The future of news and politics online

The conflict in Israel has reignited a fierce debate/desire for Threads to replace the old Twitter

I’m sorry for my delay in sending today’s newsletter. I got my COVID/flu vaccine on Monday, and I’ve been feeling the side effects. Plus, this one has taken me longer to think through.

As I wrote in Sunday’s newsletter, I have not been able to get out of my mind this question about how platforms - especially Threads - should handle news and political content.

When I asked you all how you felt, the reaction was mixed:

I ranted about this in July when Threads first launched, and Adam Mosseri said they wouldn’t be amplifying news and politics.

I still stand by what I said in that newsletter - that you can run but can’t hide from politics - but I find myself struggling anew with Meta’s position as we see breaking news happening in Israel and users looking to Threads to be the new Twitter. At the same time, polling shows that people like Meta/Facebook more when they don’t show news/politics. So, I know they can’t run away from politics and news, but should they? Do those of us who use the platforms have any say? I think so.

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Before I get into all of this, I want to acknowledge the MANY biases that I am coming into this conversation with. First, I’m a journalism and political science major. Journalism was my first love - I just added poli sci because I already had to take many social science credits. I then went into political communications after I caught the political bug in 2002.

This means I’m a news and political junkie. I also have deep-seated roots in the idea of the journalism industry since the Watergate era. I think there’s an element where, even though people don’t want to engage with the news, they should be exposed to it.

Second, my career began by encouraging and helping politicians get online. To reckon with the fact that perhaps that was the wrong move is tricky. 

Thus, it makes sense that my first reaction is that, of course, news and politics are essential. That can be true, and it doesn’t mean it has to be on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or TikTok.

To start exploring this, I went down a deep rabbit hole of history. I started with

Taylor Lorenz

’s excellent book about the rise of online influencers. She opens the book by talking about blogs - mainly political blogs like Talking Points Memo - that rose to influence in the early 2000s. This is when I was at the Republican National Committee in 2004. I remember the blogs on the right that uncovered the fake documents Dan Rather had used to question President Bush’s military career.

Fast forward to the early 2010s, where you have Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube fighting to show they were relevant to the conversation. They leaned heavily toward news and politics. They needed influential people to create content so users would keep coming back. It made sense at the time. Both Obama and tech were considered cool and cutting-edge. 

Then, 2016 happened, and the political mood at home and worldwide changed. When COVID happened, we needed those online communities even more. Post-2020, people just wanted an escape. We were all tired - still are.

Then I looked up at my bookshelf and saw a series of books that a former UW-Madison journalism professor of mine, James Baughman, wrote about the history of television. I forced myself not to spend all afternoon reading these, thus further delaying this newsletter and other work I need to do, but trust me, I’m finally digging into these again. In the first chapters I skimmed, Baughman talks about how entertainment has always ruled. It’s been the government - whether here in the U.S. when the FCC required broadcast stations to “operate in the public interest…” - or in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia who have public service broadcasters such as the CBC, BB, and ABC - that impose requirements to show news related content.

So, the first lesson is news has rarely been profitable - though Baughman does note that it was in the 60s, which makes sense given all that was going on then. Even today,

Simon Owens

noted in one of his newsletters, “If there’s anything we’ve learned from The New York Times’s success, hard news coverage produces diminishing returns, especially in non-election years. While outlets like WashPo were doubling down on their politics coverage, the NYT was expanding into verticals like recipes, product reviews, games, and sports.”

It makes sense if you want to turn a profit that no platform will focus on news.

There’s another element that I think is at play here, too. That is the loss of community when Musk changed Twitter. Recently, a friend told me about an argument she had with someone over a grilled cheese sandwich. They later realized that the argument wasn’t about the grilled cheese; it was something more significant. I think a part of the reaction to Meta’s stance on news and politics is partially driven by the Twitter community, which was mainly politicians, journalists, and experts feeling like him saying they aren’t focusing on news and politics means he’s rejecting a community looking for a new home. (I don’t think this is what Adam necessarily means, but it doesn’t stop it from feeling that way.)

I also think that the crisis in Israel reminded us of how we missed that community when breaking news is happening. It’s different than turning on CNN.

I don’t think we’re going to get the old Twitter back. We aren’t going to get our old news ecosystem back (nor do I think that would be a good thing). We are rebuilding our communities and rewiring our daily habits for where we go to get news and connect with people. That’s hard. 

So, where do we go from here?

Let’s talk about rebuilding the community first. While platforms play a role here, I think this will ultimately be up to all of us and where we choose to assemble. Some journalists decided they would try to make Threads their home and have been encouraging people to follow one another on it. Other communities are popping up in other places. For instance, Substack Notes has become my community of other writers. While no community will exactly be like what Twitter once was, I do think we’ll find that again over time. We must remember it’s only been a year since Musk took over. These things don’t happen overnight. But, ultimately, community is made by what effort we put into making it.

Second, a piece in the Morning Consult poll really stuck with me. Ultimately, the analyst makes this observation and recommendation, “People are always going to discuss major news events on social media, but platforms still choose what to amplify. Incentivizing commentary around pop culture and sports, rather than something like the presidential election, can keep a platform newsy but light-hearted. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged political content is more ‘cutting’ than other types of news like sports updates.

With this reality, news publishers need to prepare for a future where more major social platforms emphasize entertainment over information. This means platforms need to be more open to forging nontraditional partnerships, like those with news influencers Kelsey Russell, who can break down news events in videos with a conversational and comedic tone.”

At first, I was appalled that we need to make news more entertaining, but as I dug into it, I was constantly reminded that entertainment sells and news doesn’t.

I wonder if government intervention will force platforms to carry news. Maybe we will. That may end up in legislation when it finally happens in Congress (and it will happen eventually, just not anytime soon).

But this is where influencers or content creators do come in. As more journalists and others are laid off or looking for work, they create newsletters, podcasts, video series, etc. You no longer need a legacy news outlet to validate your expertise. You can produce it yourself. And there are platforms like Substack or LinkedIn where people want to consume that content. More people in Canada are going to news sites now that Facebook has kicked news off its platform. The monetization of that is tricky, but the answer may be that creators on these platforms choose to include news in what we cover. And maybe people won’t want it every day, but when you have a year like 2024 coming up, I think they’ll want more help making sense of what is happening than we think.  

That, in turn, will create new online communities amongst these creators, between creators and platforms, and between creators, platforms, and consumers. We’re at the beginning of a new chapter for the information age, and we all have a role in deciding what that will be.

Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.