Not even a quarter of the country uses Twitter, and of those who do, just 10% produce more than 9 in 10 of Americans’ tweets. Yet, if you flip to the editorial pages and business channels of the nation’s top newsrooms, you’d think someone died.

The New York Times alone boasts four op-eds lamenting Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the social media giant, wedging tirades about the billionaire’s scary “free speech absolutism” between panic pieces about anti-free speech fascists like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter isn’t the most important social media site on the internet, and it’s not particularly close, but Musk is an outsider who gained the reins of the ultimate social network for the nation’s capital. For Washington D.C., and to a lesser extent, the rest of the media, Twitter isn’t just Twitter. It’s Tinder, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, and Musk threatens to undermine that game.