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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
54 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 55
technical problems, yet with the advantage that
it isn’t owned by a petulant billionaire who can
go ape if the mood takes him.
While many journalists are still addicted to
Musk’s Mess, American public radio service
NPR, which left in protest at being labelled
“state-affi liated media”, found the decision had
little impact on web traffi c. Likewise, the BBC
found Threads provided few benefi ts. On a
smaller scale, Dublin Inquirer’s deputy editor
Sam Tranum recently noted their big traffi c day
used to be Wednesday, when they published a
new set of stories, and shared on social
networks. That has now changed to Thursday,
when they send out the weekly newsletter, and
Google News picks up stories. Twitter, for all the
noise and fury, simply isn’t worth the e ort.
A persistent pattern in Autumn 2023, among
journalists and others, was to post identical
content to several online accounts. So what
happens if the same post is published on all
three platforms? For many users, the level of
engagement is about the same in each case. But
not all platforms are equal. Remember, the
typical user has many more followers on Twitter
than anywhere else. Yet in many cases, the ‘bird
site’ has the lowest engagement of all, with
fewer replies and fewer “likes”, even as the site
tells users the post has been seen by thousands
of accounts. Mastodon hundreds are worth
Twitter thousands. Musk may have rebadged it
as X, but for many, it is the ex-site.
While Bluesky it is still offi cially in beta, and
missing features such as the ability to send
Algorithms on Facebook and elsewhere,
often downplay news in favour of more up-
beat and viral content. And bad actors often
exploit those algorithms, to create “fake news”
designed to spread outrage and go viral
T
he defi ning online event for journalism
in 2023, and probably in 2024 as well,
is the continuing self-inflicted
implosion of Elon Musk.
Historians will debate whether
Musk was just an idiot who accidentally broke
his toy, or an idiot who deliberately destroyed
the information stream. But destroy it he has.
Twitter shambles on zombie-style, losing
even a name with worldwide recognition,
apparently because Elon thought “Brand X” was
a funny idea when he was fi ve years old, and still
does.
For many journalists, hanging on seems a
good idea, even if those follower counts are a
mirage and engagement has gone through the
fl oor. But even those who still keep up a
presence there are testing new venues.
Threads is being tested by many outlets, even
if they are wary of trusting a Mark Zuckerberg
product.
Bluesky o ers a familiar experience, like
Twitter before it broke, but numbers are still
small. And then there’s Mastodon, with its
slightly chaotic public image and reputation for
WHY X?
Media and state agencies would be well advised to start building
their followings outside the traditional social media silos before the
storm clouds gather
By Gerard Cunningham
MEDIA
54 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 55
direct messages or post a gif, it is promising
better days ahead, including the ability to set up
independent, federated sites connecting to the
larger network. Meanwhile, Mastodon has
oered all those features since its inception.
The real power of the Fediverse, proponents
argue, is putting ownership in the hands of
users. Even as Musk broke the “blue tick”
system, by making it available to anyone foolish
enough to pay €8 for the privilege, several
academics argued news outlets should set up
their own servers to authenticate their
journalists. Indeed, the BBC has set up an
experimental server, known as an ‘instance’ at
social.bbc.
RTÉ states that, while it has not set up any
instances, “RTÉ has reviewed a range of options
and platforms”, and the idea remains under
“active consideration”. Meanwhile, some
enterprising soul has registered an rte.social
domain name, presumably in the hope of
profiting by selling it to the national broadcaster
at a future date.
The BBC project, launched in July 2023, is still
ongoing. Yet so far it has only a handful of
accounts. Even if journalists are reluctant to get
on Mastodon, active news accounts would make
some sense to direct readers of the news site.
Programmes could also run their own
promotional accounts. There is a ready-made
nerd audience on Mastodon, and it seems a
waste not to oer them a Doctor Who account
during the diamond anniversary year of the
longest-running science-fiction programme in
the world. When contacted, the BBC said they
were not yet ready to talk about their Mastodon
experiment, but hoped to write about what they
had learned from the experience in a few
months’ time.
