The successful splash landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River. The raid to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. The identification of Muammar Gaddafi. The Bataclan terror attacks. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014—and once more in 2022. When a major world event has happened in the past 15 years, Twitter has been there to help present on-the-ground information and contextualize what you’re seeing with world experts on hand, ready to explain what everything means. (Literally 18 months ago, the world wondered at the ascendancy of the niche Twitter tank expert.)
But last weekend, when Hamas militants killed hundreds of Israelis via air and ground raids, and when Israel responded by killing hundreds of Palestinians, Twitter—which rebranded to X under Elon Musk—was largely silent. At least, unless you followed the right people, and ignored the algorithmically driven For You feed.
“For the past 15 years, Twitter’s great strength for journalists was the ability to hear from people directly involved in news stories,” says Matt Walsh, head of the school of journalism, media, and culture at Cardiff University in the U.K. “It made the news-gathering process—finding and verifying sources during a breaking story—much more straightforward.”
“I’m trying to follow a breaking conflict, and I’m none the wiser using Twitter,” adds Helen De Cruz, a philosophy professor at Saint Louis University.
De Cruz points the finger of blame at Elon Musk, who took ownership of Twitter one year ago this month. “I’ve often wondered what [features] in Musk’s new X/Twitter would kill it off,” she says, suggesting the war between Israel and Hamas was a major wake-up call for those who hadn’t acknowledged how far the platform’s utility had shrunk. The old verification system Twitter used to use to identify notable people—such as vetted journalists—was destroyed with a pay-to-play option early in Musk’s tenure, making it difficult to filter out the more trustworthy news sources. “Now you almost have to use an anti-heuristic,” says De Cruz. “If I see a blue tick, I immediately think the source is not worth listening to, and I need some additional evidence to override that basic idea.”
Musk himself was actively contributing to misinformation during the early stages of the current conflict, encouraging users to follow two accounts that were known for peddling lies, and at least one of which was openly anti-Semitic.
For Cardiff University’s Walsh, Twitter’s old blue tick system provided real benefits for the average user. “This was because the algorithm would promote journalists’ work who had a vested interest in producing trusted and reliable stories,” he says. “And if they highlighted useful Twitter accounts, users could follow primary sources themselves. It wasn’t without problems, but the benefits outweighed the disadvantages.” But Musk’s changes to that have permanently altered for the worse what verification means. “Despite Musk’s professed intention to promote citizen journalism, the war in the Middle East has demonstrated the weakness of his approach,” says Walsh. “Accounts with blue ticks are now incentivized to produce viral disinformation and propaganda to maximize engagement, and thus increase payments from X.”
And Musk’s most recent removal of headlines from links external to the platform—reportedly because Musk wants to discourage people leaving X for other sites—has only compounded the problem. “Destroying the headlines will make the platform more opaque and less useful for the purpose many people use it,” De Cruz says.
A number of other researchers similarly believe the platform has proven inadequate at meeting the scale of the task. “It was only a matter of time before Musk’s platform would face a globally significant news event and predictably it has failed in nearly every measure in terms of acting as a reliable source for breaking news,” says Steven Buckley, a lecturer in media and communications at City University of London. “Blue tick accounts with no expertise who are promoted by the algorithm have turned the platform into a sewer of disinformation and misinformation.” X did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
Despite Musk’s goal of trying to keep people on X at the expense of the traditional, mainstream media (which Musk has repeatedly suggested is untrustworthy), his changes have, for some, had the opposite effect. “I had to actually go to CNN and The Guardian and a couple of other news outlets,” says De Cruz.
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