a suprisingly self-aware and perceptive piece from a member of the media "digestive tract" that produces this problem day in and day out.
I think this sheds too much blame away from major news media outlets, whose whole job _should have_ been to fact check the stories they hear on the "ground" (twitter). But it assesses twitter's role correctly.
The piece I think people forget is that twitter has absolutely no financial interest in solving the "misinformation" problem. Fake news drives engagement. People like and retweet everything, regardless of if its true. Twitter is a key tool for the media (and I suspect that's where the vast majority of its value comes from). It's at the centerpiece of the news cycle now. Twitter is great for short, digestible snippets and one-liners that the media (and fake news) thrives on. At every level, they are incentivized to drive "engagement" and this can mean at the cost of truth.
Nothing will change (significantly) until twitters bottom line (user engagement as a proxy for ad money) changes.
NYT is being gamed to feed misinformation so this is ironic to read; like the BuzzFeed article on fake news. I'm no Trump supporter but I have screen caps of single digit election predictions; e.g. 90/10 Hillary. It's owned by a Billionaire Mexican communications mogul[1] and is pretty much leftist & big business propaganda.
The only difference on Twitter is that a lot of little voices parrot 1 message instead of one loud one. The bots are great. You need both sides of propaganda to comfortably land in the middle; or at least be informed.
[1] Please don't pretend the founding family stock split helps them retain control.
Is the implication here that BuzzFeed is itself fake news? Because that's certainly not true. Some of the best real news reporting I've seen lately has come out of BuzzFeed News.
Yeah, BuzzFeed has a frustrating business model. Produce great volumes of worthless clickbait, wrapped with adverts and use the revenue to fund actual legit journalism.
Clearly it works to some degree but I expect they're going to struggle to ever move beyond their clickbait reputation.
Well, I mean, this is why they have the BuzzFeed brand and the separate BuzzFeed News brand, right? They even show up as two different channels (and different colors) in the Apple News app. A lot of people still don't seem to realize that there is a split like this, but changing people's perception of them is really just a matter of time.
"Liberal" doesn't mean left, though. What's 'left' about big business? Or capitalism? Just because "liberal" ideas are frequently found around leftist ones, it doesn't mean that leftism is liberal, nor does it mean that liberalism is leftist.
> "Liberal" as used in America usually means leftist. The original meaning of the word is largely forgotten.
"Liberal/conservative" and "left/right" both, in their original political definitions, describe essentially the same divide (the former comes from England, the latter from revolutionary France.)
They've diverged in modern usage somewhat because debate over the desirability of the movement of the locus of government power from personal prerogative of hereditary elites based on class right to the public at large based on individual rights is no longer the primary meaningful divide in the developed world, and rather debate over the precise nature of individual rights and the manner in which they should shape governance, most of which fits within the original liberal/left space (and the rest outside the classic right/left or liberal/conservative divide), is now current.
When did "leftism" become a real word? Not a year ago, it was floated by "rightists" to denigrate liberals, since then I've seen it used as a sort of a dog whistle. It couldn't possibly be that the general public is so dense that the most acceptable political divisions nowadays are "leftist" and "rightist?"
Will it devolve into full idiocracy of "redist" and "bluist" by the next elections?
I along with other "leftists" use it as a short-hand for left-wing politics, generally those who believe in politics usually placed on the left of the left-right spectrum, including but not limited to the abolition of what we believe are systematic unjustified inequalities within society.
I was lazy; I meant socially liberal, neo-progressive above but it was easier to use "left" because it's a quick short hand. The NYT seems to be very socially liberal but on issues that are often trivial while steadfastly being a big business/pro globalist mouthpiece, also backs US Govt with little push back.
That was my mistake on "left". I was lazy. I don't believe in a political spectrum but enough people understand that simply saying "left" meant everything in this paragraph mostly
The 90/10 (or more realistically, 70/30) were predictions of her chance of winning, not the votes. I.e. 90% or 70% likelihood of having over 50% of the electoral votes. It was not a prediction of getting 90% of the votes.
