Why Elon Musk is too late to break the media
Why Elon Musk is too late to break the media
Elon Musk killed news headlines today in the hopes that posts on X would replace links to news. He's too late.
X (formerly Twitter) is no longer showing headlines for linked stories.
In the past, pasting a link into a post on X would be auto-converted to a box showing a picture from the article and, below the picture, the headline. Now it just shows the picture, with the source’s domain in the lower left corner of the picture.
One flaw in this design was immediately revealed when a user posted a link to “fortune.com” and said falsely in the tweet that evidence shows Musk is a pedophile. Without the headline, it appears the slander comes from Fortune magazine.
Not only does the removal of headlines on X reduce the credibility of media organizations, but it enables their credibility to be hijacked for disinformation.
According to past comments, Musk believes that Twitter users should publish news, not news organizations. “Legacy media propaganda” is a “waste of time and a sadness generator.”
Musk has a long history of opposing, criticizing, banning and trolling members of the press.
X replies to official media inquiries with nothing but the “poo emoji.” (Musk fired the communications department, which normally handles press queries.)
Musk complained that “corporate journalism” ignored his “twitter files,” which Musk claimed exposed the pre-Musk Twitter as censoring news based on politics and government pressure, when in fact it showed an organization earnestly grappling with difficult-to-impossible moderation choices, which the media and the public already knew.
Musk said he would create a site, called “Pravda,” that enabled the public to rate the credibility of journalists.
Musk even proclaimed last year that on Twitter, “There is not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists, so-called journalists, and regular people.” Part of his policy to replace verification with a paid-priority scheme called “verification” appears to be aimed at erasing a valuable tool for Twitter users to distinguish between actual journalists and their many fake accounts (I got verification years ago after 25 or so fake Mike Elgan accounts emerged).
Elon Musk’s anti-media actions appear to reveal a “vision”: a world without journalism. But I think Musk just hates bad press about himself, his businesses and his various causes.
In fact, I’m not aware of Musk ever criticizing any media article or segment that wasn’t in one way or another about Elon Musk himself.
When he attacks the media’s motives, he says things like: “Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn’t advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world’s biggest advertisers.” That criticism is a beef about how Tesla is covered.
When he personally directed that Twitter suspend the accounts of several journalists on the platform, he did so because they covered a story about Musk. (The accounts were later restored.) That move was about how Musk himself was covered.
The real problem, in my view, is that Musk is a megalomaniacal narcissist. To such a personality, critical news is false and laudatory news is true. And Musk wants the power to decide what’s true.
I suspect that Musk doesn’t like journalists because it’s journalists that expose Neuralink’s torturing and killing of monkeys in the development of Musk’s mind-control technology, journalists that remind the public about Musk’s lies about Tesla “AutoPilot,” and journalists that provide evidence for out how Musk is driving X into the ground.
Megalomaniacal narcissists who break rules and violate norms to increase their own wealth and power hate the media because it’s the media that exposes, documents, details and contextualizes their self-serving transgressions. That’s why the powerful among them are hellbent on convincing the public that fake news is real news and real news is fake news. And they’re succeeding with a large two-digit minority of the public.
The so-called “mainstream media” both lionizes and criticizes Musk. For every article about how tyrannical he is running his companies there’s another one about what a brilliant visionary he is. I assume Musk feels the fawning articles about him are perfectly accurate and in no way a “sadness generator.” Musk could choose to just read positive articles about himself. Instead he spent $44 billion in an attempt to control the narrative.
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Mike, I was thinking about this just the other day: People like Trump and Musk hate the media because the media is first to hold them accountable. You articulated this very well.
One note: Xitter no longer responds to media inquiries with the poop emoji, They now say something like "we'll get back to you" or some such. The poop thing ended a while ago.