X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump's recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.
On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.
Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn't explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.
In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a "false positive" and that it had been corrected. The company didn't explain further.
Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.
The problem is, for the past 2 decades twitter WAS the default place for news. I can remember watching somebody live streaming FROM THE BOSTON BOMBING in real time. News outlets would KILL for that kind of up to the minute reporting. Plus, it was able to happen not from just one person, but a multitude of people from different perspectives, live on the scene, all without the news outlet needing to pay for a single dime of labor. It's all just handed to them, from people not assosiated with the station, and therefore not paid, nor given any benefits.
And this went on for almost 2 decades. Now the platform in the past 2 years has shrunk, but it's still millions of users, compared to Mastodon which has something like less than 100k people last time I checked.
So yes. For now it IS the default for news in real time. Even if the slant has dramatically shifted in a very short time. It takes time for people to change habbits. Mastodon needs to grow, and the fediverse needs to grow. Doing so will change the landscape of the internet, since the fediverse is built to be resistant to corporate takeover. Once it becomes the default, things will look very different. The problem is, if you walk out of your house, and walk to the mall, and ask 100 random people what the fediverse is, I'd be shocked if 1 of them knew. That's where we are right now.
But that was BE (before Elon).