Salon laments that ‘not everyone has the luxury to leave Twitter’
April 29, 2022
Not everyone has the luxury to leave Twitter.
So Salon tells us. No, that’s its headline: “Not everyone has the luxury to leave Twitter.”
This then becomes the argument as to why it must remain a safe place where horrible people aren’t allowed to have free speech. For – and we find ourselves very amused by this, being journalists ourselves – the connections you can make on Twitter, the information you can find there, is so important to journalists that it’s just not possible to leave.
We’d possibly snark that journalists spending less time on Twitter might lead to fewer of those articles “Here’s what some folk on Twitter said about X” but then to be fair that is more BuzzFeed than Salon.
The complaint is quite seriously that Twitter is important to writers.
“It doesn’t matter to me — but it might to my future livelihood. As a writer in the 21st century, I’m expected to have a social media presence.” and “News still tends to break on Twitter. Alongside that, jobs and opportunities are posted there.”
You see how it’s going. Twitter is just so valuable to the journalistic and writing classes that no one should be allowed to mess with it by allowing dissenting opinions.
Salon is something of a leading outlet in the progressive media. It ranks in the low 60s for law and government media outlets and gains some 9 million visits a month. As a style guide to what is progressive this week, it’s more important than that.
At which point we should probably wish Elon Musk luck with turning Twitter into a free speech bastion. America’s journalistic classes being exposed to the unfashionable ideas that the rest of the nation holds to might improve the journalism we get, right? For as we’re told here, Twitter’s just far too important to leave it – so where better for them to find out about us?