Leading French Newspaper Le Monde Quits X Over Elon Musk’s Alliance With Donald Trump

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The well-known French newspaper Le Monde has decided to leave Elon Musk’s X social media platform due to the businessman’s political ties with former President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, an editorial penned by Jérôme Fenoglio, editor-in-chief of Le Monde, was published in both French and English. In this piece, Fenoglio asserted that the decision to withdraw from X was spurred by the close relationships between social media moguls like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Meta) and former President Trump. Fenoglio characterized this alliance as a significant worldwide danger to the availability of trustworthy information.

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In an editorial published on Tuesday, Jérôme Fenoglio, editor-in-chief at Le Monde, wrote that the motivation behind leaving X was due to the tight bonds between social media leaders such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta’s CEO) with former President Trump. Fenoglio described this connection as a substantial global risk to the accessibility of accurate information.

Lately, I’ve noticed that Le Monde had been automatically sharing content on X, but recently, they’ve stopped posting anything at all on that platform entirely. Fenoglio mentioned that our newsroom is being advised to follow suit. Instead, Le Monde is actively engaging on the rapidly expanding alternative, Bluesky. As a gamer and a follower of tech news, I’m keeping an eye on this shift in strategy.

Additionally, we’ll boost our security measures across various other social media sites like TikTok and Meta, in response to Mark Zuckerberg’s concerning remarks,” Fenoglio stated.

In the extensive editorial discussing the motives for the action, Fenoglio suggests that Musk is using X as a means to advance his political agenda, leaning heavily towards libertarianism with far-right tendencies. He’s effectively turning it into a tool to exert pressure on his business rivals or European governments with a social-democratic stance.

Fenoglio writes, “The blend of ideology and business in places like Le Monde has made it, along with most other traditional media, progressively harder to see. Consequently, we’ve decided to drastically cut down our coverage on X to only automated updates. Recently, Musk’s heightened activism, his formal role within the Trump administration, and the growing hostility of exchanges have led us to believe that the benefits of our presence are outweighed by the numerous negative consequences we face.

Musk’s criticisms and interferences in the governments of nations like the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Ireland have sparked strong opposition from citizens in those countries towards the billionaire, due to his perceived overstepping of boundaries in their internal matters.

World renowned newspaper, Le Monde, follows suit with the U.K.’s leading daily, The Guardian, by announcing their departure from platform X. The London-based media group has declared they will cease updates to all their official editorial pages on X starting November, and instead, have switched to Bluesky.

In December, the European Federation of Journalists, representing approximately 300,000 journalists globally, decided to withdraw from X because of Elon Musk’s ownership. The organization stated they could no longer ethically engage with a social media platform that its owner has turned into a tool for spreading misinformation and propaganda.

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2025-01-22 10:24