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In this issue of the Media newsletter: Why the White House isn’t worried about Elon’s Twitter takeov͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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December 12, 2022
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Media

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Ben Smith
Ben Smith

Of course the “Twitter files” are a story. Elon Musk’s selective release of internal correspondence has shed some light on how Twitter clamped down on voices it deemed extreme and misleading, mostly on the right and far right. Less interesting leaks from Facebook made front pages for years.

The release to sympathetic independent journalists is more Wikileaks 2016 — intended to be a strategic drip, drip targeting enemies — than the old, higher-integrity Wikileaks data dump. And Elon Musk is, like Julian Assange, a huge part of the story.

But most of all Musk is feeding an obsession on the right that reminds me of something else in 2016. After Brexit and Trump, Democrats woke up convinced that Republicans had won through some technical trick. They told themselves a confusing story that had the Russians taking over Western elections through a company called Cambridge Analytica.

Now, it’s Republicans who keep losing and can’t figure out why.

Those obsessions are great for racking up retweets, but electoral poison. This decade’s political losers tend to mistake social media for society. They, for instance, go around telling people that Twitter rigged a presidential race, which is the degraded end state of Donald Trump’s election fraud claims.

Our main story today is on someone who’s made a career of not caring about Twitter: Joe Biden.

Also in this issue, dogs are biting men all over the place, which is to say: Vice is cutting costs, there’s a new branded tech publication, and a prominent Moroccan journalist is rather pleased about the World Cup.

Semafor Principals will give you the latest on Joe Biden’s White House, and never, ever comes out after White Lotus drops. Sign up for Semafor Principals.

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The White House
Reuters / ELIZABETH FRANTZ

Washington: Joe Biden has reinstated a cozy Washington tradition, hosting a holiday party for journalists. Bosses and top correspondents will be in town this week, drinking government eggnog and eating a cake shaped like the White House.

Los Angeles: Bari Weiss’s new site The Free Press got inside access to Twitter, praise from fans like Bill Maher, and scathing criticism from people who saw her carrying Musk’s water. If the site is planning on practicing independent journalism, it will likely bite the hand that feeds it.

Doha: As always happens, the sport itself has drowned coverage of censorship, human, and labor-rights violations. But American soccer journalist Grant Wahl’s death has cast a pall on the World Cup for his colleagues and competitors.

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Max Tani

Why the White House isn’t stressing over Elon’s Twitter takeover

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

THE NEWS

Joe Biden’s White House is less concerned about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter than many Democrats, officials said in recent interviews.

That’s because Biden’s team believes Twitter is largely valuable for just two things:

  • Selling its message to journalists and other influential figures.
  • Encouraging friendly activists to put pressure on those elite voices.

“There’s a crowd within the White House that cares about disinformation and thinks it’s a major problem for Democrats narrowly and democracy more broadly,” an administration official said of Musk’s efforts to relax moderation and make the site more welcoming to the right. “But it’s probably a minority.”

MAX’S VIEW

Biden’s team seems to view the battle over moderation at Twitter as a matter of some concern — like, say, a big fire in California or the political crisis in Peru — but not something that’s exactly their problem.

The administration does not consider Twitter a vital part of any political strategy that reaches beyond the chattering classes. One former White House official told Semafor the platform is an “afterthought” in communications and press meetings, which tend to focus first on television and traditional media and on Facebook, a declining service that still reaches a mass audience.

It’s a stark contrast with President Donald Trump, who early this year sued the platform for removing him, comparing the ban to the Catholic Church’s silencing of the astronomer Galileo. As then-White House Press Secretary Jenn Psaki once put it: “I think it’s safe to say that the president spends a lot less time obsessing over social media than the former president.”

The disdain for Twitter inside the White House has little to do with right-wing control of the platform, and more to do with its role inside the Democratic Party: Biden’s wing sees Twitter as fuel for activist voices who push ingroup thinking, left-of-center bias, and socioeconomic bias.

When Biden ran for president in 2016, his staff’s mantra was “Twitter isn’t real life.” Now, aides point to data from The New York Times suggesting that Democrats are “more moderate, more diverse and less educated” than those on the social media platform.

