We have no choice but to leave the cesspool which Twitter has become
A hotbed of racism and misinformation and we no longer want to be any part of it
You’re reading the paid-for edition of The Ink - curated community news straight to your inbox in association with Swindon Link. Having upgraded to paid, you are supporting the most exciting and ambitious media venture in the South West enabling us to keep you informed and up to date with everything Swindon. By subscribing you have given us the ability to send news analysis, updates and features direct to your inbox.
If you are a free subscriber you will only be able to read the first part of this briefing which means you’ll miss out on the entire article.
Upgrade now and get your first month free. The ultimate try before you buy.
It only costs £5.99 a month - less than one Crème Brulée Iced Brown Sugar Oat Shaken Espresso at Starbucks a month - and you'll be supporting independent quality journalism in Swindon.
Lies to the left of you, racism to the right and we no longer want to be stuck in the middle of that
By Ink Editor Jamie Hill
As a news organisation, which covers two different publications, it is essential that we are trusted and are seen as good quality and accurate in our reporting.
We have never relied on salacious clickbait to draw people in to read our stories and believe that we need to adhere to a higher standard of journalism, otherwise what is the point of what we do?
But for the past year we have found Twitter/X, or whatever it’s called nowadays, to be an increasingly volatile platform and it’s getting worse.
It’s hard to be a trusted news organisation when your news stories are sandwiched between one story where Elon Musk is calling for the overthrow of the UK Government using a false narrative about grooming gangs and another story where an OnlyFans ‘celebrity’ is espousing the false anti-vax narrative and that covid was a massive con.
We made the decision when we first launched The Ink to not use Twitter then as already it had started to go downhill. As far as we are concerned we’ve always seen The Ink is as a way of bypassing the increasing influence of social media reach as we can deal with the audience directly. Currently The Ink does use Instagram and Facebook but only as a way to build our audience and point them in the direction of using the Substack-based news subscription service we provide.
But for our sister organisation Swindon Link, Twitter has been a platform we’ve used since its infancy to reach our online audience.
We currently have nearly 10,000 followers (9,877 to be exact) so it is definitely not an easy decision for us to make to sacrifice that much reach.
In this modern age ‘reach’ is all-important in trying to get your voice heard amongst the cacophony of other voices.
But the platform has made it increasingly difficult for us to operate in. Every day there’s just simply too much division and misinformation on the site so it causes us reputational damage to have our stories in amongst all of that.
It’s like trying to be a beacon of integrity when you’re surrounded by manure on all sides.
So in the meantime, we will still be using Facebook and Instagram but we have also launched a Bluesky account to see if that might be a more favourable platform.
If you want to join Swindon Link on Bluesky click here