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.
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.
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.
That's a very good point - I feel very uncomfortable on Twitter even today, but I can see how a "words first" education would make it easier to cope with.
It doesn't remove the issue though, since the space is so limited - IMHO Twitter is instead a much more fitting space for poets...
The best part is the reward of lying for "journalists".
If you lie and get caught, ignore it.
If the person who called you out has too much of a following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just interpreted things different.
They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find one? Well a Twitter account is free to make. Boom, the story is now how your critic is inciting violence, sexist, racist, probably voted for Trump, and insurrectionist, a climate change denier, white supremacist, transphobe, etc. That's the story now and you're the victim at the center of it all.
And the people employing these "journalists" don't just shield them from consequence, they reward them for it.
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.
The NYT also engages in the opposite of like-based reporting: contrarian articles that target engagement via outrage.
The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016 onwards)
Professor Hans Georg-Moeller of the University of Macau I think has some really good observations and a systematization of what he calls the "profilicity mode of identity production", as contrasted to "authenticity" and "sincerity". He frequently comments on how social media causes people to view their actions not directly, but on a "second order", through the eyes of the "general peer" as personified by the quantified likes and comments posts get on social media. I haven't done a great job summarizing here but he has a youtube channel with some good videos on the topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSkb1KppNc
I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for "identity production" are quite interesting.
I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to seek out more of that.
I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores.
I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias
More seriously, I can see how these are useful in situations where there is just too much content to sort through (hacker news, reddit, slashdot... google ?).
Of course you can also have randomly displayed results, but then this goes against the goal of elevating the quality of the results, at which point you need to pick winners and losers somehow. (Obviously, the traditional way to do it : human editors, has its own issues...)
After using the internet and nested thread style sites for way, way too long, I've finally comes to the conclusion that we had it right the first time with mailing lists, e-bulletin boards, forums, and imageboards: chronological, oldest to newest is the best way to read these threads.
Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
Oh yeah, I prefer forums too, they work great... until too much people want to comment on the same topic. Then they quickly become unusable for in-depth conversation, in a similar way that chats become for any conversation (except emote spam).
But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ?
(I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)
>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.
For many articles, the one dead giveaway that it was written by a human is the fact that almost all news articles have typos and severe grammar errors in the first hour or so of release.
If these Twitter journos had better spelling and grammar, they would likely be indistinguishable from GPT-3 output.
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.
"sources" are taken at face value as well and aren't reported critically at all.
If your personal narrative drives clicks it will not be challenged in any way...whether you're a random poster on twitter or a participant in the story itself.
That being said, they always had this power. It just used to be selectively chosen on the ground interviews with random people. It was slower and much more expensive, but it was there.
Or service workers whom they'd be most likely to meet: taxi drivers, barkeepers, restaurant servers, hotel concierges, shoe-shiners, etc. Accessible, yes, and possibly with a fair exposure to at least a range of views/responses from others. But not entirely representative.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, and make note of how the sources are identified. I'd be beyond shocked if "twitter" appeared even once.
IMHO the real reason for "collapse in confidence in journalism" is that this is itself a meme driven by people who, for partisan reasons, simply don't want to have confidence in media reporting things "their side" doesn't want to be true. In a world where truth (about climate change, election results, disease impact, etc...) is a partisan thing, those whose job it is to report the truth become part of the war.
But reporters today are doing the same thing reporters have always been doing.
[1] Except the occasional circumstance where someone specific says something notable and it happens to be on twitter. Trump said lots of weird stuff and it got reported, but it's not like someone went around filtering his otherwise-not-notable tweets for juicy stuff. "He Just Tweeted it Out" is a meme for a reason.
So frustrating. I talked about news and reporters, and you try to counter with links to two opinion pieces from their journal's respective "culture" sections.
Your point seems to be, what, that people who disagree with you are posting on the internet? Should we make the same criticism of Substack too?
I don't understand the distinction you're attempting to draw here. I looked at the Vox article in particular in detail, and it doesn't seem to have any kind of disclaimer that it's in a special section or that editorial standards have been lowered.
