HASHAS Following discussions organized by the Society of Journalists (SDJ) and a collective discussion by the team, Mediapart decided to leave X (formerly Twitter) on January 20, 2025. This day marks the inauguration at the House -Blanche of Donald Trump, who describes journalists as“enemies of the people”and the taking of office of Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, at the head of a ministry of “governmental efficiency”.
We have chronicled in our columns the fascist risk that this new presidency poses not only to his country, but also to the entire European continent. We chronicled how the boss of X used his social network to bring the world into a new era, that of information chaos. How he manipulated his users in the service of his side’s victory. « You are the media now »he congratulated them the day after the election of his candidate, to signify his desire to put an end to journalism.
Enlarge image: Figure 1
As a media, we have a historic battle to wage in defense of our mission of general interest, which consists of seeking the truth of the facts, by producing cross-checked, verified and documented information. To guarantee a democratic public debate worthy of the name, our responsibility is to fight against fake news, the poison of inequality and hatred, the war of all against all.
“What makes a totalitarian state or a dictatorship possible is that people are not informed […]. If everyone lies to you all the time, the consequence is not that you believe the lies but rather that no one believes anything anymore.affirmed Hannah Arendt in 1974 in an interview with the New York Review of Books. At a time when far-right ideology and the tech industry are joining forces to bring about the Orwellian world of 1984where peace is war, freedom is slavery, right is wrong, we cannot pretend not to see.
As a counter-power, we oppose this reversal of values. This involves first and foremost refusing to allow ourselves to be confined within the framework chosen by the enemies of freedom of information and pluralism.
Address everyone
By staying, whether we like it or not, we legitimize their space and their weapons. From whom? of what we have most precious: our readers, those who are loyal to us, but also, more broadly, those who are interested, even from afar, in our information, to discuss it and why not challenge them.
By remaining on this dangerous platform, we encourage them to go there, we knowingly make them take risks by exposing them to disinformation, harassment and the theft of their data. By feeding X’s algorithm, we feed the machine that destroys us and participate in producing monsters.
We are not confusing Musk and the users of X. Mediapart is aimed at everyone without exception. More than ever, we are committed to making ourselves accessible to as many people as possible, to sharing our information and making our voice heard beyond our subscribers. To do this, our strategy consists of amplifying our presence on other social networks and increasing the number of public events throughout France to allow everyone to meet us.
We refuse more than ever between ourselves: the bubble, today, is X.
We accept adversity more than ever: X has become a prison, that is to say a place of submission. We do not accept that a far-right libertarian silences and chains us.
It is time to mourn this platform, which, for a time, may have represented the promise of an Internet controlled by its users, this Internet bringing equality and shared access to knowledge, this one the same one that Mediapart launched into in 2008 when it was created. The ecosystem has changed and the networks have diversified. Extractivist capitalism has made knowledge its umpteenth drilling field and the Internet giants will exploit it until it dries up.
Rebuilding the “digital street”
We are thus aware of the limits of alternatives to It is difficult to know what will become of Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok. It is easier to imagine that Mastodon will remain viable in the long term, due to its decentralized architecture and its moderation rules differentiated according to “instances”, like the one that Mediapart created a year ago.
What we know is that between these more or less perishable universes and X, there is a difference of nature and not of degrees. Musk’s platform is now in the hands of the worst ideology of all, that of white supremacy, itself supported by the world’s greatest economic and military power. We do not know of any equivalent to this day in terms of its power of nuisance.
Unlike certain newspapers, whose survival depends on the communities they have patiently built, we have the possibility of choosing: our economic model, based on the exclusive support of our subscribers, is in no way subject to algorithms .
Rather than suffer, we decide to participate in the construction of a new “digital street”. We are doing it, with those who, like us, journalists, academics, civil liberties activists, unions, decide to leave X on January 20. We do this, above all, with citizens who resist anti-democratic attacks and help build bridges rather than walls.
Operationally, from January 20, the Mediapart account will stop publishing on X, the journalists and employees of the team remaining free to choose their positioning.
Until then, we invite our subscribers to migrate and join us on Mastodon or Bluesky. You can also find the Club account, the free expression space for subscribers, here for Mastodon, and here for Bluesky. To create an account on Mastodon, we recommend that you do so from Piaille.fr, a trusted French-speaking “instance” accessible to everyone.
We are at your side, and will continue to guide and support you in the days to come. At the same time, we will deXify our site. Together, let’s put information back at the center of public debate.
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