Twitter Was for News
Reading Time: 5 minutesElon Musk’s New, Inventive Way to Vandalize the Social Network He Owns, Elon Musk keeps finding inventive ways to ruin the one thing his social network was great for., Twitter/X dropped headlines on news links. Why is Elon Musk vandalizing his own social n
On Wednesday, Elon Musk personally saw to a change in the way that links have historically appeared on Twitter, the social media site he’s been gradually degrading over the past year and recently renamed ‘X.’ When someone posts a link to an external site, it no longer appears in a card with a picture and a headline. Instead, it shows the image that goes with the webpage (if applicable) and, in small letters, the domain name. The change introduces confusion where none previously existed and carries no discernible user benefit. Some people are clicking on these photographic webpage links thinking that they’re just regular photos to expand. Others might breeze past a tweet with a link in it, not realizing that a picture leads to an article at all. That’s almost certainly Musk’s primary goal with the switch: to discourage people from clicking on links so that they stay within X’s walls, where they can drive up engagement numbers for Musk’s flailing business. It doesn’t matter that removing headlines from linked articles creates obvious opportunities for people to lie about or dramatize where a link will take them. More tweets will now fit on the screen, maybe. Again, the engagement potential is simply robust.
For the actual business of journalism (or any other field where links often get posted online), this change is a tiny deal. Twitter is famous in media circles for being a paltry source of web traffic, and ripping headlines off of links may just serve to bury something that was already dead. (Some audience-engagement professionals believe that, for months, X has been deprioritizing tweets with links in the algorithmic ‘For You’ timeline on its app.) Businesses that lean heavily on linking out from this particular platform were already in trouble.
But for X’s viability as a place to get quality information quickly, the dumbing-down of links is a blow. A pillar of Twitter’s rise to prominence was that it was the social media site to go to and find out what was happening: Instagram for pretty pictures, Facebook for keeping up with your classmates, and Twitter for knowing what is happening in the world. That dynamic is outdated, but until recently, Twitter really did stand apart from its peers in that one way: It was the social network where people went to consume and discuss news as it was coming out. And it worked! There’s less money to be made in being the world’s biggest news feed than there is in being an addictive viral video app, but this was at least something that Twitter had that Instagram or TikTok never could. When shit was going down, the easiest way to get to the bottom of it was to have a well-curated Twitter feed.
That’s what Musk has been slowly doing away with. He hasn’t made Twitter into a competitor with one of the bigger social media apps, all of which dwarfed Twitter when it was a public company and definitely still do now that Musk has spent a year making the platform harder to use in every way imaginable. But he has changed the platform’s face in one way (other than changing the name) that’s critically important: Musk has taken the internet’s best place to get real-time information and made it into a muddle where telling left from right, let alone good information from bad, verges on impossible. That likely pleases Musk, an antagonist of the news media who has business reasons to want on-platform ‘citizen journalism‘ rather than off-platform work by professionals who may not care for him or pay him.
The effort to make links pointlessly confusing lends itself to abuse. Enterprising hucksters will post links to specific websites and intentionally misrepresent what’s on the pages connected to those links. They’ll trust that the people who see their posts won’t read on to discover the ruse. Or they’ll collect revenue-sharing checks from Musk for generating more of that sweet, sweet engagement on misleading posts.
It’s not happening in a vacuum. Stripping text out of links makes sorting through information a click harder. Other decisions of Musk’s have done much more damage, which the new damage merely builds upon. Musk’s most notable single move at Twitter was to end the company’s old blue-checkmark verification program and make those little circular status symbols available to everyone for $8 a month. Musk was just trying to make some subscription money—and I should disclose with embarrassment that he finally got my $8 a few weeks ago, when he roped off the power-user column interface once called TweetDeck. But the dilution of the checkmarks, and the boosting of posts by accounts that have its paid-for version, has made sorting through news a mess. The checkmarks used to signal an extremely broad but at least vaguely understandable notion of authenticity or affiliation with a reputable organization.
They no longer do, and during a couple of different kinds of events recently, we’ve seen how that makes Twitter worse.
One that comes to mind is a sports story. The Chicago Bears are very bad, and in September, one of their top assistant coaches resigned from the team in the middle of the season. That resignation reportedly came after a human-resources investigation, but those are all the specifics reporters know. Yet as news of the resignation filtered out, ‘verified’ aggregator accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers boosted several theories that turned out not to be true. One held that the FBI had raided the team’s practice facility. Another said that a former Bears player, who had become an FBI agent, was involved in the raid. No and no, it turned out, but the whole thing was dizzying enough that even discerning news consumers went on a roller coaster as the story slowly trickled out.
It’s not just sports. X felt close to useless during this week’s chaos in the House of Representatives. Beltway political journalists were tweeting their hearts out with incessant updates as Kevin McCarthy lost his position as speaker of the House, but those tweets didn’t show up in people’s algorithmic feeds until they were stale. The search function revealed paying subscribers’ posts before those from Capitol Hill reporters.
In this sense, Musk has cut off Twitter’s nose to spite its face. To chase subscription revenue, he’s implemented features that have made the platform infinitely less good at the thing it was always best at. Musk relies on sticks rather than carrots, threatening to make his kingdom harder to use for nonsubscribers instead of much better to use for subscribers. And by dulling the greatest edge of the site he bought, Musk hasn’t improved the experience for his biggest fans or his detractors. Left-wingers might like progressive media, and right-wingers might like conservative media. But nobody likes being lost.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/elon-musk-x-twitter-news-links-headlines-why.html
Ref: slate
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