Replacing Twitter with a News Industry Co-operative
The continuation of Twitter as a home for journalists is increasingly problematic. And, coordinating journalists moving to another social media platform is hard and (if the new platform is not controlled by the news industry) risks repeating the same issue. Perhaps, the way forward is for a consortium of news companies (e.g., Bloomberg, Reuters, NY Times, WSJ, etc.) to form their own Twitter like platform as a consortium/co-operative venture (for our purposes call this new platform Twitter-CoOp), this has precedent — the Associated Press is a cooperative owned by the member news organizations.
Why do journalists and the news industry need a replacement for Twitter?
Twitter is a very important part of the current events and news cycle, it is the go to place for journalists to share breaking news and/or get a sense of what is happening. However, Twitter is currently facing several challenges:
- Twitter is rumored to be having financial problems: Elon Musk has described Twitter as being on the fast lane to bankruptcy.
- Twitter’s solutions to its financial problems involve revamping its business model by charging for verification and so on. These changes are proving controversial and may not be in the news industry’s best interest.
- Twitter’s policies on what is, or is not allowed, to be posted are increasingly ad hoc, and increasingly appear to target professional journalists. One commentator has observed — “[Elon Musk] doesn’t want free speech. He wants to be free to set the rules based on his mood and personal interests.”
- The current management of Twitter has been taking many controversial overly partisan positions that raise doubts about its willingness to be a neutral public platform. For example, it appears that “Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first”
- Musk has a long history of distrusting professional journalists, and is a proponent of citizen journalism. Leaving aside the question of is citizen journalism in society’s best interests (my belief is it isn’t, lone citizen journalists will not be in a position to investigate and/or challenge billionaire elites), Twitter promoting citizen journalism is not in the interest of journalists and news organizations.
The result of all this is that a lot of journalists are looking for a Twitter alternative, but that presents several interrelated challenges.
What are the challenges with moving off of Twitter?
The three biggest challenges for journalists, news organizations and news makers moving off of Twitter are:
- Collective Action, how do you get a critical mass of journalists, etc. on Twitter to agree to move to the same platform? Journalists want to be a platform where other journalists and verified sources are available, sources want to be a platform where the journalists are. So because of this Collective Action problem, Twitter has significant stickiness
- Assuming the Collective Action problem can be resolved, what platform should participants move to?
- How to make sure the next platform doesn’t simply recreate analogous challenges to the ones journalists are currently experiencing on twitter? The two most widely discussed Twitter alternatives (Mastodon and Post.News) are potentially problematic. Mastodon has no business model, and it is not clear how it can be expanded, maintained and managed. Post.News is a for profit organization, and while I have the highest regard for the current management, whoever controls it in future may want to manipulate it to promote or demote news as they see fit.
The news industry creating its own shared Twitter-CoOp platform would resolve all three of these problems.
Assuming the news industry creates its own Twitter-CoOp platform, it resolves all three of these problems. The Twitter-Coop platform, assuming it is owned by a good cross section of the industry, should have instant credibility and legitimacy. The Twitter-Coop platform would issue verified accounts to all of the journalists in its member news media organization, it could also hopefully create tools to make it easier for journalists to move their various lists onto the new platform. It would also offer verified accounts to all government agencies on a free basis. While the Twitter-CoOp would not be in a position to force journalists to use the new platform, the fact that it would be backed by multiple news organizations, etc. should encourage usage.
In terms of a business model as a co-op the new platform will not face the same pressures for profit maximization, it can maintain itself on some combination of advertising, fee for service, and cost sharing arrangements. In terms of rules for what and can not be posted, those can be transparent, based on commonly accepted journalism standards. To encourage the broadest participation it would allow anyone to post on the platform, though verification would be subject to posted rules.
It is beyond the scope of this short note to discuss the underlying technology, but hypothetically the new Twitter-coop could be created using Mastodon software (which is free and open source) as a base and be confederated with Mastodon (allow cross posting, etc.).
Last edited on: February 15, 2023