Am I just supposed to know that the string "/culture/" in the URL means it isn't real news and I shouldn't trust it? Even as a big proponent of media literacy, that seems unreasonable. News organizations must be aware that people will believe them when they publish things.
Oh, come on! The title of that article is, verbatim: "The racist backlash to The Little Mermaid and Lord of The Rings is exhausting and extremely predictable"
Are you seriously arguing in good faith that you were fooled into thinking that this was a piece of objective journalism?
You are providing a perfect example of my point, which I'll endure the downvotes to point out: rather than see an opnion article with which you disagree and just accept is as an inevitable result of large populations of people living together, you feel the need to explain the disagreement as some kind of existential flaw with the whole field of journalism. Then you feel justified in extending that "mistrust" engendered from Vox authors writing articles you don't like to pieces of real journalism providing real facts with which you also disagree.
And so the whole field of journalism is sullied in your mind, simply because (in this case) you don't like the fact that some people think black mermaids and elves are kinda OK and want to defend their casting against those who don't.
I'm arguing that I literally do not understand the distinction you're drawing. In my mind, "news", "reporting", and "journalism" encompass all articles written by news organizations about current events. I wasn't fooled into thinking this was a piece of objective journalism, but I did think it's a piece of non-objective journalism, albeit one where I ultimately agree with the author's thesis.
But you seem to be saying it's not journalism at all. So what I'm trying to understand is:
* What is the shape of this "not journalism at all" category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't personally think is important?
* Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
* Does the average media-literate person know any of this?
Right now I can't answer any of these questions, which makes the entire edifice seem more like a trick than a real distinction. It's not obvious to me why a news organization would want to publish bad articles which don't live up to their journalistic standards in the first place.
> What is the shape of this "not journalism at all" category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't personally think is important?
For the NYTimes, anything from the opinion section, anything the second half of the category list (Arts, Books, Style, Food, Travel, Magazine, etc.) I would consider is held to a lesser standard than the first half (World, U.S., Politics, N.Y., Business). Also, articles in those sections were less likely to be about current events specifically, and might include reviews, interviews, and other content that isn't "of the day". The Opinion section is actually a nice divider.
> Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
Outside of explicit tagging of Opinion pieces as such, no. In the old days, in paper form, you generally knew that anything in section A was solid journalism, other than the opinion pieces in the back, and in Column 1 of the front page. Section B (Local news), was usually okay, but could get a little weak further to the back. Section C (Sports) was good on game facts, but other stuff could be weak. Section D (Business) was usually good again, but was much more likely to also include PR fluff pieces and other similar stuff. Section E and beyond (Arts/Calendar, Comics, etc.) was all less serious. Parade Magazine, an insert that showed up in many publications across the US was complete garbage.
> * Does the average media-literate person know any of this?
Most people knew about the opinions section, it was pretty clear back then that the paper didn't stand behind those pieces, and they only represented their author's opinion. The feel of each section and the advertisements included therein did give some sense of the importance of the section.
I have felt for some time that the loss of the metadata around opinion pieces has done real damage to Journalism, and that it would be good for publications to come up with some standard for identifying that, to reduce the instances of breathless reports of "The Washington Post is a socialist rag!" after a single opinion piece by an actual socialist is published.
I'm pretty sure many of those major publications ran a story or two about the "Ghost of Kiev" which was later shown to be a piece of Ukranian disinformation that was disseminated through Twitter.
On a more serious note, Twitter has been a very valuable source of info about the Ukraine War in general, which also makes it ripe for psyops from the Russian and Ukrainian governments. Several people on Twitter are very reliable sources, much moreso than the official state sources, and they get the news out faster. It makes sense for those sources to be used by journalists.
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, ...
Some of the only reasonable journalism I’ve read in the past year has been from The Atlantic. I have a large group chat with friends all over the political spectrum and we all can engage with and appreciate it every time someone posts an article from there. In fact The Atlantic gets more links for us than just about any other publication. Really, what downfall are you on about?
Uh, no? Here's the only spot in that story where the word "Twitter" (I looked for "tweet" too) is used:
> Throughout the summer, the Network Contagion Research Institute noticed a spike in extremist activity related to the Dutch protests on Twitter, Telegram and 4chan, the message board on which conspiracy theories spread largely unchecked
The source for that statement is quite clearly NCRI. It's reporting news about twitter. It's not looking to twitter for news.
