X boycott: a good move against the flood of fake news?
Following the announcement that Elon Musk has been officially tasked with making US authorities "more efficient" under Donald Trump, the British newspaper The Guardian and the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have closed their accounts on X. Musk bought X, which was Twitter at the time, in 2022, and has since been accused of doing too little to combat fake news on the platform. Europe's press debates whether leaving X is the right approach.
Echo chambers for the like-minded
Instead of diversity of opinion what we are seeing on social media is segregation of opinion, says The Guardian:
“Platforms come and go, but this feels different: the final death of the idea that social media could ever be the Internet's town square, a global meeting place for ideas that would broaden all our horizons. Now, the future of social media looks increasingly segregated for users' safety, like rival fans at football. X for the rightwing and the raging; centrists and policy nerds on Bluesky; people who hate politics on Threads or Instagram; Gen Z on TikTok; boomers on Facebook.”
Ineffective against far-right hate
El País says that closing X accounts is the wrong approach:
“Many of us want to quit because X is flooded with disinformation and far-right publications. So will the mass exit of users from the platform improve the situation? Will a newspaper that stops publishing news from journalists on this social network put an end to disinformation? In order to curb the poison and disinformation on the networks, the best approach is to denounce messages of hate and disseminate fact-based news. To achieve this objective, the worst those who seek positive social networks can do is to abandon these networks.”
Not very constructive
Politis criticises the decision:
“Unfortunately, The Guardian's reaction is yet another attempt by large media companies to fight social media by trying to shut them down and face the public with the dilemma of 'either them or us'. ... Obviously, governments should finally start regulating platforms like X, Facebook and TikTok so that fake news can't thrive there like it does now. But the Guardian's departure shows that the media never pushed in that direction. They simply took the US election as an opportunity to deal the platform a blow.”
Where is Europe's space for public debate?
Journalist Irene Lozano has also left X, and shares her thoughts on website eldiario.es:
“Switching to Bluesky seems like a loss (in my case from almost 35,000 followers to zero). But it's like any toxic relationship. If you leave, you miss the crumbs it gave you, but if you stay, you lose much more: the chance of a new, healthy relationship. ... The fact that Bluesky is a refuge also reveals Europe's failure to create its own space for public debate.”