> I'm no Trump supporter but I have screen caps of single digit election predictions; e.g. 90/10 Hillary.
Yes, of course you do, these have been well documented by the same sources that produced the models. Why would you feel the need to screen cap them? Why would you put this statement next to fake news?
538 was being laughed at for 70/30 or greater and HuffPo and NYT had Hillary dancing on stage with Jay Z. I screen capped various organizations refusing to update polls, refusing to post WikiLeaks info and above all refusing to do the fucking news.
NYT broke Watergate which was embargoed by the president. I will never forgive them for how shameful and cowardly they have become. I am sure there are great men and women who work there, and for them I feel the worst.
"Widely castigated" is a huge hyperbole. Suppression of the email stories is absolutely critical for maintaining political control by the Democrat party.
Is there any other reason the NYT would suppress this story?
Personally, I look at all of it as rigged and treat their narratives as such up front, regardless of the source.
The media in the US has been gamed by one power broker or another since its beginning. The Founding Fathers wrote and distributed propaganda anonymously.
The government invented an entire group to handle modern propaganda operations and worked with the media to peddle their narratives for the last generation.
This is all documented plainly, often via government record itself.
I don't think measuring these things is all that useful, given this.
The premise of "it's gamed for partisan gain" is firmly established by history. How much either way is a quibble, IMO. Let's focus on equitable outcomes for all, and stop diving into these overly customized data holes.
fairly easy to spot the bots, but they all follow each other and have at least one (usually only one) picture of "themselves" to seem legit. the content of their twitter is all retweets or harsh responses. click on any political trending topic and see for yourself.
this has been going on for well over a year now, really surprised twitter can't figure out a decent solution like shadowbanning
I agree with everything you said, the bots will respond with inapplicable snarky responses to the target their programmer wishes to delegitimize. "Check your sources" for a post from CNN talking about their lunch today, etc.
I disagree that shadowbanning is a good idea; any frequent Twitter user remembers the controversy surrounding various outspoken celebrities claiming they were being shadowbanned as a result of their views.
Probably a better solution would be to require a daily captcha or other solution to add friction and cost to bot operators.
> Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.
This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly.
The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.
It "encourages" superficiality because it precludes "substantive debate" by reason of its artificial character limit.
I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.
There's tons of superficial and annoying posts on Medium and Facebook posts, as well as people sharing screenshots of their iPhone notes app on Twitter. Most of their authors posted them because they want attention.
It's not about the character limit. It's more about how humans want attention and there's an infrastructure to support that desire.
But there are also tons of reasoned and interesting posts on those mediums... the closest that exist on Twitter is the occasionally burst of tweets that you probably didn't even read on Twitter but saw on one of those Twitter conversation archiving websites, as the burst of tweets is totally untraceable :/. Twitter doesn't just "encourage" superficial content with its character limit: it actively enforces superficial content if you want to participate. I have half a million followers on Twitter and I essentially don't ever post anything there as it is next to impossible to say anything of value in 140 characters :/. Everyone I know in my field with Twitter accounts and a ton of followers essentially just use it to post snide bullshit and start arguments, or try and fail to be informative and spend the next week trying and failing to correct some misconception people got due to lack of context. The closest it comes to ever working is in the small community of people who seriously take to reddit to discuss what someone said on Twitter, which is the dumbest thing I could imagine... and it isn't even like Twitter is some amazingly successful company that can say "you are wrong, this works great": most of the talk about them is that they will fail or be acquired at a much lower valuation than they had many years ago.
Twitter is an endless bag of potato chips for the mind. However, it's within our nature to seek the path of least resistance, and munch on snack food to keep busy.
Yup. The 140 character limit is twitter's worst feature. It's difficult to have any substantial discussion or nuanced debate in a stream of 140 characters or less.
Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you.
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it.
That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.
I've always viewed 24 hour news channels in the same vein. Twitter just puts a layer of social validation on top of it.
Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media.
Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work.
Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines.
The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart...
in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions.
Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
Actually I've found Twitter to be the best news aggregator and breaking news platform of all. 140 char tweets make it easy to compare tweets with other sources very quickly. The algorithmic TLs though contribute more to fake news as well as users who haven't quite learned how to curate their own feeds. What's happened to critical thinking skills? Oh well, Twitter works well for me.
I'm a twitter troll but not by choice -- you need to have organic activity to advertise on their platform.
Selection bias at work here but my push-stream is 80% journalists/writers 20% schizophrenics. I can't imagine anyone being on there by choice. My adrenal glands are shot from 6 weeks of semi-pro use.
If NYT is going to argue that people are being deceived they need to explain what people are doing on the platform. Is anyone on there really not complicit in having strong emotions spewed at them by B-list brookings wonks?
Trump currently has 30 million followers, 15 million of which are fake or bots. About 8 million just showed up in the last 5 months, 2.5 million in the last 4 weeks.
America is driven toward having the information of the world encapsulated and fed to the masses as quickly and as often as possible. In my experience, this reflects any conversation I've ever had with most people in real life, give the bullet points, spare the details. If people really wanted details, they'd have to actually care about what is being discussed instead of looking to be mildly entertained, for example, 2 people conversing in real life:
"Trump is de-funding planned parenthood, that really sucks."
"Wow... Really? Did you hear about his Covfefe tweet this morning? What an idiot!"
Seems to me the whole article is an excuse to "debunk" the conspiracy theory around the obviously-suspicious Seth Rich story.
This sort of thing just confirms, to my satisfaction, that facts will have essentially no bearing on the next US presidential election. The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.
I didn't downvote you, but it seems trollish. Sure, the Hillary email story is a giant mess, but the Seth Rich part of it is pretty short. If you don't know why someone would characterize it that way, and you can't be arsed to spend 2 minutes Googling something you claim to have an interest in, well...
> The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.
What do you think the news has been for the last 100 years (or longer)? It was never unbiased. The news has always pushed the agenda of the entity that owned it.
Well, sure, but there was very definitely a clear ethical line in proper journalism, as a profession. You had to have the basic facts right, by at least 2 different sources. I think this has changed now.
For instance, is Trump in league with the Russians? What are the facts? On the other side, did Hillary break the law with her email server? What are the actual facts? In both of these cases, you can trace the points of argument ad nauseam, and an unbiased observer can come away with a feeling that both sides of both of these issues make good points. I know it's not a popular position to take on HN, but that's the way I feel about AGW. I think both sides have good points, and I don't know what to conclude.
I'm not entirely clear that it's completely nefarious. I just think we've reached a point as a society -- almost like a Maslow hierarchy -- where any problem we discuss is so complicated that there are (at least) 2 sides to anything worth discussing, and they make internal sense, and the difference is the worldview you bring to the argument.
With the drubbing the major news outlets took being COMPLETELY wrong about the last election, I think they've squandered the last bit of trust people had in them as objective reporters of fact. And, if it's all about opinion, then people are either going to reinforce their biases, or simply check out.
> After last year’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don’t like.
Couldn't agree more. But I really enjoyed 00s forums so I really enjoy twitter. The journalists, if anything, are ruining it by treating it as a clubhouse and a legitimate proxy for what's on the nation's mind.
Something about the structure of twitter makes things that happen there seem much larger than they are. It's an OK platform if you recognize that the communities on it are really, in the grand scheme of things, very small--but so many (especially media types) apparently view every random controversy caused by 3-4 highly-followed users saying something dumb as a vast cultural trend that needs to be reported on.
This is an important thing to remember. I wish the bbc would remember this when they post random twitter comments as if it were representative of the people reading their story.
