And yet it is Twitter that has reaffirmed itself as the most powerful antidote to Facebook’s algorithm: misinformation certainly spreads via a tweet, but truth follows unusually quickly; thanks to the power of retweets and quoted tweets, both are far more inescapable than they are on Facebook.
What is the evidence of this? Even if "truth" follows misinformation on Twitter, there's so much noise, how do you find it?
that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty,
Twitter isn't public discussion, unless you consider the following examples of discussion:
Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up! - Trump
Delete your account. - Clinton
Riveting.
Don't tell me that Twitter is a vital part of discussion when public discussion has gotten worse over the past 9 years. This is a long blog post and only the last few paragraphs even begin to touch on "why Twitter must be saved", but there's not arguments beyond the sentimental.
Twitter has existed for less than a decade and society got along just fine without it. It's not as important as people think it is. The author is also absolutely wrong if they believe that Twitter isn't censored similarly to FB.
It's not just wide public discussion, when there's some large local event(weather, tornado, etc) I usually find the most up to date and accurate information on twitter 2-3 hours before any news site.
It's the CB radio of social media and I find huge value in that.
Yes, much better. All it takes is someone and their phone.
Take for instance the recent tornado we had off the Oregon coast. I had video/pictures/reports showing up even ahead of the local NOAA site or google news.
Similar, there was a fire around my office a week ago and within minutes there were an image on twitter. Within 30 minutes multiple ones from various angles.
Granted, it was the first time I ever went to Twitter for something like this, but I knew that it was /the/ place for the most up to date information.
And I try to avoid Twitter as much as possible, too annoying to read in there.
I know about the Eternal September, but I believe that the AOL users that "swarmed" the network were more technically apt than the generic Twitter user and also were way fewer.
The skill (and motivation) gap between using something like IRC and Twitter is massive.
For some meaning of "limited subsection of the general population".
I had 12000 followers for a twitter account about a specific football club - a specific subsection but not a technical or media one.
I used to randomly look at my followers and while many were "highly invested tech and media people" - the majority were just people who wanted to stay up to date (in particular I used to live-tweet during games which lots of people really enjoyed).
That was a few years ago though - personally I rarely use Twitter any more.
Twitter is absolutely essential if you prefer to get your information unfiltered from the source. Yes, that means that there's much more noise and you have to work hard to keep your stream info-dense and free from your own biases. But any other source will have someone else's biases and spin, an extra layer of fog that you have to work through.
Nothing about Twitter is essential and Twitter is highly filtered. Twitter actively censors opinions and trends it doesn't like. Over the summer, #DNCLeaks trended hard, only to get removed and replaced by a typoed tag that killed its discussion and momentum. The same thing happens, or trending tags get outright removed, time and again with topics related to recent Wikileaks. This censorship happens far too frequently to certain topics to be "glitches" and it always "coincidentally" favors Twitter's political worldview.
Twitter also very selectively enforces rules about what it judges as hate speech and abuse. Certain people can repeatedly tweet "kill all police", or advocate jihad, or advocate violence towards those who support a particular political candidate, but the moment anyone does even a fraction of the same towards any group that Twitter is in bed with, that person gets shadow banned or permabanned. Note: I'm not advocating hate speech, merely pointing out that Twitter allows it more often than not when it aligns with their politics.
Twitter had a chance to be a platform for open discussion, but its brownshirt employees chose to make it a censorship shithole. Never-turned-a-profit Twitter can go fuck itself – it's not essential and highly filtered.
That's not an answer. Do you prefer to avoid news, or do you go through some other filter? Or do you just pace the world watching the news in realtime?
I thought about your comment, and I can tentatively agree with your premise. Twitter is certainly the most used way to disseminate information straight from the source.
The problem is, that is not Twitter(the company)'s goal. For the last several years, their main focus, through user complaints, has been to limit the unfettered flow of information, to produce curated feeds, etc. This is quickly converging with Facebook functionality. A recent major development (from outside Twitter itself) has been the introduction of blocklists, directly contradicting the author's utopia of "incorrect tweet followed by a correction". Meanwhile, Twitter has been introducing similar features for "celebrity" accounts.
Given that the article's stated reason for saving Twitter does not align with the company's goals, the only way to save it would be to get rid of the company currently managing it. However, I don't see any other company actually looking to maintain the model described in the article. News sites are shutting down comments sections, removing the possibility of corrections. College campuses, normally a bastion of open debate and conversation, are looking more and more into punishing "hateful" speech and creating "safe spaces". Social media is heavily invested into curation.
The article states "Twitter must be saved". By who? Even Twitter itself does not want Twitter to remain the way the article writer envisions it, and the other major actors are tripping over themselves to go faster than in the opposite direction.
There are in fact places dedicated to disseminating information with as little filter as possible, unlike Twitter. Off the top of my head, I can think of liveleak and 4chan. Neither of them is extremely popular, and 4chan has an awful reputation. I'm surprised that the author is not extending their support to them, instead of trying to support a company that is actively trying to run away from his vision.
After a cursory glance (it's a long list) I don't think any of the organisations strike me as particularly left wing, certainly not in the traditional economic sense.
