> Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.
This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly.
The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.
I've always viewed 24 hour news channels in the same vein. Twitter just puts a layer of social validation on top of it.
Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media.
Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work.
Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines.
The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart...
in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions.
Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
It "encourages" superficiality because it precludes "substantive debate" by reason of its artificial character limit.
I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.
Yup. The 140 character limit is twitter's worst feature. It's difficult to have any substantial discussion or nuanced debate in a stream of 140 characters or less.
Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you.
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it.
That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.
Actually I've found Twitter to be the best news aggregator and breaking news platform of all. 140 char tweets make it easy to compare tweets with other sources very quickly. The algorithmic TLs though contribute more to fake news as well as users who haven't quite learned how to curate their own feeds. What's happened to critical thinking skills? Oh well, Twitter works well for me.
Seems to me the whole article is an excuse to "debunk" the conspiracy theory around the obviously-suspicious Seth Rich story.
This sort of thing just confirms, to my satisfaction, that facts will have essentially no bearing on the next US presidential election. The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.
> The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.
What do you think the news has been for the last 100 years (or longer)? It was never unbiased. The news has always pushed the agenda of the entity that owned it.
a suprisingly self-aware and perceptive piece from a member of the media "digestive tract" that produces this problem day in and day out.
I think this sheds too much blame away from major news media outlets, whose whole job _should have_ been to fact check the stories they hear on the "ground" (twitter). But it assesses twitter's role correctly.
The piece I think people forget is that twitter has absolutely no financial interest in solving the "misinformation" problem. Fake news drives engagement. People like and retweet everything, regardless of if its true. Twitter is a key tool for the media (and I suspect that's where the vast majority of its value comes from). It's at the centerpiece of the news cycle now. Twitter is great for short, digestible snippets and one-liners that the media (and fake news) thrives on. At every level, they are incentivized to drive "engagement" and this can mean at the cost of truth.
Nothing will change (significantly) until twitters bottom line (user engagement as a proxy for ad money) changes.
Trump currently has 30 million followers, 15 million of which are fake or bots. About 8 million just showed up in the last 5 months, 2.5 million in the last 4 weeks.
fairly easy to spot the bots, but they all follow each other and have at least one (usually only one) picture of "themselves" to seem legit. the content of their twitter is all retweets or harsh responses. click on any political trending topic and see for yourself.
this has been going on for well over a year now, really surprised twitter can't figure out a decent solution like shadowbanning
I agree with everything you said, the bots will respond with inapplicable snarky responses to the target their programmer wishes to delegitimize. "Check your sources" for a post from CNN talking about their lunch today, etc.
I disagree that shadowbanning is a good idea; any frequent Twitter user remembers the controversy surrounding various outspoken celebrities claiming they were being shadowbanned as a result of their views.
Probably a better solution would be to require a daily captcha or other solution to add friction and cost to bot operators.
Couldn't agree more. But I really enjoyed 00s forums so I really enjoy twitter. The journalists, if anything, are ruining it by treating it as a clubhouse and a legitimate proxy for what's on the nation's mind.
Something about the structure of twitter makes things that happen there seem much larger than they are. It's an OK platform if you recognize that the communities on it are really, in the grand scheme of things, very small--but so many (especially media types) apparently view every random controversy caused by 3-4 highly-followed users saying something dumb as a vast cultural trend that needs to be reported on.
It's amusing to see owners of disinformation platforms lose control of their content. They are put in the losing position of always playing catch-up to censor information which is often a pointless endeavor since by the time they catch up the mob's attention has moved on (but sometimes they can stop kill movements in their infancy). This is just the first wave, though. Newer platforms will be even more heavily AI-censored and manipulated; hopefully adversarial / chaos content keeps slipping through.
I'm a twitter troll but not by choice -- you need to have organic activity to advertise on their platform.
Selection bias at work here but my push-stream is 80% journalists/writers 20% schizophrenics. I can't imagine anyone being on there by choice. My adrenal glands are shot from 6 weeks of semi-pro use.
If NYT is going to argue that people are being deceived they need to explain what people are doing on the platform. Is anyone on there really not complicit in having strong emotions spewed at them by B-list brookings wonks?
This is exactly what technology platforms bring out, the public decides what is of importance. But the issue isn't the platform itself. It just shows us on a large scale what drives the mentality of 80% of the population. Group mentality always lowers the IQ of individuals who are part of it. Ever heard of herd mentality?
