These news sites should really just stop using Twitter. Every time Twitter does something stupid and they all just happily keep using it they're just encouraging more stupid decisions down the line.
News agencies have been spending the last two decades cutting way back on their field reporting and foreign bureaus. And most journalists graduate college without any actual investigative experience, and get a job where they sit at a desk and read the internet all day. No one is out knocking on doors anymore.
Twitter basically became the outsourcing platform for beat reporting. There is no plan B.
NPR bailed on Twitter and they claim they've seen zero change in their metrics as a result; I believe them.
Almost exclusively the content that is not coming from government sources themselves is coming from from videos and posts being uploaded by Palestinians/Israelis directly.
Even if NPR and others have bailed from having an official presence on Twitter, I can almost guarantee you that individual journalists at said organizations are still probably on it all day scanning for content.
... which also means it could be coming from Israeli or Hamas (or Iranian or Russian or American or ...) propagandists posing as on the ground citizen reporters and there's nobody on the ground to fact check anything.
This is particularly true in the era of deepfakes. You don't even have to stage or mis-caption or mis-attribute photos. You can outright fake things. You don’t even need to be there. That on the ground reporter in Gaza could be in a basement in Idaho using Midjourney and Dall-E.
Even if the deepfake is detectable most of the hordes on Xitter will believe it. See, believe, retweet.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-journalists-safety-25...
I think this is true, and it's absolutely horrifying. Nuke it from orbit.
Twitter didn't just become toxic with the Elon takeover. It's always been toxic. It's structurally toxic. The net effect of Twitter being the brain of humanity is to prioritize and elevate the dumbest, most divisive, and most emotionally triggering ideas from every part of the ideological landscape and de-prioritize anything deep and intelligent. Trash and rage bait drive engagement.
It's like letting trashy daytime TV drive your civilization.
[citation needed]
It's already happening:
https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/
TL;DR: NPR and many of its member stations stopped posting to Twitter in April 2023. Traffic to their web site dropped by ~1%.