I go here: http://www.memeorandum.com/
I filter out the extreme views and pick and chose the sources that I trust, but take a hefty dose of skepticsm with me when I visit any of the articles.
I don't think anyone in this subthread is suggesting Twitter can't be replaced (some are actually just arguing that it's the only current way to get direct, first-hand information about current events). What are you adding to the conversation here?
What did we actually do before Twitter? There was a shooting at my university's library late at night a few years back and I only found out about it because of Twitter. I know about 50 people that were actually physically in the library at the time and a handful of them were live-tweeting. I not only knew what was going on, and that they were safe, I was warned not to go about 200m south at the moment (which happened to be the plan, the bar my SO and I were going to was on the opposite side of campus).
When I looked the next morning, there was one (1) article about it on a local website and nothing in national or regional media. Later that afternoon a ton of info came out and hit the media, but until then, there really wasn't anything. That showed me the power of Twitter (however stupid and cliche I sound saying that [look typing?]).
Just because something isn't necessary to survive as a human being, or to allow society to function properly, doesn't mean it shouldn't be fought for (again, not necessarily saying Twitter as a company, but the idea of a social network that allows for immediate sharing of ideas and news) or at the very least appreciated.
Do you not see the utility or are you just being a cynic?
Twitter is a great medium for it, since it's public by default.
It's the easiest way for a random person to hold their own press conference. People can easily ask short questions, and get short answers. All from their phone
The Internet serves that purpose. You don't need Twitter, there's a ton of other ways to get news directly from the source. If you're arguing that "Twitter makes it visible", then yes, if you follow the right people or other share you interests, but in that case even Facebook would work.
Yes, Twitter is "absolutely essential" for getting information "from the source", and literally "any other source will have someone else's biases and spin". You've convinced me to stop reading research papers and complete my bioinfomatics education by reading Twitter. Thank you for opening my eyes!
By the definition of what? "Bias", "own bias", or "human"?
I don't know about "human", but being "biased" is something like "consistently straying from the truth in spite of available information", but there's nothing right there that says that everyone must be biased. In so far as someone is biased, they cannot be free from their "own biases" only in the same sense that I cannot think anyone's thoughts but my own. Still, nothing stops them from trying to improve.
Now, if you mean that we cannot avoid living in some particular information bubble, that's not a bias (at least in the psychological sense). That's an issue of incomplete information.
The way you framed those two quotations is misleading to say the least. Clinton did not make that Tweet as a reply to Trump's tweet, his was from 2014, and hers was from 2016.
So, your statement, "Twitter isn't public discussion, unless you consider the following examples of discussion:", does not follow. You also say that "unless you consider" the aforementioned quotations to be public discussion, you therefore can not possibly view Twitter as a tool for public discussion, which is a false dilemma.
I agree with your last line though about Twitter being censored in a similar fashion to Facebook.
All you have to do to confirm this is to visit their homepage and see all the left wing political ideology on it day in and day out.
I haven't seen anything on the Clinton email saga that has dragged on for months now and not a peep on the home page about the rising costs of the ACA premiums. Nope, just love and happiness about having the first female president. Besides that, it was a constant stream of Trump hit pieces from traditional Liberal newspapers and media outlets. It's like they didn't even try to be objective.
If you want to make your platform about public discussion, then maybe you aught to give a slightly more balanced view then the completely slanted, partisan garbage you post on your homepage. It might just give the appearance that you see things in a slightly more objective light.
Good argument. A counter example is wikileaks this election cycle. They would not have had a platform if it were not for Twitter. Lots of great discussion was enabled because of the Twitter platform. I don't think people would have organically gone to their website.
I think this is one of those examples where the platforms people use colour their opinion. From where I'm sitting Twitter and WikiLeaks aren't in anyway related. The Wikileaks stuff was all over the tech news sites, and more than anything: Reddit.
That's not to say that Twitter was useful for wikileaks, but I don't believe that it was instrumental.
Some of the wikileaks stuff was dynamite. E.g., the DNC deliberately undermined Bernie Sanders' campaign! Lots of different media outlets covered it and would have done so if they had to get that content via fax and carrier pigeon. Most people consumed that second-hand, so there was no need to drive traffic to wikileaks itself.
I thought CNN & Donna Brazile's cheating scandal of leaking questions to Clinton Campaign was the biggest dynamite as the other corruption surrounding the Clinton foundation was more or less taken for granted.
And yet it is Twitter that has reaffirmed itself as the most powerful antidote to Facebook’s algorithm: misinformation certainly spreads via a tweet, but truth follows unusually quickly; thanks to the power of retweets and quoted tweets, both are far more inescapable than they are on Facebook.
What is the evidence of this? Even if "truth" follows misinformation on Twitter, there's so much noise, how do you find it?
that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty,
Twitter isn't public discussion, unless you consider the following examples of discussion:
Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up! - Trump
Delete your account. - Clinton
Riveting.
Don't tell me that Twitter is a vital part of discussion when public discussion has gotten worse over the past 9 years. This is a long blog post and only the last few paragraphs even begin to touch on "why Twitter must be saved", but there's not arguments beyond the sentimental.
Twitter has existed for less than a decade and society got along just fine without it. It's not as important as people think it is. The author is also absolutely wrong if they believe that Twitter isn't censored similarly to FB.