter in 2008 and 2009.

Back then, media felt they had to be present there to establish direct contact with their audiences as well as with experts and decision-makers.

They found grew "audiences, built brands, developed new reporting practices, formed community, strengthened public engagement", said Barnard.

At the same time, they boosted Twitter's influence.

- 'Reaping what they sowed' -

This increasingly symbiotic relationship may have become detrimental to the media, suggested Mathew Ingram, former chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review.

"Many publishers gave up on reader comments and other forms of interaction and essentially outsourced all of that to social media like Twitter," he said.

"To that extent they are reaping what they sowed."

Criticism of Twitter predates its takeover by Musk and was centred on the network's architecture that was seen favouring polemical debate and instantaneous indignation.

It was also said to give an unbalanced reflection of society, tilting mostly towards higher-income people, and activist users.

The precise impact of the decision by newspapers, already in economic crisis, to leave X is not yet clear, but they already expect readerships to dwindle.

"We will probably lose subscriptions because some readers subscribe after seeing a news story on the social network," Jordi Juan, director of La Vanguardia, told AFP.

But Barnard said any such loss would be limited because, said, "X generates relatively little traffic to news sites compared to other platforms".

In October 2023, six months after American public radio NPR left Twitter, a report from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism deemed the effects of this departure "negligible" in terms of traffic.

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."

O.Pileggi--PV