When social media gets stuck between a rock and hard news
IT MIGHT be 2024, but the fiefdom of online political discourse is looking mighty Shakespearean. Stage right, you have social media platform X raving like a 17th-century Habsburg prince. Stage left, its rival Threads shuffles about moaning, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” Neither platform appears fit for purpose as the US sees a presidential election run-up marked by bloodshed.
X leaned further rightwards last week, as its owner Elon Musk publicly endorsed presidential candidate Donald Trump on the platform, after the latter was injured in a shooting over the weekend. Partisan ownership isn’t automatically problematic for an outfit, but since X tends to be an unfettered conduit for Musk’s whims, the site will appeal even less to those on the left.
While Musk has clearly picked a side, Meta’s Threads would like to keep both sides from grappling too much with each other. This year, Threads and its sister app Instagram began hiding political posts from accounts that users don’t already follow by default, lowering the chances of a digital bust-up between opposing echo chambers.
“I just don’t think that it’s our place to be showing you political takes from people you don’t follow. I think that’s fundamentally going to create more problems than it solves,” Threads chief Adam Mosseri said in June.
Nevertheless, Mosseri had insisted that Threads could simultaneously be a “place for news” and “a less angry space”. How Threads will possibly achieve this when there is plenty in the news to be angry about is a mystery. After last weekend, it will be even harder to lower the temperature on the platform when real-life conflagrations rage afresh.
Big Tech might be backing away from the heat of hard news, but there are still places where the inclination is to run towards the fire: the masochistic institutions called newsrooms. The New York Times (NYT), which is estimated to employ nearly 7 per cent of American newspaper staff, has grappled with multiple firestorms over its coverage of transgender issues, vaccines, and the war in Gaza this year alone.
In an interview with The New Yorker earlier this month, the NYT executive editor Joe Kahn said: “When any reporter on our staff takes on something that we think is important, but that gets a certain amount of blowback, we have to come in strongly in support of that, back their work.”
Every day, thousands of news outlets put themselves through this wringer alongside the NYT for no reason other than the belief that holding power accountable is inherently worthwhile. It serves an audience for whom gratification is fleeting but grievances are enduring, and does this sans the comforting bulwark of Meta’s US$1.3 trillion market capitalisation.
The fourth estate also finds itself in an increasingly lonely and perilous space. Fellow guardians against misinformation in academia and research have been attacked by conspiracy theorists and assailed by lawsuits.
This is an unrewarding time to be refereeing public opinion, and few outfits want to monetise eyeballs the hard way.
As X’s position remains untenable and Meta is neither here nor there, other digital behemoths might conclude that the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze in this space. If they continue to avoid answering the hard questions in hard news, we will be stuck with lemons for public forums.
