My partner and his family are from Maine, he works closely w/ organizations based in Portland. Last night we both got on X for the first time in months hoping that there might be some chance it could still work as a realtime news source when we didn’t see much here. The answer, absolutely not.
Here is what we saw when searching “Lewiston” and “Maine”: the X algorithm is privileging accounts, no matter how nefarious, that have paid for a blue check. These included obvious white supremacist, conspiracy theory, and other nefarious accounts.
There accounts immediately began spreading conspiracy abt the shooting either being fake or being committed by Muslims/“islamists.” For context, Lewiston is one of few places in Maine with a visible Black pop, most of whom are East African immigrants. My fear was a hate crime targeting them.
Because EM stripped verification from legitimate news sources and public institutions, they either are no longer appearing in searches, or have left X, and so, if you looked for info about the shooting last night you saw largely wild speculation and covert and not so covert bigotry and conspiracy.
Among that speculation was the naming of at least 5 different “suspects” users claimed they heard over police scanners. Totally unsubstantiated but all over the search results.
Have elements of these things always been there, yes. Have I, as a scholar who wrote a book about Twitter and studies the public sphere, ever seen such terrible search results on a breaking news item on social? No, except maybe in FB groups that specifically focus on spreading conspiracy and hate.
I keep telling friends and colleagues that continuing to use that site is giving content, legitimacy, and ad dollars to a project to further destabilize civil society. I am aware I sound like a killjoy and there are still things people find useful there. But I stand by this position.
Reminds me of this summer when I went to the site to search for USWNT to see results of their World Cup match. The results were filled with white supremacist accounts.
Not at all a novel observation on my part, but it just now occurs to me that the car salesman manages Xitter as if everyone treated it only as a mere amusement. We all use(d) it that way sometimes, but as you point out, it has also always been an important source of real real-time information.
If you follow a small group of people for entertainment and only use the Following feed, it's easy to see barely any changes. I had one account for science things, and a pseudonym account for following politics. The first barely changed, the second became a swamp.
I wouldn’t say it has always been a news source, but it became that because the company fostered its use as a viable source for breaking news in a responsible way, and Elon has destroyed it, deliberately so.
It was an invaluable resource for getting immediate local traffic and weather information. But you can’t even trust X for something that apolitical anymore.
not sure if it's because i don't have an account, but i tried looking at the police page and none of the posts are in order. so the third post down was something like, "manhunt ended" but it's a post from years ago.
Xitter changed the account pages when you're not logged in such that posts are in order of historical popularity.
So if you don't have an account, it's utterly useless as a news source.
You also simply can’t see some posts. I recently deactivated my account there, and when I clicked on a tweet from a reporter that was embedded in a story, I just kept getting an error message.
Journalists and others trying to inform the public need to understand twitter doesn’t do that anymore.
I’m not ruling out racism as a motivation for these shootings, but if he was targeting immigrants (particularly Muslim immigrants) it’s unlikely he’d have gone to a bowling alley or a bar.
It was SO BAD. There were clear images of him just as Classic lyrics Maine White as humanly possible and people were clogging the feeds trying to make it about our Somali neighbors, confusing them for Syrians and talking shit about gun free zones because they don't know shit about Maine gun laws
I rarely used Twitter for news other than maybe to get some basic info like place or people names to plug into Google and go directly to news/journalism sites when first learning about an event.
I've been on Twitter for 16 years. I wrote my PhD thesis about Twitter 13 years ago. 15K followers, the only platform I was on until 2 years ago (no Instagram, Linkedin, etc.).
For the last 6 months I've been decentralizing my network, no longer centralizing my usage. Best choice for me.
It’s really a shame because Twitter in its original form really allowed you to get to where the action is for breaking news events, and if you had a good network of people you followed you could easily weed out the liars and opportunists that were always there
This is important to know. I deleted my account over there so was wondering exactly this. I found out that a friend of mine was safe through the fb crisis alert which still seems to have some usefulness
Same. We are an hour north and I was desperate for news. But X has totally lost that newsgathering capacity. It was a sad and awful realization. Had to go to various FB pages and local newspapers to get updates.
Just had a student apologize after class for "not being in the right head space" because she's from a town right near Lewiston. I told her it's ok to take time, talk to counseling or better yet family. But I think she needed to be somewhere to briefly be distracted.
My partner and his family are also from Maine. I found the same on X last night. It made me realize how much I have always relied on it as a resource in emergencies. Terrifying to think about what this means to those actually experiencing the emergency. Thank you for the work you do.
I have a deep feeling of grief over the loss of what was the world's town square, for better or for worse. I like Bsky a lot, but it'll be years before we see that kind of centrality again.
It's not even just white supremacist garbage (as bad as that is). Just basic facts are wrong--and bad accounts surface that to the top.
I saw multiple accounts "thanking the Maine police" for capturing the suspect.
He's still on the loose! It's dangerous to say he has been captured when he hasn't!
Last night I saw incorrect reports, videos from entirely different events, clear conspiracy theories, and no real help or information for those sheltering in place. As someone who has used SM post-disaster (hurricane), it was clear Twitter can no longer provide that.
