Issue:
February 2025 | Cover Story
Journalists agonize over whether to stay or flee social media in the age of Musk and Zuckerberg
In his farewell address in January 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower, who had overseen a vast expansion of America’s military firepower for much of the previous decade, famously warned against the “grave implications” of the military-industrial complex. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” he said.
Joe Biden had his Eisenhower moment this year when he sounded the alarm over the tech-oligarchy taking a blowtorch to American politics. Americans are being “buried under an avalanche of misinformation”, he said in his farewell address on January 15. “Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit”.
The speech is as close as a U.S. leader has got to admitting policy failure. Biden’s predecessor Bill Clinton described regulating the then infant internet as like “trying to nail Jello to the wall”. Early attempts to assert U.S. government primacy over online platforms included a landmark clause protecting them from liability for content created by users. That is why Donald Trump was able to use X – then known as Twitter – to post wild tweets calling for insurrection in January 2021, without legal consequence.
For many, today’s control of the world’s information ecosystem by a handful of uber-rich, rightwing men is too steep a price to pay for a “free” internet, even before these owners made it clear that “they are not interested in our access to the truth”, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) said in its dark prognosis for 2025. Biden’s remarks were, of course, aimed squarely at Elon Musk, owner of X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who announced last month that he was ditching the fact-checking program at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
As if to emphasize this new alliance of political power and online monopolies, Zuckerberg and Musk were among the tech billionaires who lined up to pay fealty to Trump in his Washington inauguration in January – a gathering variously described by critics as a “coalition of creeps” and the “nerd Reich”.
The result, said William Horsley, co-founder and international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) at the University of Sheffield’s School of Journalism, is the 21st century equivalent of mob rule. “As long as Elon Musk sets the rules, X will be no place for journalists who want a civil exchange of information and ideas,” Horsley said. “If the pool has turned into a sewer, it’s time to get out of the water.”
That, in effect, is what many are doing, at least on the liberal left. In November, the Guardian said it was quitting X after observing the spread of far-right conspiracy theories and racism and how Musk had used his platform to “shape political discourse” in the U.S. presidential election. “We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the paper told its 10.7m followers. Don’t hit the door on your way out, said the newspaper’s many trolls.
In an essay written in 2016, after she became Guardian editor, Katherine Viner seemed to predict this unhappy scenario. “For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths,” she said. “Now we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.”
The same month as the Guardian, the European Federation of Journalists, representing about 320,000 journalists, also announced it would no longer post on X, citing concerns over disinformation. The federation’s president, Maja Sever, said it could “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has transformed into a machine of disinformation and propaganda”.
“X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric,” Sever said, adding that the platform “no longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies”.
Of course, tech turncoats have been advising us to abandon social media since at least 2018. During the first Trump presidency, many journalists quit in dismay. Martin Fackler, acting Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times, said he had left both Facebook and his 30k Twitter followers “out of disgust with the promotion of misinformation, outrage and ochlocracy, all for the further enrichment of internet billionaires”. “The tipping point was the first Trump administration, when I realized the platforms themselves were goading me to outrage and venting. It was like seeing the Matrix. The platforms themselves were manipulating me ... and every other user.”
Another Tokyo-based bureau chief, speaking off the record, has mostly stopped using X, typifying the middle line taken by many. “I occasionally check in to see what the right-wingers are getting angry about, but I've noticed that the algorithm has changed and nothing I post gets any traction any more. I also see a lot of material that's not safe for work, so I feel a bit weird opening it in the office.” Many of the bigger agencies, including AP and Bloomberg, have opened accounts on other platforms, notably BlueSky, in effect hedging their bets should X collapse.
But Jake Adelstein, author of the bestselling memoir Tokyo Vice, epitomizes the dilemma facing many in a profession that thrives on engagement, negative and positive. Last year, after Trump’s reelection, Adelstein fumed that he was leaving what he called “a viper pit of Nazis, false information and rigged algorithms” for what he thought was for good. He has since returned to X, prodded by a friend “who said that it was easy and comfortable to run away from the platform but it would be better to stay, argue, resist and subvert”.
“People who only know how to reach me on Twitter and thus I am sort of stuck in purgatory with it,” Adelstein said.
That’s similar to the position taken by Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia bureau chief of the Times. “Do we really want to leave the world’s biggest websites to the billionaires and their goons?” he asked. “The space is there, and it’s in contention for those willing to fight. Twitter, and Musk himself, are the symptom, rather than the illness, and the cure will be found, if it ever is, with social media rather than against it.”
