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When Twitter suddenly suspended the accounts of several prominent journalists on Thursday night – in response to a baffling claim by new owner Elon Musk that they had compromised their security – media bosses were quick to protest.
The New York Times called the suspensions “questionable”. CNN said it would “reevaluate” its relationship with Twitter. The Washington Post demanded that Twitter reinstate the account of one of its tech reporters “immediately,” noting that he had simply reported accurately about Musk. One news company, Puck, said it was suspending its paid advertising campaign on Twitter, while another, Semafor, was evaluating its own marketing push, according to a spokesperson.
But without exception, these media organizations continued to tweet at their usual pace between Thursday night and Friday, using their own official accounts to promote their latest stories.
Musk justified the suspensions by accusing reporters of publishing “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family, an apparent reference to his reports and tweets about Twitter’s decision to suspend an account, @ElonJet, which had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private jet.
The Post found no evidence that the reporters in question had shared information about Musk or his family’s location.
Early Saturday, after an informal Twitter poll by Musk, he said the suspensions would be lifted immediately for “accounts that detected my location” and the accounts of several journalists reappeared. Still, the reaction epitomized the conflicted, and seemingly codependent, relationship between media and social media.
In the 15 years since sites like Twitter and Facebook rose in popularity, mainstream media has decided to see them as both an opportunity and a threat: powerful new vectors for delivering news directly to the screens of avid readers. Publishers have invested heavily in staff whose primary role is to fine-tune and promote stories on social media; publishers reward journalists who have amassed tens of thousands of Twitter followers for the traffic they can bring to their sites.
Some managers have begun to question whether Twitter traffic is really worth it. But Friday’s modest response to a move that drew widespread criticism from free speech advocates, as well as the European Commission, the United Nations and members of Congress, suggests they won’t be letting up anytime soon.
“How [else] will they get the word out? Unfortunately, Twitter is still the only real game in town,” said Vivian Schiller, a former NPR president who also served as Twitter’s head of news in 2014. “Don’t get me wrong, Musk is an erratic hypocrite of thin skin, but it has more than a barrel for us,” she added, until another social media platform comes along to compete with her.
At least nine journalists, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell and New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, were hit with the suspensions, which the American Civil Liberties Union said were “impossible to live up to to Twitter’s free speech aspirations.”
By early Saturday, some of those accounts had returned, but others appeared to remain blocked until the offending tweet was deleted.
“I don’t know why I was suspended,” Business Insider’s Linette Lopez told The Post on Friday, “and I haven’t heard anything from Twitter.” Lopez noted that he had not written or tweeted about the controversy over Musk’s flight data, but had shared court documents that pointed to how Musk had harassed critics and disclosed personal information about them in the past. His account was still suspended early Saturday.
Free speech has been a rallying cry for Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, since he first moved earlier this year to buy Twitter and subsequently vowed to undo many of the company’s previous policies against hate speech and misinformation, rolling back. a nearly two-year ban by former President Donald Trump.
But even in the conservative-leaning media, where Musk has been roundly praised for reinstating Trump and other right-wing accounts, the suspensions were not uniformly praised.
On Friday morning, some of the hosts of Fox News’ conservative talk show “Fox & Friends” expressed bewilderment. “This is crazy,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said. “If only they were critics [Musk]he needs to explain why these people were suspended,” co-host Steve Doocy said.
Ben Shapiro, founding editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, admitted to some “schadenfreude” about reporters complaining about the move “given their enthusiasm for Twitter’s opaque censorship,” but seemed to question Musk’s argument according to which the suspended journalists had “doxed” his location. Fox News personality and radio host Dan Bongino told his show that he disapproved of censoring or suspending journalists’ accounts and said it could have the effect of giving them more attention.
Some of the strongest criticism of Musk’s decision came from an ally.
“Twitter’s old regime is governed by its own whims and prejudices and the new regime seems to have the same problem,” tweeted Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion writer. “I oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who reported on a story of public importance should be reinstated.”
Weiss is one of the writers recently tapped by Musk to lead his “Twitter Files” project, in which he has released internal Twitter documents about content moderation as part of his broader campaign to show that the former leadership of the company treated the conservative news site unfairly. sand beads
Despite Musk’s claim last month that Twitter is “by far the largest click driver on the Internet,” a recent study by social analytics firm DataReportal found that it was responsible for less than 8 percent of total references on social networks during the month of November 2021. .
Media organizations typically do not share detailed data about their web traffic. But a 2016 report using data from social analytics firm Parse.ly found that only 1.5 percent of the publisher’s traffic came from Twitter. “Twitter has outsized influence,” a Nieman Lab report concluded, “but doesn’t generate much traffic for most news organizations.”
Meanwhile, media managers have struggled to establish standards of behavior for their journalists on social media, where the temptation can be to fall into a more heated, more casual or more opinionated conversation than would be permitted in their professional writing, or tailor your stories for your particular Twitter audience.
“The really insidious part of Twitter is that it’s very easy, even for very good journalists, to confuse the reaction they’re getting on Twitter with the impact or reaction their reporting or their work is having in general,” said Joseph Kahn. , executive editor of the New York Times, in an interview with The Post in June.
Now, Twitter’s unpredictability under Musk’s ownership further complicates the equation for media bosses.
“It’s a battle between the reputational impact of supporting a volatile platform that simultaneously reinstates dangerous accounts while censoring legitimate journalists and the journalistic responsibility to remain active in countering rampant misinformation and disinformation,” said an executive at the network that spoke about the condition. of anonymity to speak frankly.
There’s precedent for quitting Twitter: Fox News silenced its official account from November 2018 until March 2020, reportedly out of concern that a photo with the address of home of host Tucker Carlson. According to metrics released by the network, it had no negative impact on Fox’s web traffic.
In mid-November, CBS News took a two-day hiatus from Twitter; one employee said the company was concerned it no longer had an official liaison to help with security issues after a significant employee exodus under Musk.
For a brief moment on Friday, it looked like one news organization was preparing a boycott of sorts, when the New York Times announced it was canceling a discussion that was scheduled to take place on Twitter’s “Spaces” that day about the best books of the year
Instead, a Times spokesman clarified that the decision was made for “technical reasons”.