I guess I’ll never get rid of those five unused invitations now. Bluesky, one of three significant Twitter alternatives, has finally dropped its invitation-only model and has opened the platform up to the public. I’ve been seeing comments that Bluesky blew it by opening up too late. I don’t know that that’s true. I’ve put most of my efforts into Threads and Mastodon, and I have issues with both. The future of all of these platforms is very much TBD.
Tag: Twitter
Despite Elon Musk’s vile behavior, a shrinking Twitter continues to dominate
Twitter’s resilience despite Elon Musk’s toxic leadership has been something of a surprise to me. A little more than a year after he took the helm, the platform that he (and virtually no one else) calls X continues to dominate short-form text-based social media. Mastodon and Bluesky never really caught on, though they have their supporters; users of Mastodon, a decentralized nonprofit, are probably just as happy about that, since they never seemed all that eager to welcome millions of Twitter refugees. The newest alternative, Meta’s Threads, is the only one that has achieved anything close to critical mass.
These realities are driven home in a new piece by Sara Guaglione of Digiday, who reports that some major news publishers have actually cut back on the efforts they’re putting into Threads and are sticking with Twitter. But there is some good news for Threads: it continues to grow, and it’s now expanding into Europe; and publishers would probably do more with the platform if Meta would provide them with the metrics they need to understand their audience.
“There’s a pull to Threads — it’s a good platform, it’s a good [and] improving product,” Matt Karolian, the general manager of Boston.com, told Guaglione. “And there’s an element of being pushed away from X, where there’s only so much time you can spend on it a day now before you just want to pull your hair out. It does feel like a confluence of factors that have really helped it grow.”
But even though The Boston Globe (of which Boston.com is a part), CNN and The New York Times report increased engagement on Threads, others, including the BBC and The Guardian U.S., have cut back. “For now,” Guaglione wrote, “Threads remains a place for experimentation.”
In addition to failing to provide publishers with the data they want, Threads also continues to lack key features for news consumers that they’ve taken for granted on Twitter. There are no hashtags and no lists, making it difficult to follow an ongoing story or a group of journalists or news organizations. Those may be coming at some point, although Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram (Threads is actually part of Instagram as well as the larger Zuckerborg), has made it clear that he doesn’t see news as a priority.
That could change as Twitter continues to shrink and as advertisers flee in response to Musk’s recent boost of a horrendous antisemitic post. At a public event, Musk apologized for the post but then told advertisers to “go fuck yourself.” CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy recently wrote that Threads now ranks No. 2 in the Apple App Store’s list of free apps and that Twitter had fallen to No. 56.
For years, Twitter was the chief watering hole for media people and politicians, and those days are not coming back — the emerging social media landscape is likely to be much more diffuse, and it would be a good thing if we all spent less time with it anyway. But even if Twitter keeps losing audience, advertisers and relevance, those early predictions that it would quickly go the way of MySpace proved premature.
Instant update: I see that “topic tags,” which appear to be hashtags of a sort, have just popped up on Threads. It doesn’t appear that you can roll your own, but this bears further investigation.
Three for Friday
As social-media sharing continues to deteriorate, I am posting more links here for the benefit of Media Nation regulars. Here are three must-reads for your Friday morning:
- “Behind CNN Turmoil, a Series of Shattered Friendships” (free link), by James B. Stewart and Benjamin Mullin, The New York Times, Nov. 15. An in-depth look at the mess created following Warner Bros. Discovery’s acquisition of the network, which led to the firing of two successive chief executives of CNN, Jeff Zucker and Chris Licht, at the hands of the new boss, David Zaslav.
- “A former sideline reporter stunningly admitted that she made things up,” by Tom Jones, Poynter Online, Nov. 17. Jones writes: “In what was a jaw-dropping admission, Amazon Prime Video and Fox Sports anchor Charissa Thompson said on a podcast this week that when she was a TV sideline reporter on football games, she sometimes fabricated a report for the broadcast.” Will Thompson keep her job. Should she? (No.)
