After years of having Twitter go after conservatives, cancel accounts, and pull down legitimate stories like the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story, it seems as if the shoe is now on the other foot.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk removed the Twitter gold badge, a verification badge for “official” accounts, from the New York Times’ X page.
The Times later received a blue “verified” badge on Thursday, a purchasable badge available to anyone.
According to The Washington Post, no explanation was given for this humiliating demotion on X.
Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of X, the site granted verified badges to verified politicians, journalists, and public figures.
Musk scrapped that system, introducing a subscription-based system where individuals could get blue badges for $8 a month and “verified organizations” could obtain gold badges for a monthly fee of at least $1,000.
The New York Times refused to pay the fee, prompting the Tesla CEO to strip the Times of its verification badge. Musk later relented and allowed the publication to have its badge without paying the fee.
On Tuesday, The New York Times published a story about an explosion at a Gaza hospital, accusing Israel of the “strike.”
New York Times lied and said
that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and used a photo of a building in a different location to make it look like a hospital. They also made stealth edits to headlines 3x in one day to cover their lies about the hospital bombing. pic.twitter.com/gKIVtLplyo— Savannah (@BasedSavannah) October 20, 2023
Subsequent investigations by the IDF, video and audio footage, and by American authorities showed that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket shot from Gaza.
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A representative of the Times later defended its reporting in a statement to Fox News, saying, “During any breaking news event, we report what we know as we learn it. We apply rigor and care to what we publish, explicitly citing sources and noting when a piece of news is breaking and likely to be updated. And as the facts on the ground become more clear, we continue reporting. Our extensive and continued reporting on the hospital in Gaza makes explicit the murkiness surrounding the events there.”
But the outlet was roasted on X with many accusing it of deliberately misleading its readers.
I agree the @nytimes didn’t “botch” the Gaza hospital story. They did something worse. They intentionally wrote an attention grabbing headline that falsely pointed the blame at Israel to generate clicks during breaking news, without waiting for confirmation or the actual facts. https://t.co/rFcv1xFZoS
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) October 20, 2023
Elon Musk has been a vocal critic of the Times, previously accusing it of supporting “calls for genocide” and suggesting it should be canceled.
The New York Times actually has the nerve to support calls for genocide! If ever there was a time to cancel that publication, it is now.
You can read their articles for free anyway using https://t.co/2NjvMTsWmj. pic.twitter.com/ow11wxw7Ny
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2023
X also implemented a five-second delay on clicks from X to the Times website, which it later removed but kept in place for its Facebook and other social media sites, the Post reported.
Traffic from X to the Times website has decreased by roughly 50 percent since August.
News organizations face a unique challenge during times of conflict, as they are tasked with delivering real-time updates while upholding accuracy.
Although we do not support censorship, Musk’s actions point out the one-sidedness of the coverage of a respected news outlet like the Times and the fact that legacy media can no longer be blindly trusted to tell us the truth.
