It's amusing to see owners of disinformation platforms lose control of their content. They are put in the losing position of always playing catch-up to censor information which is often a pointless endeavor since by the time they catch up the mob's attention has moved on (but sometimes they can stop kill movements in their infancy). This is just the first wave, though. Newer platforms will be even more heavily AI-censored and manipulated; hopefully adversarial / chaos content keeps slipping through.
How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#42Earlier 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.
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?
I along with other "leftists" use it as a short-hand for left-wing politics, generally those who believe in politics usually placed on the left of the left-right spectrum, including but not limited to the abolition of what we believe are systematic unjustified inequalities within society.
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#43> 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…
Sounds like all social media to me.
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#44> 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…
I've always viewed 24 hour news channels in the same vein. Twitter just puts a layer of social validation on top of it.
Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media.
Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work.
Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines.
The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart... in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions.
Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#45Seems 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.
Can you please clarify what is "obviously-suspicious" about the Seth Rich story?
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#46This is exactly what technology platforms bring out, the public decides what is of importance. But the issue isn't the platform itself. It just shows us on a large scale what drives the mentality of 80% of the population. Group mentality always lowers the IQ of individuals who are part of it. Ever heard of herd mentality?
A friend in one of my whatsapp groups shared an image with the meaning of covfefe yesterday, and I had no clue what it was about. I am on twitter but do not follow public personalities with the exception of 1 or 2 of them from my country. The beauty of twitter is in following people who aren't public personalities but are doing some cool/unique work in their walk of life.
Now this decision making is up-to the individual, to elevate one's own thoughts, ideas by focusing on good posts or to drown in mediocrity. The point as an individual for me is that exactly, strive to stay away from the noise-makers and focus on what is truly important. I would not be surprised if my comment gets a troll or a pissed off response that says 'I love stupidity, revel in it, keep your elitism to yourself' The best would be no comment or probably a comment which builds the conversation. But this isn't my choice, is it? Controlling what types of comments are allowed.
- The idea of freedom is that even stupidity can be practiced (my own quote)
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
538 was being laughed at for 70/30 or greater and HuffPo and NYT had Hillary dancing on stage with Jay Z. I screen capped various organizations refusing to update polls, refusing to post WikiLeaks info and above all refusing to do the fucking news . NYT broke Watergate which was embargoed by the president. I will never forgive them for how shameful and cowardly they have become. I am sure there are great men and wome…
> refusing to post WikiLeaks info NYT, among others, has been widely castigated by Democrats for putting Hillary Email stories on their front page.
"Widely castigated" is a huge hyperbole. Suppression of the email stories is absolutely critical for maintaining political control by the Democrat party.
Is there any other reason the NYT would suppress this story?
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
538 was being laughed at for 70/30 or greater and HuffPo and NYT had Hillary dancing on stage with Jay Z. I screen capped various organizations refusing to update polls, refusing to post WikiLeaks info and above all refusing to do the fucking news . NYT broke Watergate which was embargoed by the president. I will never forgive them for how shameful and cowardly they have become. I am sure there are great men and wome…
> refusing to post WikiLeaks info NYT, among others, has been widely castigated by Democrats for putting Hillary Email stories on their front page.
No they reported it happened and never the content.
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#49"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.
Something about the structure of twitter makes things that happen there seem much larger than they are. It's an OK platform if you recognize that the communities on it are really, in the grand scheme of things, very small--but so many (especially media types) apparently view every random controversy caused by 3-4 highly-followed users saying something dumb as a vast cultural trend that needs to be reported on.
Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
#50> 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 (Nietz…
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent.
Remember what Marshall McLuhan said so long ago:
"The medium is the message" (emphasis added)