Neither hoaxes nor harassment are exclusive to the world led by a president who makes no secret of his authoritarian intentions and defies the law.
Citizen Musk: The world’s richest man completes the transformation of Twitter into his global influence apparatus
A few days ago, while traveling through the Midwestern United States, key to the election outcome, the front door of X that I saw changed when I crossed a border. As soon as I set foot in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, posts from Elon Musk, the Donald Trump campaign and their spokespeople and speakers exploded with hoaxes, insults and demands money personalized by state. These were accounts that I did not follow, none of the messages were identified as advertising and the quantity exceeded any possibility of information.
It was catchy, but, for me, it wasn’t that important as a source of information. He listened to local radio, read newspapers and interviewed voters and residents of these localities. Of the dozens of people I spoke with those days, not one mentioned X, and the few quotes I heard about the media were complaints, particularly on the Democratic side, against Fox News and the Washington Post due to the decision of its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, to block the text in support of Kamala Harris that his Opinion section had written for fear of reprisals from Trump against his main company, Amazon.
Only 2% of Americans say they get their political news from X, while the most common sources remain television, notably Fox News and CNN, according to the Pew survey institute. Yet, to view information in general – or rather what users identify as information that is not at all equivalent to that of the media or journalists – in the United States, X is preferred over other networks due to pressure from millions of Trump supporters and Facebook’s decision to focus primarily on personal relationships and entertainment.
In Spain, the use of as in the percentage of audience that reaches the media through X (it has always been low but since the arrival of Musk has decreased further). Looking at global data from this year’s Reuters Institute report, attention is fragmented, but many more people use YouTube (31%), WhatsApp (21%) or even TikTok (13%) to get news than X (10%).
The avalanche of hoaxes about the US elections is a fact – with a highly targeted strategy in the final days of the campaign and on the day of the national vote to call into question the results if Trump did not win and even to incite violence – , the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the DANA in Valencia. Added to this is the level of harassment, particularly against women in public life, while male voices, particularly the more demagogues and the strongest in their opinions, tend to be rewarded at least superficially. .
Anyone who believes that Personally, I doubt whether I should leave or not – I’ve been sharing less for a long time and it hasn’t even occurred to me to give an opinion on anything – and I still find the function of make specific lists on relevant issues, but I don’t know if this is enough to stay and if BlueSky, where I have been since last year, will be able to fulfill this function. What I have no doubt about is that
Neither hoaxes nor harassment are exclusive to this network, but what makes the world run by a president who does not hide his authoritarian intentions and defies the law.
Its owner, the richest man in the world, claims that X users are now “the media”. In the meantime, it’s ruining the business, but that doesn’t matter as long as it can be used to support its political agenda without subjecting itself to any of the duties and responsibilities of real media (the EU has been trying for months, but it There is now no doubt that Musk will have carte blanche in the United States and, according to marketing analysts, Financial Timeswill perhaps benefit from the return of advertisers who have left and who now want to lean on him or on Trump in search of favoritism).
The decision to Tutor and, in Spain, The avant-garde stop sharing their content on The time spent by an editorial staff and its journalists
There is already data from the experience of other media: the American public radio NPR left X last year to protest against hoaxes, lack of moderation, simulation of official accounts in exchange for payment and poor label that insisted on putting Musk’s network as public radio of the United States government is largely funded by donations and is not part of the state and not subject to any political control. Six months after his absence from X, NPR examined the data: the effect on his audience had been negligible. And it had more time to invest in newsletters or promote its podcasts and programs in other online spaces.
As with almost everything in life, it’s a question of priorities. The priority of the media should be to inform and not to feed a minority network which claims to be the worst mirror of reality and which, little by little, contributes to deteriorating our perception and, ultimately, perhaps the world real.
