>Today, Twitter is just as important of a conduit as newspapers or the evening news. Twitter is a terrible medium for discourse. You wouldn't suggest that world leaders communicate via TikTok, simply because it's popular.
TV is even more terrible for discourse, but somehow people got used to top officials making appearance on TV. See, politicians are for people, not the other way around. They follow people to whatever venue people flock to, in order to be heard better.
In the ideal case, a politician would do AMA style engagements where they take questions from the public and give detailed replies.
Since that won’t happen for most politicians, I’ll take a televised press conference with some back and forth between reporters and the politician over a tweet any day.
That's american-on-american, I was talking about geopolitical interests. I saw reports of posts from air force bases supporting our attempted coup in Bolivia, for example.
Uyghurs in Xinjiang are typically Chinese citizens. Chinese-on-Chinese (in the nationality sense). So it sounds fairly consistent to me.
I guess it depends on how you split it, there's not a significant population of Uyghur nationalists of twitter. It's mostly westerners using them as a bludgeon to try and strike the chinese.
Free speech is not concerned with a person's ability to spew and regurgitate bs in private platforms and I see no reason to give her preferential treatment over anyone else.
freedom of speech protections exist to protect against this exact sentiment. You can't just silence everyone you disagree with. They have their right for 'spewing' their 'bs' just like you have for 'spewing' yours. And it's not up to you, me or Twitter to decide which opinions are right or wrong.
Even the folks who worked for the VOA and its parent the United States Information Agency acknowledge that was created as a Cold War propaganda channel[1]. The broadcasts were heavily influenced by the CIA. The agency was reorganized in 1999 and the USIA abolished, but it's still mostly about presenting the State Department's view of international news. [1] https://archive.org/details/warriorsofdisinf0000alvi
"Propaganda" is a loaded term. VOA is historically a very accurate and unbiased (as far as that is possible) source of news. [1] [2] [1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/voice-america-bias-and-reliabi... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/
The best propaganda is always an excellent and unbiased news source on _most_ topics.
That's a point of view, and a pretty cynical one. I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands. All that make me think that eve…
Aren't these glamorous tech companies supposed to be employing from the pool of the highest echelons of intellectualism? How is it that they have such exceedingly large valuations but they can't manage to deploy a rationale by which to manage their user-based content?
> they can't manage to deploy a rationale by which to manage their user-based content?
They do have a rationale. The issue is that it's biased.
Uyghurs in Xinjiang are typically Chinese citizens. Chinese-on-Chinese (in the nationality sense). So it sounds fairly consistent to me.
I guess it depends on how you split it, there's not a significant population of Uyghur nationalists of twitter. It's mostly westerners using them as a bludgeon to try and strike the chinese.
A bludgeon? The Chinese government doesn’t need defending from the big bad westerners telling them not to genocide their own people.
It’s not about Uyghur nationalism (although I suppose more Uyghurs may desire that if China keeps this up) but about human rights.
This eagerness to defend the CCP is not going to help anyone abused by Western nations. One genocide does not justify another.
If it got younger people engaged why would it be a bad thing?
You can't talk about policy (in a meaningful way) with memes. Our discourse is already much too simple. If any group of people needs to be pandered to, then they're clearly not actually interested in politics.
You can and people do it all the time. I mean, I create and consume memes about complicated topics all the time (mostly related to the field of software I am in), so there is no reason that they can augment any discussion regardless of topic.
Heck, an individual's Twitter experience can be radically changed just by making some changes. A few years ago, I had pretty much abandoned Twitter. Like the GP says, it was a cesspool of negativity. And then I heard someone talk about the "cocktail party" strategy: "If you were at a cocktail party and ended up next to this person, would you hang out and chat? Or would you excuse yourself and go somewhere else?" I sp…
Huh. While I was using Twitter I was mostly exclusively following people I agreed with. I was still angry all the time, because those people were posting stuff like "another cop kills another civilian" or "the US military defended freedumbz by bombing more brown people, yay!". Following only people you want to chat with doesn't necessarily mean talking about nice things.
People you agree with politically are not always the people you would want to talk to at a party. I know many people who I would agree with ideologically but bring it up so often that it is difficult to actually have a conversation with them about anything else. I know people I don’t agree with in some topics but agree with in others, and I know some people I talk to specifically because I disagree with them but would like to hear what they have to say. This isn’t to say that you should immediately go out and surround yourself with people who don’t agree with you, but I’ve found that exclusively selecting for people you agree with is pretty bland. Try to mix it up a little and you’ll probably appreciate it.
I don't trust the media enough to honestly and accurately convey information from my elected officials to me. And while press releases on whitehouse.gov are a step in the right direction, the fact that they are press releases usually makes them anodyne and uninteresting. The best approach is the one we used to have: a non-partisan (or at least, bipartisan) press corps asking elected tough questions live on television…
Why live? Live means politicians will mispeak and can be interrupted before getting their message across.
That's also its advantage - the press can't selectivity edit it to push their viewpoint.