From the Deputy Publisher: RIP, Twitter? 

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Even if you don't use Twitter, you're probably aware that it exists — and that it sometimes drives the national conversation, particularly around politics and breaking news. For example, former president Donald Trump's tweets figured prominently in last year's public hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

But big, disruptive changes have been afoot at Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company six months ago, causing many of us who use it to wonder if its days are numbered. "Is Twitter finally dying?" asked the headline of an April 15 piece on Vox.

A few days earlier, NPR became the first major national media outlet to stop posting its content to Twitter. The announcement came after the social networking site slapped a label on NPR's account identifying it as "state-affiliated media."

For journalists, those are fighting words. It's a point of pride that journalists are watchdogs, holding government officials accountable. According to Twitter's policies at the time, outlined in its platform-use guidelines, being "state-affiliated" means that the government controls what's reported and how.

After an NPR reporter asked Musk about the new label, Twitter changed the broadcaster's designation to "government-funded media." That still, according to Twitter, equated to "varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content."

The confusing labels prompted NPR to suspend activity on the site. Said NPR CEO John Lansing: "Actions by Twitter or other social media companies to tarnish the independence of any public media institution are exceptionally harmful and set a dangerous precedent."

Boston's NPR station, WBUR, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation followed suit in solidarity.

But last Friday, Twitter abruptly reversed course, removing the labels entirely. It got rid of the definitions, too.

Another thing disappeared that day: the free blue check marks once granted to celebrities, media organizations and others with lots of followers that indicated that Twitter had verified the identity of the account holder. Those check marks are now for sale, available only to those who pay a monthly fee for premium service.

Twitter has changed its content moderation policies, too, lifting bans on accounts belonging to figures such as Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. Research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a global think tank, found that the number of antisemitic tweets doubled between June 2022 and February 2023, though Musk, a free speech advocate, claims there's less hate speech on Twitter now.

All of this has made many of Twitter's advertisers nervous. Users, too.

Although a few media entities have abandoned Twitter, most of them remain on the site, including Seven Days. Twitter's not as popular as Facebook or Instagram, but it's extremely well used among journalists. Every reporter I know has an account, if only for work.

At Seven Days, we use Twitter to share our breaking news, find out what's happening around Vermont, tweet job ads via @sevendaysjobs, and push our reporting out to an audience that includes national reporters and other non-Vermonters who'd never otherwise come across our work. Prime example: Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies, once liked a tweet about Dan Bolles' 2018 cover story explaining what happened to Mr. Cheeseface, the dog on the famous National Lampoon cover. What a thrill!

To non-Twitter users, Seven Days' most visible connection to the site is through the Tweet of the Week, which appears in the paper on the Last Seven page. Sometimes hilarious, always unfiltered, these bite-size commentaries give readers a glimpse of the conversation happening online. Often Twitter users post a photo of their featured tweet, as @julielyn did on June 17, 2017. "Thanks to @sevendaysvt," she wrote, "I've now been recognized 4x as 'the girl from the 7 Days tweet' while out and about in #btv. #truestory."

If we got rid of that feature, it's not clear what could replace it. There aren't any other text-based social networks with a significant local user base that feature short posts visible to everyone regardless of their relationship to the person posting. There's still nothing else quite like Twitter.

Not yet, anyway. There are several efforts under way to build Twitter competitors. Like most journalists, we're watching them. And, for now, still tweeting.