I opened X – formerly Twitter, currently a crime scene – looking for news about Iran. Within 30 seconds I learned three things. One: Iran has enough missiles to last years. Two: Iran has no missiles left; the United States has completely wiped out its strike capabilities. Three: The United States has secretly run out of weapons.
Three “facts”. Completely contradictory. All posted with absolute authority.
Then I checked the accounts behind these bombshell reports. One was called something like “China News Network”. Another appeared to be run by a person or entity going by “American Homeland Patriot Truth Eagle”. I’m paraphrasing the names, but only slightly. I’m fairly certain these accounts originate in someone’s basement or in a backroom of some country’s intelligence services.
Twitter used to be where I got my news.
There was a golden age of Twitter as a news platform. I know that sounds absurd now, but it was real. Around 2010 to maybe 2018, Twitter was genuinely useful for breaking news. The 2010 Arab Spring was documented in real time by people actually there. Journalists live tweeted protests, wars, and disasters before television cameras could get on a plane.
Military analysts, economists, scientists, bonafide experts, posted real-time analysis and you could read it for free. You could follow someone who had spent 30 years studying a region and get their unfiltered take in minutes.
It worked because the platform hadn’t been fully figured out yet. Follower graphs were smaller. Algorithms weren’t turbocharging the most enraging content. It felt like something genuinely new: breaking news from people on the ground, unmediated, real.
Then everyone figured out how it worked.
Social platforms don’t reward accuracy. They reward speed, outrage, and certainty. Maybe outrage more than anything. A post that says “We don’t have enough information yet to draw conclusions” gets buried. A post that says “BREAKING: TOTAL ANNIHILATION, HERE’S WHAT THEY’RE NOT TELLING YOU”, gets two million views. This creates natural pressure on everyone posting to “perform” with a confidence they don’t have, because hedged, careful, honest posts simply do not travel. Nuance is the past, spicy but ridiculous hot takes is the air that sustains social media.
Once the reach became obvious, everyone with an agenda moved in. State media. Coordi-nated bot networks. Engagement farms. Political operatives. Coun-tries and organisations now treat social media as information warfare infrastructure, and it’s not just the countries you’d expect. Everyone is doing it. The goal stopped being to inform. The goal became to confuse, to polarise, to push a narrative until it feels like the only reality.
And then there’s the organic version of this problem, which might be worse: the armchair experts. During any conflict, X fills up with accounts doing missile trajectory analysis, order-of-battle assessments, and strategic predictions, all presented with the authority of someone who has security clearance and isn’t just a guy in his apartment in Ohio whose research comprises watching YouTube. A thread with 10 missile emojis and a lot of bold text looks like expertise. It just isn’t.
So here I am. The platform that, for a few years genuinely did democratise information, has been so thoroughly colonised by propaganda, engagement optimisation, and confidently wrong imbeciles that I can’t tell what’s real anymore. And the cruel irony is that traditional media, for all its slowness and caution, is looking good right now by comparison.
I find myself doing things I haven’t done in years. Reading long articles. Waiting for confirmed reporting. Checking multiple outlets before I decide something is probably true. I’m cross-referencing. I’m waiting. I’m being patient. This wasn’t supposed to be the future of news. This is the past. But instead of evolving the ecosystem of independent reporting online, we abused it. We used it to manipulate each other. The selfish gene rules. This is why we can’t have nice things.
The irony is that there is this huge push that legacy media is untrustworthy. That it comes from the big corporations, big governments, they don’t want you to know the truth, bro!
Yes, traditional media isn’t perfect but it has journalistic standards. If you want the truth, check a few traditional news outlets from a couple of different countries. If the news jives, guess what, it might be accurate.
Just don’t go trusting “American Warrior Truth Eagle” on Twitter because rocket emojis means accurate reporting. It really doesn’t.
Avid writer Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
