Spain's La Vanguardia joins the Guardian in leaving X, citing 'toxic content'

Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia will stop posting on billionaire Elon Musk's X platform and plans to suspend its accounts, saying on Thursday the social media network had become an "echo chamber" for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Spain's fourth most-read newspaper for general news said it would stop posting directly but would allow its journalists to maintain personal accounts. The editor, Jordi Juan, said he had suspended his own account.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move follows Britain's the Guardian, which also cited racism and conspiracy theories for its exit from the platform on Tuesday.

The Barcelona-based newspaper, which has 1.7 million followers on the platform previously known as Twitter, said X lacked an "effective and reasonable" moderating process since Musk bought it in 2022.

"Since the arrival of Musk to X, this platform has increasingly tolerated toxic and manipulated content thanks to the proliferation of bots," Juan wrote in an editorial.

"Ideas that violate human rights, such as hatred of ethnic minorities, misogyny, and racism, are part of the viral content distributed on X, where they gain virality and capture more user time to earn more money from advertising," the paper added in a leader.

La Vanguardia also cited U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appointing Musk as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency and the spread of disinformation by bots, from countries as far away as India, about the floods that hit the region of Valencia two weeks ago as reasons behind its decision.

When Musk took over, he fired thousands of workers including many in the content moderation department, La Vanguardia said. X also left a European Union programme against disinformation in 2023, it noted.

Critics say Musk's hands-off approach has allowed lies and hate speech to spread on the platform. Musk has said he is defending freedom of speech.