Angelo Carusone is President & CEO of Media Matters for America, a non-profit watchdog journalism organization. He was in Paris at Sciences-Po journalism school to do a presentation « Anatomy of Populist Media ». We met him to talk about Twitter/X, and Bluesky
GB : At NPDJ conference taking place at Sciences Po, you talked about the fact that X was suing you and Media Matters. You talked about this on a thread on Bluesky, not X. Are you going to switch ?
Angelo Carusone : I think the tension is that Twitter had and still has a lot of influence. It just does. Sometimes you get influence because you’re just so big. Facebook and Instagram, they’re so big that that’s where all the audiences are, and that’s where their influence comes from. What was unique, and I to some extent still is about Twitter is that its influence comes from not its size, but the users that are on it. You have decision-makers, you have journalists, you have members of the media, you have corporate leaders. And so that tends to drive news and information.
And what’s one of the side effects of not just this lawsuit, but I think what’s happening in Twitter more broadly with some of these changes is that a few years ago, if you wanted to have influence over that universe of people, you could go to Twitter and you would get information from them, you could respond and you can engage. Now, one, they’re shifting. They’re either leaving the platform or they’re going elsewhere. It makes it a little harder to do that influence work. Two, if you are somebody that is trying to drive news and information, you’ve either lost potential or that potential has been reduced because of the changes that are happening at the platform.
It’s a real concern right now more broadly, when you have this rise in the information ecosystem about authoritarianism and right-wing populism, misinformation and disinformation on the rise, you have all these new challenges. And one of the tools in the toolkit, which would have been able to go into the most influential audience in one place, it seems to be diminished. For me, personally, the tension is that we need Twitter to do the work, not just for that we do, but I think for a healthy ecosystem.
But one, it’s changing, and that shift is happening regardless of why. Then two, I think there’s some general fear and anxiety about, will you be penalized or punished or will you experience consequences if you were to engage on X in a way that gets you some… Puts you as a target on your back? That, I think, is the scary part about it, is that even if you really wanted to dive, there’s a thought in the back of your mind, could this lead to more consequences?
Angelo Carusone : You don’t need Bluesky to drive traffic. Twitter never drove a lot of web traffic to news outlets either
So a few weeks ago Bluesky was beginning to expand. Are you ok to say that if media is going on Bluesky, if journalists are going on Bluesky, and if politicians, mainly, are going on Bluesky, then it could become a new place of exchange?
I certainly think that’s very possible, because ultimately, whether it’s Twitter or any other platform, the value that it had was in a set of community and a couple of communities that could then overlap. If you have a replica of that, you don’t need Bluesky to drive traffic. Twitter never drove a lot of web traffic to news outlets either. It did some, but that was never really its primary purpose. Its purpose was in community. It’s this chicken and egg situation right now with Bluesky, you need a critical mass of enough people for it to fill that role of community.
What I would just also note is that right now it does feel for a lot of people that they’ve either lost or the value of a community that they once had on Twitter has been diminished in some way. And so whether it’s Bluesky or something else, they have to find that community because it’s so tied into doing their job. So I agree. I think it I think maybe Bluesky will be that.
What is your feeling about Threads? I’ve never been on Threads, because, I heard that there were no political thoughts allowed on it, so I had the feeling that it would never replace Twitter.
It’s true. It won’t. Even though it has huge numbers in terms of its audience and users, it doesn’t have the influence because the types of content that it will allow… You can post all kinds of political stuff there. It won’t punish you for it, but it doesn’t really promote it. So its algorithm suppresses that. So your own followers don’t really even see your comments when it comes into the political space. I think that ultimately is what people want, is they want that engagement so that they can either refine their ideas or maybe start a conversation. It’s a lot harder to have that influence on Threads. You just can’t have that.
About the lawsuits that X filed on you and Media Matters, are you going to ask your community to help you with some money to help ?
Well, we’ll have to. It is part of what I think, and this is where when we think about the effects of just this types of litigation, in the past, and typically when people think of a lawsuit, they say, Okay, it’s one lawsuit. What I think unique about this is that it wasn’t one lawsuit. It was a few lawsuits, and then next to these lawsuits, was investigations using state power, using attorney generals. If you’re being investigated by attorney generals, the way that you have to conduct yourself is very different.
Typically, if you’re sued, if you’re a news outlet or you’re a person and you’re doing this work and you get sued and you have a community, you can go and say, Hey, I need help. Come defend me. If you’re being sued and then simultaneously you’re under investigation, you are deeply limited from being able to tap into the one resource that you might have to defend yourself against the lawsuits. I think that there’s a little bit of a warning here in terms of the playbook, which is that it does feel like using state power and litigations is going to be a new sort of one, two punch for newsrooms to confront going forward.
That, I think, is the warning. It limits your ability then to get resources to then fight the lawsuits when you’re also having to confront these investigations.
Do you have the support from the media journalists in USA?
Yeah, it’s starting. I mean, these things take forever. But yes, there’s definitely… One of the biggest questions that came out of the gate early on was just how the media was going to respond to this type of lawsuit against us. Were they going to treat us an activist organization, or were they going to treat us more like one of their own got sued? The way that they looked at it was one of their own got sued.
That does matter because the types of defenses that are available to you are much different when you’re treated like a member of the media. There’s some appeals happening right now in one of the cases that will have not just media support, but also then some ideological support, where you’ll see some Conservatives that are being vocal about some parts of it. It’s a slow process, but yeah, it’s a grind.
