The fires ravaging L.A. County are burning in the country’s second-largest metropolitan area and media market. For millions, access to reliable information about the ever-shifting situation became a matter of personal safety. Millions more not in the fires’ paths tapped and pulled at their phone screens trying to figure out the answers to urgent questions: Are my friends and family safe? What should they do? Where should they go?
Entities that traditionally communicate with the public in such crises have, for the most part, been doing their best: Local media has been working tirelessly — TV stations such as KTLA have excelled in particular — while municipal and state authorities have been trying to provide as much actionable information as possible. Their efforts, however, have often been obscured by smoke: As former Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce wrote last week, the experience of facing a disaster from outside a plugged-in newsroom – his first as a “civilian” — was “dogshit,” particularly on social media:
X did okay, but its days are over as an agreed-upon meeting spot for the breaking news journalists who no longer feel like working for Elon Musk for free. Apart from a silly civilian video or two (and a solid professional livestream from BBC), TikTok was largely indifferent to whether I live or die.
I recognize his feelings. In Los Angeles, as elsewhere, local media is in financial collapse and has, for reasons both within and beyond its control, literally lost touch with much of its previous audience. Diligent, mission-driven local reporters are stretched thin, and their work is distributed in decreasingly effective ways to an increasingly fragmented populace.
Social-media platforms that once aggregated their work alongside other sources and augmented it with user-generated content have, in the last five years, all but banished the news, replacing it with more engaging material in less chronological forms. (The standout resource of the last week hasn’t been a news outlet but Watch Duty, a nonprofit fire-tracking app that aggregates and maps official and user-submitted data, which became a vital resource in recent days. For me, the app represented more than a tech angle on a big story: It helped me decide, from 2,500 miles away, when it was time to tell waiting family members to evacuate their home.)
X in particular was a lot worse than “okay.” The platform’s decline as a breaking-news resource was painfully evident before, during, and after Hurricanes Milton and Helene, two disasters that also carried personal stakes for me, during which the platform felt, as I wrote at the time, like a place where “norms around sharing and resharing good or valuable information have collapsed” and good-faith attempts by users to uncover, vet, and spread vital information were lost in “a sloshing pool of engagement chum.” It’s a platform where verification was once an imperfect signal that an account is what it claims to be (an emergency service, a local news reporter, a government official) and is now a system for influencers to pay to boost their visibility.
A few years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle and Wired sang the praises of “Fire Twitter,” an ecosystem of amateur enthusiasts, academic experts, emergency personnel, and scanner-monitoring volunteers, who, working alongside professional media and official channels, became a messy but useful source of information. These were people united, in the words of a science-communications professional at the time, by their “own ability to find information” and a shared desire to “offer it to other people.” (In 2021, the guy who ran @CAFireScanner from New Zealand told a Wired reporter that he couldn’t shake the guilt of sleeping through the beginning of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, many in Paradise, California, in 2018; now, according to the account, he works for Watch Duty.)
These ad hoc communities were fascinating and sometimes fruitful experiments in real-time reporting and aggregation, augmenting and occasionally racing ahead of traditional media while raising expectations for how quickly and thoroughly a breaking story can be updated. That X has become less hospitable to such efforts hasn’t prevented it from donning Twitter’s “global town square” costume like a decaying skinsuit:
To Charlie Kirk’s friend’s brother’s credit, X is still narrowly useful in this way, although it’s not the brag he thinks it is: People are still posting real-time, hyperlocal information into what Musk has analogized as the platform’s “probable spam folder” — the barely visible trough of posts from people who don’t pay for a blue check — and with some work, you can scrounge there for information like an OSINT analyst trying to figure out if his house is still standing. Mostly, as exemplified by a constant stream of accusatory, partisan, and conspiratorial posts by the platform’s owner, engagement chasing reigns supreme. This was the type of stuff that always threatened to overwhelm platform phenomena like “Fire Twitter,” and, it should be said, sometimes did, but it was part of a diverse mix of actors in a chaotic and contested space. Perhaps they were always doomed and the day has finally come; in any case, under the new regime, good-faith community “Twitters” don’t stand much of a chance.
