First year after Twitter. From where we will summarize this 2025 that we have just closed, and in a single stroke I have left the phrase that way. A.T. first year then. (At the beginning of the year some had already left the social network that was already called X, but will you let me take advantage of that excuse). Before Elon Musk bought the platform, many of us were half-silent on Twitter, and others were silent when Twitter ceased to be Twitter and took the name X. In an increasingly strangled environment, organizations, companies and even some media outlets stopped tweeting. Some media outlets or organizations that have continued to use accounts within X write less, less often. Others publish X as often as they did in the days before Musk bought himself, they will feel that they are hitting the void. A year ago, the habit of opening and reviewing X by more than one still persisted, even those who wrote and answered more or less frequently were not few. Those of us who were making voyeur saw that the platform hacked macho, racist messages and bots from the far right, although it did not show the slightest intention of continuing it.
i did my Twitter account in 2012, as the little bird reminded me every year. I opened the profile in August, when, at the initiative of several users, we had the opportunity to put Twitter in Basque (and before, to translate it into Basque) (the platform accepted the possibility of making it appear in Basque, but the Basques translated phrases by phrases). Looking back already poses a risk of nostalgia, but in 2025 there was a different environment on Twitter: we considered it a place for debate and to feed ourselves and follow the current situation. We were 15 years old, what do you want me to say? We did some further reading. Years of enfant farming for some, years of reading for others... During the pandemic, the visions that existed until then began to change, something we already know. Goiena and Ulua were the first media outlets to leave X at the end of 2024, big ones like The Guardian opened the door and many others came from behind. This is how Goiena announced the decision: “It’s not easy to give up the tool that audiences bring. However, we have decided that we cannot devote one more day to feeding the monster. Information is difficult in the tool of disinformation algorithms.” They apologized to those who followed the 12 accounts of the Goiena Communication Group and made the wound visible to all: “We are aware that it will have an impact on the audiences.” In that first wave, not everyone who decided to stay there argued for the decision, others did. VilaWeb dedicated an editorial to the topic: “Leaving a public space in the hands of the far right because there are a lot of people on the far right doesn’t seem very effective in counteracting the influence of the far right.”
Universities, media, journalists. Many said goodbye to X from there, including some of us who were making the voucher, in this first year after Twitter. Lander Arretxea, from the production company Hiru Damatxo, wrote on the X network in September 2025: “We’ve left this social network in great quantity since Musk bought it. And it"s not surprising. But now, most of those who comment on the contents that enter the Basque Country and the debates that arise from it are anonymous accounts that use xenophobic and transphobic messages. Or we deny the legitimacy to the debates that are taking place here, or let journalists, cultural activists, opinion leaders (and in general anyone interested in current affairs) return to this square. Disguised anonymous accounts do not represent public opinion. And it is useless to argue with them without knowing who they are behind and for what purpose they are doing it. The Basque colonies are an example, but not the only one. We can’t let them set the agenda.” The Arretxea chain received dozens of responses. Most of the anonymous, written by “anonymous accounts that use xenophobic and transphobic messages”. Only one gave me the excuse to keep writing: “How about Bluesky? ? Hahahahaha.” The anonymous frowned on us.
The petraged environment led many users to the social networks Bluesky and Mastodon. the 2025 Mastodon is similar to the Twitter square of 2012, with a few active users and similar people responding to each other on Twitter in 2012. Even Bluesky is not a very crowded square, as you may have noticed by those who have already passed through it. (I had an account on Bluesky for a week, I deleted it immediately. I’d say, “I’m going to disconnect from Twitter once, and I’m not going to get into something else!”, but I thought, “There’s not much movement here.”) 24. AEK presented the song of the korrika, and the message they wrote communicating it received 7 reposts and 11 likes on Bluesky, 1,122 likes on TikToken (the accounts of 11,500 like Zetak, but that’s cider from another barrel) and 7,652 on Instagram. the video had 869,000 views on Instagram, 303,000 on YouTube, almost 10,000 on AEK’s TikTok account, just over 134,000 on Zetaken. That is, those who left X continue on other occasions, but not in general in Mastodon and Bluesky.
