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X, formerly Twitter: Soon largely without the SPD (symbolic image)
Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP
The Chancellor's SPD party wants to largely withdraw from Platform X, which it accuses of the growing spread of disinformation. “After Elon Musk took over the short message service X, the X platform changed massively for the worse,” said a spokeswoman, referring to the US billionaire. The reason she gave was that other users had also logged out.
Broader discussions are hardly possible anymore, "the balance is no longer there," she said. »We draw our conclusions from this. We invest our time in other channels that are more relevant for political communication, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. A few weeks ago, Deutschlandfunk announced that it would be withdrawing from X. In addition, several foundations had announced that they would be leaving X, such as the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Mercator Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation.
Individual SPD politicians are still active on X. SPD co-chair Saskia Esken withdrew in October 2022, and Secretary General Kevin Kühnert also deleted his account. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, on the other hand, is still very active on the platform. The SPD does not want to shut down its account completely.
The SPD accuses the company of having fired thousands of employees who were responsible for combating the spread of hate speech. "The spread of disinformation, fake news and hateful propaganda is now the order of the day there," said the spokeswoman. Russian troll factories were spreading the word. The Foreign Office warned a few days ago that Russia was spreading disinformation on social networks. Musk took over the company, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022.
Most recently, US politicians called for stricter regulations.
mfh/Reuters