'Ouest-France' becomes first French newspaper to stop posting on X

Joker@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 493 points – 'Ouest-France' becomes first French newspaper to stop posting on X
rfi.fr

French regional daily Ouest-France, the top-selling paper in the country, is the latest in a string of European publications to suspend posts on X, formerly Twitter. The social media platform is accused of enabling the spread of disinformation under its owner Elon Musk, an ally of US president-elect Donald Trump.

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It's insane that so many places chose and are still choosing to stay and keep court at this place.

I can't believe these giant companies put profit over morals. It just doesn't make sense!

We'll see how profitable it really was in the long run, but short term profits seem to blind most corporations which is practically and fiscally foolish.

They obviously still get the clicks to justify the cost of advertising or they wouldn't do it. If one of them fails in a decade, no one is going to look back and say it was because they didn't leave Twitter when Elmo bought it...

Interesting, I think they legitimately don't know what they'll do instead:

"Strictly speaking, there are no alternatives to what X offers today," Vincent Berthier, head of the technology department at RSF (Reporters Without Borders) told AFP.

"But we may need to invent them."

I imagine they'll end up on Bluesky, possibly also on Mastodon?

Honestly, for big orgs like that I feel like a federating their website just makes sense to me.

That way they can host the content (resilience to censor ship) and can still natively share it.

And honestly, it may really help Mastodon out if people join it specifically to get at the content here.

Bluesky most likely, I don’t see mastodon happening unless there is a major change in how the network addresses moderation and defederation.

What if they were to admin their own instance? It'd be a lot of work though.

French are using Twitter a lot. Even people that are considered pretty far to the left. I've tried to discuss this with a few french connections I have and it's always "but that's where the people are"....

I never understood Twitter. I tried it for like a almost a month and eventually forgot my password and just didn't care anymore.

But when I did use it, you make a tweet or comment and then either no one responds to it, or like a hundred people respond with mostly vitriol or just total confusion, not even relating to your comment.

It ended up just being like a really shitty news feed, with a mix of random people from Ghana that started following me and visa versa for whatever reasons.