Elon Musk’s X has become a bête noire of the Brussels bubble, yet we’re still there.
For an X-odus to happen, we need the Commission to lead from the front.
There are many reasons to have beef with Elon Musk and his platform X. The oligarch isn’t just tweeting – he’s actively trying to influence European politics.
He's endorsed Germany's far-right AfD, had a cosy chat with its leader, Alice Weidel, and is now attacking election roundtables in Romania – which, by the way, are required by the EU’s law on protecting democracy online, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
X is itself subject to investigation under the DSA over how it deals with disinformation and fact-checking.
And let's be honest: the platform itself has broken bad (on Monday it was literally broken). Traffic is down. As for the engagement, we all have anecdotes about it, coming mostly from far-right trolls and/or naked lady bots.
We’ve all equally dipped our toes elsewhere, first and foremost the open-source Twitter spin-out Bluesky. That includes the European Commission, which told Euractiv that it uses 15 social media platforms as an institution.
But we're also all still posting on X, giving it our data, our content, and our attention.
Unlike the Commission, which suspended all spending on X, we EU media are still paying to push our content there. The golden tick next to the profiles of Euractiv, Politico Europe, and Euronews, is called by X “verified organisations”: it essentially means we are paying to be there.
The problem is media outlets can’t abandon X because that’s where the news – and the readers – still are.
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