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People have been running social platforms and media companies for literal decades, after all, all while Musk was busy with cars and spaceships and whatnot. A fair number of lessons have been learned! But Musk — so resolutely convinced of his own genius — has dedicated himself to making old mistakes new again, compressing a lifetime of bad ideas into six short months.1 It’s his most reliable pattern: announce a crazy new policy, preferably on a weekend; face huge blowback from users; reverse the policy, claim you were misinterpreted all along or just pretend it never happened.

So when I saw this tweet on Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023

Since embeds of his new longer-than-280-characters tweets don’t show the full text, here’s what it says:

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.

Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.

Fiiiiiiiiiinally, Elon turns his attention to micropayments. (Pretty sure this is in the Book of Revelation somewhere.)

The idea of news publishers charging readers by the article is not a new one. At least once an hour, someone tweets about “why hasn’t anyone figured out how to let me buy one article????” Literally dozens of micropayments-for-news startups have come and gone; dozens of publishers have run tests of various models; none have gained much traction.

Even today, well into the 2020s, you can find people saying the dream is an “iTunes for news” that — as the iTunes Store did 20 years ago — allows you to buy a single song (an article) rather than the full album (a subscription). (They say this despite the fact that approximately zero people still buy MP3s that way; instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Apple.)

I’ve long been a micropayments skeptic. Not because I have any philosophical issue with the idea; I’m all for publishers making money and readers consuming news. My skepticism is driven by it being a strategy that sounds appealing but works poorly in practice. Others have written about the problems with micropayments at great length, but here are, to my mind, the most significant:

Friction at the story level.

What do people do when they hit a news site’s paywall? We have some data on that question, from a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey last fall. They asked American adults: “Suppose you were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it. Which ONE of the following would you be most likely to do?”

48% said they would “try to access the information elsewhere for free from a different news outlet.” 28% would “move on to something else or to a different news story.” 7% would “try to find information about the news story on social media.” 4% would “sign up for a free trial if available.” 3% would try to “get the story through friends or family who already have access.”

A measly 1% would “pay for access to the story or outlet.”

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person faced with the need to pay a news site money will say “no, thank you.” You can view that as an artifact of subscription models, or you can view it as evidence of how transient most news stories are in people’s information lives. It’s hard to evaluate how much an individual article is “worth” before you’ve actually consumed it — and there is always free competition available, either on the same topic or in the broader universe of “things to click on in my feed.”

Friction at the payment level.

If an individual publisher sets up their own micropayments system, getting money will require readers setting up an account, attaching a credit card, and all the usual stuff that moving money online requires. Not many people will do that to read a single news story.

So maybe they sign on to one of the many micropayment startups that want to create an industry-wide network of news sites using a common payment platform — either as part of a pan-publisher subscription or on a pay-per-article basis. Unfortunately, none of them have the scale to be appealing or the appeal to build scale. (“Just sign up with your NewzBux account!” isn’t much of a pitch to your readers if they’ve never heard of NewzBux, or InfoCents, or FactCoins, or whatever.) And the companies that might be able to start with scale (Google, Facebook) are not ones that publishers trust with their money. And whoever owns the pipes, they’ll want their 30% cut.

Most paywalls aren’t that hard.

In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in. The number of completely paywalled sites is low and typically either hyperlocal (a county-seat weekly with no competition) or high-end (think The Information or Politico Pro). Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.

No one agrees on what micropayments are.

Is a micropayment 10 cents for one article? That was the number Elon Musk was thinking about in this video from November, when he complained that he should be able to pay 10 cents to read an especially good Philadelphia Inquirer story despite not living in Philadelphia.

.@elonmusk describes the issue of reading articles with paywalls. In clips never shown before in our interview he alludes to the value of what Twitter can bring. He also talks about how the media wants to own their subscribers. @kgee @EliBurton_ @klwtts pic.twitter.com/WsA2lUHo0S

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) November 1, 2022

If there is a sustainable price for journalism, it isn’t 10 cents an article. A large scale data analysis from Medill found that digital news subscribers don’t even visit those news sites on most days. For small local news sites, the typical subscriber visits once every three days. At larger sites, it’s once every five days. Those visits can include consuming multiple articles, of course, but the point is 10 cents an article would be a radical price reduction for most subscribers — and thus a radical revenue reduction for most publishers. Price points will have to be higher — and thus less appealing to fly-by readers.

Publishers don’t want to cannibalize subscribers.

It’s not at all unusual for a business to insist on their product being purchased in a particular quantity. Try to go to the grocery store and buy one peanut M&M, or one tablespoon of ice cream, or a single Corn Flake. They’ll look at you funny, because the businesses that manufacture those consumer goods have been structured around selling bags, pints, and boxes of them, respectively. Go ask the people at Tesla if you can buy a Roadster that’s only for the weekends — at 2/7ths of the price. The economics of information goods (like news) aren’t identical to those of physical goods, but they both require sustainable business models, and for most quality news sites, that requires paid subscriptions.

And that’s the root problem, from publishers’ point of view: If you sell subscriptions for $15 a month, but you sell individual articles at 15 cents each, you’re telling any subscriber who reads less than 100 articles a month they’re an idiot and should give you less money. There aren’t enough payment-willing fly-by customers to make up the difference for even a few lost subscribers. You’re encouraging your best customers to think of you as an occasional treat rather than a service you pay for — and to pause before every headline they click to estimate its worth in cash. It shouldn’t be surprising than “we’ll charge you $10 a month until you tell us to stop” is more appealing than “we’ll charge you 10 cents now and maybe you’ll come back again someday.”

As Tony Haile once smartly put it, news subscriptions are like gym memberships. Imagine a gym that charges $50 a month for a membership — but also lets anyone pop in for a single workout for two bucks. Why would anyone pay for a membership again? “If you would take the micropayments version of a gym membership, it would be like, ‘I can turn up and I can pay a couple of quid, and I can go into the gym whenever I want to use it.’ No gym works like that.”

All that said — these problems are not insurmountable. Smart people might come up with solutions, even if they haven’t so far. Indeed, I’ve long believed that if anyone could create a micropayment system for news that worked, there were only two real possibilities: Apple and Twitter.

With iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Apple controls the devices that most paying digital news consumers use. They have hundreds of millions of users’ credit cards already on file and attached to your identity. And with Apple Pay, they have a nearly frictionless payment platform that has already been integrated into countless apps and websites. If they decided to offer a “Read With Apple Pay” button for news sites, the technical problems of micropayments would mostly go away. (Along with 30% of publishers’ revenue, no doubt.) And Apple News+ is the closest thing to an all=news subscription that currently exists.2

Twitter, meanwhile, is the center of the digital news universe. There is no place online with more news-curious users clicking links to new-to-them news sites. And it showed interest in the subject, buying Tony Haile’s Scroll and integrating its network of ad-free news sites into Twitter Blue and teasing some sort of paywall integration on the way.

But that was the old Twitter. One of Musk’s first decisions after taking charge was killing off the remnants of Scroll — the closest thing to a foundation for a pan-publisher revenue model anyone had.

Unless you are one of the few Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter doesn’t have your credit card number. It has no ready payment platform for publishers to integrate into their sites. Twitter would likely only be interested in a payment system that goes through Twitter, not via links that go to a publisher site from Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

But let’s be honest: The biggest problem is Elon. What mainstream publisher would trust Elon Musk with their money right now? The guy who refuses to pay the rent on his corporate HQ? The guy who has spent the past six months dumping on the media, banning reporters, declaring their work a “relentless hatestream” from “media puppet-masters” that you “cannot rely on…for truth“? This is the guy who says he has a “major win-win” for publishers? The same guy that complains “media is a click-machine, not a truth-machine” thinks the answer is tempting people to pay with a single headline?

(Not to mention that Musk has no deadline cred remaining, and saying that micropayments will “roll out” later this month could mean this summer, late 2024, or never.)

Maybe someone will figure out micropayments for news someday. I think it’s unlikely at scale — but I could be wrong! But I am quite confident the man who has spent the past half-year destroying the news media’s favorite online space won’t be the one to do it.

1. I believe it was Techdirt’s Mike Masnick I first saw using this metaphor for Musk, specifically around content moderation.
2. Pro tip: Apple News+ now includes, along with roughly all the magazines, The Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, and the metro dailies in Charlotte, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, plus a few more. If you run into a random local-news paywall, there’s a pretty decent chance that searching for the headline in Apple News might find it. It’s now a much better product for newspapers than it was at launch.

This doesn’t exactly mean that NPR’s 50 official Twitter accounts — @NPR, @allsongs, @altlatino, @jazznight, @LouderThanARiot, @microface, @morningedition, @nprhelp, @npr_ed, @npralltech, @npraskmeanother, @npratc, @nprbooks, @nprbusiness, @nprchives, @nprclassical, @nprcodeswitch, @nprdesign, @nprembedded, @nprextra, @nprfood, @nprgoatsandsoda, @nprhealth, @nprinterns, @nprinvisibilia, @NPRItsBeenAMin, @nprjobs, @nprlifekit, @nprmusic, @nprone, @nproye, @nprpolitics, @nprscience, @nprshortwave, @nprstations, @nprtechteam, @nprtraining, @nprviz, @nprweekend, @nprwest, @nprworld, @pchh, @planetmoney, @podcastsNPR, @roughly, @sourceoftheweek, @tedradiohour, @throughlinenpr, @UpFirst, @waitwait — are leaving-leaving Twitter, and the company has been careful not to use those words. The accounts — by my count have a combined 17,665,607 followers; NPR’s flagship account alone has 8.8 million — haven’t been deleted. We can keep arguing about whether Twitter actually drives traffic1, but a multi-million-person following is definitely doing something positive for your brand, and it’s taken years to build. NPR CEO John Lansing was careful not to rule out a return:

In a BBC interview posted online Wednesday, Musk suggested he may further change the label to “publicly funded.” His words did not sway NPR’s decision makers. Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform.

“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he says. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

In the meantime, NPR’s accounts have a “two-week grace period” to “revise their social media strategies.” On Thursday, some of the accounts tweeted infographics about non-Twitter places to find them. Others just aren’t tweeting.

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities. There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content.
See full statement below: pic.twitter.com/VPDXy7lWw7

— Isabel Lara (@isalara) April 12, 2023

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

Some of NPR’s Twitter accounts already hadn’t tweeted in weeks (@AltLatino) or months (@PodcastsNPR, @nprhelp) or years (@MicroFace, @nprchives).

While there’s been plenty of public cheering for NPR’s move, it’s unclear how many other media organizations will follow suit, especially without a fairly direct push. PBS, for instance, hasn’t tweeted since April 8, but its sub-accounts, like @NewsHour, remain active.

1. For Nieman Lab, it definitely does.

The changes coincide with Twitter officially shutting down its free API, and also with Twitter inaccurately labeling NPR as “state-affiliated media” (a label also given to propaganda outlets like Russian broadcaster RT and China’s People’s Daily newspaper).

On Thursday, Twitter made it impossible to embed tweets in Substack posts. Paste a Twitter link in a Substack post and it simply doesn’t work, giving you this pop-up message:

Team is working on it. We're not the only ones experiencing problems with the Twitter API today.

— Chris Best (@cjgbest) April 6, 2023

Twitter is also not allowing users to take actions on tweets that contain substack.com links — as of Friday morning you can’t like, reply to, or retweet them. (Quote-tweeting still seems to work.)

oh wonderful — I see Elon has made it impossible to RT, reply, or like tweets containing a link to a Substack article. What's next, a SpaceX launch site right outside my condo?

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2023

The block on RTs/likes/replies also doesn’t appear to apply to tweets that include Substack sites with custom domains:

Okay, seems like the custom domains are still exempt from this goofy change in Twitter's end. (For now.)

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) April 7, 2023

A current workaround is using a link shortener so “substack.com” doesn’t appear in the link you’re sharing.

Looks like you can get around twitter’s apparent ban on substack links by just using a URL shortener lol https://t.co/Bt7HveFV1I

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) April 7, 2023

Substack’s statement:

Statement from the founders of Substack on Twitter’s decision to restrict engagement with Substack content pic.twitter.com/HbQJk5v0jn

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) April 7, 2023

Twitter’s move against Substack isn’t totally unprecedented; Instagram and Twitter squabbled in pre-Musk times, though more recently the relationship appears to have mended.

1. Substack, at least until recently, was also burning money. The Information, referring to recent SEC filings, reported Friday that the company “Substack’s expenses skyrocketed as a result of its expansion in 2021, causing enormous losses,” and that year “Substack reported negative revenue, which is unusual.” You can look at the SEC filings here.

NPR has not tweeted since Twitter slapped a “US state-affiliated media” label on its main account on Wednesday, a designation that lumps the news org in with propaganda outlets like Russian broadcaster RT and China’s People’s Daily newspaper. And it doesn’t plan to until the label is removed.

The @NPR account — which has more than 8.8 million followers — has an updated bio: “You can find us every other place you read the news.” The header image now includes the words: “Always free and independent. Always at NPR.org.”

The changes were made on Thursday, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara confirmed.

“We stopped tweeting from the main @NPR account after they attached that false label to it because each tweet we publish would carry it,” Lara said. “We have paused tweeting from that account until we hear back from Twitter on this. We’ve continued tweeting from other accounts that aren’t mislabeled.”

Abstaining from Twitter is less of a hardship than Twitter owner Elon Musk might like to think. Twitter doesn’t drive much traffic for most news publishers, even though it’s a platform many journalists can’t seem to quit. (And that’s before the “state-affiliated” label downranks your content.)

Also on Thursday, Musk told an NPR reporter that the designation may have been a mistake.

“Well, then we should fix it,” Musk wrote in an email to tech reporter Bobby Allyn, who had pointed out government aid accounts for roughly 1% of NPR’s finances.

Allyn said he “provided Musk publicly available documentation of the network’s finances showing that nearly 40% of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships and 31% from fees for programming paid by local public radio stations.”

Twitter defines “state-affiliated” publishers as ones where the government “exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

Until Wednesday, Twitter’s own policy on the “state-affiliated” label specifically noted that “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the United States, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.” Twitter removed the reference to NPR after giving its account the “state-affiliated” label.

Maybe you could categorize them all by their financial impact — from low (asking all Twitter engineers to print out their code for his personal inspection) to medium (launching a “verification” system that immediately exploded into market-moving chaos) to high (unbanning enough Nazis to drive away most of your biggest advertisers).

Maybe you’d group them by their degree of self-humiliation, from high (“Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April”) to extreme (yelling “I’m rich, bitch!” while being booed off a San Francisco stage) to otherworldly (accusing an employee with muscular dystrophy of faking his disability).

Or maybe you’d order them by the extent of disrespect they show Twitter’s users. Changing Twitter’s logo to the doge Shiba Inu isn’t offensive per se, but it is a persistent reminder that Musk considers the site his personal playground, not anything larger or more important to the world.

The question awaits its own Linnaeus. But before any more ecosystems of shame are discovered, let’s remember one in particular that hasn’t gotten enough attention. That would be Musk’s tossed-off decision to kill off a huge chunk of ongoing research into the internet and how we all interact on it. That includes work by everyone from academics to hobbyists, businesses to journalists. Elon Musk decided to kill it, and soon it will all be dead.

It was September 2006 — only six months into its existence — when Twitter launched the first version of its API. It was free to use and turned Twitter from a website you visited into a data source for an entire ecosystem of apps, tools, art projects, and experiments. Over time, the API’s capabilities expanded and a few paid products were added for those with specific needs. But for the vast majority of cases, the Twitter API was a free window into what people were talking about in the internet’s public square.

That made it catnip for researchers. While Facebook was a much larger and more consequential social network, it was purposefully opaque, limiting outsiders’ view into its inner workings. Twitter’s generous API, meanwhile, made it the most popular choice for academics researching social media and anyone else wanting to understand online discourse. There’ve been a few hiccups along the way, of course, but overall it worked well for a decade and a half. “Twitter is the most (over-)studied social media platform precisely because it offers relatively open data access,” George Washington University’s Rebekah Tromble wrote two years ago.

So of course Elon decided to kill it. In February, desperate for anything that smells like revenue, Twitter announced that it would be eliminating free API access to tweets.1 Instead, it would offer an API level much worse than what was free before at the price of $100/month. (The old free plan for academics allowed access to 100 million tweets per month. The new $100 plan allows access to just 10,000.) To do any meaningful level of research, you’d need to move up to one of their enterprise API plans, which start at $42,000/month. (That’s right, they start there — and go up to $210,000/month.) Been working on a longitudinal research project for five years? Sorry, your data’s about to be shut off.

Because this is Elon’s Twitter, the switch to this new regime has been delayed repeatedly.2 But final pricing details were released last week, and they’re as bad as feared. On Monday, a group of researchers called the Coalition for Independent Technology Research released an open letter decrying the change, saying they “will devastate public interest research” and break more than 300 ongoing research projects that they know of. “Twitter must be held accountable to the public it impacts,” the coalition writes. “And if Twitter is to be held accountable, independent research must continue.” The new rules are set to take effect by the end of the month.

I’m sure there are a few corporations who’ll be willing to pay these outrageous sums, but a Ph.D. student isn’t going to find a spare $42,000 in their couch cushions. The research just won’t get done, and we’ll all be a little bit dumber.

This is the part of the piece where I’d like to list an idea or two for how you could try to help fix this situation. (“Write your member of Congress!”) But the reality here is that the only path to change runs through one man. A man who has spent the past year setting his reputation on fire, reply-guying his way into a laughingstock. One of the richest human beings in the history of the species is unilaterally killing off the work of thousands of researchers, all to chase a buck he won’t end up getting. We may need a new category in the taxonomy.

