Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.
Would agree.
Some old school journalists from NYT wrote about that phenomenon. Colleagues doing a lot of stories that were basically the groupthink of their friend group or what they saw on Twitter.
Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.
Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.
Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.
In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.
Yes & No.
Twitter, it is always worth remembering, is not real life.
The opinions you encounter as typical there tend to be the very fringe single digit percents of each political faction. Viewing the world through it exclusively is perilous.
When someone publishes a recording that is verifiably Russian bombing of Syria, and claims it to be Israeli bombing of Gaza, it is not a matter of “opinion”. And investigative journalism has nothing to do with Twitter in particular. However, do remember that Twitter (as well as Facebook, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon, email, Matrix, WhatsApp, or what have you) is as much part of real life as anything else, online and off, is part of real life. It is not some proverbial Las Vegas where nothing counts.
That sounds a lot like how "news" were sourced before that, with random interviews at street corners near the newspaper's office, stuff they heard at parties and from friends.
I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired[1] American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper.
> I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
Publisher of NYTimes is on the record in a few interviews basically saying that yes, his journalists are putting in less work into their pieces (because they are forced to produce more pieces per day).
You used to get the same phenomena in broadsheets before that though. I saw it frequently in the Sunday (maybe Saturday?) magazine included in the big UK papers.
I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s.
I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.
Yes! I hadn't managed to sit through and read the thing until now, though I've seen a number of interesting excerpts quoted.
Two that really stuck out to me was-
Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”
Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.
The NYT has always gathered the zeitgeist of highly affluent and artsy new Yorkers, who tend to be highly invested in maintaining their status quo. They may not be right wing by principle, but they get there a lot on some subjects by talking to lots of bankers and financiers.
I guess 'maintaining status quo' is to me a conservative / right wing thing. I'm recollecting for example in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent a critique of the NYT being very pro-establishment, pro-government. But I guess that critique itself is from an extreme.
The upper crust of Manhattan is filled with left of center people who think taxes on the rich are too low, but they themselves aren't rich (because Manhattan is expensive and they spend/save all their income) and that Trump is bad because he raised their taxes when he capped SALT.
I have friends here who semi-jokingly call me a republican for being more center-left than them & not wanting to watch John Oliver, while they own $10M of rental properties & don't think they are rich. The kind of upper class folks who have laid off numerous people in their career without a hint of remorse, but also think the social safety net is too weak. People who vote for AOC but plan to move to FL for tax purposes. Etc.
Basically the Loro Piana $500 ballcap demographic.
20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").
I don’t know what you mean. “Liberal” was in scare-quotes because that’s just the word that rightwing talk radio used to describe anyone on the left (or even center), and they said the word with disgust.
Yes, I know libertarians call themselves “classical liberals” and the left uses “neoliberal” as a similar epithet for anyone more centrist than themselves, but that was the connotation of the word.
I meant that this happened in the past 10 years. “Liberal” wasn’t associated almost solely to “left”. It was generally accepted. This “classical liberal” euphemism, in its current meaning, is also kinda new, and almost everybody who uses this nowadays is not associated to liberalism at all.
Yup, and it was even worse because you could drive any narrative and reinforce any bias that way. Make up a story, search 3 random Tweets that support it, and now you can report on anything to an audience that will eat it up, no real evidence needed. It is still happening of course, but at least now people rightfully look at Twitter with a little more suspicion.
This coincided with a reevaluation of the role of objectivity in journalism, and the rise in the number of journalists who also self identified as activists. While I don't think The View From Nowhere was every really possible, I do think that this reflected a shift in norms that resulted in more blatant cherry picking of facts and backfilling of narratives to support predetermined conclusions.
I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented.
Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people.
Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends.
That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.
They got so sick of hearing about political bias they decided they didn’t want to be news sources after all, is my impression. Too bad they only came to their conclusion after getting news publishers to totally reorient themselves around social media though.
