Musk, media reach boiling point over Twitter changes

The impact of Twitter’s changes under Elon Musk boiled over last week when NPR and PBS said they would no longer use the platform over misleading labels added to their accounts.

The departures are raising questions about whether more news organizations will follow NPR and PBS off of Twitter and what it means for both the media industry and Twitter’s viability.

Paul Barrett, deputy director of NYU Stern’s center for business and human rights, called the departures part of the “longer term erosion” of Twitter’s credibility and the quality of content on it.

“If you have prestigious mainstream resources that are known for being reliable basically setting sail and saying, ‘We’re not going to participate here anymore,’ I think inevitably users who have respect for those outlets are going to think twice about whether it’s worth checking in on Twitter,” he said.

As the tension rises over how Musk is running Twitter, the billionaire CEO is continuing his selective media circuit. Following his interview with BBC News on the heels of adding the labels, Musk sat for an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in a conversation that aired Monday night.

Why NPR and PBS quit Twitter 

After Musk took over Twitter at the end of October, he announced several changes to long-standing policies and moderation measures.

Musk expanded features on Twitter Blue — a service that lets users pay for blue check marks and other special perks — and allowed back users once banned, including former President Trump. Those moves led to concerns about how media figures would continue to use the platform.

Musk’s latest barb to the press was the addition of “state-affiliated” labels earlier this month to accounts for some news outlets, including NPR, PBS and BBC. While Musk eventually walked the labels back to “government funded,” the decision was a turning point that led NPR and PBS to quit the site.

Fred Brown, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) professional standards and ethics committee, said that while news organizations traditionally aim to report the news and not make the news, in a case like this “it’s impossible for them to avoid being the news.”

“News organizations should be very careful about doing activist things like boycotting a publication or a means of communication, in this case. But in this case they also have to make a strong statement that they do not agree with the character characterization that they have been given,” Brown said.

The labels, he said, are “simply inaccurate.” The majority of funding for NPR and PBS comes from private donations, sponsorships, and member stations.

“I think news organizations have a responsibility to identify things that are inaccurate,” Brown said.

NPR and PBS aren’t the only legacy media brands Musk’s been picking fights with, either.

Twitter stripped The New York Times of its verified check mark earlier this month ahead of changes to remove some of the legacy check marks and instead ask users to pay for them.

Along with the change, Musk tweeted that “the real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” and called their feed the “equivalent of diarrhea.”

A spokesperson for the Times said the newspaper is not planning to pay the monthly fee for “check mark status for our institutional Twitter accounts.”

Overall Twitter traffic visits are down 

Twitter never boasted the overall user numbers that other mainstream social media companies did, like Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter reported an average of 237.8 million daily monetizable users in its last quarterly earnings report released in July, before Musk took the company private. Meanwhile, Meta reported an average of 2 billion daily active users on Facebook in its December report.

Despite the lower user base, Twitter gained prominence for its reputation of being “plugged into what’s going on today in the news,” and what a “certain set of influential people are saying about” the news, Barrett said.

“As those people depart, I think inevitably, the profile of the site will diminish,” he added.

Already, visits to Twitter overall have been down since January, according to data compiled by Similarweb.

Worldwide visits to the website dropped 7.3 percent year-over-year in March, marking the third straight month of declines, according to Similarweb estimates.

At the same time, there’s been a drop in Twitter referrals to news websites in recent months, according to Similarweb data shared with The Hill. For example, Twitter referrals to The New York Times dropped from roughly 7.5 million in March 2022 to under 4 million this March.

BBC, which is now labeled as “publicly funded” on its Twitter account after pushing back on the “government funded” label, also saw a dip. Twitter referrals dropped from about 4 million in March 2022 to 2 million this March.

There was also an overall decline in social media referrals beyond just Twitter over the year, based on Similarweb’s data.

Twitter is the leading source of traffic from social media referrals for many outlets analyzed by Similarweb’s data.

That was not the case, though, for NPR. Twitter was the third leading source of traffic from social referrals, after both Facebook and Reddit, according to Similarweb’s data.

The Hill reached out to Twitter for comment regarding the apparent decline in users and received only a poop emoji in response — the standard reply to emails sent to Twitter’s formerly active press office.

The Trump factor on Twitter 

Twitter’s role in how it was used by the media was in part shaped over the past seven years by Trump.

The former president, as a candidate and president in office, used Twitter frequently to weigh in real time on events.

Trump, who is running again in 2024, was booted from Twitter in January 2021 after a pro-Trump mob rioted at the Capitol fueled by election misinformation spreading on Twitter and elsewhere online.

Musk restored Trump’s account in November, but the former president has yet to return.

“Twitter may have had some trouble in the post-Trump era regardless of its corporate management, but the takeover by Musk and his petulant and erratic management of the company, I think has really driven him to the edge of the cliff,” Barrett said.

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