Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Pauses Posting to X Amid Legal Concerns

Eliza Hussman Gaines

Legal questions about revised terms of service last month led Publisher Eliza Hussman Gaines and Managing Editor Alyson Hoge to generally ban the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newsroom from posting on X, aka Twitter.

Hoge told Whispers that the new terms of service, as of Nov. 15, included provisions that allow the Elon Musk-led company to use “anything that you post on Twitter” to feed its large-language machine learning models.

The artificial intelligence models need vast stores of written language, even the copyrighted content of newspapers like Little Rock’s.

“It’s a struggle for news organizations to make sure that they protect their content,” Hoge said in a conference call. “If your content gets used to train an AI model, you end up losing the right to your content.”

Hoge told the staff, “Let’s stop.”

The paper has an official newsroom X account, and staff members have personal accounts on the platform.

“I told everybody, at least in terms of the official ADG account, let’s stop using Twitter until we sort out what this all means, and what we want to do in that situation,” Hoge said.

The newspaper did tweet about a late November shooting at Park Plaza Mall in Little Rock, but news staffers got emails noting that it was a well-considered exception.

Gaines will ultimately decide whether the newspaper re-engages on X. “We’re still analyzing the situation.” She said she wouldn’t call the X hiatus a policy.

“We’re waiting to see what happens,” Gaines said. “The terms in the change that concerned me were that they can take our content and they can modify and adapt it. That’s what it says. Does that mean that they can take one of our tweets and modify it so it looks like we wrote something that we didn’t? That’s very concerning to me.”

Gaines said the Democrat–Gazette is in the business of fighting misinformation, and that big social media platforms complicate the mission with intrusive grasping for human-generated content.

“We have not made a final decision,” Gaines said. “We haven’t taken down our Twitter account. We’re just evaluating right now.”