Recently I wanted to add a news feed to What Works, the website that Ellen Clegg and I host about the future of local news. There are a fair number of items that come to our attention, and we wanted a way to alert our readers without necessarily writing a full blog post.
Because we had deleted our Twitter account last fall in response to Elon Musk’s sociopathic debut as the platform’s new owner, I looked into setting up a Mastodon news feed. I began by signing up for a Mastodon account for What Works. That was simple enough. Then I tried to figure out how to embed it at our website. I’m not going to get into the technical details except to say that it would have required either more money than we wanted to spend or more hassle than I wanted to put up with. We revived our Twitter account — we’re at @whatworks_nu — and added a news feed to the right-hand column of whatworks.news.
How long will it last? I don’t know. Musk has been arbitrarily cutting off access to Twitter’s API, which means that the feed could stop working at any moment. For now, though, it’s by far the best alternative we have. Which brings me to the state of Twitter and its various alternatives and would-be alternatives.
Twitter is of no importance to most ordinary people, and they should feel fortunate. I’d been a heavy user since the early days, though, and I wasn’t sure what to do when Musk took over. But in late November, following some particularly vile behavior by the Boy King, I decided I’d had enough. I stopped using Twitter and went all-in at Mastodon, writing about it a few weeks later.
And I stuck with it for three months. I don’t believe I posted any tweets in December, January and February except to remind people that they could find me here or on Mastodon at @dankennedy_nu@journa.host, or to rip into Musk. I was so anxious to get rid of my blue check mark that I found out how to do it myself without waiting for Musk to get around to it. In March, though, I started drifting back, and there I remain — mostly on Mastodon, but on Twitter as well.
If you don’t care, believe me, I get it. You’re under no obligation to read this post. But if you’re dealing with the same dilemma as me, here are the various reasons that I came back: Only a tiny handful of the people and accounts I follow on Twitter moved to Mastodon. Black Twitter has most decidedly not moved to Mastodon. Likewise with conservative voices that I value. Some of Mastodon’s biggest boosters have continued tweeting like crazy. Most media and political people are still exclusively on Twitter, especially at the state level. The local news outlets and journalism organizations I follow as part of my work are not on Mastodon. Big Media won’t move, either. Finally, despite everything, Twitter is not nearly as broken as some observers will have you believe. It still works, even though it goes down more than it did before Musk laid off most of his workforce and stopped paying the bills.
Everything is always subject to change, and I wish I hadn’t sounded as definitive as I did when I wrote that I was leaving. If you want to call me a hypocrite, go right ahead. I still like Mastodon, I still expect that at some point it will become more feasible (or necessary) to leave Twitter for good, and I continue to be interested in other alternatives — especially Bluesky, with which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is involved.
For now, though, I’m back on Twitter — chagrined, not as active as I was before, but with a greater understanding that most people are not obsessed enough with social media to go to the bother of packing up and moving to a new, unfamiliar platform.
GBH is sticking with Twitter, at least for now. I just received this statement from spokeswoman Erin Callanan:
At this time, GBH is continuing to use Twitter as a platform for sharing trusted content with its audience. We strongly object to Twitter’s labeling of NPR and PBS as “government-funded” media. However, GBH continues to be the most trusted media in this market, and we have a responsibility to share our news and other programming with the broadest possible audience using the tools available to us.
This remains an evolving situation, and we will continue to monitor the changes as it moves forward.
Like all public media organizations, GBH is locally owned, operated, and governed. We receive the vast majority of our support from individual donors and members, as well as from foundations. We provide independent fact-based news, as well as other quality educational entertainment. We strongly believe that editorial independence and a free press are critical to our democracy.
In my earlier item, I mentioned GBH News specifically, as that is the local news division that competes most directly with WBUR Radio. GBH, of course, is a massive operation, comprising local and national programming on television and radio.
