Twitter Alternatives for Journalists

Twitter has declined faster than possibly thought since being acquired by Elon Musk for a staggering $44 billion. Musk laid off over half the company and has now lost all but around 300 employees, causing the company’s value to plummet. The “verification” symbol was briefly turned into a paid service, but was discontinued after several accounts impersonated others and tweeted things such as “insulin is free” and “we heart apartheid.” But Twitter has dominated world conversations and exchanges for the past few years, and its absence leaves a severe gap in communication.

There are a few institutions society has come to rely on for social media; Twitter was one of them; Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are others. However, these social media platforms make one important distinction that makes them less reliable than Twitter: content monetization. If a user draws a repeatedly large amount of engagement, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok will allow that user to make money from their posts. This does not necessarily center a truth-based model, as was Twitter’s goal: verification on Twitter was a neutral function that gave authority to the correct sources. With that gone, where can journalists turn instead?

One of the most obvious choices is Reddit. Reddit’s major pitfall is that it is a message board without verification capability (or for that matter, much moderation on anything posted there), but there is a subreddit specifically for journalists. Reddit offers many of the same functions as Twitter, including the ability to share photos and videos, but is not the place to go if Twitter’s hate speech problem was what drove you to leave.  LinkedIn also provides a familiar, though completely different interface. Though LinkedIn is marketed toward professional and workplace-based content, it also serves as a place of discussion, news consumption, and entrepreneurship. The tone of posts on LinkedIn tends to be very different from Twitter, and users are allowed to create lengthy, blog-style posts to share with friends.

Mastodon has garnered some attention in recent weeks. Mastodon is a decentralized social media network with a 500-character limit for your “Toots” (the Mastodon answer to Tweets), and also offers users the ability to create a profile and upload photos. However, Mastodon’s decentralized design has led to widespread confusion among former Twitter users. One user said that Mastodon’s server-based design and explanation read like gibberish:

"It's very simple, your account is part of a kerflunk, and each kerflunk can talk to each other as part of a bumblurt. At the moment everyone you flurgle can see your bloops but only people IN your kerflunk can quark your nerps. Kinda like email."

Some other networks, like Tribel, offer interfaces that, while very similar to Twitter, have completely different philosophies behind them. For example, Tribel’s philosophy appears to focus on being an answer to the rise in “fake news” and anti-democracy sentiments allowed in Twitter’s airspace. A closer look at Tribel shows that its founders are two Democratic political activists who also own the Occupy Democrats news site—putting a clear left-leaning bias behind the information available and widely shared on this network (the same could be said of a right-leaning bias on networks Parler and Truth Social.)

All of this is to say losing Twitter is a big kick in the shins to journalists. Its goals and format were uniquely aligned with providing easily verifiable sources and short-form digests on important information and world events. The void left by Twitter may not be comprehensively filled for some years. But in the meantime, perhaps the lessons learned from the loss of Twitter will lead to a better platform in the future.