When It Comes to Twitter, Mainstream News Outlets Should Take a Cue From Fox News. Seriously.
Fox once abandoned Twitter for 16 months in a vague, nonsensical protest. News outlets with legitimate grievances didn't even wait until their reporters were reinstated after being wrongly suspended.
Hello!
There was something interesting in yesterday’s edition of the Axios Media Trends newsletter that caught my attention:
Twitter’s lock on news
Most efforts by news organizations to quit Twitter have been brief or nonexistent, even for companies entangled in Musk's banning of journalists last year.
The Washington Post continued to run Twitter ads to boost views to its branded content campaigns on the platform late last month, despite one of its reporters being banned a few weeks prior, sources told Axios.
CNN said last month it will "reevaluate" its relationship with Twitter in light of Twitter banning its tech journalist Donie O'Sullivan from the platform. O'Sullivan's account has been reinstated, but he still hasn't been able to tweet. CNN hasn't updated its statement.
Puck News paused advertising on the platform briefly but returned to buying ads once Musk reinstated the banned journalists' accounts.
CBS News quit Twitter for less than two days last year.
By the numbers: While many advertising categories across Twitter saw between a 30%–60% drop in the number of active U.S. advertisers last quarter compared to the same quarter in 2021, the number of active U.S. media and entertainment advertisers fell by less than 15%, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Companies like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and others continue to buy sponsored tweets, mostly to help with subscriber acquisition.
Others, including Gannett's USA Today and Conde Nast, have still been running Twitter ads around branded content campaigns.
Now, I’m sure that there are a fair number of people reading this and thinking, “What are these organizations supposed to do? Just… not tweet?” And hey, fair enough! But let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane.
For once, I’m asking news outlets to take a page from Fox News.
Do you remember the Fox News Twitter boycott of 2018? Probably not (even if you’re a big fan of Fox).
On November 7, 2018, “roughly 20” (per The Washington Post) people gathered outside the D.C. home of Tucker Carlson. Earlier that evening, the Twitter account “@SmashRacismDC” tweeted the Fox News host’s address. According to Carlson, protesters vandalized his home and cracked his front door.
Before having a chance to vet Carlson’s claims, mainstream news outlets started churning out headlines like the Post’s “‘They were threatening me and my family’: Tucker Carlson’s home targeted by protesters” and CNN’s “Police launch investigation after Antifa activists descend on Fox host Tucker Carlson’s home.”
And sure, why not? The account did post Carlson’s home address, and there was video of the protest, which featured a small crowd chanting things like, “We are outside your home to protest your fascism and racism” and “We know where you sleep at night.”
It was something that was easy for even Carlson’s most vocal critics to disavow. Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America (where I worked at the time), said as much in a statement to the Washington Post and told the paper that what happened was “obviously not okay.”
For once, I’m asking news outlets to take a page from Fox News.
Carlson racked up a bunch of very sympathetic headlines in the days that followed. “Stop threatening Tucker Carlson,” wrote the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple. Slate’s Will Oremus wrote an article titled, “No, It’s Not OK That Leftists Threatened Tucker Carlson’s Family at His D.C. Home.” “The mob at Tucker Carlson’s house is a serious threat to freedom,” wrote conservative columnist Karol Markowicz at the New York Post.
And Twitter, for once, moved quickly. The "@SmashRacismDC" account was shut down for good within a few hours, which was a surprise. This… makes what happened next a bit more complicated.
On November 8, 2018, the official “@FoxNews” Twitter account stopped sharing updates on Twitter in protest of Twitter’s handling of the “@SmashRacismDC” account.
Yes, the very same Twitter account that was hit with a permanent ban. Fox’s protest was about being angry that Twitter didn’t do it even faster. If you’ve ever tried reporting a tweet for sharing private information (or breaking the rules in any way), you know that even in the pre-Musk days of the platform, it could take days, weeks, or even months to get Twitter to take action on a tweet (if the site ever took any action at all, which it usually didn’t). Fox’s “protest” of Twitter made no sense other than as part of a “work the refs” play.
Twitter quickly took care of an account that broke its rules, but that didn't fit the story Fox wanted to tell. The reality of the reaction to the protest outside one of Carlson’s homes didn’t make for great grievance bait. Twitter reacted swiftly, police opened an investigation, mainstream media outlets rushed out stories that (whether wise or not, that’s up to you) gave deference to Carlson’s version of events — even though it would later turn out that he was not telling the truth about his front door being cracked — and Carlson’s critics condemned the action.
The closest thing to a mainstream “defense” of the protest came from Alan Pyke at ThinkProgress, who was in attendance. And even that was less of a defense than an attempt to clean up some of the more fantastical narratives that began to emerge about the size of the protest (Pyke wrote that there were “13 or 14 protesters” and “four protest observers, some in the bright green hats often worn by trained First Amendment legal observers when monitoring police-protester interactions”), the door issue (“One of the protesters knocked firmly on Carlson’s front door three times then trotted back down the steps to join the rest of the group in the street. This person did not throw their body against the door, as Carlson has claimed to newspapers.”), and pushing back on Carlson’s claim that the protesters threatened to attack him with pipe bombs were apparently mentions of the “so-called ‘MAGAbomber’ Cesar Sayoc and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers. There is no mention of the phrase ‘pipe bombs’ in the police report later filed.”
