X-odous?

What does The Guardian's decision to stop posting on X mean for the media's relationship with the social network formerly known as Twitter?

Today’s edition is a short one but there’ll be longer pieces coming next week…

For a long time, journalists were obsessed with Twitter. It was a place where they could trawl for stories, gossip with each other, and compete to gain followers while pretending to not be remotely bothered. I was as guilty as anyone of being too focused on what happened in that small corner of the social media world. Twitter has never been the biggest platform but its influence was disproportionate because most of the media was there.

Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, there have been multiple waves of articles claiming that the social network is dead and lots of people promising to jump ship. By and large, all that verbiage didn’t come to much beyond a slow decline in traffic. But since Donald Trump’s second election victory and Musk’s role in promoting his campaign using X as one of the main vehicles, calls to leave the service have grown louder and a more significant number of people seem to be heeding them. The flow of users towards BlueSky has grown from a trickle to a tidal wave.

This week, The Guardian announced it will no longer be posting on X. In a statement published on its website, it wrote:

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.

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.

The paper isn’t deleting or locking its X accounts — it has more than 40 with a combined following of over 20 million — but has changed their profiles to say that they are now “archived”. Its reporters will still use X for newsgathering and it will also embed posts in stories when they’re relevant so it’s hardly a clean break.

In an internal memo to staff, which was, ironically, posted on X by Semafor’s Media Editor, Max Tani, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief, Katha Viner, wrote:

We do occasionally embed tweets in our articles and we have seen this become less stable and less useful as an experience for our readers. Please avoid embedding X posts unless necessary to the story. This could include posts containing video or images to which we don’t otherwise have access, though where we later add our own video and/or images, the embed should be removed.

For X posts that are text-only, or where we do not the images, do not embed. Instead, add the quote, or a paraphrased version, and hyperlink back to the post.

The Guardian has yet to set up an official BlueSky account but is active on Threads.

In some senses, The Guardian’s announcement is a stunt. It’s kept its accounts there in case it ever decides to come back to X and is trying to encourage readers to visit the newspaper’s website directly rather than being funnelled there through their feeds. But it’s also clear from the data that X no longer drives traffic to articles in the way it once did.

When I first started this newsletter in 2020, Twitter was the main engine for gaining new readers and subscribers. Now, following Musk’s decision to suppress Substack links last year, it’s not even in the top three sources of traffic. Sometimes it feels as though I am just posting links to these editions out of habit there because they are simply not seen by the numbers they once were even though my following on X has continued to grow.

I suspect that other British newspapers won’t be quick to follow The Guardian’s lead. For the more right-wing outlets, X’s current leadership and general climate are not so unsettling. Stories about Musk himself generate lots of clicks and those focused on Trump are even more popular. The Guardian’s announcement is more about signalling to its current readership about where it stands than gaining a larger audience.

I’m interested to hear what you think about staying on X and if news organisations should keep posting there.

While I’m not planning to stop posting links to this newsletter on X, I don’t say very much there anymore. Like a lot of other people, I’m using BlueSky a lot more. Join me!

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