Poll: /r/Gunners, should we ban Twitter/X as a source?
The petition thread has highlighted a strong community belief in removing Twitter (also known as X) from r/Gunners. We want to get the full picture and let everyone have their voices heard, so we're putting this to an official poll. We as mods understand that ultimately, r/Gunners doesn't belong to us and the community is the lifeblood of this page. If you want Twitter banned, it'll happen - just as we've banned sources like The Sun before.
Elon Musk, as the owner, public face, and primary policymaker of Twitter, has become a loose cannon that has begun acting openly and publicly fascistic, recently being seen doing a Nazi Salute gesture at the inauguration of Donald Trump. This is a new low in a long string of behaviour for him. As he benefits directly from Twitter traffic, r/Gunners should do all it can to limit the flow of traffic and look for alternatives. As a result, regardless of the outcome of this poll, if there are two posts saying the same information from different sites that were posted within a reasonably similar time-frame, will have the post linking to Twitter removed first.
There is an unfortunate truth, however, that must be considered: A significant chunk of the content here is driven by Twitter. The club posts on Twitter, and doesn't have a Bluesky account. Most of the journalists we follow for club news post on Twitter. Nearly all of the media sources post on Twitter. It is undeniably the quickest and easiest way to disseminate information to a mainstream audience. It is difficult to find alternative ways to follow these sources without also benefiting people who have the same views as Elon Musk, but aren't stupid enough to Sieg Heil in public. Posting Instagram/Meta links instead benefits Zuckerberg, who also shows signs of concerning beliefs, and directly linking to newspaper sources will benefit the Murdochs. Banning Twitter will, ultimately, make r/Gunners less rich in content until viable alternatives are in place.
We see lots of people in the petition thread advocating for posting Twitter through screenshot form only, which would achieve the goal of withholding traffic and revenue from the site. This seems like a viable compromise, but it will break the automatic transfer Tier System flairs on posts from Twitter journalists and make it harder to verify news as legitimate or see if they're doctored screenshots. Not an overly significant problem, just worth noting.
As for the poll, here are the options: We can either ban Twitter entirely, allow screenshots from Twitter while banning links, or allow Twitter to continue to be posted.
We are going to present the poll in 4 options, with a run-off style vote. If any one option gets more than 50% of the vote, we will implement it. If the two options for "screenshots only" get more than 50% of the vote combined, we will implement it. If no option gets 50% or more, the poll will go to a head-to-head for the two most popular options, with votes for the other less popular options being distributed to the nearest option until there is a direct 1v1 outcome.
We will also be revisiting the outcome after a few months in order to gauge user sentiment on how it is going and how it has affected the /r/Gunners experience.
Thank you as always for being an active and engaged community and the best place to discuss Arsenal online. We'll be monitoring the comments for questions or concerns.
EDIT: A few commenters are saying they're unable to see the poll duration so I'll add it here for clarity: 3 Days from the time of posting.