The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has permanently left X (formerly known as Twitter), or at least that’s what she has implied through a post on her official X profile. In this statement, Hidalgo strongly asserts that X is a “weapon of mass destruction of our democracies.”
Anne Hidalgo explains in her statement that despite having been “one of the first French politicians to join,” continuous abuses and disparagement have led her to leave the social network. In her post, she continues to list the reasons for her departure (which are not few) and talks about the “manipulation, misinformation, amplification of hate, organized harassment, antisemitism, and racism” that proliferate on X. She also points out the “packs that attack scientists, climatologists, women, environmentalists, and progressives.” She adds that the platform “damages the image and sovereignty of our democracies by seeking to destabilize them.”
For Hidalgo, X (or Twitter, as she calls it) has become a “weapon of mass destruction of our democracies.” Below, we leave her statement for you to appreciate in all its glory.
In her statement, she also laid into Elon Musk, the current owner of X, accusing him of having transformed the social network into something much worse (“acts deliberately to stir up tensions and conflicts“). According to Hidalgo, “the noise generated by fake news will always be much louder than the echo of a well-founded truth.” The mayor is quite blunt and describes X as a “global sewer.”
To conclude, in her writing she quotes Martin Luther King, with his phrase “we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.” Do you think Anne Hidalgo is right in her argument?
