In my eyes, news outlets like for example ProPublica had started to lose respect, because they still use Twitter like nothing ever happened.
Why they don’t leave like what The Guardian did or like the other news outlets?
Are they too corporate internally to leave Twitter?
You need to be a bit more patient. It’s happening. Lots of people are leaving Twitter/X. But it takes time.
It’s a bit of a dilemma. If you leave, you’ll also leave Twitter’s (still large) userbase to freely be manipulated by the far-right without any objections. If you stay, you support a network owned and controlled by a fascist. By continuing to provide content you encourage other people to stay on the platform. I’m personally in favor of everyone leaving, but I understand why some organizations don’t. The least they should do is establish a presence on other networks so nobody has to use Twitter to see their content though.
Most news outlets nowadays are the equivalent of Buzzfeed. They do whatever get them clicks. Journalism is optional. And so is any sense of ethics
If their customers don’t punish them by withholding their money/support, their rich owners are definitely not going to push for a change. You saw how the main tech giants bent their knees at Trump’s inauguration
OP specified nonprofit outlets. Of which there are more and more, and they don’t have the same incentives. Important not to fall into cynicism on this subject.
OP specified nonprofit outlets
Fair point! I thought I specified “most mainstream news outlets” but I actually did not in the end
Important not to fall into cynicism on this subject.
Eh. You call it cynicism, I call it realism. To each their own
I would guess it’s because there are no other alternatives to X that are as big and as popular.
Easy as well. Things like Bluesky could be a bit confusing for newcomers
Mastodon, the alternative I hoped took off, has a confusing onboarding process for non-techies. But Bluesky’s is not confusing at all, it’s as good as Twitter’s ever was
Mastodon is great. Decentralized is a must.
I don’t disagree but they need something to make it more attractive to new users. The only person I talked into making an account got confused selecting a server…but I’ve gotten a half dozen people on bluesky with no handholding
I haven’t tried it, but it’s just not as big as X.
Bluesky?
Small AF.
It got a bit more popularity over the last half of year. Not as big as X, but not small AF and it’s the best “easy” alternative. The best “hard” alternative is mastodon, what makes it “hard” is it’s very fragmented and it takes some efforts to pick instance, to understand consequences of your choice, and to figure out how to use your feed for different scenarios.
Because that is where people were and still are. So their processes are still to put content there.
That’s a self fulfilling cycle. If more institutions and organisation left and made a public statement of not wanting to be associated with fascism, then it would push another bunch to have to defend why they didn’t think nazi salutes were a problem, and they’d leave too.
Whether it makes enough of a wave to push major groups to leave is a question of public pressure, but that public pressure is expressed through “costly signalling” that show organisations have values and are willing to take a hit to live by them. And non-profits are exactly the groups who can afford to take a symbolic stand, and make things more difficult for those that remain.
Why did The Guardian leave then?
The Guardian is a top newspaper. Number 3ish in the UK. It already has a massive following.
The people being mad at propublica for not leaving I think is something only happening in your social sphere
Why most reasonable US citizen won’t leave the US now that the orange dude is in charge, free to spread his terrible ideology? Probably because they can’t leave the country (their job, their family, their friends…). The same goes for most media, they need to reach their audience and a lot of their audience is still on X. Edit: and because they refuse to leave the country in the hands of the Orange dude, too.
Papers like The Guardian are able to take risks, because they don’t rely on ads revenues but on subscriptions and because they also know some of their audience (hi, guys) aren’t on X anymore ;)
🤷