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.
Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.
It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass. The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.
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.
The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.
Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes.
>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 the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass."
Well said!
Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism rates are much higher than they are:
This is a good take on twitters effect on journalism. I was just thinking the other day about why journalists don't separate their work account and private accounts. I grew up in a time where you generally tried to keep your real identity to a minimum on platforms. Yet journalists seem to suffer from an identity fusion with their professional work, their personal views, and their ego all coming together under a single persona on twitter. I won't name any person in particular but there are some big names out there who are just off the rails crazy these days.
I agree that this is true but don't just blame Twitter. Look at the major "news" networks. Look at the poor quality of "reporting". The bigger cause is the engagement above all else mentality of generating advertising. Click-bait, faux outrage, sensationalism, half-truths, posting 5 year old images out of context as "just in", creating scary fake crises, etc.
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.
It is very convenient if you want to run influence operations, to change the perception of reality for news consumers you only have to influence a handful of journalists by planting some tweets on their timeline.
> The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.
This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit problematic because that should be based on the merit of the research. The same issues could arise for other experts or famous people, where as you say their opinions are disproportionately echoed due to their presence and activity on Twitter.
Substack is trying to provide an intermediate channel where journalists can develop an audience independently of publications, but allowing for long-form content. It will be interesting to see if that works but I suspect only a small number of journalists can be successful in that model.
are blue check marks ever re evaluated or audited, and not just for authenticity of the person being who they claim but for the general validity of what they say or report?
Are there other badges similar to the blue check for other things? My understanding is that the blue check is for verifying people are who they claim, is there another badge to signify "hey this person posts legit things with references as a reporter"?
Disagree
The amount of events posted on twitter that aren't covered by traditional news is staggering. If anything twitter has exposed how much main stream news doesn't cover real major events. If not for twitter I don't think the #MeToo or #Occupy movement would of ever been acknowledged. Also the amount of abuse the police do to citizens.
- 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.)
There is a different explanation about the 'power posters' - not that they are "insane", but that it's their job. They get good amounts of money for doing what they do.
As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.
I know the article doesn't literally mean "insane" as in mental illness, but it reminded me of something that happened long ago and its implications for the internet.
My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left.
Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it.
Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years.
And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care."
It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.
It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago?
I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.
Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort.
That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?
Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality.
Quoting comment section of that article:
"This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world."
Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life".
Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most people's references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.
Wrt baudrillard. It always strikes me how well the modern condition was understood by the 70s. It's equally baffling how little has changed. Perhaps more specifically, the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology than say the industrial processes that enabled commoditization or the telecommunication and image reproduction technologies that enabled instant broadcasting.
During the Bush era, my debate coach in HS made the interesting point that neocon conservatives were more 'post-modern' (a tortured term 20 years later) relative to old-school 'truth-seeking', anti-imperialist Leftists like Chomsky
I keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech/hacker people and routinely mute/block those who think I want to hear their inane/naïve political opinions.
And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.
Agree here. For example I used to follow Scott Hanselman of Microsoft on there as he has some interesting tech material but it was constantly blended in with his far left views so I quit. I follow tech folks for the interesting tech opinions they have. Their expertise or thoughts on politics are about as important to me as my 10 year old neighbor’s.
I went a step further and unfollowed all individuals. I read Twitter about 1 or 2 times a week, in a browser. It starts to feel like what RSS was. It's reasonably useful to keep up on things this way. And I do "go play outside" enough.
I'm currently following 50 accounts. No journalists (i.e., no news accounts). I get enough new things to think about and gadgets to consider. Quick examples:
When there's an outage, Cloudflare Radar can be useful. When there's a traffic event, my US state's DOT can be useful. When there's a new release of OpenBSD: @OpenBSD.
What do you do about the recommendations? I am constantly bombarded with suggestions for topics that I have 0 interest in. I click not interested, I update my settings, I create custom ublock rules, and yet they always come back eventually.
I've said this before, and I've said this a lot. If you want discourse to be more representative of what people generally think instead of reinforcing and normalizing the most ideological and extreme opinions, platforms should curtail or rate limit user's public posts/comments.
If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind.
Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.
I bet we could sell ultrasonic transducers to audiophiles at a fat profit.
"Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes, drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years. Only $495"
I remember @pmarca kept a Twitter list of journalist accounts. It was a pretty good thing to browse, full of stories that journalists were trying to bring to light. Then in 2016 it became unreadable, just a 24/7 TDS group therapy forum.
Pretty much anything in here applies to journalism as well. We see bias in all outlets. Nobody reports on the mundane day to day, only the exceptional events. This leads to a skewed view of the world, even if they leave other biases out of it. There's also group-think where every network is carrying 90%+ of the same story (even if the takes are polar opposite).
I wouldn't call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should understand and see through the biases. It's a poor model given the realities though.
I think this overlooks the biggest issue. It's not just that Twitter (and most online forums) aren't representative of the public at large. It's that these sites are driven by a tiny number of hyper-online turbo posters, many of whom are likely mentally unwell. It's worth reading this post: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1].
Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person to be active in multiple internet communities. I've been surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name and beliefs).
The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it's easy to think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these problems).
>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.
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.
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 political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that it's actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the person making this claim isn't either literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what he writes.
And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it massively amplified. Terrifying.
Disingenuous BS. Since when are political rallies doubling up as evangelical revivals, and why? If I wanted to live in a theocracy I would move to Iran.
I don't care for this Tristan Snell person, an obvious political shill. But your protestations ring hollow. The psychological manipulation in this example and a recent Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio (music playing over the speech, similar coordinated gestures of religiosity in the audience) are screamingly obvious.
It also thrives in "hot takes" that might sound smart at first glance but are incredibly ignorant if you analyse them. Everything is oversimplified to fit the character limit, but nobody seems to notice. It's ignorant hot-takes in answer to other ignorant hot-takes. TikTok is basically the same btw, but in video format.
The PA cartoon, "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" really summed up the potential of the service right at the beginning. Twitter steamrolled other, better discussion sites with a sub-optimal design because it's impossible to have a real discussion there. Look who backed them, look at their early marketing efforts: This shit here was the goal all along.
Which 1-3 tweets though? When I open my Twitter homepage, the top 3 tweets are: art, a selfie, and lighthearted nostalgia about 90s cartoons.
It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
The prolific "threads" that have supplanted blog posts are one of the worst aspects IMHO. The threads get engagement, and that's addictive, but it's a horrible way to consume information.
We made a 100% accessible, globally connected town square, and this is what we got. Either we accept it or admit that humanity can't deal with the kind of interconnected open discourse that proponents of direct democracy dreamed of for ages.
I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt to it, in the long run probably for the better.
Infosec is partucularly horrible at this. You have twitter rock stars who do legit know their shit but being human means they sometimes lack the right perspective and experience which can lead to posts that are incorrect or lead people to misunderstand their opinions. "AV is bad", "VPN is bad", "just convert your AD network to mac" stuff like that and then you have their fans who sometimes don't think for themselves.
The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives.
My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with "cancel" bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it.
If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).
Super tweeters are very likely narcissist, possibly psychopaths, if they are not actually a front/shill/bot. Think about the people in real life who always have to be the center of attention. Rarely you will find someone with a virtuous mission, who recognizes the power of a group. Most often you just find an emotionally damaged person who is trying to fill a hole.
Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.
Often the super-Tweeters will be people who literally have nothing better to do (eg, their time is worth very little), or who are being paid to do so one way or another, and all of the things that implies.
Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on the internet :)
I've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it?
I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all.
I think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that this makes twitter more negative than real life, because negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For example, during the black lives matter protest the #DefundThePolice hashtag got a lot of circulation on twitter and reverberated with mainstream media and politicians. Despite it being a relatively fringe slogan, the way it's worded (taken literally, it sounds like abolishing the police altogether).
The entire article is an extended definition of the headline term mixed with discussion of the implications of presentation bias. It's also quite concise. To the point that I almost can't believe this isn't trolling.
I also take issue with the headline. "Tyranny" is when you have no choice. That is not the case with Twitter. First of all, there is the choice of using Twitter. Secondly, there is the choice of who to follow on Twitter. I would hazard a guess that "tyranny" is not a thing that most Twitter users experience on Twitter.
Most people on Twitter have referred to Twitter as "this hellsite" enough times that I can't say that I think this is anything new. Knowing Twitter is terrible and terrible for you is a prominent part of Twitter culture. There are many memes around the subject.
