With Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter—and as uncertainty looms over how the site will be managed in the future—German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is apparently mulling over whether or not to leave the immensely influential social media platform behind.
“The Chancellor and the Federal Press Office are watching the development of Twitter very closely since it was taken over by Elon Musk,” Steffen Hebestreit, the spokesman for Scholz’s government, told the SPD-backed news outlet Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, adding that in doing so, the government is attempting to balance “the development of the platform one the one hand, [with] the possible alternatives that can be used instead, on the other.”
“We are tasked with providing broad information about the work of the German government, and we want to use as many channels as possible to reach users where they get their information anyway,” Hebestreit added.
Currently, the official Twitter account Chancellor Scholz uses reaches some 600,000 followers while the government’s spokesman’s account reaches about 100,000.
Scholz’s spokesman went onto say that while “giving up this information pathway immediately without having an alternative… would have been very short-sighted,” the government cannot ignore “problematic developments on this network that continue to blossom.”
The government’s statements come days after the prime minister of Lower Saxony, the state’s chief executive, announced that his account would be deleted on Tuesday, December 6th. Stephan Weil, a member of the SDP, is the first notable politician in Germany to leave Twitter after Musk’s takeover.
“Lack of controls & lack of verifications are increasingly leading to the spread of hate & hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories,” Lower Saxony Prime Minister Stephan Weil tweeted. “I don’t have to be there.”
Elon Musk, after taking over Twitter in October, fired some half of the company’s 7,500 employees. Since he took over, many prominent accounts, including former US President Donald Trump’s, have been reactivated, angering many of the political Left.