Here’s the Coalition for Independent Technology Research’s letter.

April 3, 2023

On March 29, after weeks of delays and uncertainty, Twitter’s Developer team announced new pricing tiers for access to the Twitter API that will devastate public interest research.

Over the past decade, researchers across the world have relied on Twitter’s API to study the impact of social media on democracy, the role of social media in strengthening public health, how social media has been used to amplify marginalized voices, and much more. With free API access, researchers could systematically and reliably collect public tweets posted by public figures, gather information about network dynamics, investigate bots and other inauthentic activity, or analyze conversations around specific topics. The knowledge from this research has been shared with journalists, policymakers, and the public, enhancing understanding of issues vital to society.

Free API access also allowed researchers to build public tools like Botometer and Hoaxy that detect social bots and visualize the spread of misinformation. Thousands of users, journalists, and public servants have used these tools in their daily lives and work.

Twitter’s new system to monetize and dramatically restrict access to its API will render this research and development impossible. Unless they can pay, researchers will not be able to collect any tweets at all. The Basic tier costs $100 per month but allows researchers to collect only 10,000 tweets per month — a mere 0.3% of what could previously be collected for free in one day. The Enterprise tier, which ranges from $42,000 to $210,000 per month, is unaffordable for researchers.

Yet even these outrageously expensive Enterprise tiers provide inadequate access for systematic, large-scale research into the impact of Twitter on society. Previously, Twitter provided researchers with low-cost access to its Decahose, a real-time sample of 10% of all tweets. As of March 2023, that equated to roughly a billion tweets per month. The most expensive Enterprise tier would cut that by 80% at about 400 times the price.

In response to a questionnaire fielded by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, public interest researchers listed over 250 projects that would be jeopardized by ending free and low-cost API access, including research into the spread of harmful content, (dis)information flows, crisis informatics, news consumption, public health, elections, and political behavior. Under the new pricing plans, studying the communications and interactions of even a small population — such as the 535 Members of the U.S. Congress or the 705 Members of the European Parliament — will be unfeasible. The new pricing plans will also end at least 76 long-term efforts, including dashboards, tools, or code packages that support other researchers, journalists, first-responders, educators, and Twitter users.

Though Twitter’s Developer team claimed that they “are looking at new ways to continue serving” academia, they provided no specifics—merely stating that “in the meantime” academic researchers could make use of the pricing plans described above.

What precisely is Twitter “looking into” for academia? How long might academics have to wait for these new options to appear? And what are Twitter’s plans for non-academic public interest researchers, including civil society organizations serving communities around the globe?

Twitter has not answered any of these questions. Indeed, to date, the company has failed to engage with the research community in any meaningful way. Twitter has had mechanisms for dialogue with our community readily available — including via the European Digital Media Observatory, shared working groups tied to the European Union’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, and the company’s own Academic Research Advisory Board. Twitter has not used any of these channels, rolling out these changes without substantive input from public interest researchers whose work will be shut down.

The Coalition for Independent Technology Research will continue to support the research community in the face of these challenges. To date, we have provided mutual aid to nearly 50 projects, focusing in particular on assisting under-resourced and junior researchers. We have supported the National German Library’s German-language Twitter archive efforts, and two groups associated with the Coalition have offered data storage support for researchers.

Our mutual aid efforts are ongoing and will persist as long as possible. Mutual aid is available to all researchers across academia, journalism, and civil society — members and non-members alike. (To request mutual aid or contribute to these efforts, please complete the mutual aid section of this form.)

Going forward, the Coalition will also help organize researchers who wish to explore alternative data-collection and data-sharing mechanisms. And we will continue our discussions with policymakers and regulators around the world.

Twitter must be held accountable to the public it impacts. And if Twitter is to be held accountable, independent research must continue.

That is why — no matter what barriers technology companies erect to public understanding of their services — the Coalition for Independent Technology Research will advance, defend, and work to sustain the right to ethically study the impacts of technology on society.

The Coalition for Independent Technology Research

Executive Board:
Rebekah Tromble
Alex Abdo
Susan Benesch
Brandi Geurkink
Dave Karpf
David Lazer
Nathalie Maréchal
Nathan Matias
James Mickens

Mutual Aid Committee:
Megan Brown
Josephine Lukito
Kai-Cheng Yang

1. After criticism, Twitter announced there would be a free API product, but it’s write-only — meaning it can post tweets but not read existing ones. That makes it useless for research purposes.
2. It was supposed to take effect one week after the announcement. We’re now looking at about three months. Thanks for being unable to meet deadlines, Elon, I guess?

Social media platforms present a conundrum for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists rely on social media for so many helpful aspects of their jobs. To name just a few: to connect with potential sources, to interact with audiences, to promote their work, and to find solidarity among fellow journalists.

On the other hand, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook present a dizzying array of problems, from the growing variety and intensity of online harassment — hostility, trolling, doxing, etc. — that especially targets women and journalists of color, to the constant threat that one wrong tweet might incite a mob or cost a journalist their job.

It’s important to ask: What are newsroom leaders doing to support and protect their journalists facing the increasing risks and challenges of social media?

A new study in Digital Journalism examines this question. Its author, Jacob L. Nelson, conducted in-depth interviews with 37 U.S.-based reporters, editors, publishers, freelancers, and social media/audience engagement managers, covering current and former employees at a wide array of outlets (local and national, for-profit and nonprofit, legacy media and digital media). Interviews focused on journalists’ experiences with and thoughts about their newsroom’s social media policies. Women and journalists of color made up a large share of interviewees because such journalists are more likely to encounter online harassment.

So, what did the journalists interviewed say about the value of social media policies and their organizations’ support mechanisms? The research article’s title provides a hint: “Worse than the harassment itself.”

“I find that although journalists face both external and internal pressure to devote considerable time and effort to social media platforms — primarily Twitter — they encounter little in the way of guidance or support when it comes to navigating the dangers inherent within those platforms,” Nelson writes. “On the contrary, journalists feel newsroom social media policies tend to make matters worse, by offering difficult to follow guidelines focused primarily on maintaining an ‘objective’ perception of the organization among the public rather than on protecting journalists from the harassment that many will inevitably receive.”

Journalists interviewed for this study seemed to be “one step ahead of their newsroom managers,” argued Nelson (who, full disclosure, does collaborative research with Seth, though not on this project). The journalists realized, in a way their bosses didn’t, that “the very behavior that social media most encourages and rewards — being active and personal — is the same kind of behavior that brings journalists their biggest frustrations.”

That is, journalists understood that being authentic and acting like a “real” person on social media was more likely to bring more professional opportunities and improved interactions with the public. Sounds good, right? But, at the same time, such an approach to social media, journalists realized, also made them more vulnerable to recurring personal attacks from harassers, and it increased the odds that they would inadvertently say something that would get them accused of bias and thus punished by their managers for failing to abide by strict policies on neutrality.

The overall result is that journalists feel they are walking what Nelson has elsewhere called a “Twitter tightrope”: “They spend a great deal of time engaging with the public on social media platforms, while constantly wondering if and when that engagement will come at their professional peril.” So, what do journalists want? For their managers to do more to help them mitigate the challenges and risks endemic to this work. (Indeed, as other research has found recently, news organizations are doing little to protect their journalists from online harassment.)

The “fluidity” of the social media audience — its unpredictability, particularly when some posts “go viral” and spread widely while others get little attention — was a key part of journalists’ frustrations with their managers.

“Traditional journalistic values privilege audience perceptions of professionalism, independence, and neutrality,” Nelson writes, “each of which is easier to predict when focused on a fixed audience for a specific news outlet than for the much larger, more amorphous audiences found on social media platforms.”

On top of that, some of the study’s interviewees questioned whether audiences were really so firmly committed to old-school ideas about total objectivity and neutrality, “which many journalists see not only as impossible aspirations on their own, but also as wholly inconsistent with the performed authenticity privileged by social media.” Future research could help untangle this puzzle. Because while research suggests that people generally want journalists to present the news without a point of view, it’s still unclear whether rules and expectations apply the same to social media postings as they might, say, for news articles on legacy platforms.

As Nelson writes, “Perhaps news audiences hold seemingly contradictory preferences, where they value both accurate, opinion-free news stories, as well as the political opinions of the journalists behind them. If this is indeed the case, then it might be in newsroom managers’ best interests to give the public a bit more credit when deciding what those audiences want not only from journalism, but from journalists as well.”

Research roundup

“The place of media organizations in the drive for post-pandemic news literacy.” By Fran Yeoman and Kate Morris, in Journalism Practice. How involved should news organizations be in news literacy efforts? And what are the benefits and drawbacks of their involvement? Those have been crucial questions as educators, news industry leaders, nonprofits and governments have implemented news literacy programs over the past decade. Through these programs, journalists can provide distinct insight into the news production process and humanize their work for people. But journalists’ involvement also risks these programs becoming little more than PR disguised as education.

Yeoman and Morris bring an education lens to this question by looking at five news literacy initiatives for children in the U.K. that incorporate news organizations in some form. They observed lessons and interviewed program leaders and the teachers in whose classrooms they ran. They found that there was some element of “pedagogical public relations” throughout the programs, as their leaders expressed desires to revitalize news by capturing young audiences and frequently contrasted the work of trained professional journalists with other forms of news in their sessions.

The program leaders were wary of the perception of this self-interested motive and were careful not to promote their own news organizations specifically. But they still promoted a largely uncritical view of the work of professional journalists. Yeoman and Morris instead advocated a news literacy approach of “informed skepticism” as part of a national curriculum. Journalists should have a role in such programs, they argued, but we need to be cognizant of news organizations’ self-promotional motivations lest we turn news literacy programs into little more than advertisements for traditional news media.

“How propaganda works in the digital era: Soft news as a gateway.” By Yuner Zhu and King-wa Fu, in Digital Journalism. Zhu and Fu’s study is organized around a fascinating conundrum: If we’re in a high-choice media environment in which a more trusted (or at least more entertaining) news source is a tap away, how is authoritarian propaganda still effective? Zhu and Fu note in particular the online success of People’s Daily and CCTV News, China’s premier Communist Party news sources, which each have more than 100 million followers on Sina Weibo (China’s dominant social media platform), garnering unprecedented popularity in an environment where we might think consumer choice might leave them behind.

The authors were especially interested in whether soft news plays a role in maintaining propaganda’s popularity. Does soft news offer an escape to avoid propaganda, or help capture an entertainment-seeking audience to increase the reach and palatability of propaganda? They tested their hypothesis with 5.7 million Sina Weibo posts over seven years from 103 Chinese newspapers.

The answer, in short, was that yes, soft news does serve as an effective gateway to authoritarian propaganda. More than half (58%) of the news that party daily newspapers published on Sina Weibo was soft news — less than than their non-party counterparts, but enough to have a measurable effect on the popularity of propaganda news (in this study, news about Chinese premier Xi Jinping). An increase in the popularity of soft news one month led to a significant increase in the popularity of propaganda in the next. (And notably, that effect didn’t occur in the reverse.)

There were limits to this strategy — softening the propaganda stories themselves with things like videos actually undermined their effectiveness. But on the whole, the authors conclude, “These batches of human-interest content are devoid of propaganda in text yet are instrumental to propaganda in effect,” as party media uses infotainment to lure in an otherwise politically uninterested audience.

“Now hiring social media editors.” By Tai Neilson, Timothy A. Gibson, and Kara Ortiga, in Journalism Studies. The notion that the boundaries are blurring between news and marketing within news organizations — and even within journalists’ own jobs — is hardly news to anyone at this point. Yet few feel the tension between these two realms quite as acutely as social media editors. It’s not clear there’s much difference on social media between publishing news and promoting it, and social media editors are staking out a home in the newsroom on that fault line.

Neilson and his co-authors explored that defining tension of the work of social media editors by looking at 291 American journalism job postings for social media editors (as well as engagement editors, community managers, audience strategists, and other similar titles). They also interviewed 11 social media editors working at American news organizations.

Among the job postings, they found an interesting dichotomy. Job postings rarely explicitly mentioned marketing as a desire skill or part of the job — rather, journalism experience was the top form of experience sought, almost nine times more than marketing experience. But social media editors’ primary tasks, such as analyzing audience data and helping with audience growth, “could only be classified as marketing.” Those jobs, the authors concluded, were being publicly framed as news jobs, but were in fact more commercially oriented jobs in practice.

In the interviews, though, the authors noted that editors didn’t find many of these day-to-day audience (and metrics) monitoring tasks rewarding. Instead, they were working to redefine their own roles as being oriented around newsroom strategy and decision-making, using their data analysis skills as an attempted avenue into more active newsroom leadership. The boundaries between editorial and marketing work for social media editors, the authors conclude, have not so much been blurred as simply redrawn to include marketing functions as central — and as a potential path to a more managerial role.

Information flows from local to national: Evidence from 21 major U.S. cities. By Lei Guo and Yiyan Zhang, in Journalism. It’s become a truism that news, especially in the U.S., has become increasingly national as local journalism has been hollowed out and political dynamics have pushed most debates to the national level. The national media’s preeminence over local media in determining what issues get covered has been demonstrated for decades. But Guo and Zhang’s study tests that notion on local media’s turf, with coverage of urban issues.

Using an automated analysis of thousands of news articles from 21 of the largest cities in the U.S., Guo and Zhang measured coverage over time of 16 locally based issues ranging from taxes to the environment to religion and morality. They found that in only three cities the local media predominantly led the national media in covering these urban issues — Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. (In about half the cities, there was no significant relationship between local and national coverage.) Across all cities, local media tended to lead on taxes, politics, and media and the internet, and national media led on gun control and crime.

Larger cities were not more likely than smaller ones to lead the national media in coverage of urban issues. Instead, cities’ GDP and number of local news organizations were the strongest factors in predicting whether a city’s local media would lead national media. “Affluent cities with more journalistic resources are more likely to control the information flows,” the authors concluded. This leads to more power for those cities to control their images while leaving less affluent cities even more marginalized.

The push to reinvigorate local news, they said, should center more on those less affluent (and therefore less powerful) cities, though of course their relative lack of wealth makes it more difficult for them to support new or expanded local news initiatives.

“‘Voices from the island’: Informational annexation of Crimea and transformations of journalistic practices.” By Ksenia Ermoshina, in Journalism. / “‘Keeping an eye on the other side’: RT, Sputnik, and their peculiar appeal in democratic societies.” By Charlotte Wagnsson, Torsten Blad, and Aiden Hoyle, in The International Journal of Press/Politics. The power of Russian media has been widely observed, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began last year. But two notable recent studies have given us insight into Russia’s media influence through some less-understood avenues. The first of those studies, by Ksenia Ermoshina, examines the process by which Russia asserted its dominance in the media sphere after it began occupying the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.

Along with a year of fieldwork in Crimea, Ermoshina interviewed 45 Crimean journalists, NGO workers, information security experts, and others. She found that while they all engaged in individual strategies to adapt to Russian rule, those strategies are best understood against the background of infrastructural changes — the ownership of cables and cell towers, and the quality of internet connections. She coins the term “informational annexation” to refer to the process of controlling access and circulation of information that occurred.

While policing content was certainly involved in Russia’s information control strategy, Ermoshina draws attention to the structural elements involved, like choking off internet traffic to turn Crimea into an “informational island” and by making it much more burdensome to travel to and from Crimea, cutting off institutional support and increasing journalists’ perception of the risk involved with reporting.

In the second study, Charlotte Wagnsson and her colleagues sought to determine who watches the Russian state-sponsored propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik outside of Russia and why. They interviewed 43 Swedish consumers of RT or Sputnik and found that while there were many who fit what might be the stereotypical Russian propaganda consumer — right-wing, with strong anti-establishment media beliefs — there were even more who didn’t fit that profile.

Some were more centrist pragmatists, and others were progressive and directly disagreed with views put forward by RT and Sputnik. So why were they consuming that media? The authors broke down a typology of four types of motivations, three of which involved some distance from RT and Sputnik’s positions.

Some (“media nihilists”) distrusted establishment and alternative media but were confident in their ability to consume them skeptically. Others (“reluctant consumers” and “distant observers”) consume media counter to their own ideas more out of curiosity or a pride in keeping tabs on opposing ideas. But all types, the authors concluded, contribute to those organizations’ goal of establishing international influence, since RT and Sputnik “do not need to be seen as legitimate; only as legitimate enough.”

Politicians haven’t stopped deleting some of their most cringeworthy tweets, but Politwoops, our project that has tracked and archived more than half a million deleted tweets from candidates and elected officials since 2012, is no longer able to track them.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken. We have been unable to find anyone who can help us, and with Twitter surprising developers by announcing a move to apaid model for gathering tweet data, it’s no longer clear that Twitter is a stable platform on which to maintain this work. It seems fitting to give Politwoops a sendoff, a farewell to not exactly a friend but an odd part of our national political discourse for a decade.

Originally built by the Sunlight Foundation, Politwoops always had a tenuous existence. Born in 2012, it received its first eulogy just three years later after Twitter pulled the plug, only to come back just in time for the 2016 presidential election. (Now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy welcomed it back, then deleted that tweet.) When Sunlight closed up shop, ProPublica took over the app, which is when I started to maintain it.

Politwoops was built on the idea that what elected officials and candidates said on Twitter mattered, at least a little. Like most users of Twitter, politicians usually tweet pretty mundane stuff: celebrations of victories mixed with jeers for opponents, some local flavor and attempts to jump into trending conversations. Most of the deletions are for mistakes any Twitter user could make: typos, forgotten or incorrect images, bad URLs. The occasional seems-like-a-toddler-grabbed-the-phone posts. Truly forgettable stuff.

