Truth Doesn't Trend

As facts and nuanced analysis take a back seat to hot takes is journalism being poisoned by the algorithm?

This posting has likely come to your attention through one of my social media feeds. If you’re receiving it via email then you are probably a subscriber to my Substack. Or you clicked on the link from your timeline on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Substack Notes or Twitter/X.

Chances are that in the past 72 hours you’ve been on one or more of those platforms trying to make sense of what’s happening in downtown Los Angeles and scrambling to understand how and why we are a hair’s breadth away from the president invoking the Insurrection Act.

This is my sixth decade online straddling the analog and digital worlds in pursuit of clarity and context. I still do research in libraries when the luxury of time allows. Sorting urgent information online is more haphazard as there is no Library of Congress Classification providing guidance to the right stack of peer-reviewed materials.

I was first online back in the Arpanet days (and an early adopter of the World Wide Web and active user of dial-up bulletin boards, such as Compuserve and Delphi, the anarchic Usenet and IRC chat, in addition to the more studious Bitnet). However, my first dalliances with what we now regard as social media came relatively late. Facebook I disdained for years, observing friends wasting hours playing Farmville tending virtual crops.

I was unaware of Twitter until late November of 2008. At the time I was the South Asia bureau chief for the Voice of America, based in New Delhi. When Pakistan-based Islamist terrorists carried out a complex attack on Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the initial reports on cable channels in India were inaccurate and sensationalistic. At one point some domestic newscasters blamed the shooting in India’s most populated city on rival gangs of Nigerians! Last month’s armed conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrated how unreliable Indian commercial TV outlets remain, eschewing fact-checking while swallowing propaganda from unreliable government sources. Social media accounts of Indian and Pakistani influencers were mostly mired in jingoism and misinformation. Their false assertions went viral with the few notable fact-checkers unable to keep pace with the plethora of pink slime.

Amid the confusion of the Mumbai terrorist attack, I quickly realized that the most accurate and up-to-date information came from terrified guests trapped in the targeted five-star hotels, tapping on Blackberry keyboards, posting to something called Twitter. It was possible to find these tweets because many who were posting added a hashtag (#Mumbai), a novelty at the time.

I immediately signed on to Twitter, intending only to be a lurker. I would monitor it like a police and fire scanner radio – careful not to put anything from this traffic in a news story unless independently verified. I never intended to tweet myself nor imagined that one day I would have 100,000+ followers on the platform.

My experience with Twitter was harmonious for many years. It proved to be the most effective way to disseminate information during the 2011 Fukushima disaster. I posted real-time radiation readings, described big aftershocks as they were happening and shared technical insights as nuclear reactors melted down. (Read my 2024 book Behind the White House Curtain for more on this topic.)

After Twitter was acquired by the controversial billionaire Elon Musk in 2022, I was among the journalists suspended for posts noting the silencing of the @ElonJet tracker account.

Shortly before I was silenced as a VOA journalist, a top administration official compared my Twitter postings about USAID cuts as acts tantamount to treason. The allegation was nasty and false rhetoric, but potentially an ominous accusation should America cross the Rubicon into martial law. In dozens of countries, hundreds of journalists or bloggers have been jailed in recent years for simply posting truthful information on social media.

Nearly everything I have posted on Twitter for the past couple of years is an automatic relay from my fediverse (Mastodon) account. I did not want to abandon my Twitter followers entirely, although some migrated with me to other platforms such as Bluesky and Threads. Musk had also appeared to order an alteration to the algorithm to penalize mainstream journalists, such as myself, who prefer to post links. (The algorithm does not want you leaving X.) Links are vital (preferably to original sources of information) to enhance the credibility of a posting.

There’s no longer the engagement with or enthusiasm for X enjoyed on pre-Musk Twitter. The trolling and the bots do run amuck there and the selling of verification made the blue tick worthless and causing more confusion for those seeking reliable information at times of crises.

No formidable alternative has taken Twitter’s place, although there are numerous aspirants.

Facebook and other Meta platforms (Instagram and Threads) offer an unsatisfying user experience with the algorithm controlling what one gets to see – rather than easily being able to view posts in reverse chronological order (something essential for journalists). There are also all those annoying algo-driven advertisements which eerily discern you recently Googled “cures for snoring.”

Bluesky, incubated by then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and now owned by a public benefit corporation and led by Tulsa native Lantian “Jay” Graber, whose given name 蓝天 coincidentally means “blue sky” in Chinese.

Jay Graber giving a talk at DWeb Camp 2024

Bluesky is the platform where I now enjoy the most engagement, according to the metrics. This is notable considering I have only 22,300 followers on Bluesky, compared to 107,400 on Twitter/X. Ad-free Bluesky is user friendly, devoid of the acrimony found on the legacy platform, but comes under criticism as a liberal bubble with data showing that activity on it may have peaked last November.

I disagree with the perception that Bluesky is merely a progressive echo chamber just as I would not concur with those who argue Twitter has become wholly illiberal.

Meanwhile, the fediverse (a network of interconnected, decentralized social media platforms and servers) is a utopian ideal with a steep learning curve for the non-tech savvy.