I was affiliated with GBH News for many years and still consider myself a friend of the station. But I think this is a mistake. As I noted earlier, GBH News is already on Mastodon, the leading Twitter alternative, though GBH as a whole is not. But neither is WBUR, and they took the hit rather than continuing to play in Elon Musk’s toxic garden.
Then again, there’s no particular reason why public media outlets are under any special obligation to leave Twitter just because they’re NPR affiliates. All news organizations should be packing up and moving, and that includes The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and all the rest. It’s the right thing to do, and it would make it that much easier for small players (like Media Nation, for example) to do likewise.
Despite Elon Musk’s best efforts, Twitter is still alive, more or less. From sending poop emojis in response to media requests to putting his dog in charge of the company (what company?), Musk has demonstrated massive contempt for his customers. He’s also allowed the site to be flooded with trolls and hate speech — not that those weren’t a problem even before he bought the company.
But now there’s a chance that the logjam will finally break. After Musk labeled NPR’s Twitter feed as “state-controlled media” and then, upon reflection, changed it to “government-funded media” (it is neither, though NPR does get a tiny percentage of its revenues from government sources), NPR’s leadership finally decided it had had enough. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes:
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.
Unfortunately, NPR is going to allow its journalists to make their own decision. That’s a mistake. What’s needed is to push news organizations to leave Twitter behind in order to encourage the use of alternatives, the most prominent of which (so far) is Mastodon.
From November through February, I went cold turkey, taking to Twitter only to let my followers know where else they could find me. Twitter’s weird resilience, though, led me to come back on a limited basis. I continue to do most of my social media posting on Mastodon, and I hope you’ll follow me there.
Can Mastodon be a workable substitute for Twitter? It may never be as big. But given that a lot of us are trying to figure out how to manage our social media presence now that Elon Musk is banning journalists, shutting off access to the API and just generally acting like petulant child, I was interested to see what happened the other day when I had a chance to test comparative engagement.
Since Dec. 11, I hadn’t posted anything to Twitter other than occasional tweets letting people know I had moved and where they could find me. On Friday, though, I decided to make an exception to let my followers know that I’d written an op-ed for The Boston Globe about how local news organizations can stand up to corporate chains. As of Sunday evening, I’ve gotten six likes and no retweets. Twitter claims that my tweet has been viewed 573 times, but who knows?
Twitter post
I posted the same thing on Mastodon, also on Friday. Right now I’ve gotten 24 likes and 37 boosts (retweets in Mastodon-talk). And when I posted a follow-up noting that I’d gotten more engagement on Mastodon than on Twitter, that got another 31 likes and nine boosts. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon servers don’t provide any metrics on how many views you’ve received, which, folks tell me, would be pretty much impossible given its decentralized nature.
Mastodon post
Now for some points of comparison: I have 18,900 followers on Twitter and 2,500 on Mastodon. Then again, on Twitter I have no idea how many are bots, users who haven’t logged on for years or people who’ve died. Plus my account is locked, and at this point I’m sure my followers are accustomed to my absence.
I joined Mastodon in November, so all of my followers are of recent vintage. Plus I’ve been quite active over there, using it pretty much the way I used to use Twitter. So in that respect the heightened engagement isn’t too surprising. Even so, the experience has given me one less reason to look back at what was.
The Elon Musk-ization of Twitter and the rise a Republican House controlled by its most extreme right-wing elements probably doom any chance for intelligent reform to Section 230. That’s the 1996 law that holds harmless any online publisher for third-party content posted on its site, whether it be a libelous comment on a newspaper’s website (one of the original concerns) or dangerous disinformation about vaccines on Facebook.
It is worth repeating for those who don’t understand the issues: a publisher is legally responsible for every piece of content — articles, advertisements, photos, cartoons, letters to the editor and the like — with the sole exception of third-party material posted online. The idea behind 230 was that it would be impossible to vet everything and that the growth of online media depended on an updated legal structure.
Over the years, as various bad actors have come along and abused Section 230, a number of ideas have emerged for curtailing it without doing away with it entirely. Some time back, I proposed that social media platforms that use algorithms to boost certain types of content should not enjoy any 230 protections — an admittedly blunt instrument that would pretty much destroy the platforms’ business model. My logic was that increased engagement is associated with content that makes you angry and upset, and that the platforms profit mightily by keeping your eyes glued to their site.
Now a couple of academics, Robert Kozinets and Jon Pfeiffer, have come along with a more subtle approach to Section 230 reform. Their proposal was first published in The Conversation, though I saw it at Nieman Lab. They offer what I think is a pretty brilliant analogy as to why certain types of third-party content don’t deserve protection:
One way to think of it is as a kind of “restaurant graffiti” law. If someone draws offensive graffiti, or exposes someone else’s private information and secret life, in the bathroom stall of a restaurant, the restaurant owner can’t be held responsible for it. There are no consequences for the owner. Roughly speaking, Section 230 extends the same lack of responsibility to the Yelps and YouTubes of the world.
But in a world where social media platforms stand to monetize and profit from the graffiti on their digital walls — which contains not just porn but also misinformation and hate speech — the absolutist stance that they have total protection and total legal “immunity” is untenable.
Kozinets and Pfeiffer offer three ideas that are worth reading in full. In summary, though, here is what they are proposing.
A “verification trigger,” which takes effect when a platform profits from bad speech — the idea I tried to get at with my proposal for removing protections for algorithmic boosting. Returning to the restaurant analogy, Kozinets and Pfeiffer write, “When a company monetizes content with misinformation, false claims, extremism or hate speech, it is not like the innocent owner of the bathroom wall. It is more like an artist who photographs the graffiti and then sells it at an art show.” They cite an extreme example: Elon Musk’s decision to sell blue-check verification, thus directly monetizing whatever falsehoods those with blue checks may choose to perpetrate.
“Transparent liability caps” that would “specify what constitutes misinformation, how social media platforms need to act, and the limits on how they can profit from it.” Platforms that violate those standards would lose 230 protections. We can only imagine what this would look like once Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz get hold of it, but, well, it’s a thought.
A system of “neutral arbitrators who would adjudicate claims involving individuals, public officials, private companies and the platform.” Kozinets and Pfeiffer call this “Twitter court,” and platforms that don’t play along could be sued for libel or invasion of privacy by aggrieved parties.
I wouldn’t expect any of these ideas to become law in the near or intermediate future. Currently, the law appears to be entirely up for grabs. For instance, last year a federal appeals court upheld a Texas law that forbids platforms from removing any third-party speech that’s based on viewpoint. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case that could result in 230 being overturned in its entirety. Thus we may be heading toward a constitutionally untenable situation whereby tech companies could be held liable for content that the Texas law has forbidden them to remove.
Still, Kozinets and Pfeiffer have provided us with some useful ways of how we might reform Section 230 in order to protect online publishers without giving them carte blanche to profit from their own bad behavior.
When making ethical decisions, we all have to decide where we’re going to draw the line. I’ve been watching Elon Musk’s behavior closely since he purchased Twitter in late October and thinking about where I ought to draw my own line.
It’s different for everyone, and I’m not going to criticize anyone else’s judgment. For Jelani Cobb, it came when Musk restored Donald Trump’s Twitter account, which had been locked because he incited violence during the Jan. 6 insurrection. I semi-shrugged my shoulders. No, I wasn’t thrilled that Musk had brought back Trump and his merry band of Q-adjacent loons, including the loathsome Marjorie Taylor Greene. But my goodness, have you seen the internet? Twitter’s a big place, and I didn’t see any particular reason why we couldn’t all co-exist in our own spaces.
Then there are the deeply stupid “Twitter Files,” promoted by house journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, internal documents given to them by Musk that show evidence of some mistakes in moderation but that mainly demonstrate Twitter was attempting to enforce its publicly stated policies about hate speech, incitement and misinformation. There’s some big-time hyperventilating going on about one of those mistakes — the decision to suppress the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. But that decision was reversed within 24 hours, and it’s worth noting that it was based on an actual policy not to share hacked information. This is a scandal? (Brian Fung of CNN has more.)