But for those politicians who really embraced Twitter as a place where they could be themselves, the deletions sometimes spoke volumes. Some deleted posts are hard to forget, like one from then-President Donald Trump in the early evening of Jan. 6, 2021, not long after a mob invaded the U.S. Capitol and assaulted police officers in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election:

Trump had perhaps the most-watched Twitter account during my time running Politwoops. While he was in office, Trump’s tweets got a ton of attention, but they seldom were a departure from other things he said in public. I would often get emails from reporters asking whether he had, in fact, deleted some alleged tweet they had seen, and mostly he had not; other accounts would post images of fake tweets that never appeared on his timeline. Politwoops became an integral resource for checking whether viral (and often poorly photoshopped) tweets were fake.

All the while, other politicians were posting — and deleting — interesting, newsworthy and bizarre things on the platform. Running Politwoops for the past six years has, strangely enough, made many elected officials seem more human to me. They, and not Trump, are what I’ll remember most about the site.

Sometimes deleted messages appear to be offhand remarks that politicians have instantly thought better of: When political scientist Larry Sabato wrote, “You have to admit, Biden is on fire,” referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s debate performance against Republican Paul Ryan in October 2012, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn retweeted it. And then deleted it 11 seconds later.

Other examples of this genre include Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s deletion of this somewhat cryptic tweet about men and war a minute after posting it, while New York Democratic congressional candidate Nate McMurray did the same for this hot take about The Buffalo News in October 2020.

In other cases, it was harder to tell why a tweet was deleted. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, famous for his use of abbreviations and sparsely worded posts, is a known booster of the University of Northern Iowa, his alma mater. In November 2021 he posted that UNI was trying to recruit a local volleyball player. Fourteen hours later, he deleted the tweet. That athlete did, in fact, sign with UNI a year later.

As Twitter grew in popularity among politicians, its use became more professional, with staffers posting news and pictures. That led to some interesting conversations as staffers who had access to multiple accounts, including their own personal ones, sometimes clicked the wrong button. I’ve gotten more than one email or phone call asking if a tweet posted by mistake to the wrong account and then deleted could be removed entirely from Politiwoops. (Answer: We don’t do that.)

In December 2020, I got an email from someone who worked on the campaign of then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y. The congressman had posted and deleted a tweet that showed up on Politwoops, and would we consider removing it? It’s very rare that we would do that — that’s the whole point of the site — but when I brought up the deleted tweet I saw why he was asking: Maloney had mistakenly sent a public tweet that should have been a direct message, because it included his personal cell phone number. After some conversation, we decided to redact the number.

You can sometimes tell when it’s the actual politician and not a staffer who has posted a deleted tweet. If there’s swearing involved, it’s usually the politician. One of the basic conventions of politician Twitter is that swearing is usually a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, don’t do it from your official government account, like Rep. Chuy Garcia, D-Ill., did last summer. (And probably don’t lash out at random users, either.)

After the 2016 election, when Twitter became an important part of fundraising for political campaigns, I started to notice a very strange pattern: some accounts, especially long-shot candidates running against high-profile incumbents, dramatically increased the number of their deletions. A good example of this was Kim Mangone, a California Democrat then running against McCarthy for a House seat. Mangone’s deletions consist mostly of her own retweets, which seems like a weird thing to do until you discover that Twitter prevents users from reposting identical tweets or retweets over and over in a short time span. The only way around that restriction is to delete the earlier post and then repost it.

Perhaps the most interesting political deleter is Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat active on the platform. Like many of his colleagues, Schatz deleted typos and some retweets of others’ posts. But he often posted an informal message — almost always without a link or mentioning other accounts — that gave you a glimpse into his actual thinking. Here’s an example where Schatz could have tagged some of the pundits he was criticizing, but didn’t. And another one in that vein. Or this one with early COVID advice on mask-wearing. Sometimes he’d even acknowledge the deletions, or provide an explanation for doing it. Most politicians do not do this.

Other senators are famous for their folksier tweets — Grassley excels at this — and there are some lawmakers who can be equally blunt on the platform. But I’d like to believe that I learned something about how Schatz thinks that would be hard for me to know otherwise, given that we’ve never met.

That’s one of the things I’ll miss most about running Politwoops: getting a glimpse behind the carefully crafted images that politicians present to the public. ProPublica would be happy to continue running this service, so if anyone at Twitter wants to help out, please get in touch. That includes you, Elon: politwoops@propublica.org.

Elon Musk, as he is wont to do, challenged that conventional wisdom when he made Twitter’s blue “Verified” check — previously evidence of actual verification — into a paid product. Verification was initially intended as a confirmation of identity, the sort of small mark that makes a platform sliiightly more trustworthy and secure. But it became some weird marker of status to some of the internet’s worst people, and so it became an $8 SKU.

This conversion — this shift from a “Trust and Safety” feature to a consumer product — had the results everyone predicted, a rash of impersonations, brand danger, and other malfeasance.

But last week, Musk-era Twitter went a step further and said only $8/month customers will be allowed to use SMS for two-factor authentication — a basic layer of security frequently used by journalists, celebrities, officials, and others who fear being hacked. The company tried to explain it as a matter of security (“we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used — and abused — by bad actors”) — but apparently the threat is only to non-paying customers, since Twitter Blue subscribers can keep on using it forever. There will be other ways to use 2FA for Twitter, but they’re not available worldwide and are not without their own risks.

Basic security features going behind a paywall — not good. So it was even less encouraging to see Facebook follow Musk-era Twitter’s lead:

Meta’s testing paid verification for Instagram and Facebook for $11.99 per month on web and $14.99 per month on mobile. In an update on Instagram, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that a “Meta Verified” account will grant users a verified badge, increased visibility on the platforms, prioritized customer support, and more. The feature’s rolling out to Australia and New Zealand this week and will arrive in more countries “soon.”

“This week we’re starting to roll out Meta Verified — a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support,” Zuckerberg writes. “This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services.”

On Facebook, Zuckerberg engaged in some limited back-and-forth with users over the change. (“Call me crazy but I don’t think I should have to pay you guys to take down the accounts impersonating me and scamming my followers.” “This really should just be part of the core product, the user should not have to pay for this. Clearly it’s known by Meta this is filling a need, why profit additionally from it?”)

One user argues that “direct access to customer support is the real value, much more so than the blue check mark.” Zuckerberg: “I agree that’s a big part of the value.” And indeed, a hotline to Facebook customer service is likely the most valuable piece of the package here. But it doesn’t feel good to see features like identity verification — basic stuff for running a trustworthy platform — put behind a paywall.

For Twitter, there’s a certain mad sense to the move. Elon Musk has set the company on fire, from a cashflow perspective, and he’s desperate for all the user revenue he can generate. If 63% of your best advertisers drop you, you grab at whatever dollar bills you see floating by. (Not many seem to be floating Elon’s way.)

Facebook, meanwhile, is still pulling in more than $30 billion a quarter in ad revenue. But various headwinds, whether economic or Cupertino-driven, have demanded a “year of efficiency,” which includes chasing money from users too.

We’re seeing an addendum to that old conventional wisdom about social networks. You can’t charge most of your users — but you can charge some. Few would be bothered by a subscription product that offered additional features — ad-free browsing, say, or custom icons, like the old Twitter Blue. But it’s sad to watch basic security features put behind a credit card charge.

It’s an old question by now, a byproduct of the way social media has allowed reporters to create their own personal ~~brands~~, distinct from their news outlets. It’s become normal to see big-name journalists take their followings from job to job — from @BuzzFeedBen to @benyt to @semaforben. But in other parts of the industry, reporters aren’t as lucky. This 2017 article found that two-third of local TV stations claim ownership of their on-air staffers’ social media accounts. In 2018, The Roanoke Times sued a former sports reporter to regain custody of his Twitter account when he left for The Athletic. (They settled; the reporter kept the account.) Gannett’s social media policy makes it clear that any staffer’s account “that incorporate[s] a Gannett brand in any way” is Gannett property.

(Example: “John Smith is an anchor at WZZM. His Twitter account is @JohnSmithWZZM. If John Smith leaves the company, he would not take @JohnSmithWZZM with him. Access to the branded account remains with Gannett.”)

Well, it falls short of ownership, but a Twitter feature now in testing would visually tie journalists’ accounts to their employers more clearly than before. As Press Gazette reports, several staffers of the U.K. tabloid the Daily Mirror are the media industry’s guinea pigs.

On these journalists’ personal Twitter accounts, there is now (next to the oft-debated blue checkmark) a small Mirror icon to indicate the affiliation with their employer. Here are editor Alison Phillips, assistant editor Jason Beattie, deputy online political editor Lizzy Buchan, and Whitehall correspondent Mikey Smith:

The little Mirror icon, when clicked, takes you to the Mirror’s main Twitter account.

I’ll leave this space free for everyone to get their Twitter “verification” jokes out of their system:

The feature is part of what was previously Twitter Blue for Business and is now known as Twitter Verification for Organizations. (You can get your org on the waitlist here.) While details are sketchy pre-launch, I would assume that companies will eventually pay for the privilege.

Have you noticed affiliate badges on the profiles of employees & company handles? They’re a new way to connect accounts to each other. The early access waitlist is now open if you’d like to have affiliate badges added to your organization’s accounts: https://t.co/xbCAhAKngo

— Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) January 14, 2023

If this goes forward, it’s going to spark some fascinating/terrifying discussions in newsrooms — specifically around what counts as an “official” or “professional” social media account. It’s one thing to put “@TheMetroTribune reporter” in your Twitter bio; it’s another to have a @TheMetroTribune icon follow you around the platform, on every single tweet you post — or have ever posted. Because this connection is being made at the account level, it’ll show up even on decade-old tweets.

@Emmmster Hello there. Am pretty rubbish at this so far but apparently I need to drag myself into the new century. How you?

— Alison Phillips (@MirrorAlison) December 12, 2013

That’ll be fine in the vast majority of cases, of course. But when someone digs up an embarrassing old tweet from a reporter, their current employer will be right there next to it, seemingly giving it a stamp of approval. Even in milder cases, plenty of reporters tweet about a mix of work and non-work topics — will newsrooms want to formalize their social affiliation 24/7? And will reporters (and their unions) be willing to?

My suspicion (just a suspicion at this point) is that this will be more trouble than it’s worth for many news organizations — even if it makes sense for other industries. Putting that little logo on every tweet will, rightly or wrongly, make every staffer seem like an official spokesperson for the organization. For the limited potential benefits — a little extra Twitter traffic? the branding potential of a 16-pixel square? — it’ll probably be a pass for most.

That’s the question that one publisher asked in a Digiday piece today about how Twitter is declining as a traffic source for publishers.

The question was recently echoed — and answered — by Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith. “When you get beyond the drama of Twitter and the flickers of life on your Facebook feed, what we’re seeing is the end of the whole social media age in news,” he wrote on Christmas Eve 2022.

Twitter never drove much traffic to news publishers. Back in 2016, social analytics firm Parse.ly (which was acquired by Automattic in 2021) found that “Twitter generates 1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations.”

So for most publishers, we’re talking about going from a base of “tiny” to “tinier” — as many rushed to point out after Twitter CEO Elon Musk falsely claimed, in a now-deleted tweet response to Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance, that “Twitter drives a massive number of clicks to other websites/apps. Biggest click driver on the Internet by far.” (Vance had commented, “It is really weird how Twitter drives so few clicks.”) While plenty of people, at least as of last fall, say they come to Twitter to get news, they don’t necessarily click past headlines.

But what was already small seems to have gotten smaller. A few stats from the piece:

Web publishing tech provider Automattic analyzed a random set of 21 large and small publishers and found that the sites’ traffic from Twitter in the fourth quarter fell, on average by, 13%. Of that data set, 71% of publishers saw their traffic decline.

For the whole of 2022, referral traffic from Twitter dipped by 20% year over year, according to data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat which includes 1,200 sites that are Chartbeat customers in the News and Media category.

Twitter referral traffic to a dozen major publishers’ websites declined, on average, by 12% in December 2022 compared to November 2022, according to an analysis by Similarweb, a data analytics company that monitors web traffic. Some publishers — such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo — each saw referral traffic from Twitter fall between 10% and 18% month over month.

Some publishers are hurting from the loss of Twitter Moments, the curated tweet collections that Twitter got rid of in December. And only current Twitter Blue subscribers have access to Twitter Top Articles (née Nuzzel), which might have been providing publishers with a little more traffic around the edges.

More here.

The legislation, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, gives social media platforms some truly astounding protections under American law. Section 230 has also been called the most important 26 words in tech: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

But the more that platforms like Twitter test the limits of their protection, the more American politicians on both sides of the aisle have been motivated to modify or repeal Section 230. As a social media media professor and a social media lawyer with a long history in this field, we think change in Section 230 is coming — and we believe that it is long overdue.

Born of porn

Section 230 had its origins in the attempt to regulate online porn. One way to think of it is as a kind of “restaurant graffiti” law. If someone draws offensive graffiti, or exposes someone else’s private information and secret life, in the bathroom stall of a restaurant, the restaurant owner can’t be held responsible for it. There are no consequences for the owner. Roughly speaking, Section 230 extends the same lack of responsibility to the Yelps and YouTubes of the world.

But in a world where social media platforms stand to monetize and profit from the graffiti on their digital walls — which contains not just porn but also misinformation and hate speech — the absolutist stance that they have total protection and total legal “immunity” is untenable.

A lot of good has come from Section 230. But the history of social media also makes it clear that it is far from perfect at balancing corporate profit with civic responsibility.

We were curious about how current thinking in legal circles and digital research could give a clearer picture about how Section 230 might realistically be modified or replaced, and what the consequences might be. We envision three possible scenarios to amend Section 230, which we call verification triggers, transparent liability, caps and Twitter court.

Verification triggers

We support free speech, and we believe that everyone should have a right to share information. When people who oppose vaccines share their concerns about the rapid development of RNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, for example, they open up a space for meaningful conversation and dialogue. They have a right to share such concerns, and others have a right to counter them.

What we call a “verification trigger” should kick in when the platform begins to monetize content related to misinformation. Most platforms try to detect misinformation, and many label, moderate or remove some of it. But many monetize it as well through algorithms that promote popular — and often extreme or controversial — content. When a company monetizes content with misinformation, false claims, extremism or hate speech, it is not like the innocent owner of the bathroom wall. It is more like an artist who photographs the graffiti and then sells it at an art show.

Twitter began selling verification check marks for user accounts in November 2022. By verifying a user account is a real person or company and charging for it, Twitter is both vouching for it and monetizing that connection. Reaching a certain dollar value from questionable content should trigger the ability to sue Twitter, or any platform, in court. Once a platform begins earning money from users and content, including verification, it steps outside the bounds of Section 230 and into the bright light of responsibility — and into the world of tort, defamation and privacy rights laws.

Transparent caps

Social media platforms currently make their own rules about hate speech and misinformation. They also keep secret a lot of information about how much money the platform makes off of content, like a given tweet. This makes what isn’t allowed and what is valued opaque.

One sensible change to Section 230 would be to expand its 26 words to clearly spell out what is expected of social media platforms. The added language would specify what constitutes misinformation, how social media platforms need to act, and the limits on how they can profit from it. We acknowledge that this definition isn’t easy, that it’s dynamic, and that researchers and companies are already struggling with it.

But government can raise the bar by setting some coherent standards. If a company can show that it’s met those standards, the amount of liability it has could be limited. It wouldn’t have complete protection as it does now. But it would have a lot more transparency and public responsibility. We call this a “transparent liability cap.”

Twitter court

Our final proposed amendment to Section 230 already exists in a rudimentary form. Like Facebook and other social platforms, Twitter has content moderation panels that determine standards for users on the platform, and thus standards for the public that shares and is exposed to content through the platform. You can think of this as “Twitter court.”

Though Twitter’s content moderation appears to be suffering from changes and staff reductions at the company, we believe that panels are a good idea. But keeping panels hidden behind the closed doors of profit-making companies is not. If companies like Twitter want to be more transparent, we believe that should also extend to their own inner operations and deliberations.

We envision extending the jurisdiction of “Twitter court” to neutral arbitrators who would adjudicate claims involving individuals, public officials, private companies and the platform. Rather than going to actual court for cases of defamation or privacy violation, Twitter court would suffice under many conditions. Again, this is a way to pull back some of Section 230’s absolutist protections without removing them entirely.

How would it work — and would it work?

Since 2018, platforms have had limited Section 230 protection in cases of sex trafficking. A recent academic proposal suggests extending these limitations to incitement to violence, hate speech and disinformation. House Republicans have also suggested a number of Section 230 carve-outs, including those for content relating to terrorism, child exploitation or cyberbullying.

Our three ideas of verification triggers, transparent liability caps and Twitter court may be an easy place to start the reform. They could be implemented individually, but they would have even greater authority if they were implemented together. The increased clarity of transparent verification triggers and transparent liability would help set meaningful standards balancing public benefit with corporate responsibility in a way that self-regulation has not been able to achieve. Twitter court would provide a real option for people to arbitrate rather than to simply watch misinformation and hate speech bloom and platforms profit from it.

Adding a few meaningful options and amendments to Section 230 will be difficult because defining hate speech and misinformation in context, and setting limits and measures for monetization of context, will not be easy. But we believe these definitions and measures are achievable and worthwhile. Once enacted, these strategies promise to make online discourse stronger and platforms fairer.

