Due to users’ rising intolerance of minorities, Germany’s Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency announced it would cancel its account on social media network X, previously Twitter, and asked other organizations to do the same.
After a horrific shooting spree by Hamas gunmen in Israel over the weekend, false information and doctored photographs quickly circulated, refocusing attention on Elon Musk’s platform, which most recently garnered criticism from the European Union.
Ferda Ataman, the agency’s commissioner, stated in a statement that “X is no longer a sustainable environment for a public agency” due to increased racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, hatred against trans and queer people, and other misanthropic content.
German government representatives have so far rejected requests to leave X, claiming that there is currently no other avenue through which politicians like Chancellor Olaf Scholz may connect online with a sizable portion of the populace.
X representatives were not immediately available for comment about the German agency’s choice.
To “prevent terrorist content from being distributed online,” X said on Tuesday that it had stopped the propagation of illegal messages during the previous several days and erased recently formed Hamas-affiliated accounts.
According to Ataman, the German anti-discrimination agency could only combat the sharp increase in hate speech by dedicating additional people to the issue, which was a dubious use of public dollars.
Whether it made sense to continue using a platform that has “become a disinformation network,” she added, should be a question that other state institutions and government departments should consider.
Germany’s government, diplomatic, and economy ministries have active accounts on X, despite Economy Minister Robert Habeck’s absence from the platform since 2019.