And frankly your attempt to blur the distinction is exactly the kind of memery that I was takling about. The NYT is your enemy, so you feel justified in spinning arguments to "attack" them.
"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:
The original study said that 50-55% made it back into prison. The new study says it's more like 33% that make it back into prison. Yes, 1 of 3 is better than 1 of 2 but it's still 1 of 3. I'd call that high personally. In what other circumstance would I take a risk of something bad happening if the bad outcome happpened 1 out of 3 times?
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 was thinking about going into journalism for a time and an ex- broadcaster teacher of mine connected me with a journalist to talk to. One of the biggest things, he said, about being a journalist nowadays is you need to build your own brand. Most journalists nowadays don't get hired as staff writers, they mostly work freelance. So in order to stay relevant and keep getting work, they need to develop a SM presence and get likes, clicks, etc. That part was what really turned me off from journalism as any sort of career.
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.
That is a fair question to ask. One big issue is that the Fairness Doctrine was repealed long ago. TV news used to make quite a lot of money actually reporting the news. While times have changed, they have taken the easy road down the TMZ path. I think people would be even more interested in actual news instead of the "who can shout the loudest" nonsense we have now.
The sci-fi seried Buck Godot proposed an entertaining solution - allow only a limited number of journalists to exist, and let the aspiring journalists sort it out between themselves.
The one living journalist in that story was completely amoral, but boy was she willing to go to great lengths to get the story!
The Bloomberg/Reuters model seems to work well: charge hedge funds $xx thousand per person per year for super-fast up-to-date news, and use that to fund reporting for a $10-50/month subscription service that also has a limited free tier (a few articles/month with ads).
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.
On the contrary, it is a reverent homage. What other map is so significant in modern-day culture that it has gained any reputation at all, let alone a cadre of haters? Thanks to it, discussing map projections will never not be funny.
_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 (other projections such as the Cahill–Keyes projection or Dymaxion projection seem better for both).
But of course, if you want the least amount of distortion, just get a globe.
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).
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.
And in theory, praising them with a disproportionate (compared to their own average's) number of likes and retweets when they tweet something to you(r organization's) advantage.
It's been in the news. There've been over a dozen high profile agency staffers who have left for CNN, MSNBC, etc just in the last few years.
CNN has: James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Steven Hall, Phil Mudd, Susan Hennessy, Samantha Vinograd & James Gagliano
MSNBC has: John Brennan, Frank Figliuzzi, Chuck Rosenberg, Malcolm Nance & Jeremy Bash
> 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.
I am happy to see professors engaging with the public, especially if it helps to make the underappreciated half of their job that is teaching more glamorous. I am very unhappy that some of them would debase themselves by using Twitter to do so.
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.
It also introduces even more weakness to certain types of influence. The NYTimes has some defense against people not liking an article because while people can cancel a subscription it’s not directly tied to the editor-author/journalist.
But substack is directly tied - so unless people really trust the author and refuse to cancel if they write something they don’t like you’ll be more inclined to avoid going outside the margins.
I think the causality is reversed here. Financial success on substack will come from developing a particular style that doesn't exist elsewhere in quite the same way, just like a writer or musician. It's not that people will walk on eggshells as they build a bigger audience, but rather that they have to start flanderizing themselves from the start to get that audience in a crowded market.
Yeah, what I was getting at is that you end up with a very defined market and you can’t easily switch out of it. A substack started around “public transit is pretty cool/good” will eventually be unable to have any article that implies cars have value, to pick and arguably bad example.
It’s an interesting personal question to ponder - who of those I read would I read if they wrote something diametrically opposed to what I hold? The lists are often pretty short, sadly.
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.
Very ironically/interestingly, this was case for the big anti-american posts from mainland China:
Infamously anti-west personality Sima Nan: "Being anti-American is work while visiting the U.S. is life"
https://youtu.be/Q0y84Oi3VW8
Short summary, his wife and child are U.S citizens, and he visits them often, but his entire career is made up of bashing the west, western values, and putting the ccp on a pedestal, and he's made a small fortune on this career... until his turn came.