Shanquella Robinson’s death could have easily fallen through the cracks. In the first two weeks after the 25-year-old from North Carolina was pronounced dead during a group vacation to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, her story was limited to a few local news reports. It appeared that her death would be treated like those of many other Black women and girls — with cursory, if any, attention from the news media. But then, video of a woman being beaten emerged, and the news of her death went viral.

One tweet by North Carolina blogger Mina Lo with the words, “Rest in Power Shanquella Robinson” has garnered more than 50,000 likes and nearly 17,000 retweets. National news organizations, including CNN and the New York Times, have since picked up Robinson’s story, highlighting the power and potential of Black media platforms. From the killing of Lauren Smith-Fields last year to Robinson last month, Black people online have been a driving force behind elevating stories about missing and murdered Black women and girls in the absence of mainstream media.

Black women and girls face high rates of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and homicide. However, their cases are rarely treated with urgency. Robinson’s case stands out for the level of attention it received due to not only her family’s advocacy, but also the Black-owned blogs and social media accounts that recirculated the video and emerging details, pushing it into the view of a wider audience.

“We’ve relied on the connections that we have in Black communities to spread the word of issues that are of importance to us for centuries,” said Dr. Meredith Clark, an associate professor of journalism and communication studies at Northeastern University who researches Black Twitter and Black resistance online. “It reaffirms something that we say a lot — ‘We all we got’ — and this, to me, is an example of what that looks like in a news media context.”

From Ida B. Wells’ investigations of lynchings in the South to the Black press’s role in unearthing the truth about the killing of Emmett Till, Black media outlets have historically been vital sources of information about violence against Black people, particularly when mainstream media have disregarded their stories through systemic bias and racism.

“That’s where we could go and send out our messages,” said Nicole Carr, a journalist at ProPublica and professor at Morehouse College who teaches a social justice journalism course.

More recently, especially over the past decade, social media has become a popular tool for gathering and sharing information related to social and racial justice. It is where the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was born in 2013 and where activists, scholars and others have strategically used hashtags and other messages to quickly disseminate information to the general public.

“In matters of social justice, particularly when they relate to our community, we provide through those platforms the leads that are necessary to make mainstream outlets pay attention,” Carr said. She added that for journalists, in particular, social media can provide a jumping-off point for their coverage. Journalists might see a claim on social media and decide to follow up with a public records request to see if there is any validity to it.

“I’m not comparing Twitter users to the Black press as a whole. I’m just saying we have always found spaces to amplify important messages and get the word out, even when we’re unable to do that in so-called mainstream spaces,” Carr said.

Specific elements of Robinson’s case also stood out, adding to public shock and awareness.

The video and the contradictory accounts of her death drew wider attention to her case. The publicized details have also left many social media users wondering how someone could travel with people who appeared to be her friends and die violently less than 24 hours later.

The people who traveled with Robinson returned to the United States and told her parents that she died of alcohol poisoning. However, their stories were inconsistent with the information on her death certificate published online on November 16. The autopsy report lists Robinson’s cause of death as a severed spinal cord and trauma to the neck. It made no mention of alcohol poisoning.

That same day, Twitter users quickly began circulating a video showing a naked woman being viciously attacked by another woman. In multiple media reports, Robinson’s mother has confirmed the naked woman is her daughter. In the background of the video, a man can be heard saying, “Quella, can you at least fight back?”

After the video was released, Mexican authorities announced that they were investigating Robinson’s death as a femicide — the gender-based murder of a woman. On November 18, the FBI confirmed its involvement in the case.

An arrest warrant has been issued in Mexico for one person in relation to Robinson’s death.

“Black Twitter was responsible for amplifying the clear evidence of foul play,” Carr said.

Media and criminal legal researchers told The 19th that Robinson’s story might have gone unnoticed in a sea of other developing news around the country without circulation of the video.

“People tend to enter stories through the predominant visual. Usually it’s a photograph but videos as well. So that video of her being attacked caught a lot of attention as a very, very clear indication that something was wrong,” said Dr. Danielle Slakoff, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sacramento State University who studies media portrayals of women crime victims.

Through the years, video has been “one of the critical tools to helping people understand a crisis as it unfolds,” in cases where Black people experience harm, Clark said, citing the nearly nine-minute video of George Floyd’s killing in May 2020 as one example.

In addition to the video, there is a relatability factor, she said. Many people have experienced going on a group vacation or a girls’ trip. The violence leading to Robinson’s death is a shocking turn of events.

Robinson’s mother told NBC News that she credits Black social media with the attention her daughter’s case has received. Such widespread coverage is rare for women of color, particularly Black women and girls, who are often overlooked, research shows.

Slakoff and her research team analyzed news coverage of white and Black missing women and girls in 11 U.S. newspapers over a four-year period. Missing Black girls and women accounted for about 20% of the stories they looked at, though they represent an estimated 34% of missing people, Slakoff said.

In a separate study, Slakoff also found a difference in the media portrayals of white and Black women crime victims. White women are depicted as more sympathetic while Black women are portrayed as complicit in the violence against them by highlighting details like their intoxication level or clothing at the time.

Both the number of news stories and the way those stories are told can make a difference for these criminal cases, Slakoff said. “There is a very long history of white women and girls being viewed as the ideal victim,” she said. “They are viewed to be in need of protection. So in essence, they are seen as worthy of our attention, but they’re also worthy of our resources.”

The disproportionate attention white women receive from the news media, public, and police has come to be referred to as “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” Over the last year, the national fixation on the disappearance of 22-year-old Gabby Petito, a white woman, in addition to the HBO documentary “Black and Missing” have reignited conversations about these inequities.

In light of the skewed interest from news media and law enforcement, Black Twitter has been critical in raising awareness and questions around Black women’s deaths beyond Robinson’s case.

Following the 2020 police shooting of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, initial reports labeled her a potential suspect, while many news outlets did not report on her death at all. Hannah Drake, a Louisville-based writer and activist, helped call attention to Taylor’s death on social media, which shifted the media narrative about the circumstances of Taylor’s death.

In May of that year, The 19th’s editor-at-large, Errin Haines, reported on Taylor’s death, prompting other mainstream news outlets to follow, making it a national story. After repeated demands for accountability, the officers involved in Taylor’s death were ultimately charged.

In another case, Black social media users on TikTok amplified the story of Lauren Smith-Fields, a 23-year-old Black woman who was found dead in December 2021 after spending the night with an older white man she had met on the dating app Bumble.

Fields’ autopsy results indicated her cause of death was a result of fentanyl, promethazine, hydroxyzine and alcohol, but her friends and family said she was not a drug user and called for the police to do more. Following criticism from Black TikTok users about disparate treatment between white and Black victims, more mainstream news outlets began to cover her death. Her case remains open.

Despite more national conversations about bias against Black women victims, researchers told The 19th they believe Black social media will continue to bear the responsibility of sharing these stories.

All of this is also happening at a time when digital communities made up of historically marginalized groups, such as Black Twitter, face questions about their future following billionaire Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the platform.

Questions about Twitter’s future are tied to how Black people will advocate for missing and murdered Black women and girls moving forward, Clark said. “It’s integral to thinking about how marginalized communities share information and get traction around stories that otherwise would not get attention.”

But Post has bigger ambitions. The “social platform for real people, real news, and civil conversations,” was founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin. It counts Kara Swisher as an advisor and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as one of its two investors. The other investor is Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and cohost of the Pivot podcast with Swisher. “I’ve never seen anyone, except maybe at a few strip bars, throw more money at someone than they’re throwing at Noam Bardin right now,” Galloway said on an episode of the Pivot podcast last week, in which he and Swisher interviewed Bardin. (Bardin wrote that, beyond funds from Andreessen Horowitz and from Galloway, “the only other money invested is mine.”)

Bardin wrote on Monday that Post has approved around 65,000 users out of a wait list of 335,000.

I used Twitter, posts on Post, and Swisher and Galloway’s podcast interview with Bardin to get some insight into how the company is thinking about news.

Post wants to build a business around micropayments for news

“We want to allow you to read premium news from multiple publishers,” Bardin wrote in a post on Sunday.

So far, the only publisher I’ve seen with content for “sale” on the platform is Reuters, which invites users to read its articles using “points.” (Each Post News user is given 50 points at sign-up.) Reuters is posting all its articles to Post News. But all these same articles are free on Reuters’ website, so I’m not sure why anyone would pay for them, even with imaginary free points.

This is quite a thing for Post News to claim when right now the only premium news provider I've found is Reuters, who is republishing wire stories you can read for free on their website for money while WSJ has uhhh this. https://t.co/hgPHWDXMg1 pic.twitter.com/swjkLVvpgm

— Aram Zucker-Scharff | @Chronotope@indieweb.social (@Chronotope) November 25, 2022

Ultimately, the vision seems to be that Post will allow users to pay micropayments for individual articles on Post. It’s a setup that Bardin says is good for both publishers and for itself, so I imagine he’s envisioning a revenue share, though he doesn’t say that explicitly. Here’s Bardin talking about the business model on the Pivot podcast (emphases mine):

I’ve been obsessing, the last, like six years, about this triangle between publishing and news journalism, social media networks, and the changing consumer behavior. And these three things have been working together, I believe, to bring us to the worst possible place.

News has moved to subscription, which basically converts maybe 2% of the users and so blocks 98% of the users from getting real editorialized content. Consumers have changed their behavior. They want to consume their news in their feed. And so, obviously, consumption from a feed does not work with subscription. And social media networks, with their advertising-based model, promote the worst in us because it works. I mean, the algorithms are don’t really care. They just, you know, try to achieve the engagement at any cost, right?

I spent a lot of time since I left Google about two years ago, building different products in this space, trying different things, and finally realized there’s no choice but to build something new, and what I’ve realized is that there’s a moment of opportunity now, and it’s wider than just what’s going on on Twitter, right? Facebook basically decided to drop news, move it out of the News Feed, and then stop paying news organizations. On the legal side, regulators are trying to force platforms to pay publishers. There’s this whole ecosystem of — where does news fit in? — that is kind of broken today…

What I believe consumers want is to be able to get multiple sources of news in their feed — some from creators or from people, some from professional journalists. They are willing to pay something for it. It doesn’t have to be free if you want good-quality news, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to subscribe to every publication. The fact that every publication thinks you’re gonna subscribe to it just mathematically can’t work, right? Obviously, that’s not going to work. So we need other models and we can’t have a world of just advertising or subscription. […]

We want to be able to bring the right content to the right user at the right price. And that means that if you come on the platform, spend 15 minutes, walk away feeling smarter, that’s success. But it also means that our incentives are aligned with content creators’, whether it’s publishers or individual content creators. We both make money or we don’t make money, unlike today where the platforms make a lot of money, but the publishers and the creators make nothing. […]

Let’s start, always, from the consumer. By the way, that’s one of the problem with publishers: They don’t talk about the consumer at all. It’s not part of their DNA. They’re saving the world. But when it comes from the consumer perspective, right, the modern consumer wants to get multiple sources in their feed. Why can’t you do that today? Because every time you click on it, you hit a paywall, and you’re not gonna subscribe to everything, right?

And so this means that publishers are losing 98% of the traffic. Now, the 2% that subscribe are obviously very, very valuable for them. So this means from a newsroom perspective, they end up writing for that 2%, which are the most extreme and politically aligned group, and they’re not writing for the average. And if they could hear — hear, in terms of monetization — the requests of the average, I believe it would also impact dramatically what they cover and how they cover it.

So in my view, you’re going through your [Post] feed, you see an article from The Washington Post on inflation, you click on it, and you read it. No friction. Friction is our biggest enemy, right? One click, you pay for it, you read it. The next article coming in might be The Wall Street Journal on inflation, because your feed has been changing based on what you’re reading. And you’re gonna read that suddenly. So suddenly, you’ve read two different takes on inflation in your feed, but you’re not subscribed to either of them. But the publisher can set the price. They can set the terms.

There are a few questionable statements here: It isn’t true that consumers can’t get multiple sources of news in a feed. They can! On Twitter, for instance, or on Apple News+.

It also isn’t true that you hit a paywall as soon as you click on a link to an article from a news outlet you don’t subscribe to. Most news outlets give you a bunch of free articles; local news sites are worse about this, but the two news sources that Bardin mentions, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, definitely let you read plenty of stuff for free.

And it isn’t true that publishers don’t talk about the consumer “at all” — as publishers become more reliant on subscriptions, most are talking about audiences constantly. (Maybe Bardin is referring here to “the consumer” as someone somehow separate from “the subscriber,” i.e., a person who will absolutely never pay to subscribe?)

I’m also generally skeptical of the notion that the average news consumer wants to read — and pay for — takes from multiple political perspectives on an issue like inflation, though It’s unclear here if Bardin is referring to politics, specifically.

But who does Bardin think the average news consumer is? Later in the podcast, he speaks about that:

I want to care about the 75% of users that today on Twitter don’t tweet. They really are who I’m thinking about, more than anything — not the small percentage that make all the noise and have all the followers and all the excitement. [But] regular people who want to use social media to get their news. They want to communicate with others, ask questions, and they don’t want to be called a Nazi or communist for just having a question out there.

Post hopes you’ll tip

Every post on Post has a little dollar sign to tip. It’s unclear how the tipping part will work with the micropayments part, or if they’d be separate. On the podcast, though, Galloway intertwines the two: “Yeah, I think the micropayments part — whether it’s Simon Holland with his dad jokes, or the wolf conservation group that has these wonderful videos of wolves, just the idea, and what I love about Post.news so far, is I can just say this, ‘This made me feel good. Here’s a buck.'” Simon Holland tweets PG family jokes and the Wolf Conservation Center is this.

I guess — think about which tweets you’d pay for, and then imagine that they were Posts instead and that you were paying a little bit. Would you do that? Maybe! (There have definitely been a few Twitter threads by one expert or another that I’d maybe pay $1 for, but Post doesn’t allow threads yet.)

Anyway, everyone starts off with 50 free points and if you click the “tip” button on a post, you’ll see this:

If you want to buy more points, you can, with a credit card. (Payments are processed via Stripe.) Post’s FAQ says that each point is equivalent to $0.01, and “the Points you [purchase] will be used towards supporting creators and content of your choice, and enabling the Post platform to operate.”

For “batches” of points up to 1,000, Post is taking a 29% cut. 300 points cost $4.20 (so $1.20 goes to Post), 500 cost $7 ($2 goes to Post), and 1,000 cost $14 ($4 goes to Post). If you buy larger numbers of points, there are slight discounts (10,000 points cost $126, meaning Post takes about a 20% cut.)

Most news publishers aren’t on Post, but Post is making it look as if they are

I found a lot of news publishers that appeared to have Post News accounts. But these accounts are actually placeholders created by Post News in an effort to get publishers to move there — the idea being, I suppose, that if they come on over they’ll already have a bunch of followers.

https://t.co/tUChf5Yfkt is creating fake/placeholder accounts for publishers to try to entice them to move there? pic.twitter.com/qlOQr5TFy8

— Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) November 28, 2022

Rather… media companies see Post needing..

1) Their brands to establish Post as legitimate
2) Their content to give Post actual value

Creating dummy placeholder accounts with astroturfed petitions to "bring the NYT on Post" only furthers this observation

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) November 28, 2022

Reaction to this practice has been all over the place, from “genius” to “gross.” Personally, I think it’s a little sketchy, especially since Post says it wants to work with publishers as partners and considers their content a key part of its business model.

Yep. It sails *awfully* close to this. https://t.co/FWcC9HdAUB. I get that the line "convince them to join" makes it clear it's not an official account but I'd be furious if someone did this t me personally cc @fergb @Chronotope

— Corinne Podger (@corinne_podger) November 29, 2022

Did I sign up for post news? yes.

Have I actively been using it? no.

Do I think news orgs should jump in feet first as a Twitter replacement? no.

Does it seem like they legitimately want to work with publishers to distribute news? Um…. no. https://t.co/I4GFDLezBw

— Emma Carew Grovum (@emmacarew) November 28, 2022

Here’s Andrew Zalk, Post’s head of publisher development (he previously spent more than a decade at Flipboard):

“You can attack anyone’s ideology, but you can’t attack the person.”

Bardin wrote on Sunday that he wants to “keep Post civil”:

We are focused on moderation and operational tools, hiring and training people, flagging posts, blocking, muting, tuning the comment moderation keywords. This is the biggest constraint on letting more people in faster.

He also spoke about content moderation on the Pivot podcast:

I think that’s one thing that I want to make very firm on this platform. You can attack anyone’s ideology, but you can’t attack the person…Having debates about content, about ideas, is super important. But as soon as we start throwing in, you know, what we think about that person’s lifestyle, that obviously degrades us, to where we are today.

So then can you not, say, call Nick Fuentes a white supremacist? Like many other things about Post News at the moment, it’s unclear how this will work in practice.

Until Sunday, the company’s mission statement noted that nobody should be discriminated against based on, among other things, “net worth.” Maybe they just meant “income” and meant poor people, but anyway, the “net worth” part has since been removed, though you can see it archived here.

honestly too funny that post explicitly says no making fun of billionaires. no surprise it’s funded by a16z!https://t.co/Z8HAg4raje pic.twitter.com/oWhJDIqhYz

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) November 27, 2022

As for diversity, Bardin wrote on Sunday that this is how he’s thinking about who he approves from Post’s wait list:

I am working hard to keep the audience as diverse as I can (from what I can gather reading 200 characters) but this means that some people may be invited before others. I understand the fairness argument but I feel strongly that having broad diversity at the early stage is crucial for the long term success of Post.

“You mean like you’ll actually have to do work?” he said.

