The Dutch government’s most senior communication officials have told the cabinet to pull most of its presence off the social media platform X (Twitter).
A recent report found that over 22,000 threats, incitements and intimidating posts were put up in the week before the 2025 elections, all aimed at Dutch politicians.
The Voorlichtingsraad – the council of communication directors for every ministry, chaired by the head of the government information service – said the platform “actively facilitates disinformation and harmful and criminal content” and using it clashes with the duty to follow Dutch and European law, according to Volkskrant.
If its advice is adopted, some official accounts would disappear; others would be retained only for diplomatic contacts and crisis communication.
That would mark a break from the position set out by previous prime minister Schoof in January 2025, when he said the government would stay on X and Meta despite calls from civil society groups to leave.
The Jetten cabinet, sworn in late February, has inherited that policy but is expected to decide what to do after the summer.
A continental shift
The memo, which was sent on April 9, names Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of the platform as a turning point. Since then, the officials write, cuts to content moderation and changes to the recommendation algorithm have produced a rise in “disinformation, racism, discrimination, misogyny and antisemitism”, the Volkskrant reported.
The Netherlands would be following moves already taken elsewhere in Europe. Germany’s foreign and defence ministries scaled back their use of X in January 2025, citing similar concerns.
In December, the European Commission issued its first-ever fine under the Digital Services Act – €120 million against X – for misleading users on its paid blue ticks, an inadequate advertising repository, and blocking researchers from its data. A wider EU investigation into how X handles illegal content remains open.
Threats against politicians
What forced the memo into public view was a separate Volkskrant investigation published last weekend. Reporters analysed more than 80,000 messages sent to national politicians on X in the week before the October 29 general election.
In that single week they found 122 threats, 150 instances of incitement and 428 of hate speech – all criminal offences under Dutch law. By comparison, the Team Bedreigde Politici, the police unit that logs reports across all social media, received 493 reports in the whole of 2025.
Half of the 28 ministers and junior ministers in the Jetten cabinet maintain a personal X account on top of their departmental ones, the Volkskrant reported. All nine right-wing liberal VVD cabinet members are on the platform personally except justice minister David van Weel, a former Nato cyber-defence official.
The Voorlichtingsraad acknowledged in its memo that leaving X carries risks – including being seen to retreat from public debate, and losing reach to hard-to-engage audiences – but concludes the alternative is worse. “There is no ideal choice,” it says, according to the Volkskrant.
