The rise of the online news hustlers

These sketchy, anonymous middlemen have fast-become X's favorite breaking news sources

Jul 18, 2024

The first footage I saw of the Pennsylvania man who fired eight rounds at Donald Trump came not from NBC, which was playing on TV, but from an enigmatic X account called @Faytuks. Just 80 minutes after the attempted assassination, Faytuks posted an eyewitness video that showed the deceased gunman lying on a roof. That post has since been viewed millions of times, as have dozens of similar, unsourced posts by self-described “researchers,” “analysts” and “independent curators.”

This is the wild west of news hustling on X, where a varied group of anonymous middlemen have fast-become the platform’s go-to breaking news sources. Most accounts in this vein combine news aggregation with techniques borrowed (or bastardized) from open-source analysis.

The ecosystem grew up, in large part, around the wars in Ukraine and Gaza; it also benefitted tremendously from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. And for many Americans, it only became visible after Saturday’s shooting, when their timelines flooded with no-name news “orgs,” unsourced updates and sundry mis/disinformation.

Among other falsehoods, news aggregators on X claimed that the gunman was a member of Antifa (he was not) and that he uploaded a statement to YouTube (he didn't). On Saturday, a White House spokesman even rebuked the popular news streamer Steve Lookman over his claim that President Joseph Biden's remarks on the shooting would be pre-recorded.1

"The density of wrong allegations, speculations and outright lies [that] have occurred over the last couple of hours has reached levels unseen in the digital age," bemoaned one German aggregation account. But even when news hustlers get it right, they can be dangerous.

Defining the hustle

“News hustler” isn’t an inherently disparaging term, to be clear. Breaking news IS a hustle, in that it happens very fast — perhaps nowhere more so than on X/Twitter.

At the same time, this emergent group of influential news accounts undoubtedly contains its fair share of opportunists, grifters and frauds. Speaking to AFP earlier this year, Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, complained about a surge of fake open-source accounts that “just adds more noise to the discourse around events.”

What is a news hustler? Generally speaking, I think of this as an umbrella term for the various independent influencers, streamers, “intelligence monitors,” researchers, commentators and alt media shops — insert air-quotes as needed — who seek to make clout or money off digital news without contributing reporting or analysis to it.

These accounts share some DNA with old-school headline aggregators, like @breakingnews, whose teenage founder gained a reputation for his fast-twitch updates in the late aughts. But today’s news hustlers are also plainly inspired by the open-source intelligence and journalism communities, which produce original reports based on public data sources like satellite imagery and social media feeds.

In an October 2023 report, which analyzed the online discourse around Israel and Gaza, researchers at the University of Washington dubbed seven of these accounts the “new elites” of news: a “‘small [group] of persons who exercise disproportionate power and influence’ over what audiences on X read and watch.”

“At its core what we’re looking at here is a different vision of what news is,” one of the researchers told NBC at the time. “It’s fast, it’s unvetted, and it’s very often unsourced. And there’s every indication that the shift is not accidental and that it’s part of a vision of what news is going to be on X.”

But while news hustler accounts share a number of outward markers and characteristics, they also vary widely in credibility. Consider Faytuks, the curiously named X account that posted video of the dead gunman on Saturday. Officially, the account describes itself as a “fast & reliable news provider,” affiliated with the legacy aggregator BNO News and run by a journalist in Norway. Said journalist never reveals his qualifications … or his name.

Still, the account — which posts mostly headlines from mainstream news outlets, with a smattering of unsourced social posts and official press statements mixed in — seems both fairly neutral and fairly careful, on the whole.2 An associated Discord server lists rules like “no conspiracy theories” and “post sources.”

Other news hustlers have fewer scruples. @Sentdefender, an “Open Source Intelligence Monitor” favored by Musk, regularly opines on news events and posts breaking updates that turn out to be fictitious. On Saturday, the account posted “a photo of the shooter” to its 1.1 million followers; it was, in fact, someone else. @Sentdefender deleted the tweet two hours later. (In October, a researcher at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab called @sentdefender “absolutely poisonous.”)