A friend in one of my whatsapp groups shared an image with the meaning of covfefe yesterday, and I had no clue what it was about. I am on twitter but do not follow public personalities with the exception of 1 or 2 of them from my country. The beauty of twitter is in following people who aren't public personalities but are doing some cool/unique work in their walk of life.
Now this decision making is up-to the individual, to elevate one's own thoughts, ideas by focusing on good posts or to drown in mediocrity. The point as an individual for me is that exactly, strive to stay away from the noise-makers and focus on what is truly important. I would not be surprised if my comment gets a troll or a pissed off response that says 'I love stupidity, revel in it, keep your elitism to yourself' The best would be no comment or probably a comment which builds the conversation. But this isn't my choice, is it? Controlling what types of comments are allowed.
- The idea of freedom is that even stupidity can be practiced (my own quote)
America is driven toward having the information of the world encapsulated and fed to the masses as quickly and as often as possible. In my experience, this reflects any conversation I've ever had with most people in real life, give the bullet points, spare the details. If people really wanted details, they'd have to actually care about what is being discussed instead of looking to be mildly entertained, for example, 2 people conversing in real life:
"Trump is de-funding planned parenthood, that really sucks."
"Wow... Really? Did you hear about his Covfefe tweet this morning? What an idiot!"
> After last year’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don’t like.
NYT is being gamed to feed misinformation so this is ironic to read; like the BuzzFeed article on fake news. I'm no Trump supporter but I have screen caps of single digit election predictions; e.g. 90/10 Hillary. It's owned by a Billionaire Mexican communications mogul[1] and is pretty much leftist & big business propaganda.
The only difference on Twitter is that a lot of little voices parrot 1 message instead of one loud one. The bots are great. You need both sides of propaganda to comfortably land in the middle; or at least be informed.
[1] Please don't pretend the founding family stock split helps them retain control.
> I'm no Trump supporter but I have screen caps of single digit election predictions; e.g. 90/10 Hillary.
Yes, of course you do, these have been well documented by the same sources that produced the models. Why would you feel the need to screen cap them? Why would you put this statement next to fake news?
The 90/10 (or more realistically, 70/30) were predictions of her chance of winning, not the votes. I.e. 90% or 70% likelihood of having over 50% of the electoral votes. It was not a prediction of getting 90% of the votes.
Is the implication here that BuzzFeed is itself fake news? Because that's certainly not true. Some of the best real news reporting I've seen lately has come out of BuzzFeed News.
Personally, I look at all of it as rigged and treat their narratives as such up front, regardless of the source.
The media in the US has been gamed by one power broker or another since its beginning. The Founding Fathers wrote and distributed propaganda anonymously.
The government invented an entire group to handle modern propaganda operations and worked with the media to peddle their narratives for the last generation.
This is all documented plainly, often via government record itself.
I don't think measuring these things is all that useful, given this.
The premise of "it's gamed for partisan gain" is firmly established by history. How much either way is a quibble, IMO. Let's focus on equitable outcomes for all, and stop diving into these overly customized data holes.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|8 years ago|reply
This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly.
The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.
[+] [-] tkahnoski|8 years ago|reply
Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media.
Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work.
Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines.
The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart... in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions.
Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|8 years ago|reply
I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.
[+] [-] voidhorse|8 years ago|reply
Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you.
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it.
That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.
[+] [-] teaneedz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notadoc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fgandiya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|8 years ago|reply
This sort of thing just confirms, to my satisfaction, that facts will have essentially no bearing on the next US presidential election. The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.
[+] [-] lj3|8 years ago|reply
What do you think the news has been for the last 100 years (or longer)? It was never unbiased. The news has always pushed the agenda of the entity that owned it.
[+] [-] jjawssd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pillowkusis|8 years ago|reply
I think this sheds too much blame away from major news media outlets, whose whole job _should have_ been to fact check the stories they hear on the "ground" (twitter). But it assesses twitter's role correctly.
The piece I think people forget is that twitter has absolutely no financial interest in solving the "misinformation" problem. Fake news drives engagement. People like and retweet everything, regardless of if its true. Twitter is a key tool for the media (and I suspect that's where the vast majority of its value comes from). It's at the centerpiece of the news cycle now. Twitter is great for short, digestible snippets and one-liners that the media (and fake news) thrives on. At every level, they are incentivized to drive "engagement" and this can mean at the cost of truth.
