Twitter's Broken + News Media Still Hasn't Caught Up.
People depended on Twitter for news, then Twitter broke: CC #250
In this issue: How Twitter/X did some really weird things and broke their business and how the news media didn’t really catch up on it and how Syrian Civil War atrocity videos are recycled over and over again for every conflict around the world. Good luck finding out what isn’t bullshit!
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
Once upon a time, there was Twitter. Remember Twitter? The social media platform with the revolving door CEOs and the benign neglect and the undervalued ad inventory and the weird quirks that somehow, against all odds, became both the world’s defacto chat room and the place people went to find out about news coverage as it was happening?
That was a fun social media site! But things didn’t stay that way.
Twitter (the company), as I alluded to, was surprisingly bad at running their business and at generating actual shareholder revenue when they should have had a much easier time. This corporate failing led, through a whole bunch of steps, to an acquisition by Elon Musk as a private company—an entrepreneur who has had amazing success with private space travel and electric cars and things that lead to a brighter human future.
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he had an opportunity to rebuild the struggling company’s advertising business, fend off competition from Meta/Facebook, and build promising partnerships with global entertainment and pro sports interests that could have been extremely lucrative.
Instead, Musk is treating Twitter like a personal playground with some puzzling business decisions (including ditching the Twitter name, with priceless brand equity) and shitposting like a teenager with no friends at school.
Twitter’s Disinformation & Confusion Playground
So to really, really oversimplify things, there are two schools of thought on content moderation for social media platforms:
A) No rules, no restraints. Users post what they want and there are no algorithms or human moderators controlling content. This is the free speech maximalist position; in the real world this tends to translate into an unnavigable stream of bullshit, belligerent behavior, spam, and truly gross shit worming its way into conversations about the NBA or fast food meals. Or just not being able to find or trust the information you’re looking for.
B) Lots of rules, lots of restraints. Users post within strict parameters, content is actively moderated by (underpaid or unpaid) community moderators. It’s not censorship—you can post to your heart’s content on another platform—but there are lots of topics/things that can get you kicked off of the platform. Good examples of these are heavily moderated Facebook groups or subreddits. These groups can be more restricted in what is shared but can foster a greater sense of community. They are also extremely difficult to scale.
In real life, most social media platforms find themselves falling somewhere between Pole A and Pole B. Because Meta/Facebook has intentionally leaned in on friend groups/social ties (whether from people who know each other previously or who met on the platform), it’s less important to breaking news than Twitter/X. And while Twitter has always fallen closer to Pole A, they have gone way more towards Pole A post-Musk acquisition through things like gutting their Trust & Safety processes and laying off the employees responsible for making sure that AI algorithms weren’t unintentionally prioritizing outragebait content for users.
When this comes to conflicts like Ukraine-Russia or Israel-Hamas, this basically means that Twitter is a sea of people making up fake news stories, recycling previous atrocity footage (Syrian Civil War atrocity photo and videos, for instance, are currently being recycled by cybersympathizers of both sides in both conflicts for their own purposes) and that news updates on the site can’t be trusted. Twitter’s recent decision to remove text from links and replace it with photos has only made this problem worse.
And the problem is made worse by problems in the journalism world.
Whoops, Journalists Going All In On Twitter Was Pretty Dumb
Something funny happened in the 2010s: Journalists started spending a huge chunk of their worktime on Twitter voluntarily and media outlets were happy to make their reporters spend huge chunks of their day on Twitter instead of working on stories or other projects.
Twitter was where you built your brand equity, cultivated sources and also where journalists got to talk smack and make friends online. It also generated a big firehose of traffic for both legacy and newer digital-native publications, which seemingly justified the whole timesuck.
It also led to journalists/news outlets either posting breaking news directly to Twitter or publishing news to the web in formats (such as the New York Times’ breaking news blogs) that favored Twitter over news outlet mobile apps in terms of user experience.
Basically, if you were a news junkie—a demographic that encompasses the vast majority of the journalism world and a decent chunk of the normie population at large—Twitter was where you went to find out what was happening RIGHT NOW. Not to your favorite news site or mobile app. Not to Facebook or Instagram. Not to, Gd forbid, cable news or radio talk news. You went right to Twitter.
Then Twitter broke, turned into a firehose of bullshit and uselessness, and the entire damned news ecosystem was still based around going to Twitter first.
That was pretty stupid!
And, now, the great untangling happens. We’re in a weird in-between phase where social media is gradually evolving from the great Facebook/Twitter common spaces of the 2010s to a weird bifurcated 2020s ecosystem of smaller-scale social networks on the one hand (Discord, Mastodon, Telegram, non-work Slack channels, Telegram, Whatsapp, looking at you) and television-mimicing video social media (TikTok, YouTube) on the other hand.
And news coverage is still adjusting…