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Minister Lauterbach on Thursday in the Bundestag: "Destroy the value of Twitter as quickly as possible"
Photo: Britta Pedersen / dpa
Despite the turbulence on Twitter, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) wants to remain active on the platform for the time being.
However, he already has the impression that the new owner Elon Musk "wants to destroy the value of Twitter as quickly as possible," said the SPD politician on Thursday at the SZ Economic Summit in Berlin.
"Right now I'm staying active because that's where the debate is going on and I have to face it," he added.
The founders of Mastodon had already contacted him and suggested that he could switch to the alternative short message platform.
“I haven't had time to deal with it yet.
I have other things to do," said Lauterbach.
He also fell behind a bit when it came to “Twitter production”.
In the past, he often wrote short messages about studies.
Now, as a minister, he no longer has that much time to read such treatises.
Karl Lauterbach had reported several times in the past that he was the target of insults and hate campaigns on Twitter.
“The hatred that is currently pouring down on me overshadows everything I have experienced so far,” he said in an interview with SPEGEL in February 2021.
According to Lauterbach, hatred has a new dimension of verbal brutality, a new language that really upsets him.
The minister is one of the most active political Twitter users in Germany.
He has over a million followers on the network.
Immediately after the Twitter takeover in early November, Musk initially fired about 3,700 employees, about half of the workforce at the time, and then asked some of them to return.
In the US, numerous executives have left the company.
Musk also reactivated the Twitter account of controversial ex-President Donald Trump.
hpp/reuters