NO, I mean that if Twitter goes away, Journalism Today loses a bunch of really concrete things! And here they are: A list of things that journalism will lose, and ways that it will change, if Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter leads to its shutdown.

The version of the story below includes embedded tweets. I’ve saved a second version that includes tweet screenshots so that we can preserve this post if tweet embeds stop working.

Please keep the ideas coming and I’ll update this list. You can find me on Twitter as long as it stays up, or email me here.

Real-time feedback, criticism, and perspectives on stories

The tweet that originally inspired me to do this piece was by Jenée Desmond-Harris, who writes Slate’s Dear Prudence column.

I know a lot of people hate it (who doesn't hate to be criticized or feel misunderstood?) but I think being forced to hear how readers who aren't your buddies react — and to then always have that other POV in the back of your mind — is a very good thing

— Jenée (@jdesmondharris) November 11, 2022

Brent Staples, an author and member of The New York Times’ editorial board, and Stewart Coles, an assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, weighed in.

I am sure you know this. But you have indeed hit on something: How the advent of social media (combined with online publications) blackened a very, very white public "discourse." A significant portion of anti-Twitterism originates in this fact.

— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) November 11, 2022

Yes, and research bears this out! Twitter’s influence well beyond its walls, esp. into journalism, plus #BlackTwitter’s power over the platform, has been a game changer for Black people’s sociopolitical power over the last decade or so.

And that seems to be why some hate it. https://t.co/KVwYaXOHCW

— Chokely Carmichael(StewartColes@mastodon.social) (@StewartColes) November 12, 2022

Quote tweets have been a crucial part of this, noted Johnathan Flowers, a lecturer at American University.

This right here: call and response is a crucial part of what makes Black Twitter work on Twitter, especially as the affordances of the site allow the elevation and transformation of call and response into something unique by means of the platform. https://t.co/2XK4lVCHmd

— Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Citational Rebel (@shengokai) November 7, 2022

A regular reminder of the problems with “objectivity”

Twitter has been an excellent place to publicly call out news organizations for doing dumb or lazy things. This ties in with Desmond-Harris’s point above, but the potential for being publicly called out has likely contributed to many media companies’ decisions to move away from outdated notions of “objectivity.”

It’s not that pile-ons and public shamings are always a force for good. But Twitter has served something like the role of a public editor, and that is beneficial. If editors and reporters know there is a high likelihood of being publicly called out on something, they’re likely to spend more time making an argument airtight, tracking down a few extra sources, or checking their data.

A recent NPR tweet is a good example of how Twitter has nudged news outlets toward being more direct. Of course, NPR would not be tweeting if we didn’t have Twitter. But what I mean is that we would be less likely to see this framing of news if Twitter hadn’t helped push toward it.

BREAKING: Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024. https://t.co/iqIcaN3SZA

— NPR (@NPR) November 16, 2022

The place for breaking news

Sports journalism is going to be a bit lost without major personalities dropping big news on Twitter before anywhere else

— Mike Denison (@ThatMikeDenison) November 16, 2022

Screenshotted best bits

Goodbye, screenshots of the juiciest part of a story. Goodbye, reporter threads that break the best parts down so you don’t have to read the whole thing — in the most well-done cases, these are “like a tldr or instant annotation by an expert,” my colleague Sarah Scire noted.

They'll hit a pay wall for a lot of (really good) reporting. Maybe they'll subscribe, maybe they'll find free coverage (which could also be really good, but often is from non-local / imo less-grounded TV outlets in emergencies). + also get news slower of course

— Jake Sheridan (@JakeSheridan_) November 16, 2022

An amazing way to find sources, experts, and brand-new research

When a family member was diagnosed with a rare medical condition, I only had to spend about an hour on Twitter to find a handful of experts on that condition nationwide. All responded to my DMs within a few hours and one doctor gave me her personal phone number.

Twitter gives journalists easy access to the academic and scientific communities. We can learn about new scientific research straight from the source (and academics’ threads about their own research are often invaluable; see also that “TLDR” that Sarah mentioned above.)

It’ll be harder to identify scientific sources that aren’t already well known, and much harder to find new scientific stories that aren’t broadcast as press releases to everyone on a mailing list.

— Dr Robin George Andrews (@SquigglyVolcano) November 16, 2022

And sourcing will simply become more difficult.

Finding sources will be back to the hard way — listening, asking others, reading local news coverage (whoops! There is no local news coverage any more!).

— SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN (@sivavaid) November 16, 2022

DMs as a reporting tool

DMs, falling somewhere between a text and an email, are an amazing way to get in touch with sources, even if the conversation later moves off Twitter. I don’t think someone’s ever declined my request to “follow for DM,” whereas another email in the inbox is easy to ignore. DMs in most cases just don’t seem as burdensome as emails.

The part of Twitter that would be most annoying to lose is as professional networking service. Have been interviewing a ton of people for a book project and probably 60% of interviews originate w/Twitter DM. Higher success rate than email; easier than tracking down a phone #.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 18, 2022

An internet directory

Because no thank you, LinkedIn.

lack of an internet directory. can look up a person or org's profile and get a semi up to date view of where they work/what's going on. it's also one place to look rather than finding the about us page on every website

are people going to update their sites instead? hope so!

— erika owens (@erika_owens) November 16, 2022

“That tweet should be a story”

“This tweet should be a story” is a real driver imo

— jaimegreen.net/book (@jaimealyse) November 16, 2022

Real-time conference coverage

If you couldn’t attend a conference, you could learn the highlights from Twitter, pointed out Eder Campuzano, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

* Less public criticism and feedback, leaving a gap in correspondence between reporters and their audience.
* Another effect: Power centers in newsrooms going unchallenged when they stumble.
* Live coverage of conferences and workshops. I learned so much for free over the years.

— Señor Eder Campuzano (@edercampuzano) November 16, 2022

Heavy tweeters are people who log onto Twitter 6-7 days a week and tweet 3-4 times a week (doesn't seem like a lot). These super users have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, according to Twitter's research

— Sheila Dang (@Sheila_Dang) October 25, 2022

"Heavy tweeters" who log on every day and tweet >3 times a week:
– are less than 10% of overall users
– generate 90% of tweets
– generate 50% of global revenuehttps://t.co/dWjeLZdYO0

Compulsive tweeters are a minority of the users, a majority of the business, and in decline.

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) October 26, 2022

heavy tweeter here

The platform has gotten demonstrably worse since the pandemic began. I regularly get vile, personal, disgusting comments, none of which apparently violate the terms of use. So many women I know who also use this platform experience the same https://t.co/LleSCnUUfb

— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) October 26, 2022

Damn I have few notes:
1) it deprecate tweets with links, I used to come here to find stuff to read and now it’s all just Trojan horse 457-tweet threads with the link to the article in the last one
2) see above re threads they are obnoxious to do and read https://t.co/ISNRZXRFdY

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) October 25, 2022

Look under the hood at twitter and… it’s gnarlier then you think. And/Or: If you have the sense that this place is emptying out… you’re right.

“It seems as though there is a significant discrepancy between what I might imagine are our company values and our growth patterns.” https://t.co/t6QSwXRX4s

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) October 25, 2022

Is porn twitter like regular twitter but for porn? Like are there thread guys and main characters etc, but it's all porn? Incredible that this parallel universe may exist alongside the twitter we know & love, thriving but completely invisible to us https://t.co/eLSrYMbePi

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) October 25, 2022

Twitter slowly being eaten alive by porn and crypto content is how I want this story to end https://t.co/paxMpkJbIo

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) October 26, 2022

Yes, yes, many jokes to be made, but the culture/algorithm/whatever on this app increasingly rewards ironic cruelty and it just sucks to be here. Fine if you’re a guy that thrives in the quote dunk economy, less fine otherwise, I guess https://t.co/BBWHRGfOlm

— Anne Thériault (@anne_theriault) October 26, 2022

funny as this definition of “heavy tweeter” is, it makes sense: twitter is a place where the better your posts do, the more unpleasant and unusable the site becomes. it’s a borderline-comical incentive structure that basically guarantees super users will eventually leave https://t.co/WT37pg0xOB

— Nathan Grayson (@Vahn16) October 25, 2022

Similar to the news org I heard define a "loyal reader" as someone who reads at least three articles a month… A lot of power law distributions out there! https://t.co/AGuHaiO9H2

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) October 25, 2022

Consistent with a scenario where the journos are the last to turn out the lights, because it’s harder to replicate the utility of lots of breaking news/analysis in real time, but audiences and everyone else have moved on. https://t.co/4dLWFIkp2S

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) October 26, 2022

When I announced Platformer, I described my reasoning this way: “By going independent I hope to demonstrate that reader-funded reporters can survive and even thrive, breathing new life into a profession that is bleeding out in no small part due to the platforms I cover.”

Two years later, I’m happy to tell you that — thanks entirely to you — Platformer is a growing and sustainable business. When I left my full-time job at The Verge, there were about 24,000 of you reading every free edition. Last year, that number grew to 49,000. Today, there are just under 75,000 of you. And of that group, thousands have become paid subscribers, funding the growing ambitions I’ll share more about below.

I think all this speaks to the need for independent, reader-supported journalism about some of the biggest questions of our age: about the relationship between social networks and the world around them; about how technology ought to be built and governed; and about some of the seismic changes that result from innovation.

I also think it underscores the appeal of this newsletter’s design: one big idea a day, delivered straight to your inbox at a reliable time, without any ads, affiliate links, pop-ups, SEO bait, or any of the other now-familiar features of our digital landscape. Platformer shows up, tells you a few things, and ends. I think the value of this is still somewhat underrated.

But it only works because you show up every day to read, share, and support me. Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for making Platformer the best job of my life. Together, I truly believe we’re helping to prove out a new model for independent journalism, and my hope is that many more will take similar approaches in the future. I hope you feel good about that.

Anyway!

What I learned

It’s still a hits business. As was the case last year, most of the moments that drove large numbers of free and paid subscriptions came when I broke news or wrote a piece of analysis that really resonated with you.

Some of the journalism you funded last year:

• I broke the news that Instagram was walking back controversial changes to the app.
• Along with Zoe Schiffer, I revealed how Twitter’s plans to build an OnlyFans competitor were foiled by its struggles to find and remove illegal content on the platform.
• I brought you one of the first on-the-record interviews with a former TikTok policy manager to explain what working for ByteDance is really like.

I’ve also regularly delivered news from inside Twitter as Elon Musk attempted to buy — and then get out of buying — the company, explored the fascinating case of the man who got fired by his DAO, and became one of the first writers to regularly illustrate my newsletter with DALL-E. These pieces really struck a chord with you, and the business grew accordingly.

Despite the fact that most growth is driven by hits, though, medium-performing posts help the business grow as well. They attract enough subscribers to offset churn — I averaged around 3% churn over the past three months — and often inspire some reader to reach out to me with some new idea or scoop that turns into the next hit.

That’s the basic flywheel that powers subscription growth, and it continued to work well in year two.

People will pay you to tell them it’s complicated. Sometimes when I feel like it’s been too long since I’ve had a scoop, a bit of existential dread can creep up on me: Is the work I’m doing here really valuable enough to charge for? (In a related story, I started therapy for the first time this year.)

What I am forgetting in those moments is that people are generally underserved by the commentary and analysis they find online. Most takes (and many reported articles) are still tuned to perform well on Twitter, and as such they tend to emphasize fear and outrage above all else. Most people experience a broader range of human emotion than these, and so browsing the Twitter timeline, or the stories produced in order to appease it, often leave us feeling empty: We know there is nuance and complexity there that has been sacrificed in hopes of getting retweeted.

One reason that some newsletters have become successful during this period, I think, is that they are built with different incentives. I write my newsletter assuming you’ll open it whatever it happens to be about that day; I pride myself on writing headlines that, if not exactly boring, at the very least do not over-promise.

On Twitter, each story competes against every other, warping coverage in ways that can undermine trust. But Platformer competes mostly with the other emails in your inbox — a competition that ought to be much easier to win, if only because there are funnier tweets in Platformer than you will find in most emails.

Moreover, because I write several times a week, the newsletter has an episodic format that makes it resistant to the more obnoxious forms of punditry. I don’t have to tell you absolutely everything I think about a particular subject, because I’m almost certainly going to talk about it again in the future. This lets me focus on nuances and trade-offs that folks in the hot-take business might not. (I sometimes joke that the two most common phrases in Platformer are “on one hand” and “on the other,” only at this point I’m not really sure it’s a joke.)

Anyway, let me give you a concrete example of how this works.

Last month I wrote about a tricky case involving a man who said he had wrongfully been accused of sharing child abuse materials. The case had been well covered by The New York Times. But I wanted to add some context, and underline some aspects of the case that I felt were getting lost in the discussion. In the next 24 hours, 29 of you became paid subscribers — effectively giving me a $2,900 raise (before taxes and platform fees) for a day’s work of walking through some subtle questions about tech policy.

That doesn’t happen every day. And some of those folks will churn before the year is over. But I truly wish every reporter could have the experience of getting a raise on the same day they produced something of value to their readers. It’s a powerful signal about the kind of work you want me to do, and helps to guide me to cover subjects that I might have otherwise set aside.

The Biden era is different. I knew Platformer would be a different publication after President Trump was dislodged from office. Trump was a walking catastrophe for both social networks and democracy, and his election had set in motion the series of events that led me to start writing a newsletter in the first place. (The events of 2016 were particularly difficult for one of my beat companies, which at the time was called Facebook.)

It took one failed coup and another year, but we’re firmly in the Biden era now. And while we still have no shortage of national crises, they’re not breaking out at the same chaotic frequency as they were during the Trump years. From 2017 to the start of 2021, I almost never struggled to decide what to write about on a given day. By 2022, though, it started to happen with some regularity.

That led me to explore subjects adjacent to my core focus on social networks: crypto and AI in particular. For the most part, you all came along, even when I was way too credulous (as I was with Axie Infinity). But because I had wedded myself to four columns a week, I often couldn’t manage to do as much reporting as I wanted to.

Unfortunately, I think the coming years will bring us chaotic news cycles more reminiscent of the Trump years than the ones we are living in today. In the meantime, though, I think the moment probably calls for less analysis and more reporting overall. There are moments when you want someone to help you to understand what you already read, and there are moments when you want someone to give you some interesting new things to read about. I feel like we’re in a latter such moment right now, and I need to move Platformer in that direction.

And to that end …

A four-times-a-week cadence has started to feel like a drag on newsletter quality. The most common question I get about Platformer is how I do it four times a week. The answer is that I rely heavily on the reporting of all the amazing journalists out there illuminating various aspects of tech platforms every day. And when the job is mostly making sense of stories you’re already reading about, I find it enjoyable to show up once a day and try.

But in a moment that calls for more original reporting, four times a week can feel oppressive. It doesn’t give me enough time to talk to platform employees, read upcoming books, chase newsmakers for Q&As, and wander down blind alleys.

I want to be clear that what I am describing here is not “burnout.” I love what I do, and if it seemed appropriate for the news cycle, I think four times a week would be the right way to go. But given where we are, I have some other ideas, which I’ll get to below.

You did not really want Platformer to be a jobs board. I was excited to give that one a shot, and it made a little money, but for the most part you were not clicking on job ads and companies were not buying them. I did like highlighting jobs at nonprofits for free, though; I might want to experiment with some other approaches to this in the future.

You do like the Discord, though. Sidechannel never quite lived up to the expectations I had for it as a kind of collaborative newsroom of independent journalists. But a solid group of you show up there every day to drop links, share commentary, and analyze events with me in real time. It has been an incredible resource for me this year, in sometimes unexpected ways — such as when some lawyers who had previously argued in Delaware Chancery Court helped us pick apart Elon Musk’s Twitter lawsuit.

I still think I’ve realized only about 1% of the value of having a Discord server, but this year convinced me that it’s worth investing in.

Substack figured out some new ways to get newsletters to grow. Last year I wrote here that the only way my newsletter grows is when people tweet about it. As of 2022, though, that’s no longer really the case. Substack did two things that were very helpful here.

One, Substacks can now recommend each other, and when you sign up for one newsletter, you’ll be asked if you want to subscribe to another publication that the newsletter recommends. I’m grateful to the dozens of Substacks who recommend Platformer; thanks largely to them, I’ve added 9,000 free subscribers since August 1. At the current trajectory, Platformer should easily hit 100,000 free subscribers within the next year. (Also, you can see all my recommendations here.)

Two, Substack now lets me send paywalled previews to free subscribers. I love having a model that lets me do journalism and send it out for free to anyone who wants it once a week. But sometimes I write something else during the week that I think might cause you all to consider becoming paid subscribers. Paywall previews let me do just that, sending you the top of a story and inviting you to pay to read the rest. I try not to do this too often, but whenever I have I’ve seen great results.

Substack is also experimenting with a referral program: Some paid subscribers of Platformer will soon be able to give away one-month free subscriptions to their friends and co-workers, in hopes that they will stick around longer.

So far, none of these have been a game-changer in the way that, say, launching a Discord server for paid subscribers was for me last year. But they’re steps in the right direction.

What’s changing

So what am I doing with what I learned?

Last year, I told you that I had two goals for year two: to launch a podcast, and to hire someone to help me. Like any good journalist, I blew right past my deadline. But I’m happy to say that both are happening soon.

So:

The podcast is coming October 7. Since February, I’ve been working with The New York Times on a new weekly chat show that will cover tech, business, and our weird future. My co-host is the great Times journalist Kevin Roose, and we’ve spent the past few months exploring ideas and developing something we’re proud of.

