Daily Kos staff and volunteer community bloggers have done a generally excellent job of covering and analyzing Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter, and the wanton destruction he has brought upon the company’s employees and the platform itself.
At this point there is no doubt that Twitter will never return to what it was. Let us not forget, “what it was” had already been flawed: in particular, Twitter gave Trump his main platform for becoming a politician, then gave him a free hand to spread hate and disinformation there, and control the national narrative, until after the 2021 insurrection attempt. This demonstrates how dangerous the platform has been even under less-political management. Now all bets are off.
I am well aware that Twitter has become journalists’ and other public figures’ main venue for mining and sharing information. But this venue is now dangerously compromised. Continuing to rely upon it only enhances Musk’s ability to promote the political far right — racism, misogyny, other hate speech, science-denial, disinformation, culture wars, the works — as well as undermine basic decency in labor relations and in public discourse.
Just like with the climate crisis, the days of business-as-usual are over. Anyone who continues any semblance of business-as-usual with Twitter, is now part of the problem not the solution.
If we expect advertisers to end their business with Twitter, then we too, as a news organization, should wean ourselves off our reliance upon it.
I hereby humbly request of Daily Kos management, to institute a staff policy of not embedding tweets, and even further — to entirely disable the tweet-embedding feature in diaries.
If there’s something on Twitter you *really* want to share, take a screenshot and credit the source (which should be the tweet author, not Twitter itself). I believe this complies with copyright rules, or at least with Daily Kos image-sharing rules. All it takes is an extra minute of work. I’ve written 300+ diaries myself, so I know it’s not a huge additional burden.
If someone really feels they must share an actual tweet, let it be just a simple link rather than the embedding. The visual embedding keeps prolonging and maintaining the platform’s reach and dominance.
At the same time, Daily Kos must start pursuing and using other modes and sources of sharing/presenting news. This includes simply going back “old-school” linking to news stories, screen shots of headlines, etc. (the Guardian does that all the time, their headline-collection articles are actually quite edgy).
Thank you for your attention.