Is there journalistic life after social media? After fleeing X and Facebook, Fackler says he choose four or five media he trusted to be honest and insightful, “and choose a relation with them unmediated by Google or Facebook”.
“I'm off most social media unless and until someone comes up with a better – i.e., less exploitative – business model,” he said. “I realize such an ideal platform may never appear. Even if someone invented it, a new platform must draw enough users to reach a critical mass, and it may be too late for that. It feels to me like era of mega-social media is ending, and we don't know what comes next.”
Correspondents' voices
Régis Arnaud, Le Figaro
I don’t plan to leave X, nor does Figaro ask me to do so. Figaro stays on X. Challenges, the other media I work for, did leave X. I do not find X useful either to increase awareness of stories or find information. I find it useful as a sort of news agency. If I get this right, Musk is losing tons of money on X, so you should stay especially if you hate him.
I never use Facebook (I just cannot understand how it works), and very rarely LinkedIn. I love WhatsApp, which I find incredibly useful especially for journalists who want to interact with people quickly abroad. Yesterday a friend proposed to me to leave WhatsApp for Signal, as he did, "to snub Zuck". I will not do that.
William Horsley, International director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media
Behind this madness are America’s two fanatical choices: to abolish the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasting in 1987 (the clue is in the name); and to enact Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996, which effectively gives immunity to online computer services for any content posted on their platforms. The rest of the world doesn’t have to follow the U.S.’s race to the bottom about the laws and customs that apply in public discourse. But to escape the Musk and Zuckerberg trap, every state and each individual has to choose between their short-term convenience and long-term sanity.
Richard Lloyd Parry, the Times
I post on Twitter (as I will always call it) once or twice a month, and use it passively every working day, as a way of curating experts and sources in the various fields I write about. I expect that I will continue to use it for my own purposes as long it is useful.
The impulse to quit Twitter is driven by two fallacies. The first is the notion that, by posting on a social media site, you are voting for Elon Musk. This thinking makes no sense to me. You see a similar confusion in other cultural areas. Admirers of the novels of Neil Gaiman, for example, imagine themselves to have a human connection with their author. When it turns out that he is a complicated and flawed human being, they don’t want to be his friend any more. They express this by no longer admiring his writing. But it never was, and never is, a personal relationship. You can esteem the writing and deplore the man, just as you can use Twitter for your own ends without having anything less than contempt for the appalling goon who owns it.
The second fallacy is that disliking Elon Musk, and withdrawing from his social media app, make any meaningful difference. Perhaps, notionally, you contribute minutely to the commercial credibility of Twitter by numbering among its active users. But I suspect that for a lot of the crowd who are currently announcing their defection, it’s not really about that. It’s a fashionable moral pose, the latest way for the preening paladins to advertise their virtue.
Do we really want to leave the world’s biggest websites to the billionaires and their goons? The space is there, and it’s in contention for those willing to fight. Twitter, and Musk himself, are the symptom, rather than the illness, and the cure will be found, if it ever is, with social media rather than against it.
But perhaps I’ll give BlueSky a try one of these days…
Jake Adelstein, author, Tokyo Vice
After 15 years on Twitter, I took what I thought was permanent leave from the platform.
But I had a friend challenge my decision. He said that it was easy and comfortable to run away from the platform but it would be better to stay, argue, resist and subvert. And he has a point. Sometimes engaging with people of very different viewpoints helps them understand that they may not be getting all they need to know. I have moved much more towards posting on BlueSky or Instagram or Threads and even yes, LinkedIn (which is actually a great place to post articles). I am still on X, but much less frequently.
One hopes that maybe now and then someone on the platform might see the light and what’s the point of preaching to the converted? However, every post I make on Twitter is limited so that only people I follow can reply so I spend less time doing troll maintenance. I block liberally and often.
There are still people who only know how to reach me on X and thus I am sort of stuck in purgatory with it.
Should I stay and fight and subvert or should I go and stay sane? Not easy choices. I’m staying on X and the other platforms for the time being but eventually hoping to be BlueSky and Substack as my maiin social media platforms with the others used when necessary. For fun, I’d much rather chat on Bluesky than X any day of the week.
In the end, we are writers and journalists and we have a belief that the truth makes a difference. But if you write the truth and no one reads it—it’s like you didn’t write it at all. So I have decided to try and reach people on as many forums as possible. Maybe even TruthSocial in the months to come.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
