New York Times Should Leave Twitter

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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New York Times Should Leave Twitter

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The New York Times has several accounts on Twitter. These include ones for its coverage of music, travel, books, news, opinion and video. Each has several hundred thousand followers. Some have follower counts into the millions. If the Times takes news accuracy seriously, it will drop off Twitter until Twitter has proved it can monitor and control hate speech, bots and inaccurate tweets. Otherwise, the Times supports a social medium known for these problems.
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The Times has to face two issues if it elects to drop off Twitter. The first is that its accounts likely contribute hundreds of thousands of visits to its online sections. The second is that all of its best and most widely followed writers have accounts, and to shut them down would cause, reasonably, charges that the Times is muzzling free speech. That means these accounts would remain active unless a writer chooses to drop off in protest of Twitter’s inaccurate and hate-laced participants.
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The Times also has to decide whether it wants to continue participating in one of the world’s most active news marketplaces. Twitter remains a major source of news for tens of millions of people.
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While no major news organizations have dropped Twitter to get an audience for their content, many influential people have. Most of these are entertainers. No major politicians have dropped off. So, once again, the Times would be in the vanguard.
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The Times is not alone as a possible major median company that could leave Twitter. The Washington Post has given no indication it will leave. Neither have any of the major television networks. While companies pull ads from Twitter, they continue to use the social medium to get their messages out.

The Times can lead a migration of major media from Twitter. So far, however, its editors have remained silent about the issue.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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