Real News Companies—And Most Reporters—Should Be Off Twitter
It's no longer just ethically questionable—it's incompatible with basic professionalism.
Politico published a lengthy article Saturday rounding up the (mostly anonymous) internal backlash to the liberals and Democrats decamping from X (née Twitter) to Bluesky.
Mass fury at the right-wing platform, and disgust for its faithless owner Elon Musk, might all be well justified, but there go those liberals, once again refusing to meet misunderstood Republicans where they are (in this case, squatting on the handle @Reichsfuhrer69.)
Here’s a representative sample: “Leaving X because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with,” one unnamed Democratic operative told Politico, “the echo chamber produced a party more conscious of pronoun dogma than the travails of the working class they purport to represent.”
Others can explain the many ways this argument, and anti-anti-X sentiment more generally, is so wrongheaded. To me it seems that liberals trying to guilt-trip other liberals into using X are no less preachy or moralizing than liberals trying to guilt-trip other liberals into leaving X. Most people, including professional Democrats, are free to post where they please, even unsavory places, and we should all mind our own business about it more than we do.
Instead I want to make a simple and earnest case that American political journalists, including the author of the Politico piece, should not be using Elon Musk’s platform for basic professional-ethical reasons. Indeed, the editors and publishers of major national news outlets should establish rules in short order effectively barring their journalists from maintaining a presence on the site, except as lurkers who might use it for specific reportorial purposes: monitoring Musk and his relationships with racists and other far-right extremists; tracking Republican operating more generally; reporting on the ebbs and flows of organized disinformation campaigns; and sussing out who is spending money to keep the site propped up.
DON’T ASK, DON’T HOTEL
It’s no surprise that outlets closest to Washington power centers, including Beltway tip sheets like Politico, don’t yet see the ethical problem with continuing to use X in the aftermath the 2024 election the way they did when it was Twitter.