This blog does not inspire confidence when it cites studies which classify people from "extreme liberal" to "extreme conservative". Much of the US left has rejected the term liberal for decades (check out Phil Ochs' classic "Love me, I'm a liberal"). You throw away way too much information when you just use people's self identification on a scale like that.
The idea is nice and technically possible using the Twitter API but the system will clock you and ban you instantly if you try blocking 100 people at once.
I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.
Oh absolutely and it's not that hard. But that's an overly crude filter, because following is a one-way operation on Twitter so you might well follow people you actively dislike in order to keep tabs on what they're saying. Twitter Lists allow for much finer segmentation but because users get a notification about this many of them block people who add them to lists, and the List infrastructure is kinda mediocre.
I would like something a bit more fine grained. Have you retweeted positive things about x, y, or z or negative things about a, b, or c? Then I want your tweet marked with "do not engage" because there will be no point in trying to engage with them
"Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets."
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.
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't need people to watch as many ads as possible. So perhaps the solution is a version of Twitter that can exist without monetization.
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
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 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.
It's the result of the 2 party system. From 1860 to 1932 the liberals and the conservatives belonged to one political party, as is common elsewhere. After 1932, racial issues, and civil rights issues, brought the liberals together with the labor unions, and since then the "liberals" have been seen as belonging to the left.
However, during the 1800s and early 1900s, the word "conservative" continued to hold its monarchist overtones, and therefore it was rejected by all American politicians, regardless of their party. The first presidential candidate to describe himself as a "conservative" was Barry Goldwater in 1964.
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.
But then the left become associated with a greater expanded equality -- more social programs, safety nets, education, etc. The left therefore became associated with the term "liberal" while the right with "conservative" -- liberals interested in greater social equality, conservatives believing in more of a natural social hierarchy (still on top of legal equality). Then conservatives came up with the moderately-used term "neoliberal" to promote their market-based economic policies based on classical liberalism, in opposition to the left-wing expanded equality social policies. There's also the term "libertarian" which refers to classical liberalism without anything added -- no social equality of the left, and also no conservative cultural values of the right.
But nevertheless, I'm extremely curious to know what you call liberal that is distinct from both right and left?
Bakary|3 years ago
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.
Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.
It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass. The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.
SamBam|3 years ago
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.
The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.
Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes.
1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-...
crmd|3 years ago
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".
jqgatsby|3 years ago
Well said!
Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism rates are much higher than they are:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-p...
gonzo41|3 years ago
snarf21|3 years ago
samatman|3 years ago
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.
polytely|3 years ago
cinntaile|3 years ago
This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit problematic because that should be based on the merit of the research. The same issues could arise for other experts or famous people, where as you say their opinions are disproportionately echoed due to their presence and activity on Twitter.
nradov|3 years ago
labrador|3 years ago
I wasn't sure what you meant by that. Now I'm really confused:
https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Projection
chrismarlow9|3 years ago
are blue check marks ever re evaluated or audited, and not just for authenticity of the person being who they claim but for the general validity of what they say or report?
Are there other badges similar to the blue check for other things? My understanding is that the blue check is for verifying people are who they claim, is there another badge to signify "hey this person posts legit things with references as a reporter"?
DonnyV|3 years ago
amadeuspagel|3 years ago
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
dang|3 years ago
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.)
jbuhbjlnjbn|3 years ago
As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.
refurb|3 years ago
My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left.
Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it.
Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years.
And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care."
It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.
It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago?
I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.
Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort.
That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?
PKop|3 years ago
Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality.
Quoting comment section of that article:
"This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world."
Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life".
Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most people's references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.
trgn|3 years ago
imbnwa|3 years ago
fortran77|3 years ago
And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.
Vaslo|3 years ago
idatum|3 years ago
I'm currently following 50 accounts. No journalists (i.e., no news accounts). I get enough new things to think about and gadgets to consider. Quick examples:
When there's an outage, Cloudflare Radar can be useful. When there's a traffic event, my US state's DOT can be useful. When there's a new release of OpenBSD: @OpenBSD.
tomcam|3 years ago
colpabar|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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jonnycomputer|3 years ago
If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind.
Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.
PaulHoule|3 years ago
h2odragon|3 years ago
"Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes, drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years. Only $495"
Tycho|3 years ago
dexwiz|3 years ago
giantg2|3 years ago
I wouldn't call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should understand and see through the biases. It's a poor model given the realities though.
bnralt|3 years ago
Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person to be active in multiple internet communities. I've been surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name and beliefs).
