{"id":253688,"date":"2023-01-12T16:24:55","date_gmt":"2023-01-12T16:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=253688"},"modified":"2023-01-12T16:24:55","modified_gmt":"2023-01-12T16:24:55","slug":"is-twitter-dying-and-if-so-what-does-that-mean-for-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/01\/12\/is-twitter-dying-and-if-so-what-does-that-mean-for-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Twitter dying, and if so, what does that mean for journalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published as<\/a> the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former Twitter employees finally get severance offers<\/a>\u00a0after months of waiting, only to find them unsatisfactory. Twitter\u00a0helps drive political mayhem<\/a>\u00a0in Brazil. Elon Musk says that Twitter will soon allow users to post tweets that are\u00a0four thousand characters<\/a>\u00a0in length. It may be a new year, but Musk\u2019s ownership of the platform continues to generate ample controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To back up a bit: Musk\u2019s bid to acquire Twitter for forty-four billion dollars, which he initially filed last April<\/a>, was controversial in part because of his comments about how Twitter needed to do more to protect free speech<\/a>. His decision to then delay the acquisition, purportedly over concerns about fake accounts, was also widely criticized, since many believed those arguments were a ruse designed to reduce the price, as I wrote at the time for CJR<\/a>. But the apprehensiveness around all this was a drop in the ocean compared to what has happened since Musk finalized his acquisition of the company in late October (after the most recent edition of this Thursday newsletter came out), getting rid of almost two thirds<\/a> of the staff\u2014including swaths<\/a> of the teams responsible for moderating harassment and disinformation on the network\u2014restoring the accounts of<\/a> prominent right-wing trolls, and suspending<\/a> a number of journalists, seemingly because he didn\u2019t like what they were writing about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk also stoked the flames of controversy by leaking internal Twitter documents<\/a> to a number of journalists and right-wing commentators including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson, in an attempt to show that the previous management of the company colluded with the FBI and others to ban conservative accounts, and to downplay information about<\/a> COVID and Hunter Biden, Joe\u2019s son. In The Nation<\/em>, Ross Barkan wrote that many mainstream journalists ignored the Twitter Files<\/a> because \u201cMusk has evolved into a puerile reactionary, suspending journalist accounts at will and tossing off idiotic gibes to his 122 million followers\u201d (though Barkan concluded that the story did, nonetheless, matter). Oliver Darcy, of CNN, said that the files amounted to<\/a> \u201cgrossly misleading claims\u201d that were \u201cblindly amplified to millions by Fox News.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Not everything has gone according to plan for Musk, to the extent that he ever had one; he even\u00a0feuded publicly with<\/a>\u00a0Weiss after she took issue with Musk\u2019s suspension of journalists. \u201cThe old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,\u201d\u00a0Weiss wrote<\/a>. \u201cI oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who were reporting on a story of public importance should be reinstated.\u201d In\u00a0a Twitter reply<\/a>, Musk accused Weiss of \u201cvirtue-signaling to show that you are \u2018good\u2019 in the eyes of the media elite to keep one foot in both worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twitter soon said that the journalists who had been suspended had been reinstated, but\u00a0Micah Lee, of\u00a0The Intercept<\/em><\/a>, said in late December that that wasn\u2019t quite accurate. Lee was one of the journalists whose accounts were frozen after they wrote about an account that\u2014using publicly available information\u2014tracked the movement of Musk\u2019s private plane. Lee wrote that while many of the accounts belonging to affected journalists looked like they had been unblocked,\u00a0they were still prevented from tweeting<\/a>\u00a0until they agreed to delete the tweets that Musk was upset about. Lee hasn\u2019t tweeted since. An early-December tweet pinned to the top of his timeline\u00a0reads<\/a>: \u201cTwitter is garbage and with any luck it will crash and burn before too long.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk himself has described Twitter as \u201ca plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don\u2019t work.\u201d The company was losing four million dollars a day<\/a> as of early November. Selling eight-dollar \u201cverification\u201d checks to users isn\u2019t filling the hole. So, is Twitter dying<\/a>? Or gradually becoming a larger version of right-wing troll factories like Gab, 4chan, or Parler? Or limping on as a simulacrum of its former self? Or none of the above? And what, if anything, should journalists be doing about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Michael Grynbaum wrote<\/a> in the New York Times<\/em> last month, until now, \u201cTwitter has occupied a unique role in the news and information ecosystem,\u201d with journalists flocking there \u201cto share their reporting, develop relationships with sources, and debate issues of the day.\u201d In yesterday\u2019s edition of this newsletter, Kyle Pope, CJR\u2019s editor and publisher, wrote that while Twitter isn\u2019t dead<\/a>, \u201cit is transformed, and not in a good way. But leaving is the easy part. How do newsrooms get the attention and readership they need for their work now? How do they engage their audiences in a compelling way? How do they ensure their work is relevant and noticed by the people who need to see it? None of us wants to do great journalism that no one reads.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, suggests that journalists\u00a0should avoid platforms like Twitter altogether<\/a>, arguing that\u2014in demonstrating his contempt for free speech in general and journalism in particular, with his behavior at Twitter\u2014Musk has shown why \u201cit is foolhardy for anyone to rely on centralized platforms to create and distribute vital information.\u201d Gillmor says that journalists and other information providers \u201cshould move to decentralized systems where they have control of what they say.\u201d Some journalists (including Lee, of\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>) have adopted open-source tools such as Mastodon, but not without some turmoil, as I\u00a0noted in a recent piece<\/a>\u00a0for CJR. (It seems that some Mastodon users aren\u2019t all that receptive to the ways in which journalists tend to use social networks). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing for CJR in November, Emily Bell, of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism,\u00a0raised a similar question:<\/a>\u00a0\u201cShould journalists continue to use a platform whose owner is openly hostile to the practices of the free press?\u201d The problem, Bell argued, is that should Twitter become \u201cunusable for journalists, there remains a gap in the market for a public-facing protocol that makes the public interest part of its mission at the heart of its design and ownership. Until then, journalists who remain on the platform will need to proceed with more caution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways,\u00a0as Gillmor notes<\/a>, Musk may have done journalists a favor, by making it obvious just how problematic a privately held social network can be, and how unwise it is to rely on such platforms for journalistic purposes, even seemingly benign ones. Twitter has been a useful tool for journalism, but it has also become a crutch. What replaces it, in terms of how we reach our readers and distribute our journalism, is up to us. Hopefully, it\u2019ll be something that connects us more directly to our audience, rather than using a billionaire\u2019s plaything as an intermediary.<\/p>\n

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Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer Former Twitter employees finally get severance offers\u00a0after months of waiting, only to find them unsatisfactory. Twitter\u00a0helps drive political mayhem\u00a0in Brazil. Elon Musk says that Twitter will soon allow users to post tweets that are\u00a0four … <\/p>\n

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