News platform?

This is a depressing outline of how far Twitter/X has fallen. And it has fallen. Latest stats?  Tech Crunch notes that in the US alone usage is down 23% since it changed hands. The NYT reports that advertising on the platform was down around 60% last year.

But the piece linked to at the start of this post notes the grim knife attacks in Sydney.

It’s a bizarre paradox that the same medium that delivered the direct, material and immediate news of the tragedy to the communities of those affected by it was also the place that platformed wild disinformation campaigns that exploited the murders for what I’d describe as “carnage opportunism”. Before the final numbers of the dead were even known, online nobodies and the “influencers” who pander to them decided that the 40-year-old Queensland man simply must’ve been a Muslim terrorist by virtue … of having a beard.

And:

The only Muslims at the scene of the attack were victims of it. A refugee from Pakistan – a security guard – murdered by the killer while trying to protect others from the attack.

But untrue tweets on the “must be a Muslim” theme went viral. They’ve since been taken down, but those posters hadn’t responded to thousands of furious corrections by the time an anti-vax conspiracy theorist – presently holed up in the Russian consulate in Sydney, avoiding arrest – was on X (formerly Twitter), encouraging a new rumour that the assailant was a Jewish Australian. On the same platform, receiving far less attention was the father of a 20-year-old university student named Benjamin Cohen, that online commenters now suggested was the killer, begging for people to stop sending death threats to his son.

 

Now it’s worth pointing out that it was never wonderful, but I still remember the halcyon days when tech journalists like Leo Laporte would talk in wonder of their ever increasing number of followers as the platform took off in the late 2000s. 

There was a period when it made easy pickings for the traditional media, able to build articles from this or that story on it. And of course that hasn’t ended. But there was a more reputable angle in terms of accounts on the ground which added to the overall understanding of events as they unfolded. 

Now though with a good chunk of users detaching from it and ad sales/revenues down in half it feels like it’s hollowed out entirely. Or rather been hollowed out by the ‘vision’ of its owner, one E. Musk, whose adherence to free speech – or at last speech he deems can be free, is so evangelical (which by the by seems to be true of so many who get obsessed by that particular idea) he doesn’t mind any old nonsense spouted there – however incorrect, malign or downright vicious. 

And perhaps the key problem, one Musk completely ignored, was that when the nonsense:signal ratio is at a certain point then people won’t believe it – or rather will see how it is being manipulated. As the article notes:

Once described as “the crystal meth of newsrooms”, an algorithm that formerly favoured verified sources during breaking news events has been wilfully smashed by the conspiracy-theory-delighted billionaire who now owns it – where these days, for a buy-in, self-“verified” users from anywhere can say anything, be amplified and dominate a news conversation. Their willingness to affirm whatever their audience wishes to believe is rewarded by the platform’s new policy of paying them over certain levels of engagement. As a result, journalists reporting directly from Bondi Junction were less seen and harder to find on X than a collection of extremist grifters and their @PuffyTurd308203-style-account fanboys pushing hate.

Which is ironic because the medium term implications of that are that far from undercutting traditional media people will return to traditional media or other better regulated platforms for information.