The Media Love Affair with Twitter Must End
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Every day that passes, I get older. So does the internet. And yet, where I am becoming more constitutionally intransigent, my joins creaking, my reaction times slowing to clumsy swipes, the internet is changing, growing nimbler, speeding up.
Nowhere is the pace of change more evident that on Elon Musk’s Twitter — or X — where the South African-born industrial baron has created a strange, frenzied and mirthless obsession with “free speech”. What was one the du jour platform of journalists around the world has become a cesspit. At present, it is being used — by civilian tweeters, bot accounts, and established public personalities alike — to foment right-wing aggression in the UK. It feels like a test run for what might happen in the United States, after ballots are counted in November.
The media has long been obsessed with Twitter. At its best, it has many of the facets of great journalism. It is quick, reactive and almost always the place where news breaks. Since I deleted my Twitter account earlier this year, I have become increasingly estranged from that minute-by-minute breakdown of what’s happening in the world. Fine for me, but no good if you’re a journalist. It has also been a beneficiary of the increasing personalisation and atomisation of the media, where your individual following, carried across publications, is frequently more important than the outlet that you are writing for.
And journalists ate that all up. They ate up the blue checkmarks that the bods at Twitter HQ offered them (alongside celebrities and politicians), which made them feel powerful and valued. They created something that was simultaneously a megaphone and an echo chamber, where they might have 100,000 followers yet only follow 1000 of their industry colleagues. It was a place of refuge from the tumultous nature of media as a business enterprise. As newsrooms were laying off staff, salaries being frozen and perks cut, hacks could retreat into the safe bosom of Twitter, where a dozen ‘reply guys’ would reliably tell them they’re a ‘beautiful genius’, any time they posted.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform has wholly changed what Twitter is, yet the journalistic establishment seems reluctant to let go.
I’ve intermittently defended Musk’s methods of running Twitter. His early diagnoses were broadly correct. The site had clearly become over-inflated for the complexity of its technical requirements. It also desperately needed to introduce more direct revenue generation, in a fickle advertising landscape. But those were all management decisions that needn’t have had an editorial impact on the site. The fact is, Musk has chosen to hand the CEO reins of the site over to Linda Yaccarino, but has stayed on as Head of Content.
Today, Yaccarino announced that Twitter would be suing a group of companies who have been organising an advertising boycott of the site since the Musk takeover. She is fighting one battle — a fraught, commercial one — while Musk is fighting an entirely different one. When he hasn’t been warning that the UK is heading for “civil war” he’s been trashing the “legacy media dingbats” who are critiquing his management of the company, and its impact on democratic institutions.
How does the liberal media establishment respond to a site that is ideologically, and algorithmically, against them? There is a tendency to believe that surrendering that ground is an admission of failure. There is a genuine, I think, belief in the idea that bigotry, racism and misinformation can be challenged and corrected. There is a profound unwillingness to cede this public forum to the mob. And yet, that all fails to recognise that participants on Twitter are now playing a rigged game. The narrative is being shaped.
I don’t begrudge Elon Musk his right to do what he will with a platform he spent an inordinate amount of money on (though I do think that the antitrust lawsuit will, perhaps, be scuppered by the consequences of some of his decision making). But Edward Luce — the Financial Times’ Chief US Commentator, who clashed with Musk on the platform this week — would do well to think more carefully about what he’s saying. “[Musk is] using the largest & most influential platform in the democratic world to stoke racial conflict and civil breakdown,” Luce wrote, on Twitter. What’s the antidote to that?
The question really, is whether it’s easy to stop Twitter being a platform used “to stoke racial conflict and civil breakdown” or to stop it being the “most influential platform in the democratic world”. One is an endogenous attack, the other is an exogenous one. To change the timbre of the discussion on Twitter, one would firstly need to shift a global conversation AND THEN rely on Twitter, itself, helping to curate its content (and that’s with Mr Musk as Head of Content, remember). But stifling its influence is something that can happen outside the walls of Twitter HQ. It’s something that advertisers have attempted to do, in ways that have had curious impacts on the site’s business mode*.
Mainstream journalism has not reconciled its position with social media. The development of a traffic-driven culture in newsrooms over recent years has given social media the whip hand over legacy media outlets. In short, the Financial Times isn’t going to junk its Twitter account — even if it should — because the resulting crash in traffic would be catestrophic. Almost every media organisation in the world faces the same challenge: they recognise the incipient evil, yet their own ability to challenge it is predicated on reinforcing it. You have to be crazy to want out, but that’s the only sane option: it’s a proper Catch-22.
But what this elides is the fact that being dependent on third-party outlets is a terrible commercial weakness. What would happen if Mr Musk, next week, switched off all the Financial Times’s Twitter accounts? They would, I’m sure, take him to court. Could he argue that Mr Luce’s post, implying that X is colluding in civil unrest, made the publication an inappropriate partner for Twitter? What then?
At the moment, the three main parties involved in the success or failure of the platform (Musk, the media, and the advertisers — not the meme account, however much they may wish it) are involved in a mexican standoff. However much he might neg the FT, Musk needs legacy media to keep Twitter’s centrality to the news cycle. That’s because a million Spongebob memes or videos of BMXers wiping out isn’t going to appeal to advertisers. In order for Musk to get the advertisers he needs, there has to be a core of real news happening on Twitter. Legacy media can’t exit the platform for the above reasons, while advertisers are fragmented on an approach. Mega-corporations like CVS, Unilever and Orsted can withhold spend from Twitter (it likely suits them to find a socially conscious way of reducing digital media ad-spend at this time) but most others are continuing to use the platform. All while the controversy has raged and the social demographics have shifted, useage has not suffered a substantial decline (nor will it while the News keeps happening there).
It’s a stand-off that will eventually be broken. But Musk’s Twitter has already proven itself uninterested in the success of external journalism sources. They have de-prioritised links in the algorithm, even messing around with the visual presentation of external sites on Twitter. By his own admission, Musk sees Twitter as a publishing platform to compete with legacy media, not augment it.
That should be enough for many publications to hear. There is nothing in the current direction of Twitter to suggest that it is a reliable source of traffic or revenue, nor a friend of media as a sustainable business. The time for criticising with one hand while reinforcing with the other is over. Journalists like Luce do need to go on Twitter and call it out; they need to get off the platform.
There is an ideological war to be won, but the fight on Twitter will not be a pitched battle. It won’t take place in plain sight and with a fair fight. It is asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. Accepting that is the first part of moving on. The next is understanding that the tactics of siege: withdraw, wait and starve them out. Because the platform loses all of its salience if it is just a place of communion for the radicalised and Russian bots. The converted arguing with their converters. Starving the site of real content might be the only way of reclaiming it.
And, in the meantime, journalism can think about how it weans itself off the teat of social media. Because the Twitter/X crisis has exposed a systemwide vulnerablity which needs, firstly, creative thought, and then, secondly, heavy investment.
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*The diminishment of advertising income to Twitter hasn’t come without problems. It has made subscriptions a much more central part of the platform’s revenue plan, which, in turn, has necessitated greater perks for the subscription plan. This has meant foregrounding and promoting tweets made by subscriber accounts, with the consequence that a lot more ill-informed crap clutters the average timeline.