I can't decide if I dislike these more than the articles that just list items on Amazon where they just quote the reviews like they interviewed them. I assume they generate enough money through the link click throughs that make these articles worth while? I find these more repugnant than listicles. But twitter quotes, amazon review summaries, and listicles have to be the top 3 least favorite for me.
The problem I notice is even though we might create niche interest groups online, they're hard to translate into real life. Makes it hard to connect with others when you meet them for drinks, find a movie to watch or some other sort of entertainment.
I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".
20 years ago, we’d talk each Monday about this week’s Simpson or X-Files, and we knew that 95-100% of the people in our group watched it on Sunday. We don’t have that today.
I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”
I knew a lot of people who got into Ancient Aliens craze (paradocumental series on History Channel). Every week they would meet up and talk about whatever conspiracy they aired that week.
I was so glad to be missing out.
Sure, it's just an anecdote, no perhaps I was unlucky, but I want to show that it's not always a positive thing to have this "shared culture" that you speak of.
Eh, counter-argument to that is — it is sometimes really fun to discuss absolutely outrageous and stupid conspiracy theories. It’s a fun thing to laugh at, I would say even that gives a common ground to a group.
This is fun until one person says "well, they are kinda right". Happened in that group I'm thinking of, now some of them are unironically saying the pope has UFOs hidden in a garage.
This reminds me of how me and my friends once upon a time started browsing 4chan and jbzd (Polish nsfw meme site) for "spicy memes". We found some gems, but I couldn't stand negativity of these places. Few years later some folks developed genuine strong dislike for women and people of color. They are decent people otherwise.
Hence I cannot stand "silly"/conspiracy stuff like this, even if people say it's just for fun. Sadly, it sells well, so this is what you get exposed to when you start watching TV or online memes. And since it is simplistic, it is easier to have a discussion in a group about "why Muslims are bad" or "do you also believe that Vatican is hiding UFO incidents" than about e.g. politics of The North in Game of Thrones.
Fair, I totally get what your point. But that’s an argument for getting rid of “for the memes” media, which incites unjustified hatred towards other people. I’ve known people who got into those rabbit holes as well.
However, my argument was about “having common topics for discussion in real life”. As of now, you don’t really need to meet up with people to go down the conspiracy guy rabbithole. As you mentioned, you can be siloed and find your people online.
But yeah, I guess we’ll see where the whole “media curated for one person only” tactic takes us with all the implementations of recommendations algos.
They are not at all. You just need to establish some inclusion criteria, go through one cycle of rejecting people who don't meet it, and the people who remain following a purge tend to have elevated levels of group loyalty. Astroturfing is not that hard, and there's a lot of literature on how to engineer the outcomes you want.
Maybe not the fragmentation itself, but the general awareness of that fragmentation, yes. It sounds like a healthy thing for none of us to feel like we have a sense of "the internet" as a whole. I for one look forward to again being genuinely surprised to learn people's batshit insane opinions and theories, as I was in the early 2000s the first time I stumbled upon AboveTopSecret.
>Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.
Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing is still nothing.
For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent,
while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period.
While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets
still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this
data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.
Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86
per cent.
Yeah I had the same thought about the account creation metric, I agree that X is such a new name that increased searches about its name don't really mean much.
The overall usage stat does line up with X's own claims about traffic though. i.e. X is saying that traffic is higher than it has ever been and this source suggests the same as well.
These days the only persons who start to follow me, like my tweets or even advertise in my feed are those onlyfans, digital prostitutes or whatever. In fact it's the first time I have to use the block function on Twitter.
Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year.
Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark.
I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains
The article goes into that in depth, and how that hasn't really changed even on newer platforms like TikTok, just gotten harder to follow and understand.
I argue that Twitter is far superior now to it's previous incarnation. It's no longer controlled by a certain political viewpoint and now encourages all free speech. I find it extremely useful, much more so than any other source now.
Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark.
That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.
Well same fucking thing about Twitter / X. A bunch of journalists - a profession generally and historically associated with the lower and middle class - have been / are being absorbed into the elite social classes of America, and they had a special widdle mark that gave them abilities the rest of the hoi polloi didn't have... and Elon Musk came around and he didn't just take it away from them - he did something worse. Same for the academics. Same for the so-called "thought leaders".