I have wisecracked that when I established my Mastodon account the majority of users on the eccentric platform were physicists and cat ladies. I have a significant following there (73,000+) with healthy repost and likes totals, but it is not useful for following global events.

LinkedIn showcases professional highlights, but owner Microsoft cannot seem to figure out what it should be beyond a job-finding site and there is fear the behemoth parent will inevitably smother it as it did to other children it birthed or adopted, including Beam/Mixer, MSN Messenger, Skype, So.cl and Yammer.

I’ve tried a few other platforms in recent years, which have failed to gain traction and stopped posting on them. I can’t even remember their names. Yes, I do have a TruthSocial account as an early warning system for executive actions contemplated by its owner and biggest user (Donald J. Trump). Nearly 10 million other people have done the same, but I doubt I’ll ever engage with anyone else there and I’ve never posted on it.

That leaves Substack, the current blogging platform for journalist refugees from mainstream media. It’s simple to use (by far the easiest platform from which to livestream video), has a revenue sharing model and now has a Notes component for compulsive posting of less than novella length jeremiads.

Substack did suffer early reputational damage when it was boycotted by some in academia, media and on the left for profiting from newsletter authored by white nationalists and conspiracy theorists. Let’s just say free speech absolutism is a double-edged sword.

I likely will never solicit paid subscriptions for my Substack, but many I follow there and elsewhere are constantly enticing the freeloaders with tidbits of real scoops kept behind the paywall. And therein lies the problem: How many subscriptions can the typical online user afford, in addition to subscriptions to critical mainstream media sites? Everyone seems to be adopting the paywall model for premium content, including CNN and Fox News. How many can be indispensable even for the most addicted news junkie? Are non-subscribers left to wade through the flotsam of low-quality information?

I have advocated a micro-payment model that would automatically take a few small denomination coins from a digital purse for each article or newsletter edition read. My musings here might literally be two cents’ worth of wit or wisdom, while the words of Vivian Tu or Andrew Lokenauth much costlier to glean as they potentially can make or save you a lot of money as financial advisors.

Some venture capitalists have told me this micropayment concept is not currently feasible and consumers too fickle. I hope someone proves them wrong.

Another issue with subscriptions is that even reputable news sites engage in a kind of bait & switch. It’s more akin to handing out free samples and then taking advantage of the new addict. There is a very attractive limited-time introductory offer followed by a jacked-up automatic renewal price. I did this dance with The Washington Post for years, discovering that if I cancelled I could get the rock-bottom introductory price again. The Post site is also a hassle, constantly re-requesting account name and password across devices. Why hasn’t Jeff Bezos been able to make the Post digital experience as seamless as Amazon shopping? As Bezos well knows, if the user experience is not seamless then customer satisfaction will suffer.

WaPo retains excellent journalists but in the assessment of most media critics falls a notch below the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. And the Post, my home region paper, no longer offers same-day delivery of the dead tree edition to my abode, less than 40 miles from the White House. If it did I would subscribe so I could peruse the paper with my morning caffeine.

The Old Gray Lady has discovered millions of digital subscribers are recruited and retained by offering Wordle and other games. Is fun the key for the future of the New York Times and other established news brands?

In my next professional endeavor, I have journalism innovation literally in the job description so these conundrums will be of academic interest, as well.

The bottom line: Who is willing to pay for accurate, reliable and speedy new? Demographic research reveals most of those online are going to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram for information from influencers, who don’t care about the nuances of ethical journalism. Follower numbers and viral posts correlate with confirmation bias (reinforcing established beliefs and biases) rather than accuracy. I am germinating ideas as how best to respond to this.

In the meantime, I am diving deeper into Substack, which already offers a respectable diversity of voices.

Bari Weiss, Mehdi Hasan, Jessica Reed Kraus and a new recruit, Jim Acosta, are earning from platform subscriptions. The former CNN White House correspondent’s live videos and a recent packed town hall at DC’s Lincoln Theatre (at which I made a brief on-camera appearance to highlight the evisceration of VOA) may be poised to generate total views exceeding those of his former employer. CNN’s total day viewership in the key 25-54 demographic has begun to dip below 50,000, while Acosta has already gained 300,000+ subscribers on Substack with 3% paying, about average for a recently debuted newsletter on the platform.

The Jim Acosta Show at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC, June 2, 2025 (Photo: Steven L Herman)

Heather Cox Richardson is estimated to have somewhere between 15% and 20% paid conversion, meaning she may already be a Substack millionaire from her Letters from an American history lessons with contemporary resonance.

The smart money is on Substack today, but maybe not tomorrow. There is likely a new news-oriented killer app or platform around the corner. Speculation is that it’ll combine human curation with AI summarization with an emphasis on short-form video. The worry is that its algorithm will also prioritize monetization over quality information.

One thing I’ve learned since hammering out commands on an ASR-33 teletype at the UNLV computer lab, which was linked to a DEC PDP-10 timesharing system, is every “cutting-edge” platform is just a placeholder. Today’s most advanced, most hyped interactive system will soon be overtaken—by something slicker and quicker, but not necessarily better.