Collaborating with the Times and its incredible producers, artists, composers, and other teams has been a career highlight. I could say a lot more about the show, but I’d rather you just listen to it. To that end, the trailer drops next week — that’s when we’ll share the name of the show, by the way — and the first episode will premiere a week later.

I’m moving from four guaranteed text posts a week to three. For the podcast to be as good as it can be, I need to set aside a day during the week to focus on it. The timing feels right to make this change: the news cycle is a beat slower than it was during the Trump era, and moving to three posts a week will give me more time to do the additional reporting I want to do.

The way I’m thinking about this is that my output will basically be the same, but the fourth “post” of the week will be a podcast — one whose editorial interests align closely with what we talk about around here. And that podcast is going to contain original journalism, by the way: we’ll be interviewing newsmakers, Times journalists, and anyone else who can help explain the moment to us.

And so, with that in mind, this week Platformer moves to its new schedule: you can expect posts from me Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the podcast arriving Friday morning. As always, I may write more depending on the news. But I won’t regularly be writing on Wednesdays any more.

I hired someone. For some time now I’ve been looking for someone who can help me summarize the links in each day’s post, to edit my typos and to catch my broken links. I’ve also been seeking someone to help me on the operational side, working to grow the newsletter and business overall.

I’m excited to tell you that I’ve found just such a person — and, as a bonus, this person also does incredible journalism in their own right. I can’t say who it is just yet, But I’m excited to do that very soon — and to share their work with you here over the coming year.

In conclusion

The day I announced Platformer, I said I wanted to create a “tiny media company.” As of this week, that company is now a bit less tiny: paid subscribers are now funding not one but two jobs in journalism, and in time there could be an opportunity grow even further.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting me these past two years. I truly believe that year three is set to the best yet: more newsy; more multimedia; more curious. If that sounds fun to you, and you haven’t become a paid subscriber, now’s the time. The future is going to be messy, but there’s a lot that we can figure out together.

Along with colleagues David Garcia, Fabio Carrella, Almog Simchon, and Segun Aroyehun, we collected all available tweets from former and current members of the U.S. Congress, the German parliament, and the British parliament. Combined, we collected more than 3 million tweets posted from 2016 to 2022.

Politicians from mainstream parties in the U.K. and Germany post few links to untrustworthy websites on Twitter, and this has remained constant since 2016, according to our new research. By contrast, U.S. politicians post a much higher percentage of untrustworthy content in their tweets, and that share has been increasing steeply since 2020.

What is unique about the situation in the US is that there is a very clear temporal trend: sharing of untrustworthy news sources by Republican Congress Members has doubled between 2016-18 and 2020-22 while the proportion of untrustworthy links for Democrats stays stable:

6/12 pic.twitter.com/gDqVyKbv2R

— Dr. Jana Lasser (@janalasser) September 22, 2022

We also found systematic differences between the parties in the U.S., where Republican politicians were found to share untrustworthy websites more than nine times as often as Democratic politicians.

For Republican politicians, overall around 4% (one in 25) links came from untrustworthy sites, compared with around 0.4% (one in 250) among Democratic politicians. That gap has widened in the last few years. Since 2020, more than 5% of tweets from Republican members of Congress contained links to untrustworthy information. Democratic politicians predominantly share information that is trustworthy, we found.

Over the five-year period we studied, mainstream elected U.K. members of parliament shared only 74 links to misinformation (0.01% of all their tweets), compared with 4,789 (1.8%) from elected mainstream U.S. politicians and 812 (1.3%) from German politicians.

To determine the trustworthiness of information shared by the politicians, we extracted all links to external websites contained in the tweets and then used the NewsGuard database to assess the trustworthiness of the domain being linked to. NewsGuard curates a large number of sites in numerous different countries and languages and evaluates them along nine criteria that characterize responsible journalism — for example, whether a site publishes corrections and whether it differentiates between opinion and news.

We then used @NewsGuardRating ratings to assess the trustworthiness of the links they shared. Here is the proportion of untrustworthy domains (score <60) colored by party for the US (on a log scale!):

4/12 pic.twitter.com/6cCPYj5yDq

— Dr. Jana Lasser (@janalasser) September 22, 2022

Our team looked at members of parliament from the U.K.’s Conservative and Labour parties and from Germany (Greens, SPD, FDP, CDU/CSU), as well as U.S. members of Congress.

Members of the conservative parties in Germany (CDU/CSU) and the U.K. (Conservatives) shared links to untrustworthy websites more frequently than their counterparts in the center or center-left. However, even conservative parliamentarians in Europe were more accurate than U.S. Democrats, with only around 0.2% (one in 500) links from European conservatives being untrustworthy.

What is unique about the situation in the US is that there is a very clear temporal trend: sharing of untrustworthy news sources by Republican Congress Members has doubled between 2016-18 and 2020-22 while the proportion of untrustworthy links for Democrats stays stable:

6/12 pic.twitter.com/gDqVyKbv2R

— Dr. Jana Lasser (@janalasser) September 22, 2022

We repeated our analyses using a second database of news website trustworthiness instead of NewsGuard. This robustness check was important to minimize the risk of possible partisan bias in what is considered “untrustworthy.”

The second database was compiled by academics and fact checkers such as Media Bias/Fact Check. Reassuringly, the results matched our primary analyses and we found the same trends.

The world has been awash with concern about the state of our political discourse for many years now. There is ample justification for this concern, given that 30% to 40% of Americans believe the baseless claim that the presidential election of 2020 was “stolen” by President Biden, and that around 10% of the British public believes in at least one conspiracy theory surrounding Covid-19.

Much of the discussion of the misinformation problem — and much of the blame — has focused on social media, and in particular the algorithms that curate our news feeds and that may nudge us toward more extreme and outrage-provoking content. There is now considerable evidence that social media has been harmful to democracy in at least some countries.

However, social media is not the only source of the misinformation problem. Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency and there are political leaders in Europe who have a poor track record.

However, compared with the plethora of research that has focused on the role of social media, and the relationship between technology and democracy more generally, there have been few attempts to systematically characterize the role of political leaders in the dissemination of low-quality information.

Our results are interesting in light of several recent analyses of the American public’s news diet, which have repeatedly shown that conservatives are more likely to encounter and share untrustworthy information than liberals. To date, the origins of that difference have remained disputed.

Our results contribute to a potential explanation if we assume that what politicians say sets the agenda and resonates with members of the public. By sharing misinformation, Republican members of Congress not only directly provide misinformation to their followers, but also legitimize the sharing of untrustworthy information more generally.

In early July 2022, for instance, young voters in Boone County, Missouri, complained that they had missed the registration deadline to vote in the county’s Aug. 2 primary election. They claimed no one “spread the word on social media.” The local election office in that county actually has a social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. But its accounts don’t have many followers and aren’t as active as, say, celebrity or teenage accounts are. As a result, election officials’ messages may never reach their audience.

The Boone County example raises important questions about how prospective voters can get informed about elections, starting with whether or not local election officials are active on social media and whether they use these platforms effectively to “spread the word.”

In our research as scholars of voter participation and electoral processes, we find that when local election officials not only have social media accounts but use them to distribute information about voting, voters of all ages — but particularly young voters — are more likely to register to vote, to cast ballots, and to have their ballots counted.

For example, during the 2020 election, Florida voters who lived in counties where the county supervisor of elections shared information about how to register to vote on Facebook, and included a link to Florida’s online voter registration system, were more likely to complete the voter registration process and use online voter registration.

In North Carolina, we found that voters whose county board of elections used Facebook to share clear information about voting by mail were more likely to have their mailed ballots accepted than mail voters whose county boards did not share instructions on social media.

Young people face distinct voting challenges

Voter participation among young voters, those between the ages of 18 and 24, has increased in recent elections, but still lags behind that of older voters. One reason is that younger voters have not yet established a habit of voting.

Even when they do try to vote, young voters face more barriers to participation than more experienced voters. They are more likely than older people to make errors or omissions on their voter registration applications and therefore not be successfully registered.

When they do successfully complete the registration process, they have more trouble casting a vote that will count, especially when it comes to following all the steps required for voting by mail. When they try to vote in person, evidence from recent elections shows high provisional voting rates in college towns, suggesting college students may also experience trouble in casting a regular ballot owing to confusion about finding their polling place, or because they are not registered to vote because their voter registration application was not successfully processed.

Some of these problems exist because voters, especially young ones, don’t know what they need to do to meet the voter eligibility requirements set by state election laws. Those laws often require registering weeks or months in advance of Election Day, or changing their registration information even if they move within a community.

Social media as a tool to spread the word

Social media can be a way to get this important information out to a wider audience, including to the young voters who are more likely to need it.

Younger people use social media more than older voters, with a strong preference for platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat.

News outlets and political campaigns use social media heavily. But our analysis finds that the vast majority of local election officials don’t even have social media accounts beyond Facebook. And, when they do, it is likely that they are not effectively reaching their audience.

Gaps in how local election officials use social media

We have found that during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, 33% of county election offices had Facebook accounts. Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform among Americans of all ages. But two-thirds of county election offices didn’t even have a Facebook account.

Just 9% of county election offices had Twitter accounts, and fewer than 2% had accounts on Instagram or TikTok, which are more popular with young voters than Twitter or Facebook.

Using social media for voter education

Local election officials are charged with sharing information about the voting process — including the mechanics of registering and voting, as well as official lists of candidates and ballot questions.

Their default method of making this information available is often to share it on their own government websites. But young voters’ regular use of social media presents an opportunity for officials to be more active and engaged on those sites.

While many election officials around the country face budget and staffing pressures, as well as threats to their safety, our research confirms that when officials do get involved on social media, young voters benefit – as does democracy itself.

The change is one of the biggest tweaks to article preview cards since summary cards appeared on the scene back in 2015. The customizable image, format, and interactive elements could help news orgs distinguish themselves in feeds and, ultimately, drive more engagement.

For the experiment, Twitter partnered with The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. (The three news publishers were selected for their “highly engaged and trusted audiences,” according to Twitter.) Tweet Tiles will be visible to half of people on iOS and Web, with the other half seeing standard summary cards.

Today we’re beginning to test Tweet Tiles with @nytimes, @wsj and @guardian. Tweet Tiles will let developers extend the Tweet experience and will pave future innovation for our @TwitterDev developer community https://t.co/LDyExFq4b1 pic.twitter.com/mKeU87jNIv

— Amir Shevat (@ashevat) August 25, 2022

Twitter plans to make the feature available through the Twitter API in the future, giving more newsrooms the ability to create their own publisher-specific cards.

Looks like Twitter are testing some new publisher specific cards with additional formatting options? pic.twitter.com/2mX6dfFEiq

— Matt ‘TK’ Taylor (@MattieTK) August 25, 2022

Twitter’s new “developer-built card” allows publishers stylize link previews in a Tweet

It’s much appreciated, but will Twitter still be favoring photo/video Tweets over link Tweets in the Home Timeline? (something many news outlets do) https://t.co/uB48APpfnv pic.twitter.com/VBUEJC0x4M

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 25, 2022

Later, Musk put the deal on hold and demanded more proof.

So why are people arguing about the percentage of bot accounts on Twitter?

As the creators of Botometer, a widely used bot detection tool, our group at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media has been studying inauthentic accounts and manipulation on social media for over a decade. We brought the concept of the “social bot” to the foreground and first estimated their prevalence on Twitter in 2017.

Based on our knowledge and experience, we believe that estimating the percentage of bots on Twitter has become a very difficult task, and debating the accuracy of the estimate might be missing the point. Here is why.

What, exactly, is a bot?

To measure the prevalence of problematic accounts on Twitter, a clear definition of the targets is necessary. Common terms such as “fake accounts,” “spam accounts,” and “bots” are used interchangeably, but they have different meanings. Fake or false accounts are those that impersonate people. Accounts that mass-produce unsolicited promotional content are defined as spammers. Bots, on the other hand, are accounts controlled in part by software; they may post content or carry out simple interactions, like retweeting, automatically.

These types of accounts often overlap. For instance, you can create a bot that impersonates a human to post spam automatically. Such an account is simultaneously a bot, a spammer and a fake. But not every fake account is a bot or a spammer, and vice versa. Coming up with an estimate without a clear definition only yields misleading results.

Defining and distinguishing account types can also inform proper interventions. Fake and spam accounts degrade the online environment and violate platform policy. Malicious bots are used to spread misinformation, inflate popularity, exacerbate conflict through negative and inflammatory content, manipulate opinions, influence elections, conduct financial fraud, and disrupt communication. However, some bots can be harmless or even useful, for example by helping disseminate news, delivering disaster alerts, and conducting research.

Simply banning all bots is not in the best interest of social media users.

For simplicity, researchers use the term “inauthentic accounts” to refer to the collection of fake accounts, spammers, and malicious bots. This is also the definition Twitter appears to be using. However, it is unclear what Musk has in mind.

Hard to count

Even when a consensus is reached on a definition, there are still technical challenges to estimating prevalence.

External researchers do not have access to the same data as Twitter, such as IP addresses and phone numbers. This hinders the public’s ability to identify inauthentic accounts. But even Twitter acknowledges that the actual number of inauthentic accounts could be higher than it has estimated, because detection is challenging.

Inauthentic accounts evolve and develop new tactics to evade detection. For example, some fake accounts use AI-generated faces as their profiles. These faces can be indistinguishable from real ones, even to humans. Identifying such accounts is hard and requires new technologies.

Another difficulty is posed by coordinated accounts that appear to be normal individually but act so similarly to each other that they are almost certainly controlled by a single entity. Yet they are like needles in the haystack of hundreds of millions of daily tweets.

Finally, inauthentic accounts can evade detection by techniques like swapping handles or automatically posting and deleting large volumes of content.

The distinction between inauthentic and genuine accounts gets more and more blurry. Accounts can be hacked, bought, or rented, and some users “donate” their credentials to organizations who post on their behalf. As a result, so-called “cyborg” accounts are controlled by both algorithms and humans. Similarly, spammers sometimes post legitimate content to obscure their activity.

We have observed a broad spectrum of behaviors mixing the characteristics of bots and people. Estimating the prevalence of inauthentic accounts requires applying a simplistic binary classification: authentic or inauthentic account. No matter where the line is drawn, mistakes are inevitable.

Missing the big picture

The focus of the recent debate on estimating the number of Twitter bots oversimplifies the issue and misses the point of quantifying the harm of online abuse and manipulation by inauthentic accounts.

Through BotAmp, a new tool from the Botometer family that anyone with a Twitter account can use, we have found that the presence of automated activity is not evenly distributed. For instance, the discussion about cryptocurrencies tends to show more bot activity than the discussion about cats. Therefore, whether the overall prevalence is 5% or 20% makes little difference to individual users; their experiences with these accounts depend on whom they follow and the topics they care about.

Recent evidence suggests that inauthentic accounts might not be the only culprits responsible for the spread of misinformation, hate speech, polarization and radicalization. These issues typically involve many human users. For instance, our analysis shows that misinformation about Covid-19 was disseminated overtly on both Twitter and Facebook by verified, high-profile accounts.

Even if it were possible to precisely estimate the prevalence of inauthentic accounts, this would do little to solve these problems. A meaningful first step would be to acknowledge the complex nature of these issues. This will help social media platforms and policymakers develop meaningful responses.

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter an arena for free speech. It’s not clear what that will mean, and his statements have fueled speculation among both supporters and detractors. As a corporation, Twitter can regulate speech on its platform as it chooses. There are bills being considered in the U.S. Congress and by the European Union that address social media regulation, but these are about transparency, accountability, illegal harmful content and protecting users’ rights, rather than regulating speech.

Musk’s calls for free speech on Twitter focus on two allegations: political bias and excessive moderation. As researchers of online misinformation and manipulation, my colleagues and I at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media study the dynamics and impact of Twitter and its abuse. To make sense of Musk’s statements and the possible outcomes of his acquisition, let’s look at what the research shows.

Political bias

Many conservative politicians and pundits have alleged for years that major social media platforms, including Twitter, have a liberal political bias amounting to censorship of conservative opinions. These claims are based on anecdotal evidence. For example, many partisans whose tweets were labeled as misleading and downranked, or whose accounts were suspended for violating the platform’s terms of service, claim that Twitter targeted them because of their political views.

Unfortunately, Twitter and other platforms often inconsistently enforce their policies, so it is easy to find examples supporting one conspiracy theory or another. A review by the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University has found no reliable evidence in support of the claim of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, even labeling the claim itself a form of disinformation.

A more direct evaluation of political bias by Twitter is difficult because of the complex interactions between people and algorithms. People, of course, have political biases. For example, our experiments with political social bots revealed that Republican users are more likely to mistake conservative bots for humans, whereas Democratic users are more likely to mistake conservative human users for bots.

To remove human bias from the equation in our experiments, we deployed a bunch of benign social bots on Twitter. Each of these bots started by following one news source, with some bots following a liberal source and others a conservative one. After that initial friend, all bots were left alone to “drift” in the information ecosystem for a few months. They could gain followers. They acted according to an identical algorithmic behavior. This included following or following back random accounts, tweeting meaningless content and retweeting or copying random posts in their feed.

But this behavior was politically neutral, with no understanding of content seen or posted. We tracked the bots to probe political biases emerging from how Twitter works or how users interact.

Surprisingly, our research provided evidence that Twitter has a conservative, rather than a liberal bias. On average, accounts are drawn toward the conservative side. Liberal accounts were exposed to moderate content, which shifted their experience toward the political center, while the interactions of right-leaning accounts were skewed toward posting conservative content. Accounts that followed conservative news sources also received more politically aligned followers, becoming embedded in denser echo chambers and gaining influence within those partisan communities.