Nothing will change (significantly) until twitters bottom line (user engagement as a proxy for ad money) changes.
[+] [-] visakanv|8 years ago|reply
This has been a problem for media since the dawn of man, I wonder if we can really solve it within our lifetimes. Seems improbable.
[+] [-] joezydeco|8 years ago|reply
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/31...
[+] [-] nfRfqX5n|8 years ago|reply
this has been going on for well over a year now, really surprised twitter can't figure out a decent solution like shadowbanning
[+] [-] linkregister|8 years ago|reply
I disagree that shadowbanning is a good idea; any frequent Twitter user remembers the controversy surrounding various outspoken celebrities claiming they were being shadowbanned as a result of their views.
Probably a better solution would be to require a daily captcha or other solution to add friction and cost to bot operators.
[+] [-] extr|8 years ago|reply
Couldn't agree more. But I really enjoyed 00s forums so I really enjoy twitter. The journalists, if anything, are ruining it by treating it as a clubhouse and a legitimate proxy for what's on the nation's mind.
[+] [-] bbctol|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siegecraft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|8 years ago|reply
Selection bias at work here but my push-stream is 80% journalists/writers 20% schizophrenics. I can't imagine anyone being on there by choice. My adrenal glands are shot from 6 weeks of semi-pro use.
If NYT is going to argue that people are being deceived they need to explain what people are doing on the platform. Is anyone on there really not complicit in having strong emotions spewed at them by B-list brookings wonks?
[+] [-] morsmodr|8 years ago|reply
A friend in one of my whatsapp groups shared an image with the meaning of covfefe yesterday, and I had no clue what it was about. I am on twitter but do not follow public personalities with the exception of 1 or 2 of them from my country. The beauty of twitter is in following people who aren't public personalities but are doing some cool/unique work in their walk of life.
Now this decision making is up-to the individual, to elevate one's own thoughts, ideas by focusing on good posts or to drown in mediocrity. The point as an individual for me is that exactly, strive to stay away from the noise-makers and focus on what is truly important. I would not be surprised if my comment gets a troll or a pissed off response that says 'I love stupidity, revel in it, keep your elitism to yourself' The best would be no comment or probably a comment which builds the conversation. But this isn't my choice, is it? Controlling what types of comments are allowed.
- The idea of freedom is that even stupidity can be practiced (my own quote)
[+] [-] HoppedUpMenace|8 years ago|reply
"Trump is de-funding planned parenthood, that really sucks." "Wow... Really? Did you hear about his Covfefe tweet this morning? What an idiot!"
[+] [-] snickerbockers|8 years ago|reply
Don't lie NYT, that was always the point.
[+] [-] wand3r|8 years ago|reply
The only difference on Twitter is that a lot of little voices parrot 1 message instead of one loud one. The bots are great. You need both sides of propaganda to comfortably land in the middle; or at least be informed.
[1] Please don't pretend the founding family stock split helps them retain control.
[+] [-] epistasis|8 years ago|reply
Yes, of course you do, these have been well documented by the same sources that produced the models. Why would you feel the need to screen cap them? Why would you put this statement next to fake news?
Do you not understand what was in your screencap?
[+] [-] pilsetnieks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|8 years ago|reply
Is the implication here that BuzzFeed is itself fake news? Because that's certainly not true. Some of the best real news reporting I've seen lately has come out of BuzzFeed News.
[+] [-] ajflkjasdf777|8 years ago|reply
The media in the US has been gamed by one power broker or another since its beginning. The Founding Fathers wrote and distributed propaganda anonymously.
The government invented an entire group to handle modern propaganda operations and worked with the media to peddle their narratives for the last generation.
This is all documented plainly, often via government record itself.
I don't think measuring these things is all that useful, given this.
The premise of "it's gamed for partisan gain" is firmly established by history. How much either way is a quibble, IMO. Let's focus on equitable outcomes for all, and stop diving into these overly customized data holes.
[+] [-] ue_|8 years ago|reply
These seem to be at odds with each other, which makes me doubt that either or both of them is actually the case.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hardworkforyour|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] creaghpatr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|8 years ago|reply