✅ The great social media migration

Corporate communications, public relations, media and management insight

Where are you heading after X / Twitter?

Elon Musk’s incendiary comments and misinformation on X about the UK race riots have been the last straw for many professional communicators.

This week, Musk has railed against a judge in Brazil who banned the platform for failing to block misinformation. He has previously criticised US Vice President and Presidential candidate Kamala Harris and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The social media platform has survived and even grown since Musk purchased it in October 2022 despite changes to the algorithm, the removal of content moderation and a name change from Twitter to X.

Brand accounts have fallen silent. Media and public information accounts cling on, reluctant to give up on the networks' reach. It has become part of the news gathering and media distribution system. Ripping it out is tough.

Users have stayed with X throughout this time because of its strength and its value as a source of news and the public square.

I’ve stuck with it because I’ve invested 15 years of my life on the platform. It’s helped me get work and book deals. I’ve met people who have become lifelong friends.

However, misinformation and the increasingly toxic nature of conversations on the platform have left users angry and frustrated. They mourn the Twitter they used to know.

The challenge is where to go. It was the subject of a discussion in our community last week. You can read the answer on the Wadds Inc. blog. Let me know what I missed.

Have a good week.

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Research and insight

👥 FAR-RIGHT EVOLUTION: Recent UK riots demonstrate how the far-right has evolved from organised groups to looser online networks, making it more unpredictable and widespread. While no single organisation orchestrated the violence, the events show how extremist ideologies have become more mainstream and can quickly mobilise through social media. Source: BBC.

👩‍💼MISSING WOMEN: A new study aims to understand why women are underrepresented in senior public relations roles in the UK despite making up the majority of practitioners below the director level. If you’re a woman working in public relations or have left the industry, your input would be welcomed. Source: Socially Mobile.

📱 PHONE ANXIETY: An Opinium survey found that a quarter of people aged 18-34 never answer phone calls, preferring text messages instead. This generational shift is attributed to growing up with texting, anxiety around unexpected calls, and a preference for more controlled communication methods like texting and voice notes. Source: BBC.

Social media

🚫 BRAZIL BANS X: Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the suspension of Elon Musk's X / Twitter amid a disagreement over content moderation. The decision escalates tensions between Musk, who criticised the move as censorship, and Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who argues it's necessary to protect democracy from misinformation. Source: Financial Times.

🌐 THREADS EXPANDS: Meta's Threads is integrating with the fediverse, allowing likes and replies from other ActivityPub-based platforms such as Masterdon to appear on Threads. This move towards decentralised social media aims to give users more control, though challenges remain in user adoption and Meta's role in the open-source concept. Source: Threads.

📧 NEWSLETTER SHIFT:  Joachim Eeckhout, the science marketer, has shut down his LinkedIn newsletter to focus solely on email, citing poor engagement and lack of control on LinkedIn. Despite initial rapid growth, he found LinkedIn's newsletter cannibalises his email strategy and offers limited data, leading him to prioritise building deeper connections through email. Source: The Science Marketer.

AI and tools

🎨 ARTIFACTS AVAILABLE: Anthropic has made Artifacts available to all Claude.ai users across Free, Pro, and Team plans, including mobile apps. This feature enhances creative collaboration, allowing users to instantly view, iterate, and build on work created with Claude, with millions of Artifacts already produced since its preview launch. Source: Anthropic.

📊 DATA LIMITS: Researchers estimate the limit of human-generated content at 300 trillion tokens (a unit of media that an AI model identifies as a single unit) which AI models may utilise by 2030. The result is that data scarcity could become a bottleneck for AI development, necessitating innovations in synthetic data, multi-modal learning and data efficiency. Source: Epoch AI.

Media

📺 BBC OVERHAUL: The BBC faces major challenges as 500,000 households cancel their TV licenses annually, forcing the corporation to consider radical changes. Potential solutions include merging with Channel 4, mutualising ownership among license fee payers, or significantly reducing services to focus on digital offerings. Source: The Guardian.

📰 PRINT NEWS DECLINE: Regional daily newspaper circulation in the UK declined by an average of 17% year-on-year in the first half of 2024, a slower rate than the previous year's 20% drop. The Belfast-based Irish News maintained the top spot with a circulation of 22,782, while over half of the 53 audited dailies now have circulations below 5,000. Source: Press Gazette.

📈 WEB NEWS INCREASE: Most UK local news websites saw audience growth in July 2024, with 57 out of 78 top sites increasing monthly UK visitors year-over-year. The Manchester Evening News leads with over 12 million monthly visitors, while Reach dominates the sector despite showing declining engagement across its brands. Source Press Gazette.

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Thank you to Stuart Bruce, David Edmundson-Bird, James Crawford, Micheal Greer, Claire Monks, Alan Morrison, Sharon O'Dea, Andrew Bruce Smith, Rebecca Taylor, Sarah Waddington CBE and James Whatley, and everyone who shares and debates the stories in the newsletter via our Facebook community. You’re welcome to join us.