He gave it to the common people. He put the elites and the commoners on equal footing... and they freaked the fuck out about it.
X is not dying. It just isn't lorded over by the elites any longer. And they can't fucking stand it.
Good.
The Internet was supposed to be The Great Leveler anyway. We weren't supposed to have gigantic centralized platforms where only approved speech from the Party is allowed. The sooner the rest of these enormous social media platforms either die or radically change, the better.
X didn't die, isn't dying, and won't die. The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.
And yes, the "you" in the above refers to me too... a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.
I’m not sure I agree that this is close to reality.
The reality is much more benign. Musk isn’t the savior of free speech, he inserts rules against it constantly, like throttling nyt or saying they’ll comply with authoritarian states. He’s complains about spam and bots (despite claiming it’s an easy problem to solve) then changes verification in a way the makes it difficult know who is actually who.
Separately, you seem very bitter toward people who have left twitter after Elon changed it. Perhaps because with the voices of the elite (a politically loaded term you’re using to describe experts or people at the top of their fields) departing, the platform is less valuable and interesting.
The sad thing is, I think Elon could have been a good steward for the platform, but instead he’d rather antagonize advertisers and a subset of his users. That’s not being the great leveler though—if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.
I've always found this story so fascinating. The amount they get targeted is insane for being a satire website, regardless of if you think it's funny or not.
"Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement." [0]
Considering the thousands of deaths and people murdered by the US government in places like Libya while Hillary Clinton fumbled foreign policy as Secretary of State, the article is clearly, by definition, satire. QED.
John Oliver and Stephen Colbert (and formerly Jon Stewart) would beg to differ. Their "satire" consists entirely of making fun of anyone to the right of AOC.
Saying something that's officially forbidden is quite often satire. Saying something that you know your audience agrees with is not.
Can you explain the satire to me then? To me that article looks like another example of Clinton's have people killed. Who is being made fun of? What's the joke?
I think people with near zero empathy regard their interpretation as primary, but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor.
> but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor
I agree completely. And I would think that someone with greater than zero empathy would have a hard time arguing that there is one and only one correct way to interpret a piece of writing. An author with a non-zero amount of empathy should be well aware that their work will be interpreted in a variety of ways by a varied audience, and won't seek to hide behind the flimsy shield of "satire" when they publish something intentionally provocative and incendiary.
If i found out who you were in real life, and lets say I had a big platform, and started writing "satire" about you to spreading rumors, you just have to deal with it? I can hide behind the idea I'm calling it satire with no repurcusion?
Like sticking with the Halloween theme, "Mensetmanusman's neighbors are unsure if the screams are Halloween decorations, or another child locked in his basement this year"
I can write stuff like that, because lets say I want people to start thinking you are the kind of person that tortures kids for what ever reason, call it satire, and be protected?
No one’s fundamentally obligated to impose repercussions on you for such speech, and the first amendment protects those that choose to publish your speech from any government repercussion.
> if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.
It's not as Twitter was a common space for everyone before Musk took over. I do like X Spaces. Great conversations with different point of views. Far superior format to cable tv talk shows. It seems like X is pivoting it's model away from advertisers. Given the out of touch "corporate friendly" message brought to you by ... it's refreshing to hear more realistic conversations. Not perfect, but they are up against Cable news & some of the corporate sponsored YouTube channels...which seem so...fake.
How is throttling the New York Times on X anti-free speech? NYT is its own media platform, among the most powerful in the world, why should it expect a separate outlet to promote it? Further, as a powerful media outlet, the Times itself "throttles" all kinds of voices and opinions with which its editorial board and majority of its employees and readers don't agree.
The narrative that Musk is "opening" Twitter is false. The game has not changed, he just swapped out some of the rules for ones he personally likes better. For example, deadnaming trans people is now protected speech, but calling a cis person "cis" is punishable. I do not care what your opinion on trans people is - this is a double standard and is not "free speech absolutism". He also banned an account that was posting public data about his personal jets. He is afraid of absolute free speech (which is reasonable - most people are).
