“Accounts will be mothballed, with boilerplate text added to profiles and a link to an explainer.”
Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told journalists: “After careful consideration we will no longer be posting on any of our official editorial accounts on the social media site X.
“This is something we have been thinking about for a while, given the often disturbing content promoted on the platform.
“The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.
“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives. We believe resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.”
The last post on the Guardian’s main X account was a link to the story “Birdwatch: a close encounter with a flying rhino in Borneo”, at 7.14am local time on Wednesday.
The newspaper has since added a disclaimer to its primary account, stating: “This account has been archived”.
US news sites including NPR and PBS left X last year after they were labelled as state-affiliated media under rules introduced by Musk.
Thousands of social media users have quit X in recent days following Trump’s election win to join rival app Bluesky.
Bluesky, which was originally launched by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as a research project, has added more than a million users over the past week with the app closing in on 15 million users.
Development started in 2019, while Dorsey still ran Twitter, as a “decentralised” version of the app. It was spun off after Musk’s takeover and officially launched last year.
The app is now primarily owned by Jay Graber, its chief executive, and operates as an independent company. In October it raised US$15 million ($25.4m) from investors Blockchain Capital.
Bluesky is currently ranking top in the US iPhone App Store, while it is fifth in the UK store.
Threads, a rival service with a similar design to X that is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has swelled to 275 million users since it launched in July last year.
The Guardian does not have a main Bluesky account, although its primary Threads account has 1.3 million followers. Its main X account has more than 10 million followers.
Last week, it emerged that the Guardian had offered staff counselling in the wake of Trump’s win. Viner said the result would be “upsetting” for many staff.
A spokesman said this was part of its standard “employee assistance programme”, which is available at all times.
Musk, the world’s richest man, spent election night with Trump in Mar-a-Lago and campaigned for the Republican for weeks. Musk claimed last week that X had enjoyed “record usage” during the US election.
This week Trump confirmed the Tesla boss would take the helm of a new Department of Government Efficiency to enact sweeping cost cuts in the US.
Musk’s X has endured an exodus of advertisers since his takeover in 2022 amid concerns over the social media site’s light-touch moderation policies.
Musk has emphasised freedom of speech and reinstated thousands of accounts previously blocked from the site for breaking its rules.
A Guardian spokesman declined to comment. X was contacted to comment.