These differences in experiences and actions can be attributed to interactions with users and information mediated by the social media platform. But we could not directly examine the possible bias in Twitter’s news feed algorithm, because the actual ranking of posts in the “home timeline” is not available to outside researchers.

Researchers from Twitter, however, were able to audit the effects of their ranking algorithm on political content, unveiling that the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left. Their experiment showed that in six out of seven countries studied, conservative politicians enjoy higher algorithmic amplification than liberal ones. They also found that algorithmic amplification favors right-leaning news sources in the U.S.

Our research and the research from Twitter show that Musk’s apparent concern about bias on Twitter against conservatives is unfounded.

Referees or censors?

The other allegation that Musk seems to be making is that excessive moderation stifles free speech on Twitter. The concept of a free marketplace of ideas is rooted in John Milton’s centuries-old reasoning that truth prevails in a free and open exchange of ideas. This view is often cited as the basis for arguments against moderation: accurate, relevant, timely information should emerge spontaneously from the interactions among users.

Unfortunately, several aspects of modern social media hinder the free marketplace of ideas. Limited attention and confirmation bias increase vulnerability to misinformation. Engagement-based ranking can amplify noise and manipulation, and the structure of information networks can distort perceptions and be “gerrymandered” to favor one group.

As a result, social media users have in past years become victims of manipulation by “astroturf” causes, trolling and misinformation. Abuse is facilitated by social bots and coordinated networks that create the appearance of human crowds.

We and other researchers have observed these inauthentic accounts amplifying disinformation, influencing elections, committing financial fraud, infiltrating vulnerable communities and disrupting communication. Musk has tweeted that he wants to defeat spam bots and authenticate humans, but these are neither easy nor necessarily effective solutions.

Inauthentic accounts are used for malicious purposes beyond spam and are hard to detect, especially when they are operated by people in conjunction with software algorithms. And removing anonymity may harm vulnerable groups. In recent years, Twitter has enacted policies and systems to moderate abuses by aggressively suspending accounts and networks displaying inauthentic coordinated behaviors. A weakening of these moderation policies may make abuse rampant again.

Manipulating Twitter

Despite Twitter’s recent progress, integrity is still a challenge on the platform. Our lab is finding new types of sophisticated manipulation, which we will present at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in June. Malicious users exploit so-called “follow trains” — groups of people who follow each other on Twitter — to rapidly boost their followers and create large, dense hyperpartisan echo chambers that amplify toxic content from low-credibility and conspiratorial sources.

Another effective malicious technique is to post and then strategically delete content that violates platform terms after it has served its purpose. Even Twitter’s high limit of 2,400 tweets per day can be circumvented through deletions: We identified many accounts that flood the network with tens of thousands of tweets per day.

We also found coordinated networks that engage in repetitive likes and unlikes of content that is eventually deleted, which can manipulate ranking algorithms. These techniques enable malicious users to inflate content popularity while evading detection.

Musk’s plans for Twitter are unlikely to do anything about these manipulative behaviors.

Content moderation and free speech

Musk’s likely acquisition of Twitter raises concerns that the social media platform could decrease its content moderation. This body of research shows that stronger, not weaker, moderation of the information ecosystem is called for to combat harmful misinformation.

It also shows that weaker moderation policies would ironically hurt free speech: The voices of real users would be drowned out by malicious users who manipulate Twitter through inauthentic accounts, bots and echo chambers.

Twitter was taking up too much of journalists’ time, the Times said. It was also driving harassment and abuse, and bad tweets harm the reputation of the paper and of its staffers. The company also made it clear that Twitter is truly optional, and that using it isn’t a job requirement.

There must be an Elon Musk in the water because this week, The Guardian released new social media guidelines for its own staffers.

The guidelines are “based on extensive input from journalists and commercial staff across [Guardian News Media], in the UK, US and Australia,” the Guardian said. Here are a few key parts:

Social media is optional — really.

GNM does not require you to tweet or post on any social media platform. Most staff can do their jobs extremely well using social media either occasionally, such as to share Guardian and Observer stories; for monitoring (‘listen-only’ mode); newsgathering/finding sources; or not at all. You are not expected to have a presence or a following on social media.

Employees aren’t exactly forbidden from expressing political opinions. But…

The Guardian and the Observer are renowned for fair and accurate reporting, and being trusted matters. Editorial colleagues — particularly those working in news — should remain especially mindful of blurring fact and opinion when using social media. Be aware that expressing partisan, party-political or strong opinions on social media can damage the Guardian’s reputation for fair and fact-based reporting, and your own reputation as a journalist. The same applies to likes and retweets.

Reporters with large followings need to be especially careful about this, the memo notes:

Your behaviour, more than most, will reflect on GNM and may have a disproportionate impact on those you engage with on social platforms. Think carefully before you quote-tweet.

Don’t use social media to fight with or criticize colleagues or the company.

We strongly discourage the use of social media to air any form of internal disputes with colleagues or contributors, or with GNM. This is a serious matter.

Also, subtweets about colleagues are “never acceptable.”

Guardian reporters should generally not break news on Twitter

Remember, as a journalist your job is to break news for GNM, on GNM’s platform, not on social media. Only tweet breaking news if the news editor is happy for you to do that, rather than report it for the website.

Just because Twitter says it’s a story doesn’t mean it is.

It’s worth keeping in mind that just because a story is generating interest on social media, or a handful of people have tweeted about it, that does not necessarily mean it has news value and needs to be reported or circulated further on social media.

Delete your tweets! Expense Tweetdelete!

We strongly encourage staff to regularly delete historical tweets and other social posts. We recommend using the Tweetdelete service to do this. The cost of this can be expensed.

The Guardian also “plans to create a new role in the managing editor’s office that includes responsibility for social media, so that GNM journalists and editors have somebody to talk to for expert advice and support, including on abuse or harassment when needed.”

Now, a new study that analyzed former president Donald Trump’s tweets finds that there are no clear-cut answers when it comes to determining how people engage with content that’s clearly labeled as containing misleading information. The study drew from more than 1,200 tweets from Donald Trump’s Twitter account between October 30, 2020 and January 8, 2021. The authors also collected these tweets’ engagement metrics as well as the nearly 2.4 million replies to these tweets.

At the outset, the study found that labeled tweets were much more likely to garner user engagement: Compared to unlabeled tweets, labeled tweets were liked approximately 36% more, retweeted 70% more, quote tweeted 88% more, and the median number of replies labeled tweets generated was 84% higher than that of unlabeled tweets.

“Before I was a researcher and was just a Twitter user, I thought labels would have a backlash effect,” Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and one of the authors of the study, said.

But this study’s findings are consistent with other studies, he said. In one study, researchers found that although Twitter labeled Trump’s tweets as possibly containing misinformation, these labeled tweets increased users’ engagement with those tweets. Another study found that simply blocking Twitter users from engaging with Trump tweets containing misinformation led to fewer of these tweets being shared (although they proliferated on other social media platforms). In contrast, when Twitter chose “soft moderation” — where tweets were labeled as containing disputed claims or other such marker for misinformation — those tweets from the former president were more likely to be disseminated.

The new study — published recently in the preprint repository SSRN — went further in trying to determine what kind of labeling seemed to make a difference with Twitter engagement.

To determine the different kinds of labeling, Papakyriakopoulos and his coauthor Ellen P. Goodman looked to previous work by Emily Saltz and Claire Leibowicz to determine whether the kinds of labels Twitter had applied to Trump’s tweets.

“We classified tweets as soft-moderated or not, and as containing three types of misinformation: fraud-related, election victory–related, and ballots-related. We categorize warning labels by type (veracity or contextual), rebuttal strength, and their linguistic and topical overlap with the associated tweets,” Papakyriakopoulos and his co-author wrote in the study.

“Veracity labels” called out whether information within a tweet was true or false. “Contextual labels” went beyond that to provide more information about the issue. Here’s how the authors classified the other variables:

The second variable was linguistic overlap to signify that the label used the exact same vocabulary as did the tweet. For example, the variable would have the value one when the word “fraud” appeared both in the label and the tweet. The third variable was topical overlap to signify that the label and tweet referred to the same issue, but with different wording. For example, the variable would have the value one when the word “steal” appeared in Trump’s tweet, while the label referred to election “fraud.”

By analyzing these different qualities of a label and correlating them with engagement, the authors found a few things.

Contextual labels, providing more information, did not increase user engagement. While veracity labels, stating whether something was true or false, did increase engagement, that only happened when these labels were misplaced. “If Twitter placed a label on a tweet incorrectly, then engagement went up,” Papakyriakopoulos said.

At the same time, a correctly placed label did seem to change the nature of the replies, he said, in a way that primed the topic for discussion. “There weren’t more replies, but they were actually discussing the topic at hand,” Papakyriakopoulos said.

The group also evaluated whether the strength of the label’s rebuttal affected engagement. Stronger rebuttals — ones where the label went beyond just saying a claim was disputed and instead offered an outlet for people to learn more or offered what the truth was — were associated with less toxic replies.

The below tweet, with a label clearly stating that voting by mail is safe and secure and offering a link to where people can learn more about it, is an example of a strong rebuttal.

The below tweet, with a loose “This claim about election fraud is disputed” label, is a weak rebuttal. At the same time, the label in the subsequent tweet is strong: It clearly refutes Trump’s claim that he won the election.

Stronger rebuttals increased engagement from both sides of the political spectrum. The nature of the support didn’t change, however: Perhaps predictably, conservatives would support claims that Trump made more and liberals would be more vocal about being against his claims.

Was there a special “Trump effect” to these results? The findings suggest no. “Although it was Trump and I expected to see much more polarization — especially because we heard this narrative of fake news and tech platforms violating free speech — we did not find that the labels actually had this backlash,” Papakyriakopoulos said.

What does all this mean for content moderation on social media platforms, or at least on Twitter?

“Perfect moderation doesn’t exist,” Papakyriakopoulos said. To him, moderation is about getting people to discuss something constructively, especially since misinformation is always going to find a way to be present. So, he said, platforms have to decide: “How can you make people discuss [information] instead of polarizing them further?”

Twitter and other social media platforms need to think of content moderation as not only removing bad information, but also in terms of how users are present on platforms and how their opinions are shaped in real time.

It would be helpful, Papakyriakopoulos said, if Twitter and other platforms were more forthcoming about how their labeling process worked. “If they can provide more information about how they moderate content and how they did it historically, that would be really helpful,” he said. “These can be things that everybody — researchers, the platform itself, or even other platforms — can learn from.”

Twitter Spaces launched as a mobile-only product for a select number of hosts back in December 2020 — a few months before Clubhouse hit its peak; remember Clubhouse? — and was rolled out widely in May 2021. (Anyone with more than 600 followers can host a Space.)

Eric Zuckerman, head of U.S. news partnerships for Twitter, said he and his team have been talking to newsrooms about using Spaces for the past year. His pitch? Social audio like Twitter Spaces presents “an opportunity for newsrooms and journalists to have an open and authentic conversations with their audiences about what’s happening in the world and about the stories that they’re covering,” he said.

Twitter has long held appeal for journalists looking to connect with audiences and sources. On its best days, the platform is a place where reporters can get story ideas, answer questions, and build trust by showing more of their work and process. Twitter Spaces, Zuckerman says, are another way that journalists can continue the conversation. During a Space, hosts — which can be newsrooms or individuals — invite followers to listen in on an interview, discussion, or panel and even hand them the (virtual) mic to join the conversation.

Recent newsroom-hosted Spaces include NPR’s Steve Inskeep talking about his abbreviated interview with Trump, the Miami Herald going behind the scenes of their months-long investigation into the Surfside condo collapse, and reporters at The Washington Post jumping on to respond to the news Microsoft was acquiring the gamemaker Activision.

.@NPRinskeep’s interview with Donald Trump ended with the former President hanging up.

Steve will discuss this interview with @DomenicoNPR and @MaraLiasson at 1 PM on @TwitterSpaces. https://t.co/uSQDZ4BJxj

— NPR (@NPR) January 12, 2022

Newsrooms have promoted Spaces around anniversaries, too. On January 6, there were plenty to choose from: HuffPost, BuzzFeed News, USA Today, New York Times Opinion, The Daily Beast, Politico, and the Associated Press all held Spaces looking at the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol.

Join @AP journalists @JulioCortez_AP, @MCJalonick, @DavidKlepper and @ctlong1 on Wednesday as they speak with @RADIOEDD to look back at the year since the insurrection at the Capitol. https://t.co/h8Ux3k1JXn

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 4, 2022

Some of the best Spaces I’ve heard have been where reporters share what they know and what they’re still trying to figure out. When the news broke that Facebook planned to change its name, tech journalists Kara Swisher and Casey Newton held a rollicking discussion with a lot of blue-checked names speculating about what the new name might be, and why Facebook might be interested in making the change. The freedom the reporters felt to make some educated guesses — the kind of conjecture that might not make it into print — made it all the more fun.

There’s a fairly thorough primer on using Twitter Spaces but Zuckerman says the first thing he tells newsrooms is to listen to other Spaces and test out the feature on their own. Sarah Feldberg, editor for emerging products and audio at the San Francisco Chronicle, echoed the advice.

“Test. Test. Test,” Feldberg said. “The feature is fairly easy to use, but the functionality seems to be updated regularly, so it’s important to stay on top of how it’s working and make sure your guests know how to join the Space and start speaking.”

The Chronicle has done four Spaces so far: a service-oriented discussion about holiday gifting, one with restaurant critics Soleil Ho and Cesar Hernandez, and two in partnership with their flagship daily news podcast Fifth & Mission.

The Fifth & Mission ones have featured podcast host Cecilia Lei and health reporter Erin Allday interviewing public health experts about Covid-19.

“They’ve been a way to give our community live access to local experts and to talk about pressing issues around the pandemic, like advice for parents of children too young to be vaccinated and concerns around long Covid in breakthrough infections,” Feldberg said. “We recorded the audio from those conversations and edited the highlights into subsequent podcast episodes.”

“We knew it was much more infectious. I have to say that I think the extent of that is jaw-dropping … 5 times more than anything I’ve seen in the prior two years”: Dr. @Bob_Wachter talks the current omicron surge and what to expect in 2022. https://t.co/n1dXkGXB4I

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) January 8, 2022

NPR — which has hosted more than 60 Spaces so far — has also been able to use and reuse conversations hosted on Twitter Spaces. Matt Adams, engagement editor at NPR, pointed to a wide-ranging conversation between NPR pop culture critic Eric Deggans, NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann, Dopesick author Beth Macy, and Dopesick series creator/showrunner Danny Strong that was recorded for listeners who missed the live Space and yielded three digital stories.

An interview with the U.S. Surgeon General — and the live audience questions — were broadcast more widely, too.

“The reporters open the conversation, talk through recent reporting, and update our audience on what they should know. But I think the real special feature to social audio is the social part, opening the mic to the audience to ask questions that can help us figure out topics we haven’t covered yet or get their reactions to how NPR is covering the news,” Adams said. “I’ve worked in online communities for a long time and before you used to send out a survey to get feedback or ask members how we can better provide a service … To me, social audio is an in-real-time survey where we can gain feedback and hopefully reach new audience members.”

Twitter Spaces featuring celebrities and reporters covering the White House and Congress have done especially well for NPR. (The actor Matthew McConaughey had more than 4,000 listeners when he said, about running for political office, “I am not — until I am” in a Twitter Space hosted by NPR.) Once started, the newsroom can boost attendance by tweeting out choice quotes or letting users know they’ll be opening the conversation up for questions soon.

Ultimately, Adams said Twitter Spaces are part of a larger strategy at NPR to think through how a radio company “can reach beyond the airwaves and digital .org page” and “hear from a wide range of guests and sources.”

“We’re starting to wonder, ‘Okay, can this work as a social audio conversation? How can we get more voices on this whether from the audience or our sources?'” he added. “I’d say that it’s becoming part of our strategy just like we produce pieces for on-air.”

It’s time to flex those Twitter fingers and take it to the next level

Twitter Blue is now available for subscription in the US, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia on iOS, Android, and web pic.twitter.com/if3wXfoGpB

— Twitter Blue (@TwitterBlue) November 9, 2021

After first gathering feedback in Australia and Canada, users in the United States and New Zealand can now subscribe to Twitter Blue for $2.99/month. (There’s no annual option yet, and Twitter doesn’t have a timeline for when users in the rest of the world will have access.) A handful of the new features build on technology offered by the news startup Scroll — which Twitter acquired in May — including a news aggregating feature similar to Nuzzel.

Who is this for? Twitter senior product director Sara Beykpour declined to share subscription numbers from the rollout in Australia and Canada, but did note that the people who opted for Twitter Blue tend to fall into at least one of the following categories:

• Super tweeters. People who tweet a lot and/or spend a lot of time on the site.
• Verified Twitter users, especially those with large followings.
• News lovers. “People who can’t get enough of reading and keeping up with the news,” as Beykpour described them.

If that sounds a lot like journalists you know and love, Twitter’s thinking isn’t too far off. Beykpour even told a group gathered virtually for a press conference that Twitter designed the new product with “people like you” in mind.

Twitter senior product director Tony Haile, the former CEO of Chartbeat and Scroll, introduced the ad-free reading experience. Twitter Blue subscribers visiting sites like The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, The Atlantic, Reuters, Mother Jones, Insider, Slate, BuzzFeed, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and more will see the article content without ads. Twitter will also note — mid-feed — which articles will be ad-free, hopefully nudging more to click. (Being a Twitter Blue user does not mean that you’ll bypass paywalls — if you’re not also already a subscriber to the L.A. Times, for instance, you can still hit the publication’s paywall.)

