Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

Retro · 14 Nov 2024

You know what's left of Twitter has sunk to new depths of depravity when an established quality newspaper like The Guardian refuses to post on it any more. All this thanks to Elon Musk, who's completely ruined it.

The Guardian has announced it will no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts.

In an announcement to readers, the news organisation said it considered the benefits of being on the platform formerly called Twitter were now outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it.

“We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X,” the Guardian said.

The Guardian has more than 80 accounts on X with approximately 27 million followers.

The Guardian said content on the platform about which it had longstanding concerns included far-right conspiracy theories and racism. It added that the site’s coverage of the US presidential election had crystallised its decision.

I do love how news organisations report about themselves in the third person.

It's good to see that regular users are also seeing the poisonous husk of Twitter for the cesspit that it is and are now quitting. About a million users have now joined Bluesky in their efforts to escape from Twitter. It's interesting and heartening to see that Twitter's would-be prime competitor, Threads, owned by Meta, aka Facebook, isn't getting a look-in.

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 1 million new users since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach nearly 15 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

“The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”

Bluesky began as a project inside Twitter but became an independent company in 2022, and is now primarily owned by chief executive Jay Graber.