Austrian TV moderator Armin Wolf has called on German media professionals to leave the platform X, owned by US billionaire Elon Musk. “I believe that if the most prominent journalists in Germany, as in Austria, were to withdraw en masse from X, it would severely weaken the platform” Wolf told the Zeit.
Wolf cited the extent of disinformation and insults on X as the reason for his call. “It has become simply too time-consuming to find anything interesting amidst all the rubbish” he said.
Armin Wolf, who has written more than 126,000 posts on Twitter and later X in 15 years, announced his departure from the platform in November along with around 30 other Austrian journalists. Since then, the moderator of the ORF’s ZIB2 has been posting on the social media network Bluesky. “I think it’s important for it to be diverse on Bluesky” Wolf said.
Wolf sees it as “fantastic” if dozens of German journalists from all political spectrums, from Monitor’s chief Georg Restle to Welt’s editor-in-chief Ulf Poschardt, were to join forces and post on Bluesky. “It would dramatically upgrade the platform” he said.