Twitter’s breaking-news downgrade is sometimes solely attributed to the character and biases of Musk’s extreme political leanings. But subtler changes matter even more. Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X, but its new influencer economy demands viral engagement, and viral engagement comes through the For You page and especially video; what was once a platform defined by timeliness now works a lot like the rest of social media, where breaking news has long been second class and aggregated viral clips, often far downstream from their sources, rule supreme.
It’s both accurate and tempting to point out that by losing its utility as a news platform, X has in some way failed. But Musk — along with the leaders of other debased platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok — doesn’t really care. While X is getting undeniably worse for the narrow purpose of aggregating and distributing the sort of timely, straightforward information that users occasionally but intensely desire in times of crisis, it is just mimicking what its bigger competitors do better, and at a much greater scale: Turning crises into intense, disorienting spectacles optimized for maximum engagement. To log into Instagram, TikTok, or X during the early days of the fires was to encounter a feed littered with shocking fragments of information and video, presented in no obvious order and often stripped of any markers linking them to their original sources. This didn’t provide the sensation of being better informed; the geographic and temporal vagueness of what you were being shown provided something closer to a feeling of bearing witness, albeit to something you couldn’t quite make sense of. One got the distinct sensation, after a few minutes, of being identified by the platforms as a user with a keen interest in a new category of content, only this time it wasn’t “bike repair,” “contouring techniques,” or “Ja’Marr Chase,” but rather “fire,” “disaster,” and “Los Angeles.”
On Instagram, information quickly split into hyperpersonal and hyperdetached categories: In private Stories, friends and acquaintances shared their plans, fears, and, in some cases, lost homes; just below, in Reel after Reel after Reel, strangers supplied maximally arresting clips of flames, ruins, human despair, and conspiratorial clues. The platform might not have been useful in the urgent-emergency sense, but it was functioning perfectly well as designed, aggregating user-generated media about and adjacent to a disaster and refining it, through a process of algorithmic ranking and targeting, into a perfect show.
You might recognize this as a version of one of the oldest and most persistent critiques of the commercial news media: Even the most staid newspapers and broadcasters have always been guilty of emphasizing the sensational aspects of a crisis. Their defense, when offered, was that they were merely giving their audiences what they wanted — tragedy as entertainment — alongside things they might need or use. After years of professing otherwise, tech platforms no longer bother with the second part of that arrangement.
Among the early promises of social media was that, in contrast to traditional media organizations that decided what their audiences would see, content and its distribution would be provided and controlled by users who were free to associate as they pleased. The absolute and rather sudden dominance of algorithmic recommendations leaves us with platforms that are becoming more like traditional media organizations, only much bigger, and now completely unburdened of civic and social responsibility — tautological editorial machines that no less proactively decide what to show us than the Los Angeles Times once did, only now based almost exclusively on how likely they think we are to look at it. They’re tools for consuming the product of disaster, not for surviving it.
These platforms are, in their grim way, well adapted to the time. In an era of accelerating climate disasters, political strife, and digitized war, they are systems built to efficiently extract profitable spectacle from calamity while maintaining a safe distance from the raw stuff of news. They endlessly produce the feeling of acute crisis while casting it as remote, even when it’s right outside your door; they convert cataclysm into user minutes and ad impressions, leaving audiences more anxious and overwhelmed but not necessarily better informed or equipped. Their temporary civic utility has been replaced with an externality of despair. (This is something to remember when Mark Zuckerberg talks about bringing “civic content” and news back to platforms that have become structurally hostile to the real thing.) To call this a failure, though, is to make assumptions about the priorities of social-media companies that were at best temporarily and incidentally true. The platforms are doing just fine on their terms. They’ve noticed we’re interested in the flames, and they’ll be ready to show us more.
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