X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump's recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.
On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.
Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn't explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.
In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a "false positive" and that it had been corrected. The company didn't explain further.
Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.
And yet if you click that journalist's profile, the ONLY social media link is to that festering shithole. Journalists are complicit and enabling Twitter to do this by treating it as a legitimate platform and the default place for news.
You haven’t been paying much attention to the current state of journalism, have you?
Twitter is a decent portion of their revenue stream, and given that none of us want to pay them for their efforts, what do you suggest they do?
Those clicks are their livelihood & we’re all sitting here reading the article pasted directly to this thread.
WE, INCLUDING YOU, ARE COMPLICIT IN THIS TOO.
E: “I don’t wanna pay for the news, I want journalists to forgo their living & only post their work on sites I’m actually willing to steal their content from”
Keep on downvoting children. Y’all suck as humans.