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.
> 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.
There doesn't have to be a single explanation, though. It can be paid shills and obsessives.
Eh. It can happen. I know someone who's paid to moderate [1] a "grassroots" brand subreddit. It's just that "you're not real" is easier to believe than "you genuinely think Donald Trump is the prophesied Jewish messiah." Barring conclusive evidence (which rarely [2]) people gravitate in one direction.
I'd guess it's a mix, with a little straight money, a lot of obsession, and a middling amount of compensated cat herding.
[1] The playbook being basically "discuss reasonable criticism, remove unreasonable criticism" ie "nobody talk too much about that battery fire, but don't make it look suspicious."
[2] "On the Internet, you know everybody who disagrees with you is a dog."
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?
As people’s “real world” connections dwindle the desire to just talk continues - I’ve known people who are perfectly content with their crazy idea if they can talk about it now and then, but if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.
> if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.
We’re a social species so a big component of our thinking is in community with others. When that community is healthy our rougher edges are smoothed out, when that community is lopsided or absent altogether then we drift and warp.
> “insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we’re practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any public communication mechanism.
Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus" books were borne from his time as an editor for Penthouse's letters-to-the-editor section, where he had the same experience.
In writing the story, took all of the crazy conspiracy letters and entertained the idea of "what if every single one were true?"
There is one major difference between then and now though; back in the '90s, those nutty voicemails never made it into the public domain, and thus those "ideas" were unable to spread.
In 2022, political rallies are playing Qanon theme music, because they know exactly how well those ideas have spread.
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
To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary term, rather than an epoch.
Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and capitulated.
In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same mountain as it has since then.
I think so too. It’s become a term which means so many different things to so many different people, I don’t know how much value there is in calling someone a “postmodernist” from a political standpoint these days.
Vonnegut, Pynchon, Wallace etc. are what one should think about when they’re discussing postmodernism. People relating it back to gender or race theory is kinda silly IMO.
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 mentally tuned them out! Also, twitter seems to have made recommendations more in-line with my filter bubble so even when I notice them, they're often relevant.
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's ironic that you're accusing the parent poster of "Disingenuous BS", when you yourself are engaging in moving the goalposts. The parent post was complaining about how a tweet was unfairly describing a political rally as a "nazi salute", but you're changing the topic to "political rallies doubling up as evangelical revivals" and "psychological manipulation". It's fair to be against this political rally for those reasons, but it's unfair to accuse them of "nazi salute".
Right, it just looks like a Nazi salute and it serves the same psychological purpose, but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK. I think it would be wiser to ask yourself why this is being deployed at political rallies, rather than complaining about how it is 'unfair' to draw comparisons just because you can identify superficial differences.
It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity. It seems to me that if you're in a culture where people are widely familiar with Nazi iconography, and you're not exploring Nazism in some fictional or educational context, then you'd want to avoid doing and saying things that make you look and sound like a Nazi, such as training a crowd of people to do a stiff-arm salute at a political rally for theatrical effect, the same way it's a bad idea to hold up swastika flags and claim you were being 'ironic' or 'trying to provoke a discussion'.
In the sense of what? Raising your right hand? That's basically the only part that overlaps. From wikipedia:
>The salute is performed by extending the right arm from the shoulder into the air with a straightened hand. Usually, the person offering the salute would say "Heil Hitler!" (lit. 'Hail Hitler!', IPA: [ˌhaɪl ˈhɪtlɐ] (listen)),[3] "Heil, mein Führer!" ('Hail, my leader!'), or "Sieg Heil!" ('Hail victory!').
Also, in the video a prayer was performed and afterwards they slammed their hand while saying "as one", both of which are not part of the nazi salute.
>it serves the same psychological purpose
Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as "symbol of support in a political rally"?
>but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK
I'm certainly not defending the actions that were taken by the participants of the rally, and I suspect neither is the other poster (thepasswordis). The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not. The problem with this is that words have meaning, and if you start using in cases that clearly does not fit the original meaning, then it gets watered down. eg. "nazi" nowadays is synonymous with "white supremacist" (which itself has also been watered down), which is far from the original meaning of "member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party". That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?
