This newsletter is not about Elon Musk
But he's going to make it about him anyway
When I started this newsletter, I told myself I wouldn’t just focus on what Elon Musk was doing over on Twitter dot com. However, he’s decided that journalists are his mortal enemy (that and a good joke), so here we are, in the age of Doge, breaking down what he did this week instead of fixing the platform he bought for billions of dollars.
Last week, I briefly discussed the move to remove legacy blue checkmarks, relegating them solely to Twitter Blue subscribers. However, the deadline came and went. Turns out, it’s not so easy to remove millions of legacy checkmarks. You have to do that one by one.
I figured there would be movement on this, not least because Musky manages to do something every week to upset people. When I sat down to write this post, which was originally another Reading List, I stuck some of these updates at the top and thought I would continue as normal below it. That did not happen. Not only did the platform follow this up by removing the New York Times’ checkmark after it announced it wouldn’t be paying for the verification program (all while not doing it for any of the paper’s sub-accounts), it decided to continue to give people even more reasons why they should leave the platform and go to an alternative like, say, Substack Notes.
So let’s start at the top:
Last week, NPR’s Twitter account received the “state-affiliated media” label, as first reported by Matt Novak at Forbes. This is usually reserved for organizations like Russia Today (RT) that are funded directly by the country’s government and therefore, can be classified as propaganda outlets more than trusted news sources. According to The Daily Beast, the move coincided with a thread from Michael Shellenberger, who claimed NPR was no worse than state-run media. “NPR is worse than the propaganda of Maoist schoolchildren during the cultural revolution,” he said. This wouldn’t normally be relevant, but since Shellenberger is a Twitter Files journalist, Musk has that relationship. Regardless of what you think of NPR, the organization is objectively not state-affiliated media. It receives most of its funding through public donations, and while it does receive state funding, that amounts to less than 1% of its annual budget. If we would apply the label to any form of public media, the BBC fits way more snugly into this category, and as of Friday, it wasn’t categorized as state-affiliated media on Twitter.
While Musk admitted on Thursday that the label might not be completely accurate (OPB reported that he said in an email exchange with NPR that, “if we label non-US accounts as govt, then we should do the same for US, but it sounds like that might not be accurate here”), NPR is, as of this writing, not tweeting from its account until the label is removed. Speaking of government funding, a short post at Nieman Lab notes that Musk himself has received way more federal funding than NPR despite also saying that federal subsidies should in general not exist.
And yes, his response was to apply a similar label — “Government Funded Media” — to other outlets that receive government backing. PBS, BBC, and other public media now have the state-affiliated label. Although, as The Daily Beast notes, it was not applied to the CBC, Al Jazeera, or accounts that belong to the BBC. The British organization obviously does not agree and has contacted Musk, or Twitter rather, to resolve the issue.
Government Funded Media as a descriptor goes against the purpose of the state-affiliated label. The latter was meant to identify propagandist outlets, not ones that simply get some federal funding. Like the new blue checkmark wording, it’s a middle ground that makes no sense.
Yes, this is another example of a person in power doing whatever they want despite public or democratic pushback. But it’s just more of the same. Muskrat (oh, I like this nickname) has been restricting the power of journalists consistently since he took over Twitter, whether he’s suspending journalists who mentioned the Musk jet account or outright trying to become a journalist himself with the Twitter Files.
He wants to be the media so badly because that system has a lot of power over the public, and Muskrat is fed by the public’s reaction to his antics. The media has power, so why not emulate that to gain even more power than you already have, especially when you can use it to sway public perception?
He simultaneously claims to be a man of the people but also wants to limit those who disagree with him. He criticized the media following the release of the first Twitter Files, in which Muskrat shared documents with journalists that would be on his side and would supposedly make the platform look awful. “Why is corporate journalism rushing to defend the state instead of the people?" He knows the basics of what’s great about media. He knows what to say to make it seem like he understands, so the people will listen.
But as we know, once you cross him, he uses his platform to wield a big, clunky stick. For example, we have what happened to Substack.
Last week, it appeared that Twitter restricted access to embedding Substack links and limited how people could interact with tweets about Substack. It’s certainly similar to other Muskrat-based efforts to limit off-ramping from Twitter and to restrict what it deems as promoting third-party platforms. But this seems to have gone into effect, completely coincidentally, after Substack announced Notes, a Twitter competitor that allows writers to publish small posts.