What has brought me to this moment, though, is Musk’s own behavior. In late November, Twitter announced that it would no longer take action against misinformation about COVID-19, in accordance with the Chief Twit’s wishes. And then, within the past few days, came the end of the line, at least for me. First Musk attacked Yoel Roth, his former head of trust and safety. Musk tweeted out a short section of Roth’s Ph.D. dissertation to make it appear, falsely, that Roth supports the sexualization of children. “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” Musk tweeted. (If you’re interested in the particulars, see this piece at Business Insider by Sawdah Bhaimiya.)
Then, on Sunday, Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” and followed that up with a meme from some fantasy movie (“Lord of the Rings”?) of Fauci whispering in President Biden’s ear, “Just one more lockdown my king.” (Details from Jesse O’Neill in the New York Post.)
At what point does indifference morph into complicity? What we have now is the head of Twitter, with 121 million followers, tweeting out messages that are putting actual people and their families at risk. In what should have been a surprise to no one, Roth has had to flee his home and go into hiding, according to Donie Sullivan of CNN. Fauci, as you no doubt know, has been facing death threats throughout the pandemic, and Musk’s amplifying a bogus call to arrest and prosecute him could make matters worse. I realized that was my line, and Musk had crossed it.
I’ve downloaded my Twitter archive and will no longer be posting there except to help those who contact me and are looking for an alternative. I’ll set my account to private as soon as I’ve tweeted this out. I considered deleting my account altogether, but who knows what’s going to happen? Maybe next week Musk will enter a monastery and donate Twitter to the Wikimedia Foundation. Yes, that’s pretty unlikely — as unlikely as one of Musk’s SpaceX rocket ships safely taking you to Mars and back. For the moment, though, I don’t want to do anything that I can’t reverse if conditions change.
This was not an easy decision. I’ve been a heavy Twitter user since I joined in 2008. I’ve got more than 19,000 followers, and I know that not all of them are going to move to other platforms. But here are some alternatives below. You might also want to check out this roundup from Laurel Wamsley at NPR.
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The most promising Twitter alternative is Mastodon, which is a decentralized network of networks that — once you get past the clumsiness of figuring out how to sign up — works very much like Twitter. I joined in early November, and more than 1,300 people are following me there already. I’m at @dankennedy_nu@journa.host. There are various guides on how to get started. Here’s one from CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.
If Mastodon is the earthy-crunchy alternative to Twitter, then Post News is the corporate version. Like Mastodon, Post News is promoting itself as a civil environment free of abuse and trolling. I know that some Mastodon folks are criticizing Post News for being just another venture-capital play that may eventually come to as bad an end as Twitter. They’re not wrong. For now, though, I’m looking at Mastodon as a place where I can connect mainly with journalists, academics and the extremely online, and then mosey over to Post News to engage with normal people. The interface is simple and attractive; the site is still in beta and will continue to improve. You can follow me at dankennedy_nu.
Let’s not forget that Facebook isn’t going anywhere. If we don’t know each other, please don’t send me a friend request; follow my public feed instead. Here’s where you can find me.
I’m also on LinkedIn and Instagram, but I prefer not to use those to engage the way I do on the other platforms.
There are a million takes on what has happened to Twitter that I could point you to, and believe me, there are very few that are worth reading. But this one is worthwhile. It’s by Ezra Klein, and he questions whether any of these platforms, even the nice new ones, are doing us any good.
Finally, what we need more than anything on Mastodon and Post News is some diversity, which, at its pre-Musk best, is what was great about Twitter. Black Twitter needs a home, and I really miss my non-Trumpy conservative followers and the less politically engaged. I invite you all to take the plunge. Join one of the alternatives. Cut down or eliminate your Twitter activity. And discover the joys of de-Muskifying your life.