>It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity.
I'm not against taking note of the similarity. I'm against calling it a "nazi salute" with no qualifiers.
> Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as "symbol of support in a political rally"?
It's collective, coordinated, and directs attention toward an individual on stage, as opposed to an individual expression of support like clapping or cheering - which many people might do simultaneously but isn't normally coordinated outside of a music performance. The 'as one' hand slamming you mentioned emphasizes the coordination here; it's novel, but basically an iteration on the original gesture.
> The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not.
The tweet is somewhat hyperbolic and sensationalized, but while it's not exactly the same I really think it's more similar than different - it's a choreographed gesture of support for a political figure at a political rally involving a straight arm salute. As I said earlier, harping on the cosmetic differences sidesteps the very obvious question of 'does this look like a nazi rally to a casual observer?' And that matters, because political rallies aren't intellectually rigorous exercises in philosophical inquiry, they are theatrical performances designed to motivate political behavior through emotional arousal.
> That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?
Groypers (this is an in-joke). We also have open neo-nazis who are explicitly aligned with the historical national socialist movement to the point of fetishizing it. The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains in multiple countries at present can be generally described as fascism without any loss of precision or clarity. This doesn't have to refer to the-Italian-party-once-headed-by-Benito-Mussolini. Obsessing over typologies is sometimes a coping mechanism to avoid engaging with an issue, like having an argument about meteorology to avoid admitting you should have brought an umbrella.
>As I said earlier, harping on the cosmetic differences sidesteps the very obvious question of 'does this look like a nazi rally to a casual observer?'
But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi rally"? If you go around saying that a politician just held a "nazi rally", what pops in your head? You seem to think that the answer to both is something along the lines of "collective, coordinated, and directs attention toward an individual on stage", but I doubt most people believe that. This sort of behavior isn't limited to just political rallies for white supremacists, it's used by basically everyone. Calling right-wing or even white supremacist rallies as "nazi rallies" makes as much sense as calling left wing rallies as "Bolshevik rallies".
>The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains in multiple countries at present can be generally described as fascism without any loss of precision or clarity
You don't see the problem here? You just equated "right wing authoritarianism" with "nazis" and "fascism". What does "right wing authoritarianism" mean, anyways? Is it just people who are more right wing and authoritarian than you by some arbitrary amount? If a politician is called a "nazi" or a "fascist", his policies could be anywhere between "more funding for the police and stricter immigration enforcement" and "round up minorities and send them to death camps".
> But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi rally"?
A combination of Nazi-style iconography and right wing/reactionary rhetoric. I've yet to see a 'left wing rally' in the US but I suppose that could take in center-left rallies by politicians like Bernie Sanders. And people do label such events as a bunch of commies.
I'm not sure what you have in mind with 'Bolshevik rallies'. I can't think of anything visually distinctive about historical examples, and when I think of Communist party events I think of very formal affairs in auditoriums as you might see from China or North Korea. I'm having trouble imagining an American equivalent.
> You don't see the problem here? You just equated "right wing authoritarianism" with "nazis" and "fascism". What does "right wing authoritarianism" mean, anyways?
If you're struggling with very common political theory terms used in a wholly conventional way, perhaps you should consult a dictionary instead of asking me to stand in for one.
>A combination of Nazi-style iconography and right wing/reactionary rhetoric
So a rally with people raising their fists[1] and arguing for state expropriation and/or redistribution would be a "communist rally"?
>And people do label such events as a bunch of commies.
And you think that's a fair label?
>If you're struggling with very common political theory terms used in a wholly conventional way, perhaps you should consult a dictionary instead of asking me to stand in for one.
Sounds like you're trying to dodge the issue, which is that politics lies on a spectrum and there isn't an obvious point between "wants more funding for cops and tighter border control" and "wants to round up and kill a particular ethnic group" that defines "right wing authoritarianism". Even if you were somehow able to come up with a principled definition, I doubt that it's something that most people would agree with, which means practically speaking all these phrases essentially boil down to "people with politics that I find too extreme".
