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By all accounts, one of the great benefits of Twitter has always been real time access to information. That made it a vital platform for journalists and news outlets seeking not just a live feed for their coverage but also to build their brands as immediate sources for reporting and commentary. As political reporter Peter Hamby wrote in a 2013 paper for the Harvard Shorenstein Center, for better or worse, Twitter forever changed the news business as a result.
Now, two years since Twitter’s board first agreed to sell the company to Elon Musk, reliable information is disappearing from the site as more and more journalists and newsrooms have reduced their presence, or outright disappeared from the platform now known as X. Mediaite spoke with four journalists about what caused them to limit their use of Twitter and what their social media use looks like now.
Oliver Darcy, CNN’s senior media reporter and author of the Reliable Sources newsletter, spoke with Mediaite about both his team’s decision – and his own personal one – to completely exit the platform in July 2023.
“I just don’t know why you would want to serve as a cog in the machine of someone who is at war with you and doing everything he can to smear your profession and tarnish what you do,” he said. “So it just seemed pretty clear that Reliable Sources was no longer a good fit for X.”
Musk has become increasingly antagonistic to the media industry since taking over. His own personal disdain for the media has extended into a broader effort to discredit it; Musk and his high-profile supporters regularly post on X celebrating the decline of traffic to news sites and ratings of news networks. Those that publish stories critical of him bear the brunt of his attacks. He has also made extreme changes to the platform in an effort to reduce the reach of the traditional media, changing how links are displayed and stripping prominent outlets like The New York Times of their verified badges.
Perhaps his biggest tiff with media newsrooms came when he made changes to Twitter’s “state-affiliated” designations in April 2023. Twitter removed this label from accounts of state-run outlets, such as Russia’s RT and Iran’s PressTV, but then added them to BBC News, CBC and Radio Canada, PBS, and NPR — although those organizations are not operated by any government. Musk changed the labels multiple times before they were eventually removed, but that prompted both NPR and PBS to stop posting on their primary accounts (although several NPR affiliates and PBS programs, such as PBS NewsHour, remain active). CBC took a pause as well, and was on the butt end of a joke from Musk when it resumed posting on X.
Despite his claims to being a free speech absolutist, Twitter accepted more censorship requests under Musk than prior to his ownership. When an official X account tried to claim that the company “supports” pro-free speech organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, the non-profit came out and stated it has not received “any form of support from X whatsoever” and called the platform “a haven for disinformation and in no way an ally” to them.
All the while, Musk has sought to burnish Twitter’s bonafides as a news platform by bringing media veterans on board to post exclusive content on the platform. The results have been mixed. The signing of two of the biggest names in media – Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon – to revenue sharing deals has mostly imploded. Musk axed Lemon’s deal after an interview between the pair went awry, and Carlson has begun promoting his own website’s subscription service rather than Twitter.
It is a stark change from the Twitter that was revolutionizing the digital media landscape just a decade ago. It became conventional wisdom in the 2010s that a presence on Twitter was vital to the success of any media operation, due to the easy access to verifiable information, firsthand sources, and – perhaps, most of all — readers and audiences, in a way that was practically unmatched by any singular website or digital tool.
The present version of Twitter has become the opposite of that: prominent Twitter features — such as TweetDeck, the search bar, and direct messaging — have been restricted, the verification program has become a subscription service that any account can access, leading to a proliferation of bad information, and hateful content has reportedly spiked.
“It wasn’t perfect by any means,” Darcy said of old Twitter, “but at least there was an attempt at creating a community where there was a priority on truth stemming the flow of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Right now, the person that owns it is a prominent peddler of that kind of content.”
Rachel Chen, a Toronto-based journalist with several years’ experience in audience development, told Mediaite she “used to spend a lot of time on Twitter — I liked the feeling of being ‘the first to know’ about events and there were a lot of interesting discussions.” But she quit the platform when Musk took over.
“I studied information policy in university and I know how much it takes to run a platform,” said Chen. “The way he talked about Twitter made it clear to me he has no idea what it takes. He still doesn’t.”
Others had similar feelings about the state of the platform under Musk, who made it a priority to gut the company and significantly reduce its staff — many of whom worked in moderation or other services that made it a reliable source of news.
“I had been on Twitter in some form or another since 2012 or 2013 and I remember being really excited for all the stuff I had learned there and the people I never would’ve met otherwise,” Aria Velasquez, the founding writer of the Labor Pains newsletter, told Mediaite, “but all things must come to an end.”
While not all of Twitter’s problems began with Musk, the journalists Mediaite spoke with cited his acquisition as the turning point.
“I had started getting a little tired of Twitter already by the time Elon bought the site last year,” Velasquez said. “Then when he took over… I knew my days on that site were numbered.” She called it quits sometime in February 2023, four months after he assumed control.
Two years into Musk’s leadership, Twitter’s business and reputation is in tatters. Despite his claim to being a “free speech absolutist,” Musk has waged high-profile wars against his own critics. Musk is currently suing Media Matters for America, a liberal research group critical of the content allowed on Twitter. He has tried to bring legal action against several other critics or users he didn’t like, including the the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League, and the individual behind the @ElonJet account. As recently as January, multiple journalists and content creators have been repeatedly suspended after making posts critical of him or sharing information about his critics.
