Hello, it’s tech reporter Alexandra Sternlicht. Last night my colleague Kylie Robison broke the news that X (formerly Twitter) plans to transform news article links shared on the platform into context-free images. X owner Elon Musk confirmed the move hours after Kylie’s report, saying in a tweet that “this is coming from me directly.” He justified the decision with the rationale that the format “will greatly improve the esthetics.”
While pictures are lovely, the change means that unless users write their own captivating and informative headlines, there's a chance that news will get lost on the social platform most closely associated with news. From its earliest days, Twitter distinguished itself from other social media platforms because of its strengths as a modern-day newswire and its reputation as a public chat room for journalists.
Up north, Meta is blocking news articles on Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada after the country passed a law allowing news organizations to negotiate payments for content shared on their platforms. This is happening against the backdrop of significant wildfire activity, inspiring ire from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who said: “It is so inconceivable that a company like Facebook is choosing to put corporate profits ahead of ensuring that local news organizations can get up-to-date information to Canadians,” at a Monday news conference.
These things—hed-less images floating on Twitter and Canadian Instagram feeds filled with bikini models, focaccia art, and other banalities while the country burns—would’ve been inconceivable a few years earlier. In 2014, Meta (then-called Facebook) went on a “listening tour” of publishers and proposed that it share advertising revenue with publishers to incentivize media companies to post links to the Facebook mobile app. “Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park,” wrote legendary New York Times journalist David Carr in 2014. “More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you.”
When I worked at New York Times in audience marketing less than two years after Carr penned that column, it certainly seemed like the Facebook pooch wanted to play—even snuggle—with our Times Square-based crew.
I was a lowly analyst on the team responsible for spending money on social media to convert regular Times readers to subscribers. But in my year-ish on the team, Meta and Twitter acted as our lap dogs. Not only did we have weekly calls with both platforms where they incentivized us to use new features and attempted to solve our problems, they wined and dined us. Meta hosted my team in a suite for an Ariana Grande concert at Madison Square Garden. Twitter rented the tip of floating waterfront restaurant the Frying Pan for us to eat cheese and drink wine with views of the Hudson and talk Twitter video.
Now, of course, I’ve switched to the other side of the media where my professional platform interactions occur through tense on-background phone calls. I have no idea how the relationship between the Times’ audience marketing team and the social platforms has evolved over the years. Still, as Meta moved from courting publishers with ad revenue sharing to countrywide news bans and X overhauls the article format, it's safe to say the publisher-platform relationships have soured over the years.
And indeed, as Politico noted on Tuesday, Musk's move to scrap headlines comes as European regulators are trying to make social media platforms compensate news publishers for using snippets of their content. Removing headlines and other text from tweets could give X a clever way to sidestep news publishers' copyright claims.
As Carr wrote in that 2015 column, “Everyone knows that if the dog is big enough, he can lick you to death.”
Here’s what else is going on in tech today.
Alexandra Sternlicht
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