It's amusing to see owners of disinformation platforms lose control of their content. They are put in the losing position of always playing catch-up to censor information which is often a pointless endeavor since by the time they catch up the mob's attention has moved on (but sometimes they can stop kill movements in their infancy). This is just the first wave, though. Newer platforms will be even more heavily AI-censored and manipulated; hopefully adversarial / chaos content keeps slipping through.
This is exactly what technology platforms bring out, the public decides what is of importance. But the issue isn't the platform itself. It just shows us on a large scale what drives the mentality of 80% of the population. Group mentality always lowers the IQ of individuals who are part of it. Ever heard of herd mentality?
A friend in one of my whatsapp groups shared an image with the meaning of covfefe yesterday, and I had no clue what it was about. I am on twitter but do not follow public personalities with the exception of 1 or 2 of them from my country. The beauty of twitter is in following people who aren't public personalities but are doing some cool/unique work in their walk of life.
Now this decision making is up-to the individual, to elevate one's own thoughts, ideas by focusing on good posts or to drown in mediocrity. The point as an individual for me is that exactly, strive to stay away from the noise-makers and focus on what is truly important. I would not be surprised if my comment gets a troll or a pissed off response that says 'I love stupidity, revel in it, keep your elitism to yourself' The best would be no comment or probably a comment which builds the conversation. But this isn't my choice, is it? Controlling what types of comments are allowed.
- The idea of freedom is that even stupidity can be practiced (my own quote)
64 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI think this sheds too much blame away from major news media outlets, whose whole job _should have_ been to fact check the stories they hear on the "ground" (twitter). But it assesses twitter's role correctly.
The piece I think people forget is that twitter has absolutely no financial interest in solving the "misinformation" problem. Fake news drives engagement. People like and retweet everything, regardless of if its true. Twitter is a key tool for the media (and I suspect that's where the vast majority of its value comes from). It's at the centerpiece of the news cycle now. Twitter is great for short, digestible snippets and one-liners that the media (and fake news) thrives on. At every level, they are incentivized to drive "engagement" and this can mean at the cost of truth.
Nothing will change (significantly) until twitters bottom line (user engagement as a proxy for ad money) changes.
This has been a problem for media since the dawn of man, I wonder if we can really solve it within our lifetimes. Seems improbable.
The only difference on Twitter is that a lot of little voices parrot 1 message instead of one loud one. The bots are great. You need both sides of propaganda to comfortably land in the middle; or at least be informed.
[1] Please don't pretend the founding family stock split helps them retain control.
Is the implication here that BuzzFeed is itself fake news? Because that's certainly not true. Some of the best real news reporting I've seen lately has come out of BuzzFeed News.
Clearly it works to some degree but I expect they're going to struggle to ever move beyond their clickbait reputation.
These seem to be at odds with each other, which makes me doubt that either or both of them is actually the case.
"Liberal/conservative" and "left/right" both, in their original political definitions, describe essentially the same divide (the former comes from England, the latter from revolutionary France.)
They've diverged in modern usage somewhat because debate over the desirability of the movement of the locus of government power from personal prerogative of hereditary elites based on class right to the public at large based on individual rights is no longer the primary meaningful divide in the developed world, and rather debate over the precise nature of individual rights and the manner in which they should shape governance, most of which fits within the original liberal/left space (and the rest outside the classic right/left or liberal/conservative divide), is now current.
Will it devolve into full idiocracy of "redist" and "bluist" by the next elections?
That was my mistake on "left". I was lazy. I don't believe in a political spectrum but enough people understand that simply saying "left" meant everything in this paragraph mostly
Yes, of course you do, these have been well documented by the same sources that produced the models. Why would you feel the need to screen cap them? Why would you put this statement next to fake news?
Do you not understand what was in your screencap?
NYT broke Watergate which was embargoed by the president. I will never forgive them for how shameful and cowardly they have become. I am sure there are great men and women who work there, and for them I feel the worst.
NYT, among others, has been widely castigated by Democrats for putting Hillary Email stories on their front page.
Is there any other reason the NYT would suppress this story?
Are you disputing that the email story made it to the front page of the NYT?