That's an entirely different, unrelated argument. I asked about the New York Times, which is just as powerful and influential (probably moreso) as Twitter. NYT content is not free for Twitter users to read, why should it be able to use Twitter for free to essentially mine for subscribers?
Twitter can ban and throttle whoever it wants, they own the platform.
What's __silly__ about the NYTimes being throttled on Twitter is how Musk champions his platform as a bastion of "free speech", while silencing those he disagrees with (NYTimes) or can't be bothered to defend (enemies of authoritarian governments).
What __concerning__ is how many people claim to believe that Musk is actually a free-speech champion. Are they just trolling the rest of us, or do they actually believe it? Either one is worrisome.
But every NYTimes tweet is, essentially, a free advertisement. It doesn't post a simple comment or opinion (its writers do, sometimes), but every post from the official New York Times account is a brief summary of, and link to, a story on its own platform (most of which are inaccessible to non-paying subscribers). Yes - this is also true of almost every other media platform that tweets - but that makes this an argument about advertising content, not "speech."
NYT does not claim to be a platform for everyone's free speech, and their editorial board is held to account for the shit they publish. Compleyely diffetent business.
Elon wants it both ways - when u ask him, why is there messed up shit on twitter, he sats free spedch. When u ask him, why can't X post on twitter, its because he editorialized it.
He wants all the benefits and none of the accountability.
It claims, quite famously, to publish "all the news that's fit to print" and then internally, chooses stories to promote (often with very specious sourcing) and others to squash.
I only have a few anecdotal pieces of evidence but I know of two people, who didn't give a damn about checkmarks, who have stopped using twitter because it's unusable now. They were die-hard twitter users who were on it every day but now they don't even open it. They were also the only two twitter-obsessed folks I know and now both of them have no interest.
Again, just anecdotes but I feel like that's more evidence than you're sharing in this comment.
> a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.
That's a weird take. The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed? It would seem you're describing a personally significant change right there.
> The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed?'
He is saying that there was no meaningful change to the Twitter software that would diminish previous value found in posting on Twitter. You post your dumb quip and it shows up in other people's feeds just as it did before Musk.
> there was no meaningful change to the Twitter software
Social networks are more about the people in the community than the technical specifics. I didn't join twitter because they had an amazing way to input 140 characters, I joined because there were people I liked there.
> Yes, that's what the rest of the comment says – that the people left due to a change in the social dynamic.
The comment: "The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it."
> What's with all the replying without reading going on around here lately?
That's right, the "toys" are explained as being status. The comment explains that the community moved to reducing these people to being regular Joes like everyone else, and that is why they ran away crying, so to speak. I'll leave you to ponder the veracity of that claim, if you care. It is irrelevant here.
> I dunno, you tell me.
I am afraid I don't know enough about you to even begin to understand your behaviour. I'll assume from this you don't know yourself all that well either.
Oh, yes, I understand now how reading the comments might impede or otherwise distract from you reaching some kind of goal. Reads like bad faith participation, but thanks for the explanation anyway.
To the extent people were bothered by the change, I think it was mostly because the blue check is primarily a benefit to Twitter to make it easier to spot people impersonating folks who are worth impersonating. Making it pay-to-play defeated the whole reason for its existence.
Who are the nebulous "elites" and are you suggesting that Musk and Trump don't belong in that number? It seems like the argument is that the sheep got one over on the _maybe_ wolves by... rallying behind a couple of _definitely_ wolves who threw on some crummy sheep costumes?
Don't you love when people do that? lol "Trump and Musk aren't like the elites!" like oh I didn't realize your normal, everyday, average Joe could just leverage their assets and spend $44bn to buy a platform just to ~destroy it~ sorry, make it better by making sure no one posts there.
Given the nonsensical things I've seen declared "elite" and "nonelite", I'm certain that "elite" is just used as a synonym for "whoever I currently hate".