- “As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content,” by Eric Hananoki, Media Matters for America, Nov. 16. The sociopath in charge of X/Twitter has flirted with antisemitism and neo-Nazism for quite some time. But his latest outburst could carry real consequences, as major advertisers may finally be waking up — including IBM, which has suspended its ads.
Threads may be a better place (for now) than X/Twitter, but let’s not get too excited
These days I do most of my microblogging (now there’s a blast from the past) at Threads, the Meta-owned Twitter alternative that is moving ahead of Bluesky and Mastodon, if not ahead of Twitter itself. Threads is filled with self-congratulatory posts about how nice everyone is along with occasional criticism of people for not walking away completely from Elon Musk, who has transformed X/Twitter from the hellsite it already was into something even worse.
Well, lest we forget, here’s the top to Brian Fung’s CNN story on the latest in a lawsuit brought against Meta by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram, at times directly overruling some of his most senior lieutenants, according to internal communications made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the company.
The newly unsealed communications in the lawsuit — filed originally by Massachusetts last month in a state court — allegedly show how Zuckerberg ignored or shut down top executives, including Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, who had asked Zuckerberg to do more to protect the more than 30 million teens who use Instagram in the United States.
Mosseri, in case you don’t know, is the guy who’s in charge of Threads. As for the great Threads versus Twitter debate, well, pick your favorite evil billionaire. At least Zuckerberg and Mosseri seem to want Threads to be a well-run platform that makes money rather than a plaything for a right-wing sociopath — which is what Twitter has devolved into.
One year later, calculating the damage Elon Musk has done to Twitter
This past Friday marked one year since Elon Musk purchased X/Twitter and took a wrecking ball to it. Twitter was far from perfect — we all called it “the hellsite” long before he arrived. But he’s done everything he could to drive it into the ground, empowering trolls, restoring extreme-right and neo-Nazi accounts, and enabling disinformation on a widespread scale.
Musk took specific actions to degrade the experience as well. He ended a modest paid-subscription service that allowed you to edit your tweets. He got rid of the blue checks for verified accounts and replaced them with blue checks for anyone who was willing to pay, thus greatly amplifying hate and falsehoods. He blocked access for anyone who didn’t have a Twitter account, which blew up embedded news feeds. And he proved that he himself was among the most sociopathic users of the service he’d purchased, engaging in such behavior as amplifying an online wilding campaign against a young journalist and putting her life in danger.
The results for Twitter as a business have been devastating. The Washington Post reports (free link):
The number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post, and the company — which the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has renamed X — is hemorrhaging advertisers and revenue, interviews show.
The Post also reports that Musk has succeeded in moving Twitter far to the right. My own experience is that a number of conservatives who I’d like to follow on one of the new platforms that have sprung up or grown in response to Musk’s actions have stayed put, almost as a sign of tribal loyalty. Not everyone — certainly a lot of the Never Trump conservatives have moved elsewhere. But it’s enough that the old sense you had on Twitter that everyone was there has fractured, probably forever.
After Musk bought Twitter, I went all-in at Mastodon, which had already been around for several years. But though I was able to build a decent list of followers and have found engagement to be quite good, most news organizations and prominent people are missing. Bluesky, co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, seems like the closest thing to a direct Twitter replacement, but it’s falling behind because of its incredibly aggravating invitation-only scheme.
Which leaves us with Threads, part of the Zuckerborg. It’s definitely the fastest-growing of the alternatives, and it’s where I spend most of my social-media time these days. It’s also adding features quickly in an attempt to catch up. Threads got off to a fast start when it was launched during the summer, lagged, and now seems to be taking off again. Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Threads now has 100 million monthly users — no doubt well behind Twitter (Musk took the company private, so he’s free to lie about metrics), but impressive nevertheless.
