The future of live news online sucks

Watching the hurricane through influencers' eyes

Greetings from Read Max HQ!

I was back on TrueAnon last week, discussing the North Carolina icon and role model MrBeast, for an episode released today and available wherever you get your podcasts. This was the best (and funniest) conversation I’ve had about MrBeast since writing about him for the Times magazine last year; you can also hear me eat a Feastables bar for the first time. We also talked about the Slop feature I wrote for New York a couple weeks ago.

Below, in this week’s edition of the newsletter, a disquisition on the new way we consume live news now (out: reading tweets from local meteorologists; in: watching some guy give himself hypothermia in a hurricane for Adin Ross’ attention).

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On Wednesday evening, where did you go to find up-to-the-minute news about Hurricane Milton? If you checked X.com at around 8 p.m., as the storm made landfall in Tampa and Sarasota, and clicked on the prominent “Hurricane Milton” link in the “Happening now” sidebar, you were taken to a landing page with a few videos from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and an exhortation to “check back later” because there was “nothing to see now.” Three hours later, at 11 p.m., nothing new had been added:

There was, of course, plenty to see on Wednesday night; it was just that it was basically impossible to find any of it on Twitter. The landing page was empty; the FYP feed worse than useless; the machine-curated hashtag pages a mix of days-old posts and influencers I’d never heard of sharing the same handful of images and videos. This was not a problem of “misinformation,” to be clear, so much as one of “no information”: Twitter seemed effectively incapable of serving me even relevant, up-to-the-minute fake stuff, let alone any actual news. Unless you’d already searched out and made a list of local journalists, meteorologists, and storm chasers, it was impossible to tell from Twitter alone where the storm was, how hard it was hitting, what its effects looked like, or how people were responding.

Instead--in place of the professional and citizen journalists, the eager experts, and the volunteer aggregators--what I found was clipped videos from a bunch of fucking freaks. There was Caroline Calloway, of course, who compared to some of the other creatures live-streaming their way through natural disasters out there comes across like a model of modesty and eloquence.

And you may have also already encountered “Lieutenant Dan,” the Florida man who promised to ride out the storm on his boat (he survived), though it’s not “Dan” who repels me so much as the assorted Twitter and TikTok and streamer personalities who have attempted coast in the slipstream of his viral success:

@terrenceconcannon@JoeSea on why he wont leave the boat

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Among the other characters I was introduced to as I tried and failed to seek any kind of reliable information about the storm was this rich lady in Tampa Bay who refused to evacuate “bc her husband (a builder) built the home commercial grade,” as well as her son, “Blade,” who has a star turn at the end of this video:

@kricketfeltBack to back devastating hurricanes!!! This cant be real 😭🌀🙏🏻 We can not handle this much devastation! #hurricanemilton #hurricanehelene #florida #storm #PortRichey #fypシ゚viral

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And Mike Smalls, Jr., a streamer on the Twitch competitor Kick (a kind of reactionary alternative to mainstream streaming platforms funded by an Australian gambling company), who attempted to ride out the storm on an air mattress because Adin Ross said he’d give anyone who did it $70,000.

This is, as Ryan Broderick put it, “the kind of thing that plays on TV in Robocop.” None of these people are particularly informative or helpful; they’re barely even entertaining. All these videos--which are generally what surfaces to the top when you search “Milton” on TikTok or Twitter--are new recombinations of the same kinds of awful reality-TV motifs that now dominate every social network: endurance challenges to unclear end; wealth porn and self-aggrandizement; and, most importantly, mental illness as a form of entertainment. It’s just that, instead of watching them because you’re bored, you watch them because they’re what comes up when you’re looking for information about an ongoing news event on social media.

It--really!--wasn’t always this way. For most of the Obama-Trump Era--the Long 2010s--Twitter was the website to go to for up-to-the-minute updates about Things That Were Happening--hurricanes, invasions, elections--from journalists, experts, and people on the ground. It was far from perfect; it was relatively easy for hoaxes to spread and morons to gain attention. But it more or less worked: Twitter’s search and sorting mechanisms, helped along by the many users who treated “posting about news” as an uncompensated part-time job, tended to surface interesting and relevant information in a timely fashion.

But “News,” even breaking news, is not really a priority for Twitter anymore, nor is it for any social-media platform. Offering a big central-but-decentralized news hub for free is not a great business model; it is a great way to get some of the most annoying people in the world to be mad at you all the time. The TikTokization of most platforms--the aggressive imposition of a non-chronological, highly sensitive, algorithmically sorted feed, consisting mostly of professional influencers often paid directly by the platform based on engagement, as the default mode for consumption--has made them uniquely bad places to follow breaking news.

But it’s also made them more consistent money-makers for a certain kind of dedicated content creator. “I do not think it’s an accident that a lot of the people refusing to evacuate are professional content creators,” Rebecca Jennings observed. “They know they’ll never have this many eyeballs on them ever again.” I have no clue if it’s actually “a lot,” but it’s also impossible to accurately gauge the percentage of streamers and influencers among non-evacuees, because such a high proportion of the media the average Twitter or TikTok user is seeing from inside the evacuation zones is coming from pros (or semi-pros, or would-be pros). Every incentive of the platforms pushes the streamers to stay, but through the same incentive system they become the most immediate and prominent sources of “news” or “information” about the storm.

It’s obviously maddeningly depressing to imagine a bunch of people compelled to put themselves at serious risk for the sake of a burgeoning career in “content creation.” But worse is the thought that these people, for millions of lazily searching casual news consumers around the world, are the media. This is the other side of the process, described by Kyle Chayka in his recent New Yorker piece on the journalist Taylor Lorenz’s decision to decamp from The Washington Post to Substack, by which salaried and institutionally affiliated journalists are pushed into the position of becoming entrepreneurial “internet personalities”-- entrepreneurial “internet personalities” are pushed into the position of being journalists, or at least the closest equivalent.