When we learned last spring that Elon Musk might buy Twitter and transform it into some sort of troll- and bot-infested right-wing hellhole, my first thought was: Bring it on. Although I’m a heavy user, I had no great affection for the service, which was already something of a mess. If Musk ran it into a ditch, well, what of it?
On second thought, I realized I would miss it — and so would a lot of other people. In particular, Twitter has become an important service in calling out injustice around the world as well as a forum that gives Black users a voice they might not have anywhere else. My friend Callie Crossley was talking about Black Twitter on the late, lamented “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” ages ago. Black Twitter could go elsewhere, of course, but it would be hard to recreate on the same scale that it exists now.
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For now, I’m staying, but I’m also playing around. Mastodon meets a lot of my needs (I’m @dankennedy_nu@journa.host), mainly because a lot of media and political people I want to follow immediately made the move. But, so far, I see none of the non-Trump conservatives whose presence I value and very few Black users. That may be my fault, and it may change. I’m also skeptical of Mastodon’s extreme decentralization, with each server (called an instance) having its own rules of engagement. I’m also on Post News at @dankennedy_nu, but I really don’t like the micropayment scheme on which it’s staked its future, explained at Nieman Lab by Laura Hazard Owen.
Twitter really does matter. It may be the smallest of the social platforms, but it’s a place where people in media and politics have to be. I’m not sure it can be replicated. So much has been written and said about Twitter over the past few weeks, and no one could possible keep up with it all. Here, though, are three pieces that I think cut through the murk as well as any.
The first is from Dr. Meredith Clark, my colleague at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Professor Clark is a leading authority on Black Twitter and the author of the forthcoming book “We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives.” Meredith says she’s staying. In a recent interview with Michel Martin of NPR, she explained why:
We’re digging in our heels. We’ve been on this platform. We’ve contributed so much to it that we’ve made it valuable in the way that it is today. We’ve made it an asset, and so no, we’re not going anywhere. And then I see other people, honestly, who have more privilege, a number of academics who are saying, nope, we’re going somewhere else. We’re leaving for other platforms.
But I do really think that there are limits to those relationships because there aren’t many platforms that allow many speakers to talk to one another all at the same time in the same place. My use hasn’t changed all that much. I don’t plan to be one of those people who migrate. I just tweeted the other day that I’ll be the last one to turn the lights off if that’s what I need to be, because I’m certainly not going either.
By the way, Meredith was a guest earlier this year on “What Works: The Future of Local News,” a podcast hosted by Ellen Clegg and me. You can listen to our conversation here.
Taking the opposite approach is Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, who has suspended his Twitter account in favor of Mastodon — a step that he admits has cut him out of numerous conversations, but that he believed was necessary in order not to be a part of Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a reflection of his own obsessions and ego. Like Clark, Dr. Cobb is Black; unlike Clark, his reasoning makes no mention of Black Twitter per se, although he does note its value in bringing to light racial injustices. “Were it not for social media,” Cobb writes in The New Yorker, “George Floyd — along with Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor — would likely have joined the long gallery of invisible dead Black people, citizens whose bureaucratized deaths were hidden and ignored.” But that, he emphasizes, was then:
Participating in Twitter — with its world-spanning reach, its potential to radically democratize our discourse along with its virtue mobs and trolls — always required a cost-benefit analysis. That analysis began to change, at least for me, immediately after Musk took over. His reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account made remaining completely untenable. Following an absurd Twitter poll about whether Trump should be allowed to return, Musk reinstated the former President. The implication was clear: if promoting the January 6, 2021, insurrection — which left at least seven people dead and more than a hundred police officers injured — doesn’t warrant suspension to Musk, then nothing else on the platform likely could.
