Breaking the news james fallows twitter
The journalists who have departed from X/Twitter since owner Elon Musk corrupted his social media platform and emerged as a leader of MAGA politics have been rightly unkind in their assessments. Some examples:
• Magazine/newsletter writer James Fallows (several hundred thousand X followers): “Elon Musk has made it a vehicle of propaganda, hatred, and lies.”
• Sports book/newsletter author Jeff Pearlman (85,000 followers): “Uniquely ugly and gross and cruel … an unambiguously anti-truth platform.”
• The Guardian (a whole news organization): “X is a toxic media platform.”
All true. But a question remains: Why aren’t more journalists and newsrooms doing this? Because the majority aren’t. It essentially comes down to how one weighs the value of a righteous stance against a lot of practical considerations that make remaining on X logical.
Some journalist dissatisfaction with X predates Musk’s purchase in 2022. One journalist wrote that she tried to tough it out “while Twitter’s endemic racist, sexist and transphobic harassment problems grew increasingly more sophisticated and organized.” She signed out in 2017.
Under Musk, X has gotten worse. After he eviscerated content moderation, X now welcomes and amplifies political and demographic hatred, along with blatant disinformation, a lot of it pumped by Musk himself. It has restored users banned by previous ownership, and the algorithm downplays progressive viewpoints. Musk was clearly insincere, if not lying, when he said in April 2022: “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
All of this, along with Musk going more public as a funder and adviser of Donald Trump, has prompted a notable exodus of individuals, including some journalists, to other social media sites such as Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky, which I joined last week while still staying on X*.
X has lost an average of 14% of its daily users every mont BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. You may know Twitter is under new management. NEWS REPORT Employees have until 5 p.m. today to commit to extremely hardcore work or leave the company. BROOKE GLADSTONE While US Twitter users are dazed and confused. Bigger things are at stake beyond our shores. AVI ASHER-SCHAPIRO Some sort of intense sense of arrogance. Brashness. Yeah. Might lend itself to bullheaded li pushing to get your rocket in the air. But the priority of building a social space requires engineering for the most vulnerable among us. BROOKE GLADSTONE Plus, with jitters swirling around the Twitterverse, some have set off in search of smaller, more peaceful corners of the Internet. CLIVE THOMPSON They're kind of like, look, guys, we had this kind of quiet space that was working really well for us. And now there's a ton of new people running around with very different cultural assumptions. BROOKE GLADSTONE It's all coming up after this. [END OF BILLBOARD] BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced his third run for the presidency at Mar a Lago in what he'd have called a low energy hour if he hadn't been delivering it. DONALD TRUMP Our country is being destroyed before your very eyes. BROOKE GLADSTONE This on the heels of a week long defenestration of MAGAism and its leader by the press. 14 candidates endorsed by Trump, who once said that with him in charge would all get tired of winning – lost. Leading to the best midterm result for a president in decades. Since then, the pundits have been asking. [CLIP MONTAGE] NEWS REPORT Is Trumpism over? I mean, the donors are running away. The Murdoch media are moving away. NEWS REPORT Donald Trump's moment has come and gone. That window is closed. NEWS REPORT To mark the fifth anniversary of the Lowy Institute’s blog, The Interpreter, please join us for a conversation with James Fallows, drawing on his experience as a journalist and media critic to examine the role of old and new media in politics. This discussion takes place in a year of leadership change in two countries where James has extensive reporting experience: China and the United States. Interpreter editor Sam Roggeveen, moderating this session, will talk with James about the ways traditional media, blogs and social media have changed politics in both the US and China, and what this says about the future of each. There will be plenty of time for audience questions. James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. In recent years, he has reported extensively from China and his latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. He is also the author of Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, and is chair in US media at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney. Fallows' latest piece on Substack is prompted by Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter and successive moves that "seemed childish, willful, heartless and destructive, and seemed to reveal how little he grasps the difference between running a media organization and running an electric-car or rocket-ship firm. It’s like a rich football fan buying an NFL team and imagining that he can name draft picks and call plays." So, Fallows has lost hope in Twitter, which he has valued as "a source of information and . . . connections you might not have developed in other ways, a real-time sensory network for breaking news. . . . I’ve gained much, much more from Twitter—in connections, suggestions, insights—than I’ve lost, via friction or frittering. This is what’s going away."Lowy Lecture Series - In conversation with James Fallows: Political media, old and new
Fallows isn't sure when or why that will happen: "I think most will try to hang on, until the water backing up behind the dam becomes too deep. Will that moment come because of trolling? More vitriol and hate speech? Reputational queasiness about using this platform and being associated with Musk? I don’t know. When it happens, there will be a range of new habitats." He names several, and links to another list, "but there won’t be any one convenient place. If there were, people would already have moved."
Fallows concludes, "for the media, the challenge is beginning the slow, hard work of creating something different and new. If there were 'an' answer to this problem, someone would already have