The Global Town Square Is Dead. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.

A video was recently posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) with a caption informing viewers that they were watching footage of Hamas fighters shooting down an Israeli helicopter in Gaza. The video has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and reposted more than 2,500 times. The issue? It’s totally fake. The clip is from a video game called Arma 3. It’s not in Gaza. It’s not in Israel. Nothing about it has anything to do with the current conflict.

Other videos, horrifying real ones from Israel and Gaza, are all over X with little or no warning. It has turned the platform—a place people used to go for news—into a ghastly brew of suffering and confusion over what’s real, what’s not, and what’s being posted just for clicks.

On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Casey Newton, founder and editor of the technology newsletter Platformer, about how the war between Israel and Hamas is revealing how broken X really is. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Lizzie O’Leary: How did misinformation get so bad on X?

Casey Newton: Ever since he took over, Elon Musk has systematically gotten rid of the vast majority of the people whose job it used to be to prevent false things from going viral on the platform, and has repeatedly endorsed accounts that are known spreaders of misinformation. After eliminating all of the verification badges from the vetted journalists who used to have them, he started selling those badges to people for $8 a pop and paying those people based on how many views they got. That’s a recipe for having a lot of misinformation on your platform.

What type of content moderation does exist at X?

If you are posting child sexual abuse material, for example, they will make some efforts to catch that. They also have some automated tools that are looking for terrorist content; it’s illegal to host terrorist content, so they still have to pay glancing attention to that. I’m sure they’re still removing some posts and some accounts, but the teams have been decimated and Musk spent the past couple of years talking about the fact that he doesn’t really believe in content moderation in general.

For people who are trying to get real-time information about the Israel-Hamas conflict, and who still have the muscle memory of going to Twitter for news, where does this leave them?

They’re not able to do that in the way that they once were. It has caused what Ezra Klein has called an “exodus shock.” People are realizing, “Oh, this place isn’t actually for me anymore. What are my alternatives?”

You and I talked about this a little bit with regard to Ukraine, but it does feel like the past week or so has been palpably worse. Why do you think that is?

We know from a report that Sheera Frenkel did in the New York Times that Hamas is seeding Twitter with videos of violence as part of its campaign of terrorism. Because Twitter doesn’t have the same tools and teams in place that it once did to prevent that stuff from spreading or remove it quickly from the platform, people are seeing a lot more violence and gore this time than they did in the early days of the Ukraine conflict.

Engagement is so fundamental to how X operates right now. Why does misinformation, inflammatory content, gory content, get so much engagement?

Something that trolls do, in the aftermath of a calamity, is find old videos that look like they might be related to the current crisis, and then they post them. We’ve seen videos of fires in Algeria or a firework celebration that was repurposed to look like a bombing in the current crisis. People have even posted video game footage on X in recent days and tried to pass it off as combat on the ground in Israel. This technique is effective because you see a video clip without context and someone tells you that it’s breaking news. There’s no meaningful system of verification on X. That’s just a recipe for chaos. But what’s interesting here is that Musk has now created a financial incentive for people to do this because the more views they get on their posts, presumably the more they’ll be paid.

If you’re the person who posted that video game clip with somebody holding an RPG launcher, are you getting paid?

Quite possibly. The system is still somewhat opaque. X did a big payout to creators earlier this year in an effort to encourage more people to become paid subscribers. They then updated that plan to say only views from verified subscribers would count toward your engagement goal, so people who are paying $8 are broadcasting to people who are also paying $8.

There aren’t many paid subscribers, so my assumption is that those people aren’t going to make out like bandits, but Musk is very capricious. He changes the rules for things all the time. I could very easily see him deciding he wanted to pay out more or less in any given week on any given subject, depending on his mood.

How much of this is driven by Musk personally?

One hundred percent. There is no other person who has a meaningful vote on what happens on X. He’s the one who decided to get rid of the Twitter branding. He’s the one who decided to get rid of the old verification system. He’s the one who decided to remove headlines from article previews in the feeds.

Musk has said what he wants Twitter to be. While he will sort of make noises about it being a global town square, he seems a lot more interested in it becoming a payments platform, a jobs board, a place to make audio and video calls. I don’t think there’s any reason to expect that he wants to operate a news platform like Twitter used to be. In my mind, that story is already over. I think what we’ve seen over the past few weeks is the stragglers and the die-hards who are just waking up to a reality that has actually been in place for more than six months.

So those of us who are just flexing our old Twitter muscles are doing it in a place that was cleared out a long time ago?

Who wants to go learn a different platform? Who wants to start again? Who wants to build a new audience? What if there is no one there for them to be broadcasting to? I get it. It’s exhausting, and it’s also sad because Twitter, for all its flaws, at its best was a really useful thing, but it is literally dead. Twitter does not exist anymore. In my mind, that’s a good thing—I don’t really think anybody should be spending their time on X.

Earlier this week, the European Union’s commissioner who oversees the Digital Services Act demanded that X remove graphic images and videos from Hamas as well as disinformation about the war or face fines. In response, CEO Linda Yaccarino said the company had removed hundreds of pieces of content. She added, “There is no place on X for terrorist organizations or violent extremist groups, and we continue to remove such accounts in real time, including proactive efforts.” Are these just the last gasps of the old system of content moderation?