Yet I find that there are three buckets of Twitter users that I need to connect with who aren’t going anywhere: friends who are not extremely online; Massachusetts politics folks; and people and organizations involved in the future of local news. For some reason, they’re still firmly planted on Twitter.
Twitter was far from perfect — very far indeed. It had become a frequently ugly place, and a lot of us were already using it differently compared to, say, 10 years ago. But Musk has made it much worse.
Mainstream media, elected officials feed misinformation in Israel-Hamas war
The war between Israel and Hamas has given rise to a cornucopia of misinformation and disinformation on social media — especially with Elon Musk’s mean, shrunken version of X/Twitter doing little to screen out the worst stuff. But we should keep in mind that several dangerously wrong stories have been reported or amplified by mainstream news sources and political figures.
The most significant is the explosion at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday, a disaster that has reportedly claimed hundreds of lives. Palestinian officials immediately blamed the blast on an Israeli rocket attack and, in the absence of any independent verification, news outlets were quick to report that claim as though it were fact. I’ll use The New York Times as an example, but it was hardly alone. According to the Internet Archive, the Times homepage published a headline on Tuesday at 2:25 p.m. that said, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” Over the next hour or so, a subhead appeared saying that Israel was urging “caution.” Then, finally, at 3:46 p.m., came a subhead that stated, “Israelis Say Misfired Palestinian Rocket Was Cause of Explosion.” (I’m using the time stamps from the Times’ live blog rather than the Internet Archive’s.)
The Times’ evolution played out on Threads as well. Threads posts are not time-stamped, and at the moment this says only “one day ago,” though it was clearly posted sometime in the afternoon on Tuesday: “Breaking News: An Israeli airstrike hit a Gaza hospital on Tuesday, killing at least 200 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which said the number of casualties was expected to rise.” A short time later: “Update: At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.” Then, finally: “Update: The Israeli military said its intelligence indicated that a rocket that malfunctioned after it was launched by a Palestinian armed group was responsible for the explosion that killed hundreds of people at a Gaza City hospital.”
Now, we still don’t know exactly what happened. But the weight of the evidence suggests that Israeli officials are correct in asserting that the missile was actually fired by Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, and that it accidentally damaged the hospital. BBC News reported Wednesday that the evidence is “inconclusive” but added: “Three experts we spoke to say it is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli air strike with a large munition.” The independent investigative project Bellingcat cited a tweet by Marc Garlasco, a war-crimes investigator, who said, “Whatever hit the hospital in #Gaza it wasn’t an airstrike.”
The problem is that the initial incautious reports by the Times and other mainstream media, quoting Palestinian statements as though they were fact, clearly created a public narrative that Israel had committed a horrific war crime by bombing a hospital and killing hundreds of people. Indeed, two Muslim members of Congress, Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar, tweeted out the original unverified report.
Two other examples:
• The claim that Hamas terrorists beheaded Israeli babies has become so widespread that President Biden repeated it several days ago, and even appeared to say that he had seen photographic evidence. The White House had to walk that back. But though Hamas acted brutally in slaughtering civilians and taking hostages, no evidence has emerged for that particular incendiary assertion. The fact-checking website Snopes reports: “As we looked into the claim, we found contradictory reports from journalists, Israeli army officials, and almost no independent corroborations of the alleged war crime, leading to concerns among fact-checkers that such a claim may be premature or unsubstantiated.”
• There remains no evidence beyond an initial report by The Wall Street Journal that Iran was directly involved in planning and approving Hamas’ attack on Israel. This was an especially dangerous assertion since it could have led to a wider war — and still could if the Journal’s story ends up being true. At the moment, though, it appears that the Journal’s reliance on Hamas and Hezbollah sources were spreading misinformation, perhaps deliberately. Indeed, Max Tani of Semafor reported earlier this week that the Journal’s own Washington bureau had raised “concerns about the story” before it was published.
Correction: This post originally said that the hospital had been “obliterated,” but the evidence suggests that the damage fell well short of that.