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.
This guy is popping on stage with Michael Flynn, who is doing a national tour combining 'Stop the Steal' election theft narratives with New Apostolic Revival theology.
I think this conversation is an example of people living in different worlds, and it's the type of thing that has been created out of the place that things like what I linked above have pushed the discourse.
In my world: the nazis were essentially a psychotic death cult who engaged in genocide. They didn't work up to this. This was core to their political ideology starting in 1920.
But there seems to be another world where the Nazis were just some bad guys with some bad ideas or something, and in that world random politicians who say anything outside of mainstream, American leftwing political ideology are "nazis".
Obviously I think that's bad, since like I said before I think its a form of holocaust denial. In fact this was something that soldiers and journalists worried about when they found the nazi death camps at the end of the war. They worried that in the future people wouldn't believe that this had happened, or wouldn't understand how bad it was.
It seems like that has happened. I think that in a large part mass media like twitter has facilitated it.
What I would say is: please study history. The nazis weren't just some bad guys. They tried to kill several entire races of people, and erase their existence from history. They succeeding in killing a lot of them before we were able to stop them. It cannot be overstated how evil the Nazis were, and I wish people would stop trying to downplay this.
> random politicians who say anything outside of mainstream, American leftwing political ideology are "nazis"
> its a form of holocaust denial
This is nonsensical and self-contradictory. People on the far right today are compared to Nazis because they are articulating the exact same ideas of genocidal elimination, sometimes with explicit reference to and endorsement of the Nazis. you're invoking 'random politicians' as if they were quirky nobodies in unimportant political backwaters, but this is demonstrably not the case. I can point to members of Congress and and successful state level politicians that openly endorse far right anti-Semitic propagandists.
> What I would say is: please study history. The nazis weren't just some bad guys. They tried to kill several entire races of people, and erase their existence from history. They succeeding in killing a lot of them before we were able to stop them.
It's because I've studied history that I think you are (at best) staggeringly naive. The Nazis were clear about the intensity of their animus towards Jews and lots of other groups, but not explicit about how they were going to achieve their goals of eradication (because they didn't know). As a result few took them particularly seriously at first, and even when they took power foreign observers assumed they would set aside their bombastic demagoguery in favor of mundane administrative efforts. The same sort of unwillingness to contemplate political risks obtains now, and it is just as foolish.
I wonder what effect this sort of "debate" in public is having on people's ability to talk to each other.
In a normal discussion if you and I were just talking to each other and nobody was watching, it would be easy for you to just admit that you are wrong. You are wrong about your comparisons between center right American politicians being similar in any meaningful way to Nazis (for instance: both Nazis and American conservatives use spoken word to convey their messages. They both held political rallies. These are not meaningful similarities.), and you are also wrong about your understanding of people raising their hands in prayer.
Do a google search for "lifting single hand while praying in church" and you will find pages and pages and pages of religious people debating the biblical relevance of this. There is absolutely nothing meaningfully similar between a religious person raising their hand in prayer (what was happening in the linked video) and a Nazi salute.
You were just simply incorrect about this, seemingly because you didn't know about the practice of religious people doing this.
In a normal conversation, it would be easy for you to just receive this piece of information you didn't have previously, integrate it into your understanding about the world, and rebuild your arguments around this new understanding.
But online, especially with twitter and the like, every one of these discussion is effectively happening on a stage in front of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people. People (I think you are doing this right now) will go so far to avoid being wrong about something, that they eventually get to the point of having to build and present a world model that is totally rotated around the thing they were wrong about. The entire world has to change to support this minor inaccuracy in what was said.
So for example: instead of acknowledging the fact that you were just wrong about how people pray, you are now building out this world in which The United States of America is filled with thousands of churches full of millions of people who for the last several hundred years at least have been signaling their alignment with a genocidal, national socialist German death cult.
Can you see how that's a problem? Not the way you're engaging with this (which I do think is a problem), but the fact of making all of every conversation public?
Even suppose we were having this conversation in a private message. Even that doesn't matter because either of us could just screenshot it, put it on twitter, and invite the mob to ridicule the person who was wrong.
