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NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

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Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#661

Post by effingwewt »

philistine wrote: post #568
effingwewt wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit the nail on the head. Most twitter account followers are nothing but bots. Millions of 'followers' but likes and retweets only in the dozens. It also makes for huge egos. Like, they know they bought all their followers, but they wake up one day and forget, and start to believe their own bullshit. To be fair it is everywhere, youtube accounts will millions of followers do the same. Never more than 200 comments…

Low engagement does not absolutely equate paid bots. Twitter is ooold . I bet the overwhelming majority of NPR followers are inactive accounts by people who signed up somewhere in the '10s and went to the website twice.

Not when all their followers were gained the first week.

Please show me the celebrity/business/politician with even a quarter as many retweets or likes as their follower count.

It doesn't happen. It's an open secret they all buy their followers. They call it 'growth hacking' or 'fake it till you make it'- I call it bullshit.

There are firms that do nothing but increase follower count.

Simply do an internet search for 'where to buy twitter followers'. It's pretty sad its literally that simple.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#662

Post by [deleted] »

rjzzleep wrote: post #602
lostlogin wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Chinese and Russian state propaganda channels are getting the same label for a different situation, it’s a bit off. Your (and Elons) argument has shades of the famous ‘with us or against us’ line. Details matter.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#663

Post by kube-system »

jacquesm wrote: post #519
anonporridge wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm giving you a regular flow of money that keeps you well fed and housed in a nice area, you're going to at least subconsciously care about how I perceive you and if I approve of the things you're doing, because I have the power to cut off that flow of money at any time. This is why many wealthy individuals and organizations donate to both political parties. The implicit threat of losing a flow of money you've be…

Show how the NPR is pulling their punches when they report on the Federal government and I'll consider it. But from where I'm sitting - far outside of the USA - they offer some of the most balanced and clean reporting out there (and that includes the BBC).

I agree with your perception. There are many within the US that simply have a different window of what they find to be acceptable sources, topics, and opinions to entertain. The word 'balanced' implies a sort of central tendency, which can vary depending on what someone finds worthy of consideration.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#664

Post by waboremo »

sahila wrote: post #599
waboremo wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's incorrect. You're comparing unstable funds vs stable funds. Income from a job is stable (relatively), income from other sources like say a monthly donation, is unstable. So yes, my example is still accurate: they rely on the 1k/mo as STABLE funding.

Where do you address the fact that npr says that “stable” funding represents only 1% of total funding?

What's there to address? 1% stable funding is still 1% you can rely on, just because you receive additional funds from private sectors or alternative sources that are unreliable, doesn't negate this. You can literally see this in CPB funding, where private sources are incredibly variable, and that is what CPB gets, NPR is only allotted a portion.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#665

Post by gkoberger »

mb9000 wrote: post #386
gkoberger wrote: post #298

Musk (and Trump) are really, really good at vocally saying things everyone agrees with to cover the fact they're doing the exact opposite. They're populist champions to such a degree that their supporters (and even the media / independents) can't fathom they don't actually care at all. Free speech, no wars, anti-corruption in DC, etc. These are all things most people agree with. If some of the stuff Trump/Elon did se…

Maybe the average person just likes one brand of hypocrite over the other brand. And what sort of secret stuff has Trump or Elon done that hasn't been covered 100x by the media?

Like I said, they don't do secret stuff. People associate shame with having done something bad, and their in-the-open shamelessness is what breaks people's mental models of how to evaluate them.

