No one wanted what Twitter was trying to push on us last week. A lot of people wanted to make sense of the chaos surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk. I saw a lot of people looking for answers. I didn’t see anyone demanding graphic, up-close video of the moment of Kirk’s death.
But that is what Twitter not only offered, but made virtually unavoidable.
There was a time when Twitter was a must-have during a breaking news event. I remember refreshing my timeline over and over again on multiple occasions—the attacks across Paris in 2015, the firing of Joe Paterno and the subsequent protest, the death of Kobe Bryant. I refreshed the website once while trying to learn more about Kirk’s shooting and knew immediately I wouldn’t be doing it again.
The platform died the moment Elon Musk bought it and began dismantling everything that made it essential for sports fans and people trying to follow breaking news events. Now, it’s on life support, and I think the sports media is the only thing keeping that EKG from showing a flat line.
Why?
I have my own opinions of Charlie Kirk, but I had no desire to see him killed, and I sure as hell did not want to see what the app put right in front of my face. You know why? Because I am a human being who recognizes that he was also a human being with a wife and kids. That bullet carried real, devastating consequences, but Twitter treated it as just more content. The site is treating the worst of humanity as its P1s.
Do you want your brand associated with that? It isn’t a free speech platform. It’s a cesspool, and it’s time for sports media brands to say goodbye.
There was a time when such an idea was unthinkable, but that isn’t the world we live in anymore.
Shock Without Value
Elon Musk is a loser. Think about everything he does, thinking it will generate outrage that leads to clicks and likes. The chainsaw? The joint? The “salute” (come on, we don’t have to pretend it wasn’t)? The guy is an internet troll, and that’s all Twitter is under his ownership.
In the age of AI chatbots, Musk wanted to make sure Grok was Twitter at its most racist. Why? It triggers the libs, you see!
Try doing a search for any image or video on Twitter. How many graphic, hardcore porno clips did you have to scroll through first?
There are no content filters, and Twitter’s official position is that is what makes it valuable and necessary. I would argue that is exactly what makes it worthless.
There is no content moderation and no fact-checkers. What was once a tool has been flooded with misinformation, AI slop, and hate speech, and all the CEO has to say about it is “I know! Cool, right?”
How can we justify putting content on a platform that asks our audience to sift through the most graphic garbage available on the internet just to see what Nick Wilson has to say about the latest perceived slight to Shedeur Sanders? Why does our industry want to be in business with that?
Are You Talking To Anyone?
The value proposition for Twitter or any other social media platform is reach, right? But what reach does the site really offer now?
Bots—fake accounts built to engage and enrage users—are obviously a problem, but maybe the bigger problem is we don’t have a good gauge on just how prevalent they are. Musk and his staff swear that they have dealt a blow to those practices, but it’s still estimated that these accounts have more than quadrupled since Musk bought the site.
Add to that the reality that Twitter isn’t in the same stratosphere as its top competitors, and I ask you, what real audience is there that we cannot go without?
Speaking of audience, do you know how few of your followers actually see your content? Barrett Media has 16,400 followers. Our last ten original posts have combined for 7,014 views. That’s an average of about 701 views per post. That means everything we post reaches less than 4.3% of our audience.
Twitter’s goal is to keep you on Twitter. Links to podcasts, columns, or live audio are suppressed. If Twitter users are way more likely to see native content than links, why would you not focus on creating native content for more popular platforms?
But hang on. Let’s go back to the beginning of this section. Estimates vary on the percentage of Twitter users that are not real humans, but let’s be generous and say it’s only 10%. That would mean of the 701 people that see an average Barrett Media post, only 630 of them matter. That means we actually reach less than 4% of what we are told is our audience.
If you are stuck generating images or creating videos, the tools are better on Instagram and TikTok, respectively. Plus, those are platforms where users go expecting to find that content. There is a much better chance you find new fans there than on Twitter in 2025.
Is The Whole Model Dead?
In November, Pew Research released a study that said 22% of adults in the U.S. use Twitter, which ain’t nothing, but compare it to YouTube (85% of adults), Facebook (70% of adults), and Instagram (50% of adults), and it’s clear that there are better uses of your time on social media. Even TikTok (33%) dwarfs Twitter at this point.
In fact, there is no subset where the numbers for Twitter show some hidden value. It draws 21% of conservatives and 22% of liberals. It’s slightly more popular with minority audiences (24%) than white audiences (19%). Only 16% of its users are over 30 years old. Men like it more than women, but it’s 25% vs. 17%. Where is the must-have metric?
Sports media may need to have a very uncomfortable conversation. The business thrived on breaking news, right? Twitter was for Woj Bombs and Adam Schefter news dumps. Text-based social media worked because of us. The sports media created an audience and gave it credibility that attracted others.
Earlier this year, Bluesky was having a moment. Downloads were surging, and the site was hitting some user goals, but the reality was that the total number of users was never that big. As of this writing, the official count is just under 39 million.
Gabby Hinslif of The Guardian offers a theory that explains a lot about the falling influence of Twitter and the lack of any real, new competition. She wrote that there was a time when we could think of Twitter as Pangea. Conservatives were there, liberals were there, independents were there. Sports fans were there. Comedy fans were there. You get it.
That era is over. Now liberals are on Bluesky. Conservatives are pulled in a million directions. Sports fans have decreased, but sports is still what is holding that house of cards up.
Why are we doing the heavy lifting for a platform that has become irrelevant?
Twitter has a problem. The lack of content moderation has turned it into an absolute sewer. There’s a reason businesses don’t have a presence on sites like 4chan. They don’t want to be associated with the content, and they don’t want potential customers and users to be exposed to any of it because they were looking to interact with the brand.
I didn’t want to see Charlie Kirk getting shot. I didn’t want the extreme closeup that was served to me, but it was forced on me while looking for a clip from the Carolina Panthers’ loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. I’m sure there were people that had it show up on their phone while they were looking for a column from Barrett Media.
I don’t think that’s good business for us, and neither does Jason Barrett.
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. To stay updated, sign up for our newsletters and get the latest information delivered straight to your inbox.
Demetri Ravanos is a former columnist and editor for Barrett Media. He is the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host of the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
Remarkable column. Thank you!