CBS News Suspends Twitter Posting Due To “Uncertainty”

CBS News is halting its activity on Twitter over Elon Musk’s turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company, Variety reported.

“In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Johnathan Vigliotti, CBS News national correspondent, said in a report about the latest chaos at the company on “CBS Evening News” Friday.

A statement with nearly identical wording was shared Friday by the Twitter account of KPIX, the CBS-owned station in San Francisco.

@KPIXtv tweeted: In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News Bay Area is pausing its activity on the social media site as we continue to monitor the platform.

According to Variety, the most recent post on @CBSNews is a retweet of a segment shared at 3:38 p.m. ET about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special council to oversee investigations into Donald Trump. On @CBSEveningNews, the most recent tweet is a story about a dog that “turned itself in to police after getting lost during a walk,” which was posted at 5 p.m. ET. @CBSMornings last posted at 3:30 p.m. ET, linking to an article about users speculating about “whether Twitter will live or die”.

Rolling Stone reported that while CBS Los Angeles, CBS Chicago, CBS Dallas and CBS New York didn’t tweet the statement, none of those affiliates have tweeted anything over the past 20 hours. CBS’ main Twitter account also hasn’t posted anything since Thursday.

According to Rolling Stone, the Twitter accounts for shows like CBS Evening News, CBS Mornings, and CBS News itself also stopped tweeting since midday Friday, and many of their correspondents – including Vigliotti, Scott MacFarlane, and Vladimir Duthiers – have refrained from tweeting since the statement was put out.

The Hill reported that the statement that CBS News tweeted came after Twitter employees resigned en mass on Thursday night, in response to Musk’s ultimatum to either get on board with a “hardcore” work environment or leave.

This is the first time I’ve heard of a news organization choosing to stop posting information on Twitter due to “the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution”. It is unclear to me exactly why they made that decision, but it could potentially be due to the chaos that Elon Musk’s decision making has brought to Twitter.

I wonder if other news sites will also stop posting on Twitter? If so, that could potentially result in lack of news sources available on Twitter. We could be going back to seeking out the news websites instead of their Twitter accounts – like we did before Twitter existed.

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