It’s not just detractors or major media outlets that have been on the receiving end of Musk’s ire. He has also beefed with Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists who he worked with to release the “Twitter Files,” dismissed Andrew Ross Sorkin’s concerns about the declining traffic publishers are receiving from the social network. Musk also claimed Kara Swisher – with whom he used to have a friendly relationship – “should take it easy on the Adderall” after she interviewed a former Twitter executive about the platform’s problems.
“I mean, in general, I think it was kind of like a Jenga puzzle, and at some point, the puzzle just collapsed,” said Darcy. “He had done one thing at a time, removing one piece at a time of what made Twitter worth spending time on. It became clear that this was going one direction. It was a one way train, and I did not want to be on the train anymore.”
“I actually think I had a fairly open mind early on, at least, when Musk expressed some interest in purchasing it,” said Darcy. “But I’m not sure I ever anticipated this… I don’t think I ever anticipated getting to the point where I’d leave the website altogether.”
Musk’s chaotic stewardship of the social media behemoth has fueled an exodus of other users. Darcy cited data from multiple research firms and public sources, reported by NBC News, that found usage of the site has declined overall every month since November 2022. “I do think a lot of people have reduced the amount of time on, or content they’re posting on, Twitter,” he said.
Some publications that left the platform said they did not face problems as a result. Six months after leaving, NPR reported that it has only lost 1% of its website’s traffic as a result.
Indeed, media analytics company Chartbeat found that Twitter accounted for just 1.1% of its clients’ referral traffic in February 2023, lower than any point in the five years prior.
Others have struggled after quitting Twitter. Frankie Huang, the co-editor of Reappropriate, an Asian-American and Pacific Islander feminist blog, told Mediaite the site suffered following its exit: “To be blunt, Reappropriate is pretty fucked without Twitter at the moment. We had relied on Twitter as a public utility and never imagined that it would fall apart in such a rapid and disastrous manner.”
A survey Reappropriate ran of its readers showed “an overwhelming majority of readers find us through Twitter, which meant we were completely reliant on Twitter functioning properly to be seen at all,” Huang said.
Other outlets that have remained on the platform have seen their referral traffic drop. Social media engagement firm NewsWhip found in September 2023 that The New York Times, which Musk has called a “mouthpiece of the state,” saw posts with links to their articles receive much lower visibility on Twitter compared to other media websites.
“If you look at everything that he’s done – and this is not even including the fact that sometimes, the site’s basic features don’t function that well anymore – I just don’t know how you can look around in that space and decide that that’s where you want to put your time and effort,” said Darcy.
In the meantime, alternatives are vying to take Twitter’s place as the premier text-based platform, with varied levels of success among journalists. Threads and BlueSky have proven the most popular, while Mastodon and Spill have pulled some popular media personalities but little mainstream traction.
“In my perfect world, the ‘Fediverse’ would kick into gear and allow people to just interact across different platforms,” Darcy said. In the absence of that infrastructure in place, Reliable Sources currently posts to Threads, Instagram, and Linkedin.
“I don’t know if there’s one platform out there that’s the ‘perfect’ platform right now,” he said. “I will say, though, our primary platform at Reliable Sources is a newsletter where we have a direct relationship with our audience, and there’s no middleman or algorithm that’s stepping in the way.”
Meta, the operator of several social media websites including Threads, has had an adversarial relationship with media as well. “I think that some of the things that are said and done are concerning, in terms of what Meta is doing,” Darcy said. “I am no stranger to criticizing Meta, or Mark Zuckerberg, or [Instagram head] Adam Mosseri. But I don’t think they’re governing their platforms in the same realm as the way Elon Musk is governing Twitter, or X.”
The other journalists that spoke to Mediaite also have given the smaller alternatives a shot. “I joined Bluesky about a month and a half ago, and so far it’s been fine. Most of the people I liked following on Twitter are on there and it’s not as crowded,” Velasquez said.
Huang, who had “completely abandoned Twitter” in March, said they “have grown somewhat fond of Bluesky, though I withhold any real optimism about it replacing Twitter for me as a distribution platform for my work and what we publish on Reappropriate.”
“I still use Instagram to connect with friends, but professionally I’m probably sticking to LinkedIn,” Chen said, because “the platform was built for that.”
Whether any alternative works out, or another Twitter is needed at all, remains one of the great quandaries for the media industry. “Regardless of any problems with the site, journalists have a very unhealthy relationship with Twitter,” Darcy said. “Everyone in the industry is, or has been for a while obsessed.”
Huang, describing Twitter currently as “a clown car on fire,” said “I do think newsrooms should still continue to use it, in the spirit of taking up some space so misinformation [doesn’t] take up all of the space.”
Rather than “helping keep the site alive,” Huang argued journalists should abandon the platform in the hopes of hastening its demise. “We should just nuke it from orbit at this point.”
“I think there is no harm in still using it professionally, if you have the capacity,” Chen said, but she “probably” won’t use it again because “there is so much noise in the world already.”
One conclusion was consistent among the journalists that spoke with Mediaite: the only way they’d consider returning is if Musk was no longer in charge. “I think as long as he’s at the top of a platform, that platform’s not going to be stable because he has proven that he does not govern in a stable way,” said Darcy.
“I never had a large audience on my personal [Twitter] account, so it’s not as though I lost a megaphone or anything,” Velasquez said. “I do miss seeing really smart people in conversation, but I don’t miss how much time I spent on that site, if that makes any sense. I’ve taken back some of my brain space.”
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