End of an era: Media abandons X over ‘disinformation’

AUTHOR:M.J. GDNUS
Media outlets have begun abandoning X, the former Twitter platform once favored by global media, now accused of facilitating the spread of disinformation under its owner Elon Musk, an ally of US President-elect Donald Trump.
Citing a “harsh and extreme” atmosphere, Swedish left-liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) on Friday became the third major media outlet to stop publishing its content on the social media platform.
“Since Elon Musk took it over, the platform has become increasingly aligned with his and Trump’s political ambitions,” editor-in-chief Peter Volodarski said, according to AFP.
The British center-left daily Guardian announced on Wednesday that it would no longer publish content on its official X accounts, which it called “toxic.”
The Spanish newspaper Vanguardia did the same a day later, saying it would rather lose subscribers than remain on a “disinformation network.”
Several users questioned whether they should stay on Twitter as early as 2022 when Musk, the entrepreneur known for Tesla and SpaceX, bought the platform and drastically reduced content moderation in the name of free speech.
The question has resurfaced since Trump won the US presidential election this month, which Musk actively supported.
‘Disturbing content’
“I expect more media outlets to part ways with X,” said Stephen Bernard, a specialist in media manipulation at Butler University in the US.
“How many of them will probably depend on the actions that X, Musk and the Trump administration take on the media and journalism,” he said.
Musk, the world’s richest man, was chosen by Trump’s team to head a new ministry for government efficiency.
The Guardian has nearly 11 million followers on the social network, but said that “the negatives outweighed the benefits of being on X.”
The British newspaper said that the platform promoted or found “often disturbing content,” highlighting “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”
Such media attitudes toward the platform are in stark contrast to the enthusiasm that Twitter generated in 2008 and 2009.
At the time, media outlets felt they needed to be online to connect directly with their audiences, experts, and decision-makers.
There, they “built brands, developed new reporting practices, created communities, and strengthened public engagement,” Bernard said.
At the same time, they expanded Twitter’s influence.
‘Reaping what they sowed’
However, this increasingly symbiotic relationship may have been detrimental to the media, according to Matthew Ingram, former editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review.
“Many publishers have given up on reader comments and other forms of interaction and have essentially outsourced that work to social media like Twitter,” he said.
“To the point where they are now reaping what they have sown.”
Criticism of Twitter predates Musk’s takeover, focusing on the network’s architecture, which has seemingly favored contentious debates and resentment.
The network has also been seen as providing an unbalanced picture of society, skewing towards the wealthy and activists.
The exact consequences of the decision by the media, already in economic crisis, to abandon X, are unclear, and are already expecting a drop in readership.
“We will probably lose subscribers because some readers subscribe after seeing a story on the social network,” La Vanguardia’s chief executive Jordi Juan told AFP.
But Bernard believes those losses will be limited because “X brings relatively little traffic to the portals compared to other platforms.”
In October 2023, six months after NPR left Twitter, a report by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism assessed the impact on traffic as “negligible.”
Bluesky, a decentralized social platform that offers many of the same features as the former Twitter, appears to be benefiting from the media exodus from X.
Bluesky announced on Friday that it had gained one million users in 24 hours.
But its 16 million users are still far fewer than X, which is estimated to have several hundred million.
“Strictly speaking, there is no alternative to what X offers today,” Vincent Bertier, head of technology at Reporters Without Borders, told AFP.
“But we may have to invent them.”
Bertier called the departures from X “a symptom of the failure of democracies to regulate platforms.”
Musk may represent “the radical face of this information nightmare,” Bertier believes.
“But the problem goes much deeper.”