By: Maida Salkanović
Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and his growing involvement in US politics, organizations worldwide have begun distancing themselves from the platform. In Southeast Europe, the shift has been slower, partly because Twitter never fully caught on in the region. Its user base has always been limited, yet many remain active as alternative platforms slowly emerge, still struggling to gain traction.
“This no longer makes any sense. Twitter has become a black hole of hatred and disinformation—a playground for bots and aggressive trolls. Faktograf has no place here anymore. If there are any real people left, join us on our WhatsApp channel,” Croatian fact-checking platform Faktograf tweeted on January 16, 2024. The tweet was reflective of the atmosphere that has been present on Twitter since billionaire Elon Musk took over and renamed it X. After acquiring the platform, Musk relaxed content moderation and introduced community notes—an experiment already deemed a failure by research.
On November 6, the day after the US elections in 2025, X experienced a record number of users shutting down their accounts (about 115,000). This mass deactivation followed months of growing backlash over Elon Musk’s increasing alignment with Donald Trump and right-wing politics. That alignment became official just five days later, on November 11, 2024, when Trump announced that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would serve as co-chairs of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—an initiative aimed at reducing government bureaucracy and wasteful spending.
Many civil society and media organizations subsequently announced their departure from the platform. Some organizations from Southeast Europe followed suit. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) stopped publishing content on X on January 20, 2025. “We chose the date of the US presidential inauguration to emphasize the threat to journalism announced—and later confirmed—by the American administration, as well as due to political, professional, and ethical concerns regarding the platform and its owner,” EFJ president Maja Sever told SEE Check in an email. She noted that many media and organizations followed their example, and that these decisions were mostly driven by concerns over changes in content moderation, journalist safety, and the increasing presence of disinformation and hate speech on the platform.
Jordi Ilić, a social media and design specialist at Faktograf.hr, told SEE Check that Elon Musk turned a network that once gathered journalists, experts, and real people discussing important issues into an information weapon.
“Musk claimed that Twitter would become a haven for free speech under his leadership, yet he suspended the accounts of journalists who criticized him. He abolished many community standards that protected users from disinformation and hate speech. The platform has been overtaken by bots,” she said.
Reluctant Shift in a Region Where X Never Thrived
In Southeast Europe, however, X never gained the popularity it had in some other parts of the world, especially among the media and civil society leaders.
Mediacentar Sarajevo, a Bosnian organization supporting the development of independent and professional journalism in the country through training, publishing, media research, and TV and audio production, told SEE Check that in their latest research, not a single media outlet in Bosnia and Herzegovina identified X as a key platform for communicating with its audience. They acknowledged that this is not the case in some other countries in the region.
“We assume the importance of X for Bosnian media will continue to decline, especially as user numbers shrink across Europe and globally,” they said. According to Mediacentar, Facebook remains the key platform for publishing content and reaching audiences, while an increasing number of outlets are turning to Instagram and YouTube, mainly due to changes in the media habits of younger users.
In Serbia, the platform seems to carry more weight. Zoran Miodrag, communications director at the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS), told SEE Check that they plan to remain active on the network because it still holds significant relevance in Serbia and represents an important source of information for audiences who read CINS stories and listen to their podcasts.
“For now, we see no reason to leave the platform, and the fact that major media organizations like the New York Times, OCCRP, ProPublica, and others are still active on it supports that decision,” he said.
Mediacentar is one of the organizations still present on X, though they plan to initiate discussions. Conversations in the media community about the ethical and reputational aspects of using this platform are not widespread in Bosnia, they noted, likely due to the platform’s limited local relevance.
Alternatives Arise But Struggle to Take Root
The downfall of X has opened space for other apps to try and take its place. Meta launched the text-based application Threads in July 2023, aiming to rival X.
Threads, however, has failed to replace X both globally and regionally. In a January 2025 article by Mediacentar, only three out of twelve interviewed news outlets from Bosnia and Serbia had a Threads account.
CINS told us they created a Threads account during its early rollout but soon abandoned it due to a lack of audience interest.
“Our impression is that audiences on Instagram and Twitter/X have different habits, and Threads currently doesn’t show potential to gain traction. We occasionally open it via private profiles and see that significant societal events, those that attract major attention on both Instagram and Twitter/X, go almost unnoticed on Threads. That suggests that any activity there would bring no value to either CINS or its users,” they said.
Additionally, following Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that the company would end third-party fact-checking in the USA, relax content moderation, and reintroduce political content into user feeds, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts surged. Still, organizations in the region have not taken this as a cue to look for Meta alternatives.
“The key difference for now lies in the fact that the owner of X actively uses the platform for personal political propaganda, direct attacks on journalism, and promoting trends that directly threaten press freedom and the safety of media workers. This difference in approach and rhetoric toward journalism and professional standards forms the basis of our differing attitudes toward X and Meta,” Maja Sever said.
Bluesky, an initiative originally developed as a project within Twitter in 2019, has rapidly gained ground in the US, especially among left-leaning users. Following the US elections, the app gained over 1 million users within a week.
That success, however, has not translated to Southeast Europe. While Bluesky offers some innovative features and attracts users seeking more ethical alternatives, its popularity in Southeast Europe remains limited, Sever told SEE Check.
“Although Bluesky has potential, it’s currently not a fully adequate replacement for X in this region, but there are always other ways to reach audiences,” she said, adding that it does show promise.
“Even though it’s a relatively new network, we should remember that it also took Twitter some time to take off in this part of Europe. We believe Bluesky has a chance to gain traction and become a significant channel for professional and public communication,” she added.
Most media outlets are not yet active on the platform.
“We closely monitor internet trends, both globally and regionally. We created private accounts on Bluesky early on to assess whether there’s any interaction in our language. Unfortunately, the platform remains inactive in that regard, and there are no signs this will change. The signal that a critical mass and audience exists would be the presence of local media, a larger number of domestic users, and mentions of the platform in the public sphere, which is not happening now,” CINS told us.
Still Standing, But Under Scrutiny
Even though X has lost a large portion of its user base and no longer serves the central role it once had in news and civil society spaces, it still reports significant numbers. It currently counts approximately 586 million active monthly users, compared to Bluesky’s 35.98 million.
The promise of platforms like Bluesky lies not only in offering alternatives to X, but also in their aim to reshape the social internet, which many argue has become toxic and algorithm-driven. As social networks have become inseparable from our daily lives, their real-world influence is undeniable. The entanglement between politics, big tech, and surveillance capitalism is thus all the more alarming.