X/Twitter may be terrible, but it’s still the go-to place for certain types of conversations
On Thursday, I posted an opinion about the newly enacted Massachusetts tax cut on X/Twitter and its three main competitors — Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. I did it in part simply because I wanted to make a comment, but I also was experimenting. Here’s the post on Threads:
Why are our local media united in referring to the Mass. tax cuts as “tax relief”? It’s an unnecessary package, mainly skewed toward the rich, that will offset the ballot question we just passed to try to meet some real needs in schools, transportation and social services.
Twitter and Mastodon support hashtags, so on those platforms I changed Massachusetts to #MaPoli in the hopes that it would get picked up in those communities. And here’s what I found: As of this morning, I’ve gotten 11 likes and three replies on Threads; 10 likes, four reposts and one reply on Bluesky; eight likes, six reposts and one reply on Mastodon; and 213 likes, 60 reposts and 20 replies on Twitter, including a worthwhile back-and-forth with Matt Szafranski, a lawyer who’s the editor-in-chief of Western Mass Politics & Insight, on whether state officials will be able to grab revenues from the new millionaire’s tax to fund needs other than education and transportation, as the law specifies.
Now, you might say, what’s the big deal? Aren’t we past worrying about engagement on social media? Well, yes and no. Performative tweeting has gotten many people in trouble, including me. But in this case I wanted to express an opinion that would be seen by people in the Massachusetts media and political community, and I knew Twitter would be the best outlet.
Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter a year ago and took a wrecking ball to it, there’s been a lot of what you might call Twitter-shaming — castigating anyone who continues to use Twitter on the grounds that by doing so you’re enabling Musk and his sociopathic attacks on transgender people and anyone else with the misfortune to cross his radar. For instance, he recently amplified hateful attacks on a reporter for the Las Vegas because he literally had no idea what had really happened, as Angela Fu recently reported for Poynter Online.
I went completely silent on Twitter for several months after Musk bought it and invested quite a bit of time in Mastodon, which is a lovely little community whose members include few of the political, media and local news accounts I need to follow for my professional and academic work. I find more of a political and media presence on Threads and Bluesky but very little of the #MaPoli crowd and virtually none of the people and organizations that are tracking the future of community journalism.
The Twitter-shaming, though, continues. Retired Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, who only left Twitter a month ago, posted this on Threads Friday:
The reason to quit Twitter (X) isn’t that it’s apparently collapsing financially, or killing important features. It’s a moral and ethical issue. Not only are Nazis, racists, antisemites, misogynists, liars and conspiracy theorists being welcomed back, but the owner seems to be actively supporting this. I gave up a 16-year account with over 800,000 followers because I couldn’t associate myself with this haven for hate and lies. You should too.
Well, good for you, Walt. By the way, you posted that on a platform controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, who has not exactly covered himself in glory with regard to clamping down on election disinformation and enabling genocide. There are also those who criticize anyone who publishes on Substack because that platform has become a home to some sleazy right-wingers (let’s not forget that the great Heather Cox Richardson writes her newsletter on Substack) or who uses Bluesky because Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has his own issues, is a member of the board.
I’m actively rooting for Musk to drive Twitter into the ground and kill it off once and for all. Until he does, though, I’m going to use it — not as much as I used to, and more carefully than I did in the past. But though Musk is the worst of the worst, the reality is that most of our tech platforms are controlled by dubious characters, and there’s not much we can do about it.
A devastating portrayal of Elon Musk raises serious questions about capitalism run amok
Elon Musk gets the Ronan Farrow treatment in the current issue of The New Yorker. Although much of the ground covered in Farrow’s 5,500-word profile is familiar, the cumulative effect is devastating. Musk comes across as an out-of-control egomaniac with scant regard for safety at SpaceX and Tesla, his grandiosity fed by what may be his overindulgence in ketamine, described by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as “a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects.” Emotionally abused by his father, Musk has now been disowned by his daughter, who’s come out as transgender even as Elon has indulged anti-trans hate-mongering on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter.
