Top-selling French daily Ouest-France stops posting on X

US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tries to help Elon Musk to a seat as he arrives with President-elect Donald Trump to a House Republicans Conference meeting last week in Washington, DC. Photo / Getty Images

French regional daily Ouest-France, the top-selling paper in the country, announced it was joining several other European publications by suspending posts on X following the takeover of the site formerly known as Twitter by billionaire Elon Musk.

“We are not against social networks, we are simply asking for the application of the law” on X, Francois-Xavier Lefranc, chairman of the board of Ouest-France, told AFP.

He said the decision was taken “fairly unanimously internally”.

The daily, which is targeted at France’s vast western region and still sells over 600,000 paper copies a day, is the first French daily to quit X after Britain’s the Guardian, La Vanguardia in Spain and Dagens Nyheter in Sweden.

Several users had already wondered back in 2022 whether they should remain on Twitter when Musk – a businessman best known for running electric car company Tesla and space company SpaceX – bought the platform, rebranded it as X, and drastically reduced content moderation in the name of free speech.

The question has flared up again since Donald Trump won this month’s US presidential election, actively supported by Musk.

“Unless it becomes a regulated space that respects people”, Ouest-France “will not return”, Lefranc said.

“This decision is final. We are not doing this just to change our minds in two weeks.”

On its X account, Ouest-France posted what it said was a “last tweet, for the moment”.