Fake news. Disinformation. Soap operas. Oh my!

Perhaps there’s only one executive who can speak to all three of those seemingly disparate topics with authority: National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences president and CEO Adam Sharp. In addition to overseeing the Daytime Emmys, which recognizes the best in news, documentaries, sports and soaps, Sharp is the former head of news, government and elections at Twitter, and has some thoughts on what has happened to the place under Elon Musk’s watch.

Page Six Hollywood caught up with Sharp on the eve of the Daytime Emmys, which takes place this evening at the Hollywood Palladium, where he discussed a potential merger with the Television Academy, why soaps are thriving on streaming platforms and why he finds Musk’s X, “unrecognizable” from the old Twitter.

P6H: The Daytime Emmys used to be synonymous with soap operas and network talk shows. Now it can mean something that never actually airs during the daytime — or even on television. At what point does the name become an anachronism?

Sharp: I think you could argue that even television has become an anachronism. There was a time when all of the Academies were founded, mid-last century, based on the physical piece of hardware they were recognizing: the Television Academies, the Recording Academy, the Motion Picture Academy. And if we were all still defined that way, we would all be merged into the iPhone Academy of Arts & Sciences long ago.

NATAS and the Television Academy announced this summer that they are exploring reunification. Why reunify now, after nearly 50 years apart?

It’s still very much a conversation. Ultimately, it is to better serve our members. The academies separated in the late 1970s, and over the years it has become clear that that has not necessarily been in the best service of our community. Having our representative Academies create arbitrary dividers in the membership community no longer seems necessary or appropriate. At a time of great challenge to our industry and to our membership, it is important to be a single space for our membership to convene and to be represented, and that really is the heart of the dialogue at this point.

“Beyond the Gates” arrived as the first new daytime soap in decades and earned 15 nominations this year. Does its success challenge the conventional wisdom that the soap opera is a dying form?

When you look at the streaming data from the networks, daytime soaps consistently are among the most viewed on their respective streaming platforms, often outrating their primetime programs in time shifted viewing on the streaming platform. One of the big drivers in the decline of audience for daytime programming wasn’t a shift in viewer tastes. It was a shift in workforce dynamics — two paycheck households compared to 40 years ago. But now people are discovering, ‘Oh, I don’t have to be home in the middle of the day in order to watch those shows I grew up on’ and are able to rediscover them on a time-shifted basis. And I think that’s where NBC and Peacock were able to move ‘Days [of Our Lives’] to Peacock and not miss a beat because that’s actually where it’s proving to be more compelling for the audience. It’s where ‘YNR’ and ‘[The] Bold [and the Beautiful]’ are consistently among the most-watched programs on Paramount+, and ‘General Hospital’ is doing gangbusters over on Hulu. I think it’s just recognizing that the business model is changing, but the appetite for the content is still there.

You spent six years running news, government and elections at Twitter. We are now living through an explosion of AI-generated video, deepfakes and “fake news.” Are we approaching a point where the average viewer can no longer reliably distinguish authentic journalism from manufactured content?

We are entering a very scary time when it comes to AI content, particularly in areas of news and information. It is far too easy to generate misinformation and disinformation 1793368430 compared to the misinformation campaigns we saw in the 2016 and 2020 cycles. The degree to which that has scaled now to deepfake photos, videos and audio is disturbing. I think it does put added responsibility on everyone, from creators down to individual consumers.

What worries you more today: actual disinformation or the erosion of public confidence in real journalism?

I think the latter. If you had asked me a few years ago, it would be mis- and disinformation. That was certainly the biggest challenge in 2016, 2020. Now we are at a stage of overcorrection where when you look across the political spectrum, you have those who trust only the mis- or disinformation and you have those who trust nothing. But there’s no one left who really seems to trust anyone who should be trustworthy, and I think that is dangerous.

What do you think of X now compared to Twitter?

It’s in many ways unrecognizable. In some ways, an overcorrection to many things. When I started at Twitter, there was an expression internally that we represented the free speech wing of the Free Speech Party. I remember one of our founders even wrote a post: ‘Let the tweets flow.’ Over time, particularly as the company went public, it became more and more restrictive to be responsive to advertiser demands and seeking to become “quote unquote” brand safe and overcorrected in that direction, and I think Musk’s criticisms of the company had a kernel of truth in that because those corrections were not even-handed with respect to conservatives on the platform, and they did run contrary to that earlier ethos. I think in the X era, where it has gone completely the other direction, and concerningly so, is in removing all the guardrails. It has sort of lost the recognition that we had even in those early days that free speech does not extend to individual right to silence the speech of other users, and I think that the current platform has condoned a level of and in some cases encouraged a level of abuse and harassment that results in chilling speech that then runs counter to that original free speech ethos, and is now an overcorrection in the opposite direction of those later years of the Twitter leadership.