A 200-year-old British media giant stops posting on X. Here’s why

Social media is a different universe with a political climate of its own. On good days, it is heated and on bad days it turns nasty. On Wednesday, British daily The Guardian blamed the toxicity on X and decided to stop using the platform. While the 200-year-old media giant had long contemplated exiting X, it was the discourse on the social media platform during the US presidential election, that was the last straw. The Guardian has now announced its exit from X, and its handle has now been archived.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as Manchester Guardian and changed its name in 1959, and it was moved to London.
The Guardian in a note blamed X boss Elon Musk for spearheading the toxicity on the platform. He played a key role in getting Donald Trump re-elected, and Musk will be part of his DOGE.
After the US elections, the media giant took the call to leave X after the negatives outweighed the positives, it said.
“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the Guardian said in an article published by it on November 13.
It stated how “disturbing content was promoted on X.
“The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform,” the article by the Guardian reads.
This was not because of X users solely. The British daily said Elon Musk has used the platform to shape political discourse.
Hereafter, the official Guardian accounts, which are over 30 with more than 20 million followers, will not be posting stories on X, but its reporters will use it for news-gathering.
The report even stated how far-right propaganda was being spread on X.
But now the British daily will not use the platform which “plays a diminished role in promoting our work”, it said.
The last article posted by the Guardian on X was tropical birdwatching.
During the US elections, the British daily wrote several articles where it questioned Musk’s role in the Trump campaign and a future government.
It also criticised the Democrats and Kamala Harris for not giving a strong alternative to Americans. It also called a Trump win with the support of Joe Rogan and other podcasters a win for the anti-vaccine movement.
The UK daily has been apprehensive of a Trump win and Musk’s role in it but it thinks that it can do without X and its algorithm which supports a certain kind of opinion under Musk.