German Federal Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Ferda Ataman has called on her government to leave social media platform X.
In an interview with national broadcaster ARD on January 8, she said that was because X “has actually become a political instrument of influencing power of the richest man in the world”.
Ataman said that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, ministers and ministries all gave the platform added weight through their presence on it.
“If the federal government leaves it, then of course it is a political issue. And I have the impression that people are afraid to do that. But it is really necessary,” she said.
Ataman was one of the founding members of New German Media Makers, an NGO made up of media professionals that promotes “cultural diversity through ethnic plurality in the media”.
Since 2016, her organisation, which ran a well-known “No Hate Speech” campaign, has received more than €1 million in funding from the German Government.
She became Anti-Discrimination Commissioner in July 2022 after a heated debate in the German parliament where she was accused of being a “left-wing activist” and of downplaying Islamist threats.
German-Israeli writer Ahmad Mansour called her securing the role an “appointment for cancel culture and the division of society”.
Ataman insists, “X is not a serious platform.”
She says the algorithms on X fuelled and supported right-wing extremist content.
“If you look at the [German] Constitution yourself or our demands on democracy, our demands on non-discriminatory discourse, then you can’t really continue to be present on this platform as a State agency with a clear conscience.”
Ataman, who had left X in October 2023, also also criticised Scholz for opening a TikTok channel in April last year.
Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit claimed that the damage caused by withdrawing from the platform would be greater than the benefit. “We have to go where people are looking for information,” he said.
Scholz has almost 966,000 followers on X, the German foreign office has more than 913,000 followers in German and more than 325,000 in English.
Europe’s Socialist parties have demanded Brussels take action against Elon Musk and his X social media platform over his alleged “manipulation” of the continent’s politics. https://t.co/ewgQCTnBnv
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 8, 2025
Ataman has faced criticism for referring to indigenous German white men as “kartoffeln” – potatoes – a derogatory word sometimes used by immigrants.
She expanded on this in an op-ed in Der Spiegel in January 2020, arguing it was not discriminatory and stressing that the potato was “an internationally beloved vegetable”.
Ataman claimed the term was “harmless” and “cute” and could not be compared to labels for non-hegemonic groups that had been “soaked in decades or centuries of hatred and oppression”.
Amid scrutiny over her alleged hard-left activism, she deleted many of her tweets, including accusations of racism by doctors when the Covid pandemic began. She also removed the title of “kartoffelexpertin” – potato expert – from her Twitter handle at the time.
The European Commission has handed nearly €9 million to an online project that helps migrants evade deportation in Germany, Brussels Signal has discovered. https://t.co/ce0ZZDq0qP
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) September 4, 2024