On an international and national level, several
European governments are testing their own
fediverse instances. In July, the Netherlands
launched theirs at social.overheid.nl, and the
Swiss government announced a one-year trial at
social.admin.ch in September. The German
government operates bund.de, and the EU
Commission and other EU bodies have been on
their own server since November 2022, at social.
network.europa.eu.
And on 6 December, the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), the main international
standards organisation for the web, announced
that they were “no longer active on X/Twitter and
have directed all our followers here to Mastodon.
We are encouraging all W3C-related accounts to
do the same”.
Some Irish organisations are also building a
following on Mastodon. The CSO [@
CSOIreland@Mastodon.ie] and the University of
Limerick [@UL@Mastodon.ie] are active, but
others, such as the popular “TG4 Intern” [@
TG4TV@Mastodon.ie] faded away after an initial
burst of enthusiasm.
Following an initial query to RTÉ, I conducted
a survey of government departments last
Autumn, asking if there were any plans to open
a dedicated Irish government instance to
provide verified authentic accounts in the
‘fediverse’.
The Government Information Service (GIS)
replied “Government uses social media as one
element of how we communicate public
information in a way that is accessible and
relevant to people.
The concept of using Mastodon instances is
relatively new and, while there are no immediate
plans to do so, we continue to keep all methods
of communication under review with a view to
maximising the accessibility and eectiveness
of government communications”.
Word-for-word identical response were
received from the press offices in the
departments of Justice; Defence; Environment,
Climate and Communications; Tourism, Culture,
Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport And Media; Public
Expenditure and Reform; and Transport.
At least we can conclude message discipline
is high across the departments.
So why does any of this matter?
Last summer, as wildfires raged across
Canada, state agencies rushed to evacuate
people from the city of Yellowknife, in the path
of the fires. Getting accurate, up-to-date
information to residents was literally a life-or-
death issue. Yet Meta, operator of Facebook,
refused to lift a ban on news in Canada set up
against a law on revenue-sharing. Other
algorithms on Facebook and elsewhere, often
downplay news in favour of more up-beat and
viral content. And bad actors often exploit those
algorithms, to creating “fake news” designed to
spread outrage and go viral.
“If there was ever a job for an Irish Government
Strategic Communications Unit, it would be to
orchestrate the movement of critical updates
from public bodies, transport and infrastructure
to a platform other than Twitter,” as one Irish
Mastodon user noted at the time. “Really vital
updates about hospitals, ambulance services,
transport were not accessible last night. Twitter
is a small, badly-run, walled garden inaccessible
to the broad public”.
Every site faces this kind of product rot over
time, as the network locks in its users (“I have
to be here, because everyone else is here”), and
replacing the things that first attracted people
(friends, jokes, news, and general “buzz”) with
more and more algorithmic content and
advertising, a process named “enshittification”
by journalist and commentator Cory Doctorow.
Mastodon, a decentralised network,
bypasses this algorithmic rot by design, and
because institutions from the EU Commission to
state agencies to news media can set up their
own servers to run their own instances,
authentication is built in. Bad actors are simply
defederated, removed from the network.
The Irish state, not surprisingly, is lagging.
Government Buildings on Merrion Square are
not just close to Google Docks in a geographic
sense. The state has often been reluctant to
trust anything that didn’t come with corporate
credentials. Perhaps more surprising is the
reluctance of media outlets, given how many
times they’ve been burned by pivot-to-video”
and other arbitrary algorithmic bait-and-switch
moves from Silicon Valley.
The best time to build an ark is on a dry day.
Media and state agencies would be well advised
to start building their followings outside the
traditional social media silos before the storm
clouds gather.
Mastodon, a decentralised
network, bypasses
the algorithmic rot of
enshittification by design
Enshittifiction of the web