Look at the lengths people will go to protect their idea of "well actually the entire world is wrong and I'm right".
It's really scary stuff.
I don't think it's necessary to continue talking to you about Nazis and how American Christians are or aren't signaling an alignment with them. However in the spirit of good argument, I think it's also rude to try to take the last word and not let somebody reply. Feel free to respond to this, but after that I won't be replying to you anymore.
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.
I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about.
I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about.
If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
Like all social media it values speed way more than anything else. Even on HN you’ll see it. Hundred page document gets posted, but the first comments will be from people who clearly couldn’t have read it.
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.
It's almost the perfect design for dumbing down topics and the population, keeping them fighting among themselves so they don't unify and fight the real enemy.
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.
I often catch up on latest news around several topics, sports etc. Twitter is normally faster then news mediums. So every now and then I check the trends. Every single trend you click turns into a cess pit from tweet nr 2 or 3.
Don't check the trends. Find a circle of people with your interests and stay away from political spam you're not interested in. That makes Twitter very useful for e.g. following research or getting informed opinions.
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).
You could also say your attention span in real life overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not really so different.
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.
It's a common usage, not meant to be taken quite so literally. Try something that will autocomplete search for you and start with "the tyranny of..." and see what happens.
I get:
- The tyranny of structurelessness
- ... of merit
- ... of tears
- ... of the dark
- ... of metrics
- ... of weakness
and I'm sure they'd just keep going if it could display more entries at once. While typing, it brought up an article complaining about Millennial design aesthetics containing the phrase, "the tyranny of terrazzo".
It's like "goto considered harmful" but with a longer history, and way more popular—familiar to a much wider set of readers than "... considered harmful", that is.
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.
> A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them.
This very far from my experience. I've pretty much never met an avid Twitter user who doesn't think Twitter is a personal and societal problem. As I said, it's banked into the culture and there are tons of memes about it. You won't even find journalists not speaking in this self-deprecating way...
I wonder if Discord will be one day a sort of "Twitter of Twitters" dealing with all these issues, with some servers focusing on Echo Chambers and other servers on either organized discussions or flame bait.
I'd consider them slightly different. "Hellsite" is a pretty common epithet for sites that are the brain version of cotton candy or Taco Bell: Very few people are under the impression that Tumblr or (to show my age) Fanfiction.Net were productive ways to spend their time. But 'hellsite' to me has a connotation of 'is devoid of intellectual/emotional stimulation and challenge' along with 'harmless'.
What grandparent commentator is talking about is, to me, more about realizing that Twitter isn't Taco Bell: It's arsenic. Or lead in makeup: Actively, immediately harmful. Not just 'bad for you'.
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.
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.
>> 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, where it took on a somewhat narrower, variant meaning that focuses on "social liberalism."
> 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 think the woke left and MAGA types have made more noise lately and it has disturbed some of the balance we've had the last 70 years where everyone is essentially onboard with the New Deal Regime.
Not really though. We are so immersed in it and the country is so different today than before it that we don't even notice it. We went from a pure capitalist country (where government in large part existed to clear way for capitalist projects and ambitions) to a very managed one with the New Deal. Social safety nets, benefits and entitlements, fiscal and monetary policy, and government "programs"/departments numbering in the hundreds or thousands did not exist before the New Deal.
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?
Liberal as defined by a leftist tends to mean, in my experience, a deference to less regulated markets, and support for needs based social programs.
Leftists (so called) economically challenge the idea that markets are inherently good, asserting that many industries should not be market based. Health insurance, prisons, schools, and so on. They tend to be more open to universal social programs which don't require stringent needs testing.
Leftists tend to distinguish themselves from liberals more than distinguish liberals from conservatives in my experience. I would say liberals in America have much higher respect for marginalized groups, and they seem to have a desire to solve problems, as opposed to Republicans.
edit at 1636 UTC: My above comment is quickly thought out and from mobile. I think "party alignment" would be somewhat more complex if our voting system allowed more than two parties to exist.
> what does "liberal" mean in your context? What country are you in?
