What We Lost

I discovered Twitter during the Green Movement in Iran. It was the first time I realized what a powerful tool Twitter could be to monitor a big event happening across the world in real-time. From there I watched the Arab Spring unfold on Twitter. I was working at Reuters at the time and created my own timeline of the Arab Spring told through Tweets.

Time and again, for years and years after those two events, many more events were shared by people on the ground, in real time, to Twitter. As a person working in newsrooms, those signals from direct sources were so valuable. Of course, they could not be taken at face value, they needed to be vetted with follow up sourcing the way you would any other lead, but before the days of Twitter you rarely had such an abundance of potential first-hand leads and a listening device that could bring them to you in such an elegant way.

Twitter is now gone, and X has taken its place. I won’t get into all the reasons why here, that story has been told ad infinitum at this point. The important thing is that we lost an incredible listening tool to understand the world.

Most recently, a journalist in Asheville was caught up in the destruction of Hurricane Helene. In the days of Twitter he would have had the ability to get life-saving information through updates on the platform. This time, it was unusable. He writes:

Instead, he turned to Reddit and Instagram. Slack has been a lifeline to stay connected to friends and co-workers. Above all, good old-fashioned radio has been the most important source of information, through Blue Ridge Public Media and 99.9 FM.

I miss having the ability to get such rich, direct information through Twitter, and wonder how you now get a similar stream of news from primary sources? Are you finding what you need on Reddit and Instagram as Tony has? Are you finding it in new places? Have you gone back to TV and radio?

Let me know, at my email [email protected], I’d love to hear from you.