Blog

NBC News 'gotcha' reporter Brandy Zadrozny's most recent screed can only be interpreted as sheer jealousy, after the outlet reports that just seven influential X accounts have 'dominated the flow of news' surrounding the Israel-Hamas war and have been 'easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets.'

Citing a Friday report by the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, as well as a 'separate analysis' by the partisan hacks at NewsGuard, Zadrozny writes that during a three-day period starting with the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the most popular posts regarding the crisis revealed that news on the platform is "faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself."

We should mention that the report doesn't refute anything posted by said 'influential' accounts. The entire report is simply bitching over their popularity, and the alleged (yet undefined) "change for the worse" on the platform.

"At its core what we’re looking at here is a different vision of what news is," said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new report. "It’s fast, it’s unvetted, and it’s very often unsourced. And there’s every indication that the shift is not accidental and that it’s part of a vision of what news is going to be on X."

"The people who are engaged, they probably buy into this vision, but we have doubts that it serves the public well."

Again, zero examples.

Caulfield and crew have branded the accounts "new elites" – who have exercised "disproportionate power and influence" over the Israel / Hamas news. Those accounts include:

Of course, here's what it really boils down to:

"Tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from these accounts outperformed popular news accounts belonging to CNN, The New York Times, the BBC and Reuters, despite having far fewer followers, according to the research (NBC News was not included)," Zadrozny writes, adding that researchers found that tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from 'approved' news sources garnered 112 million views over 298 tweets, while the seven 'influential' accounts drew 1.6 billion views across 1,834 tweets.