Elon Musk’s X still needs the ‘legacy media’ he so resents

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Media myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

The social media platform that was Twitter was a wondrous place, where journalists could pretend they were celebrities, and celebrities could pretend they were journalists. An exchange of sorts, in which intellectual capital could be traded for social capital and vice versa — bumbling blue-ticked broadsheet reporters could become cool and popular; Gary Lineker could be seen as a prominent political commentator. 

On Elon Musk’s rebranded X platform, that world is crumbling fast. Blue ticks are no longer earned by the company deeming your account to be “of public interest”, but bought by essentially whoever wants one. And not only are these paid-for accounts amplified by the platform’s algorithms, with more visibility and bigger word counts for their posts, they can now choose to only allow other “verified” users to reply.

All the better, you might think. The “blue ticks” (or “blue checks” in American parlance) — as the people with the old verified accounts were called pejoratively, and who included not just journalists and footballers but also academics, politicians and other public figures — had too much influence. Their virtue-signalling and moral grandstanding was pernicious; their cosy consensus needed puncturing.

Despite having had one of these old verified accounts myself, I have some sympathy for this view. But the rampant misinformation and disinformation that has crowded in around the recent horrors in the Middle East show just how much worse Musk’s new version of the platform already is.

Taking Twitter’s old guard down a peg or two was not the stated purpose of Musk’s changes. Instead, he was supposedly attempting to make the platform “by far the most accurate source of information about the world”. But by amplifying the voices of anyone who wants to pay $8, he is subduing the voices of those who don’t — including many of those who write for what he calls the “legacy media”.

Musk has been explicitly waging war on the “legacy media” for some time now. “Newspapers basically just report on what they read yesterday on X lmao,” the 52-year-old wrote at the end of September. “I don’t read the legacy media propaganda much anymore,” he wrote in another post. “Just get my news from X — much more immediate, has actual world-class subject matter experts and tons of humor.” He also decided to strip headlines from news links, claiming this would “greatly improve the esthetics [sic]”, and suggested: “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”

Musk’s view of the relationship between news consumption, news generation and his platform is simplistic — even asinine. He is right to think most people get their news from social media these days. A recent report by the University of Oxford and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that more people now got their news via social media “gateways” than directly from news websites — 30 per cent for the former versus 22 per cent for the latter. But who does Musk think is providing this news on the platforms? The same report found people paid more attention to mainstream journalists and news outlets than to anyone else on X.

What is more, who are these marvellous “actual world-class subject matter experts” that Musk thinks can provide the news without the need for anyone whose explicit job it is to gather it, scrutinise it, second source it, contextualise it, translate it into something intelligible, edit it, get it checked by a lawyer and make sure that it has some bearing on the truth?

I welcome a news ecosystem that includes not just journalists employed by mainstream institutions but also independent ones who, say, write on Substack or have their own podcasts, and “citizen journalists” who can report on what is happening on the ground in real time. But the idea that we should rely on and trust these groups more than the “legacy media” is mistaken.

Independent journalists have to be hustlers, selling and promoting their content in a way that those of us who have the privilege of being employed by media institutions are protected from. And they have to play to a crowd just as much as anyone else. Being a contrarian can be valuable, but it can also become a knee-jerk position, taken to satisfy an audience rather than being the result of a careful analysis of the matter at hand.

So yes, sure, the “legacy media” has all sorts of problems — serious ones — and we can always do better. But the idea that “experts” who pay for influence on social media are a better source of news than journalists and media institutions with decades of experience is a fallacy — as (sadly) is the notion that you can spend more than about four minutes on Bluesky at this stage without getting so bored that you have to surreptitiously slink back to X.

jemima.kelly@ft.com