Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk's X from its official accounts | Hacker News Reader

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk's X from its official accounts

theguardian.com

25 pointsjmsflknr5 comments

Nice, I hope others will follow.

> X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work

I'm sure every website owner noticed the same, most of the traffic received via ex-Twitter is pure junk. The amount of clicks can still be significant, but other metrics such as bounce rate and average session time really show how pointless those clicks are.

Good for them! No good will come from putting their valuable Intellectual Property on a US government administrator's website.

That is interesting there must be a definite business case to go on with the moral decision.

The interesting point for me will be when websites remove specific Twitter metadata instead of Open graph.

There's another article here (written in a less confusing first person; I vaguely suspect that the third-person article linked above is intended for newswire or something): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/13/why-the-guardi... which goes a bit into it.

tl;dr - Twitter is bad, and also not as important as it used to be. The Guardian does not want to and is not financially forced into producing clickbait for social media.

(The Guardian is owned by a weird non-profit, the Scott Trust (which is, confusingly, no longer a trust); it's allowed the odd principled decision, as a treat.)

Choice quote:

> The Guardian has more than 80 accounts on X with approximately 27 million followers.

> The Guardian said content on the platform about which it had longstanding concerns included far-right conspiracy theories and racism. It added that the site’s coverage of the US presidential election had crystallised its decision.

> “This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism,” it said.

> “The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”

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