CBS News Suspends Use Of Twitter ‘In Light Of The Uncertainty’ Surrounding Platform Under Musk

CBS News has decided to suspend posting to Twitter as questions about the platform’s future intensify under Elon Musk, whose takeover has led to a dramatic series of layoffs and resignations—leading some to wonder how long the social media site can continue to operate.

“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,” said CBS News national correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti during a report on Twitter that aired Friday evening on the CBS Evening News.

By Saturday morning, most CBS News accounts on Twitter had gone quiet, with the last message posted to the @CBSNews account at 3:38 p.m. ET, a re-tweet of a report on the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the investigations into former President Donald Trump:

The network’s morning show, CBS Mornings, posted its last tweet—a report about Twitter—just eight minutes earlier, at 3:30 p.m.:

The Twitter blackout at CBS extends to the company’s owned-and-operated local stations, with WCBS-TV in New York and KCBS-TV in Los Angeles both posted their last messages to Twitter Friday afternoon. At CBS’ KPIX-TV in San Francisco, the last message posted to the station’s Twitter account alerts followers to the CBS News mandate:

CBS-owned stations in Denver, Sacramento, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Dallas all stopped posting to their Twitter accounts within an hour of each other on Friday, but CBS-owned WFOR-TV in Miami was still using its Twitter account on Saturday:

CBS News’ decision to suspend its activity on Twitter follows Elon Musk’s decision to give blue check verification to anyone willing to pay for the site’s Twitter Blue service, which immediately spawned fake but seemingly-verified accounts for major national companies and individuals, and doing damage to the reliability of Twitter’s blue check—familiar to anyone who follows news companies or journalists—as an indication they can rely on the source.

ABC News, NBC News, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News were all using their Twitter accounts Saturday.