My own view of Trump’s reinstatement is rather complicated. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s easy to justify banning a major presidential candidate, which Trump now surely is. On the other hand, he was banned for fomenting violence — and now that he’s been given another chance, he’s likely to do it again, which means he’ll have to be banned all over again. Except that he won’t be with Musk in charge. (So far, at least, Trump hasn’t tweeted since his reinstatement.) In any case, I respect Cobb’s decision, even if I’m still not quite there.
I’ll close with Josh Marshall, editor of the liberal website Talking Points Memo. Like me, Marshall is dipping his toe into Mastodon’s waters while maintaining his presence on Twitter. And, like me, he’s trying to figure out exactly what Musk is up to. The other day he offered a theory that doesn’t explain all of it, but may explain some of it — especially the part that plays into Musk’s emotions and sense of grievance, which may prove to be the most important in understanding what’s going on.
Marshall sees Musk as traveling a path previously taken by Donald Trump. Like Trump, Musk is a narcissist who can’t imagine a world that doesn’t revolve around his every need and want. Also like Trump in, say 2015, Musk was until recently someone with vague right-wing proclivities who has hardened his views and openly embraced white supremacy and antisemitism because we liberals hurt his feelings. Trump and Musk have both taken up with horrible people because they were offering support and friendship when no one else would. With Trump, it’s Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. With Musk, it’s, well, Trump and his sycophants. Marshall writes:
I doubt very much that in mid-2015 Trump had any real familiarity with the arcana of racist and radical right groups, their keywords or ideological touch-points. But they knew he was one of them, perhaps even more than he did. They pledged their undying devotion and his narcissism did the rest.
Elon Musk is on the same path. There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to Great Replacement.
If anything good can come of this it may be that we hit peak social media a few years ago. Facebook is shrinking, especially among anyone younger than 60. TikTok is huge, but as a number of observers have pointed out, it isn’t really a social platform — it’s a broadcaster with little in the way of user interaction. Now Twitter is splitting apart.
This may be temporary. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg or (most likely) someone else will be able to reassemble social media around the metaverse. For now, though, social media may be broken in a way we couldn’t have imagined in, say, 2020. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing — although I wouldn’t mind if someone put Twitter back together again, only this time minus the trolls, the bots and the personal abuse that defined the site long before Musk came along.
Stop the competition. We have a winner of the 2022 Both Sides Sweepstakes: Ashley Parker, a high-profile political reporter for The Washington Post, who took to Twitter in order to share this with us:
I put it up as an image rather than an embedded tweet because who knows what’s going to happen to it over the next few days? Plus she might wake up and delete it. But click here, while you can, to see some of the replies.
I should note, too, that as far as I can tell, this is not an imposter who paid Elon Musk $8 for a blue check mark.
If you are trying to make sense out of what Elon Musk is doing with (or, rather, to) Twitter, I recommend this podcast in which the tech journalist Kara Swisher talks about her interactions with the billionaire over the years.
Swisher is appalled as any of us, but she’s more sad than angry — she says she genuinely believed Musk might be the right person to fix the money-losing platform. She doesn’t attribute any nefarious motives to his brief reign, which has been marked by chaos and performative cruelty toward Twitter’s employees. But she can’t make sense of it, either.
Toward the end, her producer, Nayeema Raza, asks Swisher what she’d like to ask Musk if they were back on speaking terms — which they’re currently not. Swisher’s four-word answer: “What are you doing?”
I’ve opened an account on Mastodon in the hopes that it will prove to be a good alternative to Twitter, now in the midst of an astonishing implosion.
What I’m hoping for is something like Twitter pre-Elon Musk, only without the trolls and bots, the personal abuse and the piling-on. I don’t think any of us believed Twitter was a wonderful place before Musk lit it on fire. So far, Mastodon sort of fits the bill, but it’s also something different. The culture is more polite — maybe excessively so, though that might just be a first impression.
In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any going back. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter is essentially gone in a few weeks. You can follow me on Mastodon at @dankennedy_nu@journa.host. And for a really good explanation of Mastodon and how its decentralized governance works, I highly recommended this Lawfare podcast.
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