If you’ve arrived here, it’s more than likely you’ve clicked on this link from one of our social media accounts.

We’ve going to be honest with you, the world of social media is changing, and sometimes we need to make changes, join new platforms, mothball others or move to where the grass may be greener.

In an never changing world, it’s important that we change, grow and innovate.  Doing nothing is not an option.

Back in August 2012 when we launched our largest and oldest social media brand Breaking News (Teesside), we chose to create them on Facebook, and a site called Twitter.  Both platforms grew beyond our expectations and we are close to 200k posts on each.

A couple of years ago, Twitter changed ownership and was later rebranded by it’s new owner, the “Worlds richest man” and billionaire Elon Musk.  The platform also underwent huge staff redundancies and changes.

We use a technical thing called API – it’s what allows our systems to share articles across all of our accounts and platforms and it provides our systems with the access that they need to function.  Without any warnings, X has changed their API multiple times without any warning which has disrupted our service for days at a time to have systems changed to use the updated API.

The algorithm that decides what content you see and  how many people see a post has also changed multiple times.  Links to news articles from publications are penalized and aren’t shown to many people, while misinformation and hate speech are amplified to a larger audience.  The platform’s owner had the algorithm changed to massively amplify his own posts.  It’s own AI even named him as one of the biggest sources of misinformation on the platform.

Engagement on X is significantly down and our audience simply isn’t there.  It is a platform full of hate and misinformation.

Earlier this month we found out that in order to maintain the same service we have always provided on X (the same level of service you see on all of our other platforms) would now come at a significantly increased cost.

As a result of all of this, we have suspended the use of X and have mothballed our accounts.  We apologise to all of our followers on this platform.

The good news, we’ve already established all of our brands on Blue Sky and Threads where we have found our community and seen more engagement.  We are fairly new to these platforms as are many people, but it’s a place where everyone is welcome.

Please follow us, details and links below:

Breaking News Teesside

Blue Sky: @bnteesside.bsky.social

Threads: @breakingnewsteesside

Eaglescliffe News

Blue Sky: @eaglescliffenews.bsky.social

Threads: @eaglescliffenews

Thornaby News

Blue Sky: @thornabynews.bsky.social

Threads: @thornaby_news

Yarm News

Blue Sky: @yarmnews.bsky.social

Threads: @yarm_news

Thank you, and hopefully we’ll see you there!