Sort of. This is tricky, because no one really agrees about how much bad stuff is allowed to be on a platform. If you’re a politician and you open your feed and you see three bad things, they might have erased 99.9 percent of things, but you will still have had a bad experience and so you’ll send an angry letter. We see this sort of thing in the regulatory debates over social networks all the time. At the same time, when you talk to researchers or people who had been using this platform to do what they call open-source intelligence, which is basically just looking at public posts to try to see what you can figure out about what’s going on in wartime and other high-stake situations, they will say that it’s much less usable than it can be. They mourn the loss of a true verification system. They feel like they’re spending more time having to debunk stuff than they used to. The people who care the most about this and work on this the hardest are saying it is worse than it used to be. It would be surprising if, after having eliminated almost all of the people who work on this stuff, X was doing even half as good a job as it used to.

What is the use case for X right now?

It’s a payments processor and a jobs board. You need to hire? Go to X. You want to pay your friend but not use Venmo for some reason? Go to X. You want to make a video call to somebody whose phone number you don’t have? Go to X. That’s the vision.

What is being on Threads like right now?

It’s uncannily like being on Twitter a year ago. I show up, most of my peers in the tech press are there. They’re posting links to things. Their readers are replying. There are little memes popping up. A week ago, everyone was sharing screenshots of their phone. There’s a main conversation of the day. Over the past couple of days, it’s been, “Is news allowed on Threads or not, and what should Threads do about amplifying news?” It’s taken over the entire platform as people debate this.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted on Threads, “We’re not anti-news. News is clearly already on Threads. People can share news; people can follow accounts that share news. We’re not going to get in the way of any either. But, we’re also not going to amplify news on the platform. To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes.” Can you unpack what that means?

Adam Mosseri in particular has had a long history of jousting with the news business. He used to run the newsfeed at Facebook, and there were a million headaches that came with that. Facebook had a long era of over-promising journalists, and it became clear that the interests of Facebook and journalists were not super aligned. There’s a lot of history of bad blood and scar tissue there.

Meta started their little text-based social network and, at first, they did not really want it to be a news thing. I believe they sincerely thought, “We’re going to take all these really cute fun creators on Instagram and we’re just going to have them start posting in text instead of pictures and video and see what happens.”

But there’s a need in the world for something like Twitter, so of course all the journalists showed up and started posting their news. And now Meta is at a crossroads: They have a vision of this thing that they wanted to build that it doesn’t seem like people want, and then they have this other thing that people desperately want them to build that has a sort of long and dark history for their company.

What does Meta do with that demand for old Twitter—with all of its problems?

The thing that made Twitter interesting was that it set the global daily news agenda. It was always a horrible business. It always had terrible leadership, but it did do that. It had an elite group of users who set the day’s conversation. It was an engine of culture. It was an engine of breaking news. There was even a sense of coolness attached to Twitter that, frankly, has not been attached to anything Meta has done in a really long time.

I suspect that if a critical mass of journalists gets on Threads and an even bigger audience follows them there, and they start to replicate these dynamics where the news is breaking on Threads and memes are being born on Threads, I think Meta will be really excited. Who doesn’t want to own a property that is setting the agenda that is the place where famous people are interacting?

Charlie Warzel at the Atlantic recently wrote, “It’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end— that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.” To me, that feels real. What do you think the next decade of social media will be?

I respectfully disagree with Charlie. Social networks exist because people have opinions and they like sharing them. I don’t think anything has changed about that. But the ways in which people can express those opinions, the platforms they express those opinions on—those are changing, but I don’t think we’re losing places to post. In fact, there are now more places to post today than there were a year ago. Not just places to post, but places where lots of influential people are posting. In effect, the reverse has happened.

People want to find a million different ways to mourn the Twitter that was, and they want to find a way to express their exhaustion at the idea of having to start again. I read a similar piece in the New Yorker this week that says social media isn’t fun anymore. I always just think, “How old are these people?”

If you’re in your 30s or your 40s, and you’ve already built your clout and you’ve made your place in the world and you’re now being told you’re going to have to go start over somewhere else, you probably find that idea profoundly exhausting. But go talk to a 13-year-old. Are they exhausted by the idea that they’ll have to be online? No. They’re thrilled. Ask an 8-year-old what he wants to be when he grows up; he’s going to tell you he wants to be a YouTuber. Don’t sit here and tell me that the social web is over. The social web is being reborn, and I’m sorry that that makes you tired.

The global town square is dead. Long live 45 different global town squares.

Yes, and no one is brave enough to write that maybe it’s a good thing that now there are 16 different places to post. Weren’t we all supposed to be upset that there were these monolithic platforms and that we were all governed by their rules? We had no recourse if a content moderation decision went against us. Weren’t we supposed to be upset about the concentration of power? Well, now we have what we asked for. There is no longer a concentration of power in social networks. And so, instead of saying social networks have no future, I think the more interesting question to ask is: What is the future of these platforms that are being born?