Farrow also offers new details about the U.S. government’s utter dependence on Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet network, which powers the Ukrainian military’s communications in its war with Russia (as well as Musk’s sucking up to Russian President Vladimir Putin), and on his rocket company, which is the sole means NASA has at the moment for launching its own satellites. The overarching picture that emerges is not just a portrait of a multi-billionaire who has way too much power, but of a culture so enamored of unfettered capitalism that it has forfeited the means to rein him in.
“There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told Farrow. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.” The same could be said of Starlink’s role in Ukraine’s war for survival or, for that matter, Musk’s opening up Twitter to disinformation about everything from COVID to election denialism.
As I was listening to the audio version of Farrow’s story, I was also thinking back to a podcast I heard a few months ago in which tech journalist Kara Swisher interviewed Walter Isaacson, who is writing a biography of Musk. Isaacson is widely respected, and I admired his biography of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Yet he came across as weirdly obsequious in talking about Musk, even going so far as to take seriously Musk’s ambitions to turn Twitter into an “everything app” that would handle your financial transactions and who knows what else. Swisher, to her credit, wasn’t having any of it.
Maybe Isaacson was bluffing so that Musk wouldn’t cut off access or trash his book before it comes out (it’s scheduled for Sept. 12). I hope it turns out to be as tough-minded as his Jobs bio. In any event, Farrow has set a high bar.
Threads hits a speed bump
Mark Zuckerberg may soon have reason to regret pushing Threads out the door before it was ready. Lindsey Choo reports for The Wall Street Journal (free link, I think; apologies if it doesn’t work) that user engagement has fallen by 70% since its July 7 peak.
No doubt Zuckerberg wanted to take advantage of Elon Musk’s Fourth of July weekend freakout, when he limited the number of posts you could read on Twitter (especially if you weren’t a paid subscriber), cut off access to individual tweets for non-members (thus blowing up our news feed at What Works), and killed off classic TweetDeck in favor of a new, lesser update.
But Threads is frustrating to use. The biggest problem is that you can only access it on a mobile device. Also missing: a reverse-chrono tab of accounts you follow, thus clogging up your feed with brands and celebrities you don’t care about, as well as no lists and no hashtags.
Mastodon has been my first stop since Musk took over Twitter last fall, but its decentralized nature presents problems of its own. It’s difficult to find what you’re looking for, there are parts of the unfortunately named Fediverse that are invisible to you, and most of the people and accounts I need to follow just aren’t there. Bluesky is still invitation-only and has had problems of its own.
I realize this is of little interest to most people, but for those of us whose work depends on social media to some degree, it’s been an interesting — and frustrating — nine months.
From ‘Spotlight’ to a spotlight on local news: A conversation with Walter Robinson
In the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Walter Robinson, a longtime investigative journalist and editor of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team. Robby, as he is known, was instrumental in uncovering the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in Boston and beyond. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. The team’s work was captured onscreen in the movie “Spotlight,” where Robby was played by the actor Michael Keaton.
Robby is a former colleague — he was a Distinguished Professor of Journalism here at Northeastern. He was also a 1974 graduate of Northeastern’s journalism program and participated in co-op.
Robinson covered and edited local news at the Globe. But he ranged wide. He reported from 48 states and 33 countries. He covered the White House during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He was also the Globe’s Middle East bureau chief and covered the first Persian Gulf War.
In recent years, Robby has been focused on the local news crisis in a big way. He has been deeply involved in the New Bedford Light, an impressive nonprofit digital news outlet. He lives in Plymouth, so it’s perhaps no surprise that he is a key adviser to the board of directors at the new Plymouth Independent.
I’ve got a Quick Take on developments in the junkyard known as Twitter. Ellen reports on a new podcast out of Memphis called “Civil Wrongs.” It’s produced by a Report for America corps member that examines a racist massacre in the aftermath of the Civil War.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.