X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump’s recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.

On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.

Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn’t explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.

In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a “false positive” and that it had been corrected. The company didn’t explain further.

Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1823 months ago

    And yet if you click that journalist’s profile, the ONLY social media link is to that festering shithole. Journalists are complicit and enabling Twitter to do this by treating it as a legitimate platform and the default place for news.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      863 months ago

      Journalists are complicit and enabling Twitter to do this by treating it as a legitimate platform and the default place for news

      100%.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      263 months ago

      True but journalists wouldn’t post there if people weren’t reading. Everyone on that site is complicit.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        213 months ago

        If large outlets said they were quitting Twitter and going elsewhere (Threads, Mastodon, whatever), the audience would follow. Media deserves most of the blame IMO.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          43 months ago

          I think you’d also need a bunch of celebrities to make the same move.

          It’s funny how only old people are left on Facebook, but Twitter still has the masses after all these years.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        3
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        There’s no “but” there. Should be an “and”.

        Absolutely blame the journalists.

    • diabolik
      link
      fedilink
      English
      223 months ago

      It’s infuriating and disgraceful, but none of the orgs and their employees seem to feel any shame about it.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        113 months ago

        It’s mind-boggling. How many articles can they write about the latest Twitter clusterfuck, followed up immediately by “follow me on Twitter”, before they wonder if they’re the baddies?

      • @Anyolduser
        link
        English
        33 months ago

        Wait until you hear about media contagion!

        This shit is par for the course.

    • HonkyTonkWoman
      link
      fedilink
      English
      3
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      You haven’t been paying much attention to the current state of journalism, have you?

      Twitter is a decent portion of their revenue stream, and given that none of us want to pay them for their efforts, what do you suggest they do?

      Those clicks are their livelihood & we’re all sitting here reading the article pasted directly to this thread.

      WE, INCLUDING YOU, ARE COMPLICIT IN THIS TOO.

      E: “I don’t wanna pay for the news, I want journalists to forgo their living & only post their work on sites I’m actually willing to steal their content from”

      Keep on downvoting children. Y’all suck as humans.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    473 months ago

    A “false positive,” eh? Okay, sure.

    How many “false positives” have there been in the other direction, labeling anti-Kamala stories as “unsafe?”

  • Ech
    link
    fedilink
    English
    333 months ago

    Weird how many “false positives” they get. Uncanny.

  • katy ✨
    link
    fedilink
    English
    213 months ago

    weird how it became a false positive only when they got called out

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    20
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    but didn’t explain why the link was flagged

    Couldn’t possibly be because Twitter is basically four chan and those “free speech extremists” always mass report shit they don’t like …

    I have zero idea why everybody is still using that shit

    • Draconic NEO
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      It’s not even really 4chan though. 4chan has limited moderation and allows alt-right crazies to run wild. Twitter had strict moderation which is designed to cater specifically to alt-right crazies and suppresses beliefs that go against it.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    193 months ago

    raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president

    Fucking media. Two years after he gets into power I’d expect headlines like this to be the norm:

    Raid on fifth Democratic Congressman calls into question the legitimacy of Trump’s new Task Force

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    53 months ago

    Not news though, is it ?

    News is Twitter doing something honest.

    But everyone continues to spread rage bait