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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#91

Post by eternalban »

mhneu wrote: post #75
guerrilla wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is why. Look at the number of Bernie supporters. I think what's really going on is that the right-wing media has a strategy of shifting the Overton window by calling liberals "left" and those same liberals have little problem with that because they consider themselves left, not knowing any better.

It's not just the word liberal, which means something different for most Americans than its meaning in other countries. In Australia, the Liberal party is the conservatives who are allied with Murdoch. The word "neoliberal" is also a problem. It is used negatively and aimed at a broad swath of center-left to center-right. But in other countries, the people called "neoliberals" would be understood to be conservatives.…

We should start using descriptive names. It is hard to confuse just who are the "money decides and confers authority" party from the "not everything is about money" party to "god speaks to me and says this is how you do it" party. Also those donkeys and elephants are pretty ambiguous as well. How about snakes and scorpions? Isn't that more descriptive?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#92

Post by bachmeier »

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…

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 punishes honesty.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#93

Post by prions »

So Twitter isn't important except for:

* influential politicians

* journalists

* Jerome powell "... though there's some evidence that Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for ideas on monetary policy"

* College educated people (94 million americans)

I don't think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#95

Post by dang »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

A classic on this topic, more general: Most of Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People [1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Someone has posted it here, perhaps in response to your comment:

Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 - Sept 2022 (36 comments)

- but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because it tends to split the discussion.

(You did the preferable thing by talking about this in the original thread.)

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#97

Post by PaulHoule »

vorpalhex wrote: post #83
ajross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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, ...

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#98

Post by dredmorbius »

bombcar wrote: post #48
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".

It’s really obvious when you follow through some of the “people are saying” links - it’s one thing to report on what Musk said, with fifty billion likes and replies already, and another to back up a statement with a link to a tweet with four likes. Some are obviously “go out and find what you want someone to be saying”.

A few years ago there was a mild dust-up when a pre-written "response" piece to a pop musician's latest release was leaked (possibly early). It included a bunch of pre-written filler and included several slots for Twitter responses to be filled in prior to actual publication.

This is a very poorly-kept secret in journalism, with certain genres (entertainment, politics, business press-releases, fashion industry) being especially prone. See pg's "Submarine" essay. The practice isn't entirely bad or unethical --- obituaries in particular are frequently written in advance with details filled in on publication. For particularly notable names, they're updated regularly. Similarly election outcomes and major technological events (e.g., space mission launches / milestones). It's much easier to have something prepared than to start from scratch as the event occurs, and these in particular have predictable deadlines.

From the 1980s through the aughts, the term "fake news" applied to VNR and ANR (video and audio newsreels), which were pre-packaged "news" segments for television and radio prepared by corporations and/or PR firms. See: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fake_news>

But in other cases, especially where something's being sold, it's at the very least deceptive.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#99

Post by tux1968 »

samatman wrote: post #82
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.…

This is an insult to the Mercator projection, which exists to provide an objective map of longitude to up and down. The social graph of Twitter journalism is an ephemeron, it means only itself and maps to no other part of reality. This distorts in every direction it can, while giving no useful reference frame in return.

> Mercator projection, which exists to provide an objective map of longitude to up and down.

While true, it also distorts reality and leads to mistaken ideas about the world:

https://wonderfulengineering.com/the-authagraph-world-map-is...

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#100

Post by samatman »

tux1968 wrote: post #99
samatman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insult to the Mercator projection, which exists to provide an objective map of longitude to up and down. The social graph of Twitter journalism is an ephemeron, it means only itself and maps to no other part of reality. This distorts in every direction it can, while giving no useful reference frame in return.

> Mercator projection, which exists to provide an objective map of longitude to up and down. While true, it also distorts reality and leads to mistaken ideas about the world: https://wonderfulengineering.com/the-authagraph-world-map-is...

If you cut meat with an ax, this is a mistake, but it isn't the ax which is mistaken.
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