German football club leaves X, warning Elon Musk ‘capable of influencing German election’

FC St. Pauli, a German football club currently competing in the country’s top-tier league, has announced leaving the social media platform X, describing it as a threat to democracy.

In a post on the club’s website on Thursday, St. Pauli said “Elon Musk had turned a space for debate into an amplifier of hate that was capable of influencing the German parliamentary election campaign.”

Germany is set to hold a snap election in February following the collapse of its three-party coalition government last week. The country’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has warned of the need to prepare “against threats like hacker attacks, manipulation and disinformation” that could seek to divide the country during the electoral process. 

St. Pauli, named after its district in the northern German port city of Hamburg, is known for its activist left-wing supporters. The club is the latest entity to depart from X on ideological grounds, with left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian announcing on Wednesday it would “no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts.”

Many individuals have reportedly left the platform following the U.S. presidential election, setting up accounts on rival services including Threads and Bluesky, which gained more than 1 million new users last week. St Pauli encouraged its users to move to Bluesky.

The club also singled out X’s owner, stating that since his takeover “Musk has converted X into a hate machine. Racism and conspiracy theories are allowed to spread unchecked and even curated. Insults and threats are seldom sanctioned and are sold as freedom of speech.”

The club singled-out Musk’s support for the U.S. president-elect Donald Trump — who has now nominated Musk to lead a government efficiency effort — describing him as “a major backer of the Trump campaign [who] also used X for this purpose.

“It is to be assumed that X will also promote authoritarian, misanthropic and far-right content during the forthcoming German election campaign, this manipulating the public discourse,” the club warned.