As with Scroll, a portion of the subscription revenue will go toward directly supporting the partner publications, allocated based on how much time an individual Twitter Blue user spends on each site in a month. Each user can see which news sites they’re supporting, too.

“Our goal is that each site makes 50% more per person than they would serving ads to that person,” Haile said.

Haile also showed off a ‘Top Articles” feature designed with former Nuzzel lovers in mind. (He sounded a triumphant note here; Haile mentioned he’s been getting a lot of flak in his mentions for Nuzzel going dark.)

Using a “simple and transparent algorithm,” the Top Articles feature will show a Twitter Blue user the articles that have been most tweeted by the people they follow in the last 24 hours. Unlike trending topics, it’s not curated or moderated by Twitter employees. “It’s a different and complementary way to experience Twitter,” Haile said.

It’s not quite an edit button but Twitter is introducing an “undo” option that gives Twitter Blue subscribers 60 seconds to edit their tweet before it goes live. Think of “Undo Send” in Gmail, which offers a similar feature for the times you hit send and then notice you’ve signed your email “Satan” rather than “Sarah.” (Just me?) It’s unclear if Twitter plans to extend this much-requested feature to the entire user base and free Twitter users wouldn’t be wrong to wonder if the existence of Twitter Blue will wind up delaying the rollout of new features to non-subscribers.

Twitter Blue also offers more customization, such as the ability to “pin” a conversation at the top of your DM box, and a “Reader” view that streamlines threads. They’ll also give paying users the option to beta test new features, starting with the ability to tweet longer videos. Twitter Blue users can post videos up to 10 minutes long — opposed to the max of 2 minutes 20 seconds for everyone else.

The last nifty feature I’ll mention is the ability to create bookmark folders to organize tweets. You might want to keep tasty-looking recipes in a different folder than potential story ideas. Smita Gupta, senior product manager at Twitter, said she uses them to put user-generated feature requests in one place. “You guys all have so much to say,” she noted.

This is a highly illiberal measure. Preventing people exercising their free-speech rights in advance because they are ‘disruptive’ is fraught with risk for a democratic society. https://t.co/ZFpP83Qviv pic.twitter.com/EKNJgYAAfb

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) October 5, 2021

Wagner wouldn’t have been surprised to see one or more of these tweets embedded in a news article. That’s generally considered fair use. But he was surprised to see them appear on the Daily Mail’s website in the form of a sidebar to this piece, with no mention of their provenance, accompanied by his headshot.

Hey @MailOnline I don't mind you (or anyone) reproducing my tweets, which are publicly available, but turning a Twitter thread into an *opinion piece* without my permission goes a bit farhttps://t.co/5RSOnBBHgb pic.twitter.com/WxX04ZRfRz

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) October 5, 2021

“They regularly use my tweets in articles, which is fine,” Wagner told me via DM. “I accept that when I tweet anyone can quote from the tweet as long as it is attributed — but this is something new.” (The Daily Mail did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)

The response from Wagner’s Twitter followers was swift: Make ’em pay! When Wagner complained to them, the Mail temporarily replaced the tweets-in-a-column with his headshot and bio. They also agreed to pay a fee, and the tweets went back up — they’re now printed directly in the body of the article.

The fee? £250 (USD $340.99 at 0.73 pounds to the dollar, or the equivalent of 114 people paying $2.99 each for Twitter Super Follows). “They offered £100 but I suggested they take into account that what they did was probably illegal,” Wagner said, “and they agreed immediately.”

With eight tweets in the original thread, that works out to $42.62 per tweet, which is really not bad for a morning’s tweetage.

I'd rather see Adam get paid than Twitter. Unless you mean Twitter would pass on payment to the user whose tweets are lifted?

Daily Mail aside, the balance of power is already too much towards platforms at the expense of news sites, I'd argue.

— Sam Wilkin (@MrSamWilkin) October 5, 2021

unrolling the twitter thread right into the CMS https://t.co/rrRMtzE9zK

— Brandon Hardin (@hardin) October 5, 2021

Sure, having a few news stories sprinkled throughout the News Feed probably makes a subset of their users happy and more willing to tap that blue icon on their homescreen again tomorrow. But there aren’t that many of them. Only 12.9% of posts viewed in the News Feed have a link to anything, much less a link to a news site. The percent that are about news — defined broadly, including sports and entertainment — is now somewhere less than 4%. It’s something of a niche interest for Facebook users.

Meanwhile, oh, what a giant pain in the ass it has been for Zuck & Co.: Fake news, foreign propaganda, Covid lies, Nazis, horse paste, fact-checking, accusations of political bias, and a seemingly never-ending list of additional headaches. Because Facebook, architecturally, makes little distinction between the best sources and the worst — but, architecturally, incentivizes content that appeals to our less rational natures — it gets blamed for roughly 80% of what ails the world.

Maybe you think that’s fair; maybe you think it gets a bad rap. Either way, Facebook would be happy if all of it could be sucked right off its servers and replaced with more puppies and silly memes and Instagram sunsets. And the company has taken a steady series of steps to reduce the role of news, especially political news, on its platform, the latest just a few weeks ago.

A new study out today from the Pew Research Center suggests it isn’t just Facebook that’s seeking a trial separation from the news — it’s also Facebook’s users.

As social media and technology companies face criticism for not doing enough to stem the flow of misleading information on their platforms, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that a little under half of U.S. adults (48%) get news on social media sites “often” or “sometimes,” a 5 percentage point decline from 2020.

Across the 10 social media sites asked about in this study, the percentage of users of each site who regularly get news there has remained relatively stable since 2020. However, both Facebook and TikTok buck this trend.

The share of Facebook users who say they regularly get news on the site has declined 7 points since 2020, from 54% to about 47% in 2021. TikTok, on the other hand, has seen a slight uptick in the percentage of users who say they regularly get news on the site, rising from 22% in 2020 to 29% in 2021.

That people would be reducing their news use of social media isn’t shocking; you may remember that 2020 was a pretty busy year! 2021, for all its continued pandemicity, has been at least a little less insane, news-wise. (Since January 20, at least.)

But Facebook’s decline (7 percentage points) was substantially larger than Twitter’s (4), Reddit’s (3), Snapchat’s (3), YouTube’s (2), Instagram’s (1), or LinkedIn’s (1). (Besides TikTok, WhatsApp and Twitch saw increases, though small ones.)

And because Facebook’s user base is so much larger than other (non-YouTube) social platforms, the impact of that drop in news usage is magnified. If my back-of-the-envelope math is right, the net decline in news usage on Facebook was about 5× the size of the net decline on Twitter. Facebook’s seeing a bigger decline that’s happening within a much larger user base.

That this is all happening despite 2020’s splashy-sounding debut of the Facebook News Tab for all its (U.S.) users and the company wearing out its checkbooks writing checks to publishers around the world. As I’ve argued, those payments (and those from rival duopolist Google) should be understood more as paid lobbying than an actual attempt to center journalism as an important anchor of their platforms.

Facebook users tend to be more casual news consumers than users of more news-oriented platforms like Twitter or Reddit — so a reduction there is probably more significant to an individual user, in terms of their overall news diet. But that more casual news consumer is also the sort more likely to be time-targeted in their news consumption — the person who pays attention to politics for the 30 days before an election and ignores it the rest of the time — so a higher drop-off from 2020 shouldn’t be too surprising.

But still, fewer people counting on Facebook for news is probably a good thing — and a sign that the interests of the company and its users may be strangely aligned, for once.

Nguyễn wrote about how those slides, while attention-grabbing, ran the risk of oversimplifying issues, stripping them of their importance, and potentially spreading misinformation:

Coincidental or not, creators are applying this millennialesque visual language to their work, which makes it easy for savvy brands (or anyone who can replicate that design style) to jump on and pervert the movement by using it to further their own corporate mission. Then there’s the question of whether it’s even appropriate to aestheticize these human rights-related issues. As corporations and individuals become attuned to the widespread adoption of memes and certain creative aesthetics in online spaces, they could further be used to “commodify tragedy and obfuscate revolutionary messages,” wrote the Instagram creator @disintegration.loops, later referencing how Breonna Taylor’s death has devolved into a meme.

Most of these activism slideshows don’t appear to be made with malicious intent, nor are they actively harming anyone, but some are worried about the long-term neutralizing effect of making advocacy more digestible and consumable for a large audience.

But slides like these, when done right and with care, make complex stories (about, say, a mutating virus!) more digestible and accessible. At The New York Times, the audience team has been experimenting with variations of these slides and cards on its social media platforms, deputy off-platform editor Jake Grovum said.

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A post shared by The New York Times (@nytimes)

“When there’s either an important, complicated news story or something that [would benefit from] context, there’s a real good journalistic reason to do this kind of thing,” Grovum said. “If you look at some of the examples when it works best, it’s almost like you get the first three or four grafs of a news story all in one post. You have the copy of the tweet, a couple of lines in the card, and then it’s just a lot more information and context, and everyone knows that context can be lacking on social.”

At the Times, using slides and cards on social became more of a priority around the beginning of the pandemic last year. The audience team wanted to have a more “visual presence” on Times platforms and wanted to make more use of the maps and data visualizations that lived on the website.

“It all came from wanting to be more visual,” Grovum said. “We made it part of our daily routine to have these visual presences for whatever news or whatever story we’re trying to share.”

Single cards work better on Facebook and Twitter because those apps don’t have a carousel feature (you know, where you swipe left to see more images in a single post) the way Instagram does. Grovum said he’s found that Facebook and Twitter lend themselves well to text-heavy cards and that users are actually taking the time to read and share them.

The cards have been particularly useful to the Times in debunking misinformation, though Grovum said a broader challenge is designing cards in ways that are still helpful even if they’re screenshotted and stripped of context.

Here, a Facebook post from this past April about a vaccine-related false claim had more than 8,300 shares and 25,000 likes, a sign that users want to share factual information with others.

Compare that to the engagement on another Facebook post from the same day that explains what the word “cheugy” means. Just over a thousand likes and 534 shares.

Grovum said the Times looks at metrics and qualitative feedback (like comments) on the cards as proxy for utility. More engagement is a sign that people found the information helpful, even if they didn’t click the link.

“We’re pretty aware and upfront with ourselves about how these are optimized for off-platform engagement, reach, and sharing. If you wanted to optimize for people clicking through the site, you wouldn’t put a third of the story on a card,” Grovum said. “We’re very aware that there’s a trade-off here, and we’ll usually do bot — we’ll have a link post or something and [also] do the shareable version and get the best of both worlds. Link posts without a visual can drive more actual click-through, [while] the cards are better for engagement.”

Because the text cards are usually image files, they can be difficult to read or even access for people who are visually impaired. Grovum said the Times is still working through those accessibility issues by adding alternative text to some posts, but noted that many social media management tools still don’t have an efficient way of including it, which can cause problems in workflow.

Trying out these new formats is helpful to the Times because it gives journalists a chance to learn about what their audiences want to see.

“Even with templates, these are labor-intensive no matter how easy your processes are. It takes longer to do [a card] than to write a tweet and just get that out,” Grovum said. “But I think it pays off to understand your audience and lean into things that you know are going to resonate with them.”

Twitter Blue is an odd name for the social network’s $3/month premium service, which it formally announced this morning after weeks of leaks. Is it the late-night version of Twitter where you can swear? Is it Sad Twitter? A service regulators will eventually force Twitter to spin-off?

But of course Twitter’s Celtics-inspired bird log has long been blue (thank heavens they abandoned that awful mucus green). And its verified accounts have made being a “blue check” either a mark of elite status, dastardly power, or both. So the choice isn’t that curious.

From the announcement:

We’ve heard from the people that use Twitter a lot, and we mean a lot, that we don’t always build power features that meet their needs. Well, that’s about to change. We took this feedback to heart, and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.

And for those wondering, no, a free Twitter is not going away, and never will. This subscription offering is simply meant to add enhanced and complementary features to the already existing Twitter experience for those who want it.

Starting today, we will be rolling out our first iteration of Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada. Our hope with this initial phase is to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more .

Testing out new subscription products in Canada is by now a media tradition; The New York Times’ paywall also debuted there, ten years ago. Testing in smaller anglophone1 countries lets corporations work out the kinks on a smaller scale before expanding to the U.S., which Twitter Blue is expected to do later this year.

So what do you get for your three bucks a month? Right now, a pretty underwhelming mix of features.

Undo Tweet: Typo? Forgot to tag someone? Preview and revise your Tweet before it goes live. With Undo Tweet, you can set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to click ‘Undo’ before the Tweet, reply, or thread you’ve sent posts to your timeline. Correct mistakes easily by previewing what your Tweet will look like before the world can see it.

Twitter users have been calling for an edit button for well over a decade.

looking for an edit button. Not finding an edit button. Giving up on the edit button idea

— Kirk Peterson (@BigA) November 10, 2006

But this is only an edit button if you catch your typo in the first 30 seconds. For a mistake found that quickly, a quick delete-and-repost will work fine for just about anything other than the biggest celebrity accounts and the worst unintentional slurs.

And if you choose to use this feature on mobile, you either (a) have to just…stare at your tweet for the next 30 seconds as you watch the time tick by, or (b) tap “Send now,” turning tweeting from a one-tap action to a two-tap one.

Maybe this will be a big hit with someone, but right now, it’s a little disappointing.

Reader Mode: Reader Mode provides a more beautiful reading experience by getting rid of the noise. We are making it easier for you to keep up with long threads on Twitter by turning them into easy-to-read text so you can read all the latest content seamlessly.

Note that, unlike most “reader modes” in web browsers and elsewhere, this isn’t about taking content published on the web, stripping out all the ads, and turning everything Helvetica.2 This is just for Twitter threads.

Twitter threads are indeed clunky messes for the uninitiated; like much of Twitter, they were a solution hacked together by users to solve a problem, not the result of a real development process. Twitter Blue’s reader mode blends all the tweets in a thread into one interrupted flow

Compare that to what that exact thread looks like on Twitter today:

The new version is probably a nicer read, but note that it comes at the cost of removing all the like and retweet buttons for individual tweets, which could hurt their reach. And frankly, if you like Twitter enough to spend $3 a month on it, you probably understand how to read a thread just fine already. The people this functionality would benefit aren’t going to be the people using it.

Bookmark Folders: Want an easy way to better organize your saved content? Bookmark Folders let you organize the Tweets you’ve saved by letting you manage content so when you need it, you can find it easily and efficiently.

As someone with Stage 4 Chronic Tab Addiction (CTA), I know well the impulses that lead one to want to categorize and juggle enormous amounts of content. And keeping track of individual tweets within the platform has always been a bit of a challenge.

You could always use likes as a sort of bookmark system, of course. But that flattens the “I approve of the news announced in this tweet” like, the “I think you’re cute, please see that I liked this in your mentions” like, the “this tweet was well played, good on ya” like, and the “Oh, this is actually important for work” like — all of which are perfectly legitimate uses of that little red heart.

Twitter unveiled Bookmarks in 2018 as a way to deal with one problem: People know that you’ve “liked” one of their tweets, but they don’t know if you’ve bookmarked it. (This is an especially useful distinction for journalists.) But your bookmarks were still a flat, unfiltered mess, a neverending scroll, which limited their usefulness.

Bookmark folders could solve that.

Consider this use case: You’re a reporter just starting work on a story. You want to see what people are saying about Topic X on Twitter, so you search some searches and check out some tweets. Before, if you wanted to keep track of, say, 10 or 12 of them, you either had to (a) like them, in which case they’d be mixed up with everything else you like, (b) use bookmarks, in which case there’ll be no easy way to find them in your bookmark haystack, or (c) use something outside Twitter, like keeping them each open in browser tabs or dumping them into Evernote or OneNote or Drafts or wherever you like to hold digital stuff.

Compare that to being able to quickly create a “Topic X” folder in your bookmarks and put the tweets there. They’re segregated from the main flow and easy to find days, months, or years from now. This is the feature that’ll earn my $3 a month.

The last element of Twitter Blue: “Subscribers will also get access to perks, such as customizable app icons for their device’s home screen and fun color themes for their Twitter app, and will have access to dedicated subscription customer support.”

Real customer support is welcome. But a very large share of Twitter’s direct customer interactions are about abuse on the service — telling Twitter that someone is threatening violence, spewing bigotry, stalking someone, or something similar. And Twitter’s responsiveness to those reports is famously…inconsistent, both in terms of its decisions (what to do with a particular tweet or user) and its responsiveness.

So will Twitter Blue subscribers who report an abusive Nazi now get priority service, faster replies, and more thorough communication? Nice for them, I guess, but that kind of customer service doesn’t seem like something that should be limited to a paying elite.

One last note: $3 a month (well, $2.99) is pretty darned cheap. Certainly cheaper than most digital news subscriptions, and cheaper than most SaaS subs overall. With all the talk of subscription overload — and how much those $4.99s and $7.99s and $9.99s can add up as monthly bills — it’s interesting Twitter is aiming this low. Maybe that’s a sign of how inessential most of its initial feature offerings are. Or maybe it suggests Twitter sees a market opening at this price point — that $2.99 is the “aw, hell, why not” price level that will trigger a sale in a meaningful number of people.

Twitter earns about $4.30 in quarterly revenue for every active user it has. Adding a Twitter Blue subscription — $3/month, $12/quarter, $36/year — is a substantial increase in ARPU even at that low of a price point. I’ll be interested to see how much more experimentation there is on this lower side of the pricing spectrum.

1. N’interprète pas cela comme un manque d’amour, Québec.
2. Yes, reader, I know that’s San Francisco, not Helvetica.