I quite like the definitions here[0] honestly, and to quote from that:
> We believe markets are astonishingly good at creating wealth but less good at distributing that wealth. We support a market-based economy that promotes economic growth and nurtures innovation, while also supporting a safety net that shares the gains of that growth with everyone.
In the UK, I would contrast that with a left who are skeptical of free markets, and a right who are skeptical that anyone who doesn't accumulate wealth under free markets should be entitled to any.
Assuming you're American, and assuming my memory of their positions is correct, Elizabeth Warren is a liberal where Bernie is a leftist.
OK, I see what you mean. Does that correspond to actual political parties in the UK? Is there a "liberal" party that is considered neither left nor right?
I would say that in the US, what you're calling liberal would translate to "centrist/mainstream Democrats" who believe in the market but also in a social safety net. In other words, the majority of Democrats. But we also just call that the left, because it's the mainstream political viewpoint that is opposite to the right.
What you are calling the left, we call "progressive", which is why you see so many references to the "progressive wing" of the Democrats. Which includes Bernie and also AOC, who also call themselves "socialists", but in the US this doesn't mean communist -- it's not about government ownership, but vastly stronger regulation, protection, and government action generally.
While Elizabeth Warren is really her own idiosyncratic category. She's doing her own thing that isn't really aligned with mainstream Democrats or with the progressives, or with anybody else particularly. If anything, you might call her more "technocrat" than anything else.
But at the end of the day I hope I've answered your question as to why liberal = left in the US. Because liberal means pro-equality, and for whatever historical reasons, equality moved from mere legal equality to a more robust equality of opportunity. And we use "classical liberal" to distinguish the old liberal from the new.
> 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.)
> America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought have any relationship to "left."
That's simply not true. Because "liberal" is a word that means many different things in many different countries, it's a famously malleable term.
For example, Wikipedia says (emphasis mine):
> The definition of liberal party is highly debatable... This is a broad political current, including left-wing, centrist and right-wing elements. All liberal parties emphasise individual rights, but they differ in their opinion on an active role for the state. This list includes parties of different character, ranging from classical liberalism to social liberalism, conservative liberalism to national liberalism... [1]
Indeed, a quick search for the term "left" on that page shows that "liberal" is used to describe leftist parties in the Bahamas, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Croatia, and North Macedonia at least. It's not just an American thing.
I think the two party system is ultimately to blame for this, though I have no idea what the solution would be. Up in Canada, we have three left-leaning parties, NDP, Liberal, and Green, which represent some very different political views but all have varying levels of representation in our parliament.
After living in the States a few years it's become clear that none of the 3rd parties are taken very seriously, and if you're not R you've gotta be D, and vice versa. For a country where I've met so many sharp and politically sophisticated folks, I think it's a bummer they have one binary choice when it comes to their national vote.
Within each party is where you find the subdivisions. Democrats have within them Socialists to classical liberals" and the Republicans have MAGA to traditional liberals. It's fluid though.
It's within the primary elections where you see the most interesting elections at times. Sometimes you'll get a challenger in a district where it makes sense, like when AOC took on an established classical liberal and flipped it, pushing the representation leftward while still being Democrat.
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.
Instead of using "n*liberals", we should be calling them "conservatives". Larry Summers, for example, is a conservative.
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?
This is a completely mistaken use of the word "neoliberal." Neoliberalism refers to a worldview that thinks in terms of market-oriented policies, global trade, privatization, etc. You thinking it has something to do with wokism or OK symbols is a perfect example of the word being used incorrectly.
Correct. I don’t understand why you’re being down-voted for stating something that’s so incontrovertible. Neo-liberalism is an economic philosophy that aims to turn back the clock on Keynesian (or New Deal for the other side of the Atlantic) policies and return to “laissez-faire” capitalism of the 19th Century.
It’s orthogonal to social liberalism (or “wokism”), i.e., one could be an advocate of privatisation of state services and just as easily be socially conservative or socially liberal.
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.
First, "neoliberals" aren't supporting any of this.
Second, your facts are wrong. The ok sign stuff was some very sensitive people pushed by foreign propaganda. Militias aren't the army. That's why they're militias. Like calling the Wagner Group the Russian Army.
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.