Everybody has been trying to get into the Twitter game, to fill in the vacuum that the platform will leave once the whole thing finally implodes. Mastodon, Hive, Spoutible, Post News, and so many others have ramped up marketing and promotion efforts in the past few months. Now it’s Substack’s turn. Notes allows users to post “short-form content” as a way to “drive discovery” across the network. The announcement itself doesn’t impact me at all. I’ll probably try it since I’m already here, but compared to so many other efforts, it likely won’t gain a ton of traction. Although, it’s worth noting that Substack has more of a user base than many of the other Twitter clones, and will likely be easy to use — at least easier than Mastodon — so maybe it has a chance.
Regardless, Twitter became openly hostile to Substack. The newsletter platform even addressed it on Twitter itself. Founder Chris Best tweeted, “This morning Twitter started throttling links to our platform. We hope this action was made in error and is only temporary, because writers deserve the freedom to share whatever links they want.”
People reported a lot of weirdness around the situation. Forbes’ Novak showed that Substack links were categorized as “malicious” and might be unsafe. Author Seth Abramson claimed that searching “Substack” on Twitter would redirect to just “newsletter” as a search term. Retweeting, replying, or liking any Substack links was disabled.
Muskrat responded by making a shocking revelation: that Substack had been “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.” Best said this is untrue, and since then, Muskrat hasn’t revealed any evidence to support the claim. Whichever side you land on, the idea that Substack would download the Twitter database (?), which needs a massive technical overhaul to begin with (??) to build their platform that already has tons of users (???) is one of the more absurd occurrences in post-Musk Twitter. Top 10 at least.
The decision had even funnier consequences. Matt Taibbi, who tanked any credibility he had as a journalist by taking part in the Twitter Files, doing zero due diligence in reporting Muskrat’s claims as fact, and putting absolutely nothing revealed into its proper context, criticized the move on his Substack, said he would be using Notes rather than Twitter. He was subsequently throttled by Twitter. Then, journalist Matt Binder, who had previously been suspended by Musk during the jet nonsense, noted that searching for Taibbi’s name would turn up zero search results. @BigTechAlert, which monitors Silicon Valley on Twitter, showed that Muskrat had unfollowed Taibbi. He has now officially left Twitter.
As of Sunday night, the move seems to have been reversed, which has been confirmed by Substack. “We’re glad to see that the suppression of Substack publications on Twitter appears to be over. This is the right move for writers, who deserve the freedom to share their work,” the official Twitter account posted on Saturday.
This Substack situation, in particular, has been very amusing because watching Silicon Valley companies being petty towards each other is always funny. Plus, as we can see from the checkmark fiasco from last week, Muskrat has a tendency to pull back on large moves, so it was a foregone conclusion to see Substack return to Twitter.
But it reminds us that Muskrat has no idea what he wants to do with Twitter beyond wanting to use it to boost his own following. Therefore, he doesn’t want anybody jumping off Twitter. Granted, nobody wants this for a company they own, but especially Muskrat, who spent $44 billion on the platform and has only watched it lose value ever since. And he’s going to do everything he can to prevent that, whether he’s stopping links to third-party sites, cutting off Substack by claiming the site can be dangerous, or silencing his critics. It’s authoritarian behavior, but it’s also childish and clumsy.
I didn’t want this newsletter to be about Musk — not Muskrat anymore — but that’s tough when the man has made everything about himself. And he did it by funneling that attention through one of the internet’s most socially valuable platforms. You can look at the people who mourned it when the Musk deal went through and see all that Twitter has contributed. No other social media service does what Twitter does, so it’s impossible to ignore, even when you’re not a user.
And journalism has understood that for a long time. So it’s utilized Twitter to publicize its own work and gain traffic but to also do reporting. People post official statements there or document local events. It’s a great resource for journalists, and when you have a guy that has a toxic relationship with the media (but also wants to replace them), he’s of course going to cut that off however he can. Substack has also been a great resource for writers who want to produce work independently, and why would he deal with that competition? It’s petty but destructive. It also means that, unfortunately, we’re going to continue to talk about him.