Neither hoaxes nor harassment are exclusive to world led by a president who does not hide his authoritarian intentions and defies the law
Citizen Musk: the richest man in the world completes the transformation of Twitter into his global influence apparatus
A few days ago, while I was traveling through the Midwest of the United States, key to the outcome of the elections, the front door of X that I saw was changing when I crossed a border. As soon as I set foot in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, posts from Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s campaign and their spokespersons and speakers exploded with hoaxes, insults and requests for money personalized according to the state. They were accounts that I did not follow, none of the messages were identified as advertising and the quantity overwhelmed any possibility of information.
It was eye-catching, but, for me, it wasn’t that important as a source of information. He listened to the local radio, read the newspapers and interviewed voters and residents of those places. Among the dozens of people I spoke to those days, not one mentioned X, and the few quotes I heard about media were complaints, particularly from the Democratic side against Fox News and the Washington Post due to the decision of its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, to block the text supporting Kamala Harris that his Opinion section had written for fear of Trump’s retaliation against his main company, Amazon.
Only 2% of Americans say they get their political news using X while the most prevalent sources remain television, particularly Fox News and CNN, according to the Pew pollster. Still, to see news in general – or rather what users identify as news that is not at all equivalent to the media or journalists – in the United States, X is preferred to other networks driven by Trump’s millions of followers and Facebook’s decision to focus primarily on personal connections and entertainment.
In Spain, the use of X “for news” declared by users is 16%, according to the latest data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism from the University of Oxford, which has confirmed both the decline in the use of this source and in the audience percentage that reaches the media through X (it was always small but since Musk’s arrival it has dropped even more). Looking at global data Reuters Institute report This year, attention is fragmented, but many more people use YouTube (31%), WhatsApp (21%) or even TikTok (13%) to get information than X (10%).
The avalanche of hoaxes about the United States elections is a fact – with a very directed strategy in the last days of the campaign and on the day of the national vote to question the results if Trump did not win and even to incite violence –, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the DANA in Valencia. This is coupled with the level of harassment, particularly against women in public life, while male voices, especially the most demagogues and firm in their opinions, tend to have at least superficial reward.
Anyone who believes that Personally, I doubt whether to leave or not – I have been sharing less for a long time and it has not even occurred to me to give an opinion on anything – and I still find the function of making specific lists on relevant issues useful, but I don’t know if that is enough to stay and if BlueSky , where I have been since last year, will be able to do this function. What I have no doubt about is that
Neither hoaxes nor harassment are exclusive to this network, but what makes world led by a president who does not hide his authoritarian intentions and defies the law.
Its owner, the richest man in the world, proclaims that X users are now “the media.” In the meantime, it is ruining the company, but it is irrelevant as long as it can serve to prop up its political agenda without submitting to any of the duties and responsibilities that the real media has (the EU has been trying for months, but now there is no doubt that that Musk will have free rein in the United States and, according to marketing analysts, Financial Timesmay benefit from the return of advertisers who have left and who now want to suck up to him or Trump in search of favoritism).
The decision of the Guardian and, in Spain, of The Vanguard to stop sharing their content on The amount of time spent by a newsroom and its journalists in
There is already data from the experience of other media: the United States public radio, NPR, left X last year in protest of hoaxes, the lack of moderation, the simulation of official accounts in exchange for paying and the wrong label who insisted on putting Musk’s network as part of the United States Government – public radio is largely financed by donations and is not part of the State nor is it subject to any political control. Six months after his absence from X, NPR looked at the data: the effect on his audience had been negligible. And he had more time to invest in newsletters or promoting his podcasts and programs in other online spaces.
As with almost everything in life, it’s about priorities. The media’s priority should be to inform, not feed a minority network that pretends to be the worst mirror of reality and that little by little contributes to deteriorating our perception and, ultimately, perhaps the real world.
#exodus