In X yes, in Instagram and TikToken yes, but in Mastodon and Bluesky no measurements can be made and no advertising can be placed. Many organizations, companies, political parties, politicians and media maintain the X account for this reason. Also because in the last decade they have formed a large group of followers. We know the dark ones of the Met, and we know that the TikTokens are no clearer. The wave that drove us to leave X has led some to talk again about the virtues of decentralized social networks. The question is legitimate: “If we’ve left X arguing, among other things, that we can’t wait for the transit of giant platforms, why are we still on Instagram? Why do we have to be TikToken?” I split my calluses in two when I start to turn these questions around, because I"m going to give the reason to whoever asks me that question. And yet I think we need to be there. A little parenthesis if I"m gonna explain myself. In a conference on Cultural and Creative Industries I heard a person with experience in the sector, how Artificial Intelligence is the fight that he believes the Basque language should win in this century: “We’re going to work on ours, but the big ones have to understand Basque, they have to work in Basque.” After many years of dubbing, he has spent many hours training a great language model. He told us how his voice was then used without permission for a video of a large company without being recorded by him and without compensation. That the stone could bring to the roof the work done, but that it is important to “be in the big ones”, is implicit in it. The one on social networks creates something similar in my trips. Even knowing that we’re feeding the big ones, I think it’s strategic to be on the networks.
We know, above all, the habits of use of the youngest Basques (I say “above all”, because older speakers are not far away): there they are, on Instagram, YouTube and TikToken. According to the latest panels of the IKUSIKER Audiovisual Observatory, almost eight out of ten university students, TikToken, and ninety-six percent of students, on Instagram. Those who use Mastodon do not reach two percent.
It is necessary to see and hear who created it. In the spring a colleague passed me the news: They have created La Llista, a platform that classifies and gives visibility to content creators who speak mainly Catalan on social networks. Content creators measure their performance on networks and publish data on a monthly basis, although llista.cat trends can be analyzed on the web at all times. the data for November 2025 are the most recent that I have found: 158,000,000 views on content created by 934 active content creators on Instagram, YouTube and TikToken. For those who want to look at it from envy (or translate it into Basque), it is not a bad pastime. There are also some who create in Basque (especially those who do it from Basque and in Basque, that is). I belong to a generation that normally saw cartoons in Basque when we were children, I have a crew that until adolescence was not so strange to see fiction in Basque on television. We have lost the habit in years without offers or with low offers. The fact that content creators speak in Basque is not so foreign to us, it is natural for us. Those created by the media for networks, for some they are more “natural” in Spanish: we are learning the language of the networks, the recipients and the authors. There are no dimensions of Llista.cat, but some people who speak in Basque have an echo. (Another issue is whether they are asked to do influencer marketing, or almost entirely in Spanish, so that these paid videos are made in Basque, and the following in Spanish.)
But the responsibility must be imposed on whoever corresponds. It is more up to individual content creators to design strategies that allow Basques who work in networks to have something to see, to follow, to share. We need TikTok to be in Basque and understand the algorithm as a language of Basque. They need to understand that the media is strategic, and they should design strategies that start today and focus on the long term: local, national, large and small alike. In the HIRU(H)ARI meeting organized by Tabakalera, Maialen Lujanbio said: “Culture is not only a creative place of resistance, but in our case, in Euskal Herria and in Basque, it is also a creative place of existence. A space to reinvent existence and to emphasize and create existence. And I think that, metaphorically, it is also up to the Basque cultural or cultural sector to create plankton in these times: to create that aesthetic, cultural, artistic, critical food. In the global ocean or among the great oceans of global cultures, for the Basque sea, plankton, enough food to be able to be, and for the joy of being, artistic, aesthetic, critical, cultural, ideological food.” I don’t ask for the Basque content of social networks that I ask of bodybuilders, but among the great oceans of global communications, I would like to give the sea in Basque a little plankton, enough to be able to have it. (I wasn’t in Tabakalera, I didn’t take the time to listen to the full two-hour talk, but I was able to hear Lujanbio’s, among other things because Tabakalera put some passages on Instagram. Plankton for the fish).
The last blow before the water drowns. If there are speakers that we need for the survival of the language, we need those who create the content to put the contents in it. We just need to decide ten years from now that we don"t want to be there. But let’s not decide to go to the little squares on the edge, as if being in the big square was not important and strategic.