The site formerly known as Twitter continues its merry dance towards the cliff’s edge under the stewardship of thriving one-man cringe industry Elon Musk. The site has now removed the automatic inclusion of headlines in posts that link to third-party news stories, leaving a preview of the article’s main image and the web domains but “depriving readers of key context from the publishers about their articles”, as The Washington Post puts it.
It’s part of the billionaire edgelord’s ongoing war with credible news services since he took over the platform — a war that is both rhetorical and practical. He’s called The New York Times “an unregistered lobbying firm for far-left politicians”, said that Reuters “and facts are not well acquainted” and had his platform label National Public Radio as “state affiliated media”. But in more concrete moves, he allowed people to buy into X’s verification system and instituted a five-second delay on links to major news sites, further diminishing the traffic from X to these sites. As Nieman Lab argues: “If you had to come up with a single move designed to deal a blow to whatever traffic is left and make sharing news more of a hassle, you couldn’t do much better than eliminating headlines from posts.”
The potential for an explosion of fake news is obvious, and as it turns out, many X users were happy to fully exploit the opportunity on the site’s behalf. Just look at the “news” that’s been circulating about Musk in recent days:
We particularly appreciate the reader context that’s been added to the last post. Working under the defamation regime we do in Australia, and knowing the free-speech absolutist’s gossamer-thin skin, we feel the need to be very clear: none of the links in the posts above lead to pieces making or backing up any of the claims in those posts.
Elsewhere, some users have put together handy guides on how to return to a similar format of news sharing as was previously available, via, we’re sure, an entirely random article selection:
