X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, is marking some links to news organization NPR’s website as “unsafe” when users click through to read the latest story about an altercation between a Trump campaign staffer and an Arlington National Cemetery employee. The warning being displayed is typically applied to malicious links, like those containing malware, and other types of misleading content or spam. However, in this case, the web page being blocked is an NPR news report, raising questions about whether or not Musk’s X is actively trying to stop the news story from spreading.
The problem is no one has really made an effort to take over in the news/politics space. Meta basically decided Threads wouldn’t be for that. Mastodon exists, but given it’s nerd-based nature it’s way more tech focused. Then there’s Substack’s half-assed effort, but they seem happy to focus on newsletter subscriptions for now. So there’s competitors in microblogging generally, but there’s still zero competition in news/politics.
I think it’s a little like “no one goes there anymore it’s too crowded”. If people started posting on mastodon people would use it, and it wouldn’t be so nerd-dense.
A friend and I had a minor fight about this. She was like “but all the good content is on Twitter” and I was like sometimes you have to be the change you want to be and suffer a little to make the world better. I think you can suffer through less immediate memes. She did not accept this.
But anyway yeah you’re right that content needs to move. NPR and others could probably just switch, but none of them probably want to be the first to move.
Looks like NPR was on Mastadon for a little while in 2020: https://mstdn.social/@NPR
That’s true, the truth is that most people are lazy, if you are a company your social media person should be mirroring your stuff everywhere, it’s just copy paste.
This is why misskey actually gained some traction over in japan, the artists there are mirroring their drawings there alongside twitter and pixiv.