TV News LIES

The day after the presidential election, the social media landscape shook.

On Elon Musk's X, more than 115,000 users deactivated their accounts, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform. At the same time, traffic on Bluesky, a smaller rival to X, began to soar, with daily usage climbing some 500% in the U.S., according to data from Similarweb.

"We've been growing by about a million users a day for several days," said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an interview with NPR on Monday. "It's proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they'll have a better time."

Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online; it’s people endlessly winding each other up out of boredom or frustration or desperation to be part of some gang, which ends in viral bullying, death threats, children ripping other children to shreds on platforms they are legally not old enough to join.

Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall. But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives.

You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election, with several prominent Labour MPs joining the charge. What’s the point, the chair of the women and equalities committee, Sarah Owen, asked, in being on a site that’s “gone from cat memes, to sharing Wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion”?

More...

The Guardian announced Wednesday that it will no longer post its content under its official accounts on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the Guardian said in a statement.

The move comes just after Musk was named the co-head of President-elect Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk has increasingly been involved in Trump’s campaign and concern is growing about what impact he will have on the administration.

The BBC has been accused by more than 100 of its staff of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza and criticised its lack of “accurate evidence-based journalism”.

“The consequences of inadequate coverage are significant. Every television report, article and radio interview that has failed to robustly challenge Israeli claims has systematically dehumanised Palestinians,” the letter said.

First reported by The Independent newspaper on Friday, the signatories included more than 100 anonymous BBC staff and more than 200 from the media industry, as well as historians, actors, academics and politicians.

“The consequences of inadequate coverage are significant. Every television report, article and radio interview that has failed to robustly challenge Israeli claims has systematically dehumanised Palestinians,” the letter said.

TVNL Comment:  The bias of the media, in the UK and the US in particular, has contributed to the unbridled cruelty of the IDF in Gaza, the West Bank, and now in Lebanon.  The war against Palestinians has gone on for decades, and now has escalated into an overt and unapologetic genocide.  Kudos to the BBC staff and others who are standing up against the dehumanization and deaths of so many innocent civilians.

More...