Some of Biden’s aides tweet a lot: Chief of Staff Ron Klain most prominently, but also rapid response director Andrew Bates, and Digital Director Rob Flaherty.

Klain is well aware of the scrutiny paid to his Twitter account, which he largely uses to influence the journalists he knows are glued to the platform, according to current and former officials. In the months leading up to the midterm elections, he incessantly used Twitter to highlight when gas prices were decreasing (and ignored them when they weren’t).

Flaherty is also the main point of contact with social media platforms, and has driven the outreach to many of the administration’s most vocal supporters online. The digital team pushed to reward Heather Cox Richardson, the popular liberal Boston College professor and Substacker, and Brian Tyler Cohen, a progressive YouTuber, with rare Biden sitdowns. And earlier this year, his team invited some of the biggest-name #resistance accounts to the White House for a briefing and conversation about some of the victories Biden’s team wanted to highlight.

Flaherty, who won an internal battle to move the White House’s digital messaging outside its communications office, is among those who have expressed concern that Musk’s regime could mean more “disinformation” on Twitter.

But there, too, aides said they remain much more worried about false information circulating on Facebook.

One compared the White House view of Twitter to its view of Fox News: A medium with a big audience who aren’t usually open to persuasion, but which they can’t totally ignore.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

The White House posture has critics on the left. Crooked Media editor-in-chief Brian Beutler thinks Democrats ought to take Musk’s takeover dead seriously.

“It is not uncommon to watch ideas leap seamlessly from Twitter thread into the churn of U.S. policy making or political strategy or mainstream news media. As long as influential elites continue to use it the way they use it, having control over what dominates political discourse on Twitter will affect what our political leaders choose to prioritize,” he writes.

THE VIEW FROM INDIA

The former head of Twitter in India, Manish Maheshwari, writes: “Neutrality is essential. If you favour one side, you are bound to lose the other. And it is the notice board of the world because the world is here.” He notes that when government pressure led Twitter to force some voices off the platform, they went to a local rival, Koo, which continues to compete in India.

“The only problem today with Koo is that it is local, and if you want to interact with people outside India, you need something else,” he wrote. “What if Koo expands globally? Then it becomes a viable alternative to Twitter for content creators and consumers.

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Intel


Vice joins the growing list of media companies slimming down before the holidays. Two Vice staffers told Semafor that the company quietly let go of employees at its food vertical Munchies and its music vertical Noisey. The millennial media company plans to leave the sites and their social pages up, but will seriously reduce content for Munchies.

The company has been looking for savings everywhere it can find them, including in day-to-day expenses. Four current and former staff told Semafor that company credit cards have occasionally been declined in recent months, and the company’s research subscriptions, including Pacer and Nexis, have also been shut off at times. Vice did not return a request for comment.

— Max Tani

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One good text ... with Abderrahim Foukara

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Charter

This week, we’re excited to talk about Charter as part of our newsletter swaps program.

Started by Quartz co-founder and NYT and WSJ alum Kevin Delaney, Charter’s free newsletter provides sharp analysis on workplace trends, tips for managing yourself and others, briefings on the latest business books, and highlights from original research.

Sign up for the 3x/week newsletter.

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Source Greasing

The creative agency Huge is launching a new design and technology-focused magazine and business news product. The company is describing the publication as a “new standard for branded content,” saying that unlike other agency-owned publications, the magazine will operate with “complete editorial independence from Huge’s core business.” The agency has hired Bloomberg and Forbes vet Jennifer Leigh Parker to serve as the editor in chief, and published a glossy first issue with stories about automation.

— Max Tani

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Staff Picks

Christian media is going to be an important battleground for Republican 2024 presidential candidates. One broadcaster is getting ready for its moment by staffing up with cable news veterans. Over the past several months, Trinity Broadcasting Network has enlisted former Fox News and Newsmax executives and on-air talent in the hopes of professionalizing its programming and peeling off viewers from those networks.

The old dream of publishers morphing into tech companies is dying. Vox Media, among the furthest down this road, will get out of the business of licensing its CMS.

CBS is compiling tributes to Grant Wahl, from figures ranging from Billie Jean King to Lebron James, whom Wahl put on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a high school player. “Anytime his name would come up I would always think back to me as a teenager and having Grant in our building,” James said.

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