Meanwhile, @Visegrad24 — a four-year-old news “aggregation” and “curation” account with more than 1 million followers — on Saturday tweeted an “unconfirmed” report that the Trump shooter was both alive and a member of Antifa. The account, run by a conservative British publicist living in Poland, routinely savages the mainstream media and cherrypicks breaking news updates to advance an openly pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine agenda. In June, the account was briefly suspended after posting child sexual abuse material. But X levied no consequences — not even a clarifying “community note” — after Visegrad posted the false rumors about the Trump shooter’s political affiliations.

The Elon effect

It’s hard to imagine this hustle succeeding on the old Twitter — and indeed, most of the news hustlers I’ve encountered only gained traction in the past two years. Stats from Social Blade, a social media analytics site, show that many news aggregation and monitoring accounts began tweeting more often and gaining more followers during the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. They then exploded in popularity after the October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, sometimes gaining tens of thousands of followers in a matter of days.

Changes to X under Musk made that upsurge possible. For starters, Musk did away with the blue-check verification system that previously distinguished credible news accounts, replacing it with a pay-to-play model where any huckster can purchase a veneer of legitimacy — and an algorithmic visibility boost — for the low monthly price of $8 to 16.

He also loosened restrictions on accounts that promote conspiracy theories and introduced an ad revenue-sharing program that incentivized paid users to wrack up more views. By all accounts, the pay-outs from that program have been modest, verging on pitiful: roughly $300 per user on average in the first seven months. But news hustlers often fund their operations in other ways, as well, from crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee to on-site creator subscriptions.

X has also arguably taken steps that make it more difficult both for news hustlers to cite their sources and for readers to evaluate their credibility. The site throttles the reach of posts that include links and strips headlines from posts that link to news sites anyway.

Musk, moreover, has interacted with a number of more spurious news hustlers, including @sentdefender, @visegrad24 and @warmonitors — an account that researchers have linked to a Lebanese teenager.

‘It was pointless’

But it’s not just the out-and-out misinformants I worry about, as I said above. Misinformation is a menace, obviously, and civil society/democracy/the electorate/what have you would undoubtedly be better served by a platform that didn’t mark every crisis with crackpot rumors. But rumors, inklings and unconfirmed reports are also part and parcel of any breaking news event, regardless of who’s reporting it. *My* chief concern is that many readers no longer seem to care who’s presenting “the news” at all — a fact that hustlers of all stripes both exacerbate and capitalize on.

This is what irked me about Faytuks, when I first saw the account on Saturday evening. Some friends and I had gathered to celebrate a birthday, but naturally we ended up watching TV news and frantically refreshing our X feeds. Faytuks popped up for my friend Christine first; later me, then Jason. None of us had heard of the account before, and we had aggravatingly few ways to evaluate the video it posted.

The blue checkmark: meaningless. The bio: nondescript. The shaky, handheld video itself: unsourced, uncited and presented without comment. Googling “Faytuks News” turned up nothing. The inside of the Discord was a jokey, memey mess. Meanwhile, NBC didn’t yet have the video: A news hustler can travel halfway around the world while the mainstream media is still fact-checking him.

Many years ago, in a different professional lifetime, I took part in a study on the internet-reading habits of professional fact checkers. Fact checkers, the study found, verify online information through a technique termed “lateral reading”: clicking out into several connected sites, then evaluating the first page based on those links. Other people, meanwhile, are more likely to judge the credibility of online information based solely on the characteristics of the website or feed it appears in — things like name and logo and, one suspects, blue-check verification.

You can probably guess which approach is more effective in screening out misinformation and other bullshit. (Lateral reading is now commonly taught as part of digital literacy programs.) But news hustle accounts, by design and expediency, offer little for the lateral reader to review. They don’t link to their sources and, often, don’t name them. They come with no context or credentials themselves. They’re accountable to no larger institution, and thus free from institutional accountability or ethics.

And yet, despite all those red flags — or maybe, more alarmingly, because of them — many millions of people seem increasingly eager to flock to hustlers in breaking news situations.

“I tried using both 𝕏 and legacy media this weekend,” tweeted Musk, “but legacy media was so far behind and wrong that it was pointless.”

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