The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it's easy to think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these problems).
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
slg|3 years ago
>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.
uwagar|3 years ago
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.
thepasswordis|3 years ago
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 political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that it's actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the person making this claim isn't either literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what he writes.
And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it massively amplified. Terrifying.
anigbrowl|3 years ago
I don't care for this Tristan Snell person, an obvious political shill. But your protestations ring hollow. The psychological manipulation in this example and a recent Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio (music playing over the speech, similar coordinated gestures of religiosity in the audience) are screamingly obvious.
teachrdan|3 years ago
[deleted]
jiggywiggy|3 years ago
It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.
Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.
password1|3 years ago
h2odragon|3 years ago
delecti|3 years ago
It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
duxup|3 years ago
Every time I’ve tried to cultivate a nice list of feeds it has been constant hassle to manage it.
andrew_|3 years ago
jimmaswell|3 years ago
I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt to it, in the long run probably for the better.
CharlesW|3 years ago
The Twitter experience depends mostly on who you follow and how.
The "who" is self-explanatory, and for the "how" I recommend solely using Twitter Lists almost exclusively.
coldcode|3 years ago
metabagel|3 years ago
You can also create a list of people who you are consistently interested in hearing from.
However, I agree that you’re probably better off without Twitter. It’s a time sink.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
MisterTea|3 years ago
How about leaving it at shutting down and be done with it.
badrabbit|3 years ago
The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives.
My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with "cancel" bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it.
If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).
readingnews|3 years ago
jraedisch|3 years ago
Very well put.
dexwiz|3 years ago
Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.
rconti|3 years ago
Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on the internet :)
iancmceachern|3 years ago
unwise-exe|3 years ago
Which potentially has implications if your area of interest isn't inherently tied to the main polarization axis.
patchtopic|3 years ago
codpiece|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
isaacfrond|3 years ago
I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all.
I'm left a bit confused.
ufo|3 years ago
yew|3 years ago
WaitWaitWha|3 years ago
It is a giant echo chamber of very few, where the media buys in to the echo as "everyone" and reverberate outside of the chamber as the truth.
[0] https://omnibudsman.substack.com/i/73890656/the-point
parasti|3 years ago
enviclash|3 years ago
guerrilla|3 years ago
jraedisch|3 years ago
vintermann|3 years ago
tlholaday|3 years ago
Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow` user @A.
Ideally:
> twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A
Edit: API Review Time!
brezelgoring|3 years ago
I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.
anigbrowl|3 years ago
CharlesW|3 years ago
jccalhoun|3 years ago
Pxtl|3 years ago
https://megablock.xyz/
> Don't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
equalsione|3 years ago
Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
ec109685|3 years ago
And if you look at the graph below, it does seem to show Twitter users who post political opinions skew liberal.
prions|3 years ago
* 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
antonymy|3 years ago
rchaud|3 years ago
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't need people to watch as many ads as possible. So perhaps the solution is a version of Twitter that can exist without monetization.
rchaud|3 years ago
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
ausbah|3 years ago
petesergeant|3 years ago
SpicyLemonZest|3 years ago
Bakary|3 years ago
lkrubner|3 years ago
However, during the 1800s and early 1900s, the word "conservative" continued to hold its monarchist overtones, and therefore it was rejected by all American politicians, regardless of their party. The first presidential candidate to describe himself as a "conservative" was Barry Goldwater in 1964.
crazygringo|3 years ago
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.
But then the left become associated with a greater expanded equality -- more social programs, safety nets, education, etc. The left therefore became associated with the term "liberal" while the right with "conservative" -- liberals interested in greater social equality, conservatives believing in more of a natural social hierarchy (still on top of legal equality). Then conservatives came up with the moderately-used term "neoliberal" to promote their market-based economic policies based on classical liberalism, in opposition to the left-wing expanded equality social policies. There's also the term "libertarian" which refers to classical liberalism without anything added -- no social equality of the left, and also no conservative cultural values of the right.
But nevertheless, I'm extremely curious to know what you call liberal that is distinct from both right and left?
0xbadcafebee|3 years ago
ceejayoz|3 years ago
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sh4un|3 years ago
[deleted]
npc54321|3 years ago
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