Fifteen years in the past, on April 1, 2009, The Guardian pulled off an April Fools’ prank, asserting it will stop print operations and shift fully to Twitter (now often called X). The joke performed on the social media platform’s rising reputation, predicting the way forward for information within the age of 140-character bursts. Little did anybody know that the long run was about to take an sudden flip, and The Guardian, 15 years later, would finally stroll away from the very platform.
On November 13, 2024, The Guardian introduced in an editorial its choice to “not publish content material on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts,” citing the “usually disturbing content material” discovered on it.
The British publication home, with 27 million followers throughout “greater than 80 accounts on X,” grew to become the primary main UK media organisation to announce its departure from Elon Musk’s revamped platform. The Guardian’s editorial group expressed dismay on the troubling content material pervasive on X, together with “far-right conspiracy theories and racism,” including that the “website’s protection of the US presidential election had crystallised its choice.”
“The US presidential election marketing campaign served solely to underline what we’ve got thought of for a very long time: that X is a poisonous media platform and that its proprietor, Elon Musk, has been ready to make use of its affect to form political discourse,” wrote The Guardian within the editorial piece.
The Guardian mentioned that posts on X will often be embedded in its work as a part of its stay information reporting and that customers of the social media platform would nonetheless have the ability to share its articles all through the positioning. In line with the Guardian, reporters may even be permitted to maintain utilizing the positioning to report tales.
Elon Musk’s response to the Guardian’s exit was swift, and in true Musk trend, lower than diplomatic. He took to X and posted that the Guardian was “irrelevant” and a “laboriously vile propaganda machine.”
From prank to severe exit
Again in 2009, The Guardian famously performed an April Idiot’s prank on its readers. The mock announcement promised to condense total tales into 140-character bites, summarising main historic occasions like “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas” and “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare conflict.”
In its mock announcement, the publication even boasted of pioneering a brand new period of reports, saying it was “consolidating its place on the innovative of recent media expertise.” The Guardian then predicted that, with the rise of Twitter, journalists might condense even essentially the most important occasions into 140-character sound bites, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known speech shortened to “I’ve a dream that my 4 little kids will at some point stay in a nation the place they won’t be judged by the color of their pores and skin however by…”