The media in the US has been gamed by one power broker or another since its beginning. The Founding Fathers wrote and distributed propaganda anonymously.
The government invented an entire group to handle modern propaganda operations and worked with the media to peddle their narratives for the last generation.
This is all documented plainly, often via government record itself.
I don't think measuring these things is all that useful, given this.
The premise of "it's gamed for partisan gain" is firmly established by history. How much either way is a quibble, IMO. Let's focus on equitable outcomes for all, and stop diving into these overly customized data holes.
this has been going on for well over a year now, really surprised twitter can't figure out a decent solution like shadowbanning
I disagree that shadowbanning is a good idea; any frequent Twitter user remembers the controversy surrounding various outspoken celebrities claiming they were being shadowbanned as a result of their views.
Probably a better solution would be to require a daily captcha or other solution to add friction and cost to bot operators.
This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly.
The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.
I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.
It's not about the character limit. It's more about how humans want attention and there's an infrastructure to support that desire.
Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you.
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it.
That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.
Remember what Marshall McLuhan said so long ago:
"The medium is the message" (emphasis added)
Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media.
Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work.
Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines.
The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart... in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions.
Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
Selection bias at work here but my push-stream is 80% journalists/writers 20% schizophrenics. I can't imagine anyone being on there by choice. My adrenal glands are shot from 6 weeks of semi-pro use.
If NYT is going to argue that people are being deceived they need to explain what people are doing on the platform. Is anyone on there really not complicit in having strong emotions spewed at them by B-list brookings wonks?
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/31...
"Trump is de-funding planned parenthood, that really sucks." "Wow... Really? Did you hear about his Covfefe tweet this morning? What an idiot!"
This sort of thing just confirms, to my satisfaction, that facts will have essentially no bearing on the next US presidential election. The journalists have had their day. Future political wars will be waged and won on social media, based on propaganda and confirmation bias.
What do you think the news has been for the last 100 years (or longer)? It was never unbiased. The news has always pushed the agenda of the entity that owned it.
For instance, is Trump in league with the Russians? What are the facts? On the other side, did Hillary break the law with her email server? What are the actual facts? In both of these cases, you can trace the points of argument ad nauseam, and an unbiased observer can come away with a feeling that both sides of both of these issues make good points. I know it's not a popular position to take on HN, but that's the way I feel about AGW. I think both sides have good points, and I don't know what to conclude.
I'm not entirely clear that it's completely nefarious. I just think we've reached a point as a society -- almost like a Maslow hierarchy -- where any problem we discuss is so complicated that there are (at least) 2 sides to anything worth discussing, and they make internal sense, and the difference is the worldview you bring to the argument.
With the drubbing the major news outlets took being COMPLETELY wrong about the last election, I think they've squandered the last bit of trust people had in them as objective reporters of fact. And, if it's all about opinion, then people are either going to reinforce their biases, or simply check out.
Don't lie NYT, that was always the point.
Couldn't agree more. But I really enjoyed 00s forums so I really enjoy twitter. The journalists, if anything, are ruining it by treating it as a clubhouse and a legitimate proxy for what's on the nation's mind.
A friend in one of my whatsapp groups shared an image with the meaning of covfefe yesterday, and I had no clue what it was about. I am on twitter but do not follow public personalities with the exception of 1 or 2 of them from my country. The beauty of twitter is in following people who aren't public personalities but are doing some cool/unique work in their walk of life.
Now this decision making is up-to the individual, to elevate one's own thoughts, ideas by focusing on good posts or to drown in mediocrity. The point as an individual for me is that exactly, strive to stay away from the noise-makers and focus on what is truly important. I would not be surprised if my comment gets a troll or a pissed off response that says 'I love stupidity, revel in it, keep your elitism to yourself' The best would be no comment or probably a comment which builds the conversation. But this isn't my choice, is it? Controlling what types of comments are allowed.
- The idea of freedom is that even stupidity can be practiced (my own quote)