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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#161

Post by JacobThreeThree »

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".

It's poison for the career of traditional media also.

News consumers no longer need the journalist middle man, they can go directly to the source of the news.

Journalists should now, more than ever, be focused on traditional journalistic efforts. Succumbing to the temptation to just "find a story on Twitter" is just cementing the fact traditional media is dead and the era of the citizen journalist is here.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#162

Post by mattgreenrocks »

bombcar wrote: post #59
yew wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of them probably are effectively paid advertising teams. That doesn't really explain some of the people you used to get on forums though. Why pay someone to write 24/7 micro-serial "Transformers" fan-fiction?

Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”. There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.

Weird Internet used to be a few places. Now it (more precisely, the ideas) is everywhere, and reported on as if it is perfectly normal, because "journalism." This ends up legitimizing it further, even if it is painted as weird, as some ideas benefit from any sort of exposure ("the man is oppressing us by painting it as bad!").

Terminally online users are the problem. Until we regard their neurosis, addiction, and proclivity for unreality as a real problem, this will only get worse. Pulling on this string will drag several much harder problems along with it, such as equitable access to mental health care.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#163

Post by teachrdan »

thepasswordis wrote: post #159

Here is an example of how insane twitter is: https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1571629917372039168 This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced at least that many people. The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American polit…

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#164

Post by neodymiumphish »

naravara wrote: post #145
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".

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 senti…

True, but those extremist subreddits or forums are expected to include those views. Journalists are expected to include at least somewhat more objective points of view, but they often don't.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#165

Post by notriddle »

naravara wrote: post #145
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".

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 senti…

Of course, but there's a difference between a Bud Light ad glorifying beer, and E-B secretly funneling money towards academic studies that show positive impacts from moderate consumption of alcohol. Some groups aren't really expected to be impartial.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#166

Post by pessimizer »

crazygringo wrote: post #132
petesergeant wrote: post #15

As someone from one of the many countries with a right/left/liberal split, I really don’t like that American politics conflates left and liberal together.

I'm very curious, but what does "liberal" mean in your context? What country are you in? I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-left-liberal distinction. But in case it helps explain, at least in America, "liberal" has the basic connotation of "individual equality". Originally this meant equality before the law, often called "classical liberalism" which both left and right generally endorse. B…

> I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-left-liberal distinction.

America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought have any relationship to "left." In Australia, the right-wing party is called the Liberal Party.

"Liberals" are free market advocates who support change through competition and a hands off approach by government. "Conservatives" prefer the government support of firm moral values and established traditional institutions.

Somehow the US thinks that "liberal" means having a concerned look on your face, and that it's somehow related to communism, which takes the exact opposite position on the liberal's only defining belief. Communism shares so much more with conservatism, starting with an absolute belief in the importance of morality and institutions. Communism's major difference from conservatism is that it believes that the traditional institutions were created and controlled by a small group of inbred people for a small group of inbred people (which is undeniable, but also when conservatives get off the bus.)

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#167

Post by thepasswordis »

teachrdan wrote: post #163
thepasswordis wrote: post #159

Here is an example of how insane twitter is: https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1571629917372039168 This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced at least that many people. The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American polit…

[flagged]

The Nazis were openly and explicitly engaged in genocide. They killed millions of people in death camps. They didn't talk about it, they didn't allude to it. They did it. MILLIONS of people were killed like cattle. This happened in real life.

White nationalists are bad. Racists are bad. The people associating themselves with those people shouldn't be.

Being a stupid ignorant racist, and building actual in real life death camps and then putting millions of people to death in gas chambers are galaxies apart, and the people implying that idiots saying stupid things on youtube are equivalent to an actual genocide are, in my opinion, engaging in a form of holocaust denial.

The death camps were core to the Nazis political ideology.

Is there a single US politician calling for this or anything even remotely aligned with it? Your implication that MTG appearing on stage with a racist internet troll is somehow equivalent to her aligning with people engaging in the industrialized murder of millions of people is absurd.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#169

Post by pphysch »

SamBam wrote: post #79
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.…

There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's effect on journalists. [1] He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is. T…

Joseph Pulitzer, the prize's namesake, was simultaneously a media mogul and U.S. congressman. His name is often associated with the dawn of "yellow journalism" and USA imperial war propaganda.

Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not start with Twitter or the internet.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#170

Post by pessimizer »

nemo44x wrote: post #122
tablespoon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm not convinced these kind of semantic disputes matter. Non-Americans don't typically identify as "libertarian", but that doesn't make it hard to express or describe the idea of being pro-business and anti-regulation. > The word "liberal" means exactly that - showing preference and deference to private enterprise - in the overwhelming majority of the world, as it refers to economic liberalism. Except in America,…

> Except in America, where it took on a somewhat narrower, variant meaning that focuses on "social liberalism." Right and you'll find large populations of both Democrats and Republicans fall under the "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" banner with Democrats generally skewing one way a bit and Republicans the other. But ultimately, both sides headed the same direction just at different speeds and priority. I th…

> New Deal Regime

Weird that the mainstream gets to claim this when they advocate against anything resembling any of it any opportunity they get.

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