The Traditional Media Panics as Elon Musk’s X Platform Destroys Their Ability to Control What You See

The outbreak of war between Israel and the Hamas-run government of the Palestinian enclave in Gaza has pushed “X,” the social media platform formerly known as Prince, I mean Twitter, to the forefront of news distribution. Some, however, claim that X is so overrun by misinformation that it is useless. Evidence, however, shows that this critique is driven by a dislike of the changes Elon Musk made to democratize X, laziness on the part of online and traditional media, and the inability of corporate media to control the narrative.

The article is behind a paywall, but you can read it here for free.

N THE WAKE of Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israel this weekend—and the Israeli military’s response—journalists, researchers, open source intelligence (OSINT) experts, and fact-checkers rushed to verify the deluge of raw video footage and images being shared online by people on the ground. But users of X (formerly Twitter) seeking information on the conflict faced a flood of disinformation.

While all major world events are now accompanied almost instantly by a deluge of disinformation aimed at controlling the narrative, the scale and speed at which disinformation was being seeded about the Israel-Hamas conflict is unprecedented—particularly on X.

The author blames Musk opening up X from being a middle school mean girls’ club dominated by cheerleaders blue-check accounts to anyone willing to pay $8/month and submit proof they are actual people for the influx of bad information. A large percentage of the former elite blue-check accounts would have had trouble doing the latter part, proof of humanity. So instead of leftwing celebrities telling us what to believe, now we get to see what actual experts in the field have to offer.

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