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How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

nytimes.com

31–40 of 65 posts

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Liberal" doesn't mean left, though. What's 'left' about big business? Or capitalism? Just because "liberal" ideas are frequently found around leftist ones, it doesn't mean that leftism is liberal, nor does it mean that liberalism is leftist.

"Liberal" as used in America usually means leftist. The original meaning of the word is largely forgotten.

Absolutely not true. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, usually regurgitated by people who don't discuss politics much.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#32
Trump currently has 30 million followers, 15 million of which are fake or bots. About 8 million just showed up in the last 5 months, 2.5 million in the last 4 weeks.

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/31...

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#33
America is driven toward having the information of the world encapsulated and fed to the masses as quickly and as often as possible. In my experience, this reflects any conversation I've ever had with most people in real life, give the bullet points, spare the details. If people really wanted details, they'd have to actually care about what is being discussed instead of looking to be mildly entertained, for example, 2 people conversing in real life:

"Trump is de-funding planned parenthood, that really sucks." "Wow... Really? Did you hear about his Covfefe tweet this morning? What an idiot!"

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#34

> Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo. This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly. The medium basically encourages superficial…

Yup. The 140 character limit is twitter's worst feature. It's difficult to have any substantial discussion or nuanced debate in a stream of 140 characters or less.

Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you.

It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it.

That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#35
Seems to me the whole article is an excuse to "debunk" the conspiracy theory around the obviously-suspicious Seth Rich story.

This sort of thing just confirms, to my satisfaction, that facts will have essentially no bearing on the next US presidential election. The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#36

> Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo. This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly. The medium basically encourages superficial…

It "encourages" superficiality because it precludes "substantive debate" by reason of its artificial character limit. I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.

There's tons of superficial and annoying posts on Medium and Facebook posts, as well as people sharing screenshots of their iPhone notes app on Twitter. Most of their authors posted them because they want attention.

It's not about the character limit. It's more about how humans want attention and there's an infrastructure to support that desire.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#37
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been to silicon valley? It is about 80% liberal big business, with a smattering of rogue libertarians.

"Liberal" doesn't mean left, though. What's 'left' about big business? Or capitalism? Just because "liberal" ideas are frequently found around leftist ones, it doesn't mean that leftism is liberal, nor does it mean that liberalism is leftist.

When did "leftism" become a real word? Not a year ago, it was floated by "rightists" to denigrate liberals, since then I've seen it used as a sort of a dog whistle. It couldn't possibly be that the general public is so dense that the most acceptable political divisions nowadays are "leftist" and "rightist?"

Will it devolve into full idiocracy of "redist" and "bluist" by the next elections?

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#39
> After last year’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don’t like.

Don't lie NYT, that was always the point.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#40
"Twitter is basically a bunch of 00s forums that would all hate each other mashed together but also for some reason, professional journalists" - https://twitter.com/StuntBirdArmy/status/733846091347693568

Couldn't agree more. But I really enjoyed 00s forums so I really enjoy twitter. The journalists, if anything, are ruining it by treating it as a clubhouse and a legitimate proxy for what's on the nation's mind.

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