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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#141

Post by uwagar »

used to be a regular twitter user until a few things shocked me that a person could tweet thru out the day..eg., many coronavirus expert accounts...it seemed like personal accounts but how can they tweet thru out the day like serious / data intensive tweets...7 days a week....felt these accounts were fronts, maybe they had a team of people contributing the tweets.

it really put me off when twitter started inserting suggested topics and tweets from people i really didnt follow to just fill out my feed. even more offputting was the suggested tweets came interspersed in the tweets of those that i follow. does it happen to others or is it just me because i only follow a few people < 50.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#142

Post by hidudeurcool »

ajross wrote: post #60
crmd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms. This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".

> This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying". That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, an…

No post body was provided.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#143

Post by rr888 »

thrown_22 wrote: post #125
rr888 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure who you're talking about now. Sounds like Russian BS. Do you have a source for any of these three things? > were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate symbol used by secret Nazis > Ukraine having 20% of it's army wear literal swastikas > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that bad.

> were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate symbol used by secret Nazis https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture... > Today they argue that Ukraine having 20% of it's army wear literal swastikas https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-turns-a-... > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32868328

Thanks for replying, some of the assertions didn't seem right now I see where you come from. I didn't classify ADL as neo-con. The Wapo article does say there are a few thousand far right soldiers, which I think is well known, it certainly isn't 20% of its army. The last quote is post on HN, which I dont think is proof of any official neo-con policy.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#144

Post by antonymy »

Every time I think about how to improve Twitter I inevitably conclude the simplest solution that generates the most net good for the world is to remove it from the internet. This is true for virtually all social media, however. The way these networking sites are set up is practically an invitation to bad actors and social engineers to manipulate large swathes of society, or at best, simply exploit people for advertising money. I don't think the good from these sites outweighs the bad, not even close. People who use them tend to become miserable, misinformed, and distracted. I have faith the internet can supply a better alternative for disseminating useful, timely information than Twitter. God I hope so, anyway, because if Twitter is the best we can do then there is no hope.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#145

Post by naravara »

crmd wrote: post #14
Bakary wrote: post #7

The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession. The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.…

>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms. This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".

Journalists are less likely to do this than various activist groups. Spend 5 minutes on any politically extreme subreddit or forum and you'll see tons of posts that are just compilations of insane tweets from random accounts, some blue checks and some not. Tons of online activity just involved "nut-picking" for unhinged people on Twitter who say crazy or provocative stuff to create a narrative that this type of sentiment is everywhere.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#146

Post by slg »

>The more interesting part comes when we use the "how often do you use/post" questions to ask not what the distribution of users looks like, but what the distribution of tweets looks like:

>Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets.

Where did this 60% come from? Did the author really translate survey responses along the lines of a user "sometimes" posting political content and uses Twitter "a few times each week" to a direct percentage of all tweets? This isn't even getting into that "using" Twitter doesn't necessarily mean posting tweets.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#147

Post by BlueTemplar »

Mattasher wrote: post #134
bachmeier wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is less of a problem to me than the other side effect of like-driven journalism. If you only preach to the choir, you can get away with misleading or inaccurate claims. Like-driven journalism encourages a style where you present only some of the facts or even just make stuff up. Folks like stuff because of what it says. They don't care if it's partial truths or lies. Like-driven journalism quite literally punish…

This gets to the heart of the problem and is even understated. If your audience is partisan, going against what they want to hear by providing nuance, context, or even straight news, can provoke extreme outrage. Perhaps people will recall when the NYT had to change a factually correct headline because it wasn't sufficiently critical of the previous president.

And good luck fitting nuance and context into ~~140~~ 280 characters !

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#148

Post by naravara »

PaulHoule wrote: post #97
vorpalhex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYTimes, front pages, sources from Twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/media/russia-war...

NYTimes is one of those publications, like the Atlantic, that used to have quality writing but now chases clickbait... In a rush to the bottom to catch up with Gawker, Huffington Post, ...

The Atlantic's political desk is a little bit crap, but a lot of the politically adjacent stuff like arts and culture or city planning are fantastic.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#150

Post by bnralt »

Bakary wrote: post #135
bnralt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Every_ map projection distorts reality in some way. There's simply no way to accurately portray a sphere as a two dimensional object without some trade-offs. The Mercator projection has some useful trade offs, which is why Google maps used it for so long (and still does as certain scales, I believe). I don't believe the authagraph projection is even the best map projection for preserving things like shape and area (…

The Mercator is like circumcision. There might be many reasons invoked for it, but the main reason is that it's just what people in the US are familiar with. Even with no real trade-offs it's fairly clear that Google would still have picked it.

Apparently Mercator wasn't the original projection they used[1]. But they found that it worked better for giving people directions because it preserved route angles in higher latitude regions (it's benefit for navigation is the reason it became so popular, from my understanding).

For what it's worth, I feel like I don't actually come across the Mercator projection that often (I'd say the Robinson projection is more popular in schools, for instance).

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/5/17653122/google-maps-updat...

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