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I'm starting to suspect we really need to get better at supporting journalists on this platform, instead of just shouting them down and screaming for defederation.

Why?

Next year there is:

• An American presidential election
• A UK general election
• A Ukrainian election
• A European parliament election
• UN security council election
• A whole lot more [en.wikipedia.org]

The single most useful platform for journalists to distribute news is now being held hostage by a narcissist who has zero qualms with using his ownership of Twitter to his personal benefit. I suspect some event will occur in the next year and a half that will cause terminal distrust in the ongoing use of it as a news source.

The social media alternatives for breaking news are:

• Threads (news-averse, corporately owned, just sucks in general)
• Bluesky (still closed beta but growing rapidly; very news-friendly)
• ...and the Fediverse.

Look, I totally get it. I'm a trans journalist, I'm well aware of how brutally hostile my industry is to minorities, and how the "view from nowhere" reporting of one title in particular [nytletter.com] is actively being used to harm trans lives across the U.S. (I won't even begin talking about the British media I work in, which I reserve a particularly vicious disdain for).

What we are facing down is a complete collapse of trust in reportage and an information environment that can be manipulated at the whims of rich men. Already I'm hearing concern about what we do as an industry heading into an American election with Twitter in the state it is; a lot of our processes have relied on Twitter over the years. Next year could be the first election where Twitter isn't the default place people go for news, which is a tremendous opportunity to shift the ecosystem to an open source alternative.

But it won't happen if we have a shitfit every time someone who is tangentially connected to an org that at one point published a transphobic article joins the Fediverse.

And the alternative is much worse — we continue to rely on the toxic miasma that is Twitter for rapid news distribution and that culture increasingly pushes the Overton window rightward, or disinformation perpetuated by the platform's controllers results in a creeping fascism we have no infrastructure in place to combat.