Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 65 posts

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#51

Post by notfromhere »

jjawssd wrote: post #45
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #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.

Can you please clarify what is "obviously-suspicious" about the Seth Rich story?

not sure if he's arguing for or against the Seth Rich conspiracy

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#52

Post by notfromhere »

eridius wrote: post #20
Quequau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, BuzzFeed has a frustrating business model. Produce great volumes of worthless clickbait, wrapped with adverts and use the revenue to fund actual legit journalism. Clearly it works to some degree but I expect they're going to struggle to ever move beyond their clickbait reputation.

Well, I mean, this is why they have the BuzzFeed brand and the separate BuzzFeed News brand, right? They even show up as two different channels (and different colors) in the Apple News app. A lot of people still don't seem to realize that there is a split like this, but changing people's perception of them is really just a matter of time.

It's like complaining that the New York Times has actual news articles next to the crosswords and ads

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#53

Post by saurik »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #36
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there are also tons of reasoned and interesting posts on those mediums... the closest that exist on Twitter is the occasionally burst of tweets that you probably didn't even read on Twitter but saw on one of those Twitter conversation archiving websites, as the burst of tweets is totally untraceable :/. Twitter doesn't just "encourage" superficial content with its character limit: it actively enforces superficial content if you want to participate. I have half a million followers on Twitter and I essentially don't ever post anything there as it is next to impossible to say anything of value in 140 characters :/. Everyone I know in my field with Twitter accounts and a ton of followers essentially just use it to post snide bullshit and start arguments, or try and fail to be informative and spend the next week trying and failing to correct some misconception people got due to lack of context. The closest it comes to ever working is in the small community of people who seriously take to reddit to discuss what someone said on Twitter, which is the dumbest thing I could imagine... and it isn't even like Twitter is some amazingly successful company that can say "you are wrong, this works great": most of the talk about them is that they will fail or be acquired at a much lower valuation than they had many years ago.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#54

Post by jjawssd »

notfromhere wrote: post #51
jjawssd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please clarify what is "obviously-suspicious" about the Seth Rich story?

not sure if he's arguing for or against the Seth Rich conspiracy

I just want more information about this subject. Not sure why I am being down-voted?

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#55

Post by linkregister »

jjawssd wrote: post #47
linkregister wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

What are you saying, that the Democrats celebrated the move?

Are you disputing that the email story made it to the front page of the NYT?

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#56

Post by lj3 »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #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.

> The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.

What do you think the news has been for the last 100 years (or longer)? It was never unbiased. The news has always pushed the agenda of the entity that owned it.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#57

Post by ikeyany »

saurik wrote: post #53
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there are also tons of reasoned and interesting posts on those mediums... the closest that exist on Twitter is the occasionally burst of tweets that you probably didn't even read on Twitter but saw on one of those Twitter conversation archiving websites, as the burst of tweets is totally untraceable :/. Twitter doesn't just "encourage" superficial content with its character limit: it actively enforces superficial…

Twitter is an endless bag of potato chips for the mind. However, it's within our nature to seek the path of least resistance, and munch on snack food to keep busy.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#58

Post by teaneedz »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #21

> 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…

Actually I've found Twitter to be the best news aggregator and breaking news platform of all. 140 char tweets make it easy to compare tweets with other sources very quickly. The algorithmic TLs though contribute more to fake news as well as users who haven't quite learned how to curate their own feeds. What's happened to critical thinking skills? Oh well, Twitter works well for me.

Re: How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation

#60

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

lj3 wrote: post #56
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #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.

> The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias. What do you think the news has been for the last 100 years (or longer)? It was never unbiased. The news has always pushed the agenda of the entity that owned it.

Well, sure, but there was very definitely a clear ethical line in proper journalism, as a profession. You had to have the basic facts right, by at least 2 different sources. I think this has changed now.

For instance, is Trump in league with the Russians? What are the facts? On the other side, did Hillary break the law with her email server? What are the actual facts? In both of these cases, you can trace the points of argument ad nauseam, and an unbiased observer can come away with a feeling that both sides of both of these issues make good points. I know it's not a popular position to take on HN, but that's the way I feel about AGW. I think both sides have good points, and I don't know what to conclude.

I'm not entirely clear that it's completely nefarious. I just think we've reached a point as a society -- almost like a Maslow hierarchy -- where any problem we discuss is so complicated that there are (at least) 2 sides to anything worth discussing, and they make internal sense, and the difference is the worldview you bring to the argument.

With the drubbing the major news outlets took being COMPLETELY wrong about the last election, I think they've squandered the last bit of trust people had in them as objective reporters of fact. And, if it's all about opinion, then people are either going to reinforce their biases, or simply check out.

Post reply on HN