Still, Fox pushed forward with its Twitter protest.
Business Insider reported on November 10, 2018, that Fox News managing editor Greg Wilson had sent an email to the news channel's entire digital team instructing them to “refrain from tweeting out our content from either section accounts or your own accounts until further notice.”
And for 16 months, that’s how it was. Yes, 16 months. Fox News protested silently against Twitter after the social media company did a surprisingly good job of dealing with an account that violated its rules.
Unfortunately, for the world, Fox’s return to Twitter in March 2020 was to promote the channel’s coverage of COVID-19. Eeeeek! But hey, as it turned out, Twitter (apparently) wasn’t actually responsible for much of Fox’s web traffic, anyway!
Fox News abandoned its Twitter account for 16 months in an act of vague protest against the social media platform. Meanwhile, the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets with legitimate grievances against Twitter have continued to kiss Elon Musk’s ring.
After Musk hastily announced a new Twitter policy banning people from posting what he called “assassination coordinates” (referring to the account that tracks where his private jet is at any given time, even though he had previously said that the account was allowed to stay and it wasn’t in violation of existing rules), he started suspending the accounts of journalists who reported on this as a story.
Drew Harwell, a journalist at the Washington Post, had his account suspended for tweeting, “Twitter just suspended a competitor’s account (joinmastodon) because it posted a link to its own website’s version of ElonJet - public, legally acquired data that Twitter decided two days ago was against the rules. Loving the free speech (h/t mmasnick).”
“This is what Twitter is now defining as ‘doxxing people’s location,’” wrote Harwell on Mastodon after his Twitter account was locked. “A factual piece of reporting about the company blocking a competitor. Can’t do anything until I delete it.”
The link in his tweet included a screenshot of the post that got the official Mastodon account suspended, which read, “Did you know? You can follow ElonJet on Mastodon over at mastodon.social/elonjet.” Harwell’s tweet did not link to the mastodon link.
Accounts that were suspended included New York Times reporter Ryan Mac,
of, CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, Matt Binder of Mashable, and others. And though some of these accounts have been reinstated, others haven’t. Harwell and O’Sullivan seem to still be locked out of the platform, yet CNN and the Washington Post continue to tweet (and in the case of the Post, continue to funnel money to Twitter in the form of ad dollars) as if nothing happened at all.This was a chance for mainstream media outlets to band together in solidarity with their employees, to send a signal that they value their reporters and the quest for truth. This was a chance for these outlets to say, “You know what? To hell with this; we’re out unless you unsuspend these accounts that didn’t even break the site’s rules — not even the ones Musk made up on the fly. If we are going to continue to have a Twitter presence, we need things to get a lot less chaotic around here.”
But they didn’t. None of the mainstream outlets did. Instead, they decided to grovel at Musk’s feet. NBC News suspended journalist Ben Collins from covering Twitter and Musk, seemingly for noting Musk’s claim about “only discovering” who the company’s general counsel was six weeks after completing his purchase was silly. Months earlier, Musk had already said in a separate tweet that he was aware that James Baker was Twitter's general counsel.
Twitter’s worth has very little to do with its technology. Twitter’s worth is in its user base and journalists’ obsession with the platform. One would think that if Fox News could stop posting for 16 whole months when the company didn’t have a legitimate grievance with the platform, outlets with actual issues could take similar actions in solidarity with their reporters.
Musk knows that he needs the legitimacy that journalists bring to Twitter. This would have been a great time for these companies to make clear that they won’t continue using the platform should Musk continue making arbitrary changes to the site’s rules and suspending journalists for doing their jobs. (Yes, it’s legitimate for news organizations to cover the actions and allegations made by one of the richest people on the planet, which is what Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post was doing when Musk suspended her account.) Twitter doesn’t need to be a news hub. He needs them more than they need him.
Instead of drawing a line in the sand, the mainstream news media lit the equivalent of a 15-foot neon sign reading “DADDY ELON, WE ARE SO SORRY OUR JOURNALISTS UPSET YOU. WE WILL DO ANYTHING TO KEEP YOU HAPPY. PLEASE HAVE SOME ADVERTISING DOLLARS!”
As Musk continues to turn the right-leaning platform (yes, it was right-leaning before Musk purchased it; another report recently came out that Twitter leadership pre-Musk went out of their way to avoid enforcing the platform rules against conservatives for fear of backlash) into a far-right propaganda firehose, news outlets that continue to treat it as a neutral hub will be handing Musk a much-needed lifeline. Hopefully, for the sake of news organizations, the trade of their dignity and credibility in exchange for absolutely nothing will have been worth it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
The right just seems to understand this concept better than the left. To call these publications "leftist" would be a misnomer, but as with Democrats, they tend to capitulate with little to nothing to show for it.
What happened to media outlets' spines? What happened to journalism? It's frustrating because it shapes the population's worldview, regardless of truth, when all the media outlets trot out the same platitudes...
Look at The Sun in England: the country's most popular newspaper (tabloid), it used to be solidly pro-Labour and very much the "working man's paper", but gradually it shifted to being solidly pro-Conservative -- and it took nearly all of its several million readers with it!