There's a difference. I have a hard time thinking of anyone (other than Bernie) on the left who has followers in the same way as Trump or Elon. It's a very new (yet not new at all) type of cult of personality.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#666

Post by fdschoeneman »

lgdskhglsa wrote: post #605
fdschoeneman wrote: post #590

I'm sure NPR does some good work, and while I believe it is biased, I've found it to be less biased than CNN or MSNBC. I don't understand why NPR objects to being labeled as either state funded or state affiliated. It was established by an act of Congress, for one thing, and according to its own website, and its own disclosures, it does depend on federal funding. And that figure is substantially more than the claimed…

WBUR is an NPR station, not only is it not difficult to find out the writer is an employee of NPR, it's out in the open and advertised as such. Do writers need to disclose on every article that they're employees of the organization they're writing for? https://www.wbur.org/about

I think they should make it clear in the first paragraph when they are, in effect, writing about themselves or their employer. That's what I would have done.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#667

Post by zerocrates »

fdschoeneman wrote: post #590

I'm sure NPR does some good work, and while I believe it is biased, I've found it to be less biased than CNN or MSNBC. I don't understand why NPR objects to being labeled as either state funded or state affiliated. It was established by an act of Congress, for one thing, and according to its own website, and its own disclosures, it does depend on federal funding. And that figure is substantially more than the claimed…

The "state affiliated" label on Twitter was originally applied to sources that are not editorially independent from their states. Twitter put this label on NPR, then removed an explicit mention of NPR as non-state-affiliated from their public policy related to the label, then removed the mention of editorial independence from the policy entirely, then changed the label to "state funded."

I think it's easy to see why NPR objected to the initial "affiliated" labeling, and that they see the new one as just a quick wording change to try to bat back some criticism, but that it carries the same stigma.

In terms of the affiliation of the author, this is a story written by NPR itself: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter...

The poster here on HN just happened to post the version from WBUR's website. Also, I don't know if it was edited later or not, but the piece both on NPR's site and WBUR's site has a disclosure at the end explicitly stating that it's NPR reporting on itself.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#668

Post by badwolf »

jacquesm wrote: post #335
thefilmore wrote: post #26

It's labeled "Government-funded Media".

Ninja editing this stuff is par for the course at Twitter, as are impromptu decisions, reversals of those decisions and reversals of the reversals. If you want to keep track of stuff you need to screenshot and timestamp it.

This will surely bring advertisers rushing through the doors!

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#669

Post by giantrobot »

sahila wrote: post #309
waboremo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're being paid $1k per month by your job. You would say you receive almost nothing, right? Simultaneously, you would also say what you do get is essential to your livelihood. Same here, larger scale. Hope that helps you visualize the situation.

That's not an accurate analogy if what you're saying the $1k/month is your entire pay. More accurate would be saying I make a $100k/month of which $1k comes for a certain source, and then me saying that thousand is essential to my livelihood. I'd be lying if I said that; I make a whole lot less than $100k/month and I could easily forgo $1k/month today which just goes into my savings anyways.

It's disingenuous to talk as if the relationship to NPR content to their funding is some simple linear relationship.

Every penny of their income is important. If they had less content to provide to member stations, those stations would have less content and would pull in fewer donations. It then becomes a death spiral since less content results in fewer donations.

While federally originated dollars are a small portion of NPR's total income they're not unimportant since they can't be replaced by other sources. A 1% reduction in income means they need to reduce expenses by 1%.

In your analogy, $1k/month goes into savings. Losing that wouldn't break you financially. You're not spending your all of your income. If you were you'd need to cut your expenses by the $1k/month. In that case you'd consider that 1% pretty important.

Re: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'

#670

Post by JasserInicide »

devjab wrote: post #73

I'm Danish and I may have a different take on this than many Americans, but I'm frankly a little appalled that our democratic institutions are still renting their digital homes on the turf of tech giants. The EU set a good example when Elon musk bought Twitter and the EU created their first Mastodon servers, both for it's organizations and it's elected officials, and everyone should frankly follow suit. We shouldn't…

I'm Danish and I may have a different take on this than many Americans, but I'm frankly a little appalled that our democratic institutions are still renting their digital homes on the turf of tech giants

They do this because our federal government is absolutely incapable of doing it themselves. Any tech project (hell, any massive project in general) they undertake goes massively over-budget/over-schedule and is loaded with subcontractor after subcontractor circling overhead like vultures trying to get their piece of the pie. It's why no government at any level is capable of delivering a public works project anymore. It's why so many have so little faith in our governments. No one cares about the end results, they just want to know how they can benefit personally from it and then fuck off

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