And you don't think that the guy with the golden toilet who owns several estates and the guy who bought a social media platform because he was mad they weren't allowing the golden toilet guy on the platform are textbook elites, even by your definition?
They really do have people brainwashed to think they're on their side...
Trump genuinely isn't. Sure he has money in the bank, maybe, but he can't get invited to the cool parties. None of the newspapers support him. The man eats his steaks well done for crying out loud! I'm not saying this makes him better, much less that it means his presidency achieved something, but he was absolutely a different kind of person from who we usually see in power.
> The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.
Not quite. I used to get work through Twitter until Elon made it so you need a subscription to DM people. I used to get about one DM per week, but I haven't had any for about 3 months.
Musk has enough money to single-handedly pay for the costs of running twitter for the next few centuries, and nobody in their right mind would actually let twitter be “killed”.
I dunno. Weird that he said it like it was going to happen, then, instead of saying he wouldn’t let it die. But he says a lot of weird stuff, so maybe this is one of those cases where we’re supposed to assume he’s just saying gibberish that doesn’t mean anything.
Voting for one of the elites does not really make you get one over on the elites. For all Trump's yapping about draining the swamp, his swamp was a lot smellier.
And guess how billionaires become billionaires? By screwing over poorer people as much they can.
And all of those "brainwashed mids" just randomly happen to live close to cities, where housing is more expensive, meaning higher income, which means higher education levels.
Common sense is more valuable (in the real sense, not just money) than a diploma.
And, the GPT revolution is making traditional education even less important than before.
“Hate all you want, but I'm smart, I'm so smart, and I'm in school. These guys are out here making money all these ways, and I'm spending mine to be smart. You know why? Because when I die, buddy, know what's gonna keep me warm? That's right, those degrees.” - Kanye West
Common sense has a new meaning nowadays: it is just opposite of educated. And in that semantic space education = brainwashing. So yes, by that definition higher education (etc) leads to less common sense.
>That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.
Some people get it. From before the 2016 election:
>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
I'm eager for Twitter to fail because I think it's been a net negative influence on the world almost since its inception, but it has not seemed realistic to hope that it could go away until now. Certainly, it will be replaced by something, and that thing may be just as bad, but I'm happy for the possibility that it might be better too.
I recall reading an article about the genesis of Twitter, and it included one of the tweets from one of the founders who was tweeting 'just had Ethiopian for dinner' or something like that. My response to that, and to every tweet ever since has been, "yeah, I don't give a shit."
Yes indeed. It's only "censorship" when the government demands it. Engaging in voluntary moderation is not censorship in a meaningful sense. It is, in fact, an aspect of freedom of speech that people should not be compelled to engage in speech that they don't want to engage in.
Strictly speaking, you're correct -- but it also highlights that not all censorship is wrong or bad. It can very easily be a valid exercise of free speech rights.
Twitter (or any social media) moderating people's posts isn't wrong, for instance. Nobody's rights are being infringed when they do this. You might disagree with their moderation policies, but that's a different thing altogether.
Legally speaking in the US, it's only censorship when the government is doing it.
It's government censorship when the government is involved with funding the companies doing the censoring or when the FBI "nudges" companies to suppress stories. Having spooks in executive positions doesn't help the optics either. If anything, a bunch of companies acting in lock step to suppress certain stories or opinions should face anti-trust scrutiny...assuming we have a functioning justice system. The government outsourcing censorship to private corporations is government censorship...
Huh? It is now vastly more censored - everyone who isn't paying for the blue check is essentially shadowbanned, while "conversations" are dominated by ChatGPT reply bots and grifters.
> Forbes reached out to Twitter for comment, and received an automated poop emoji, which the company has been using to respond to press requests for at least a month.
You gotta admit, the kind of shenanigans Musk pulls are hilarious. The definition of F-U money.
Call me when we've had a verified audit and report and detailed breakdown of all censorship. I want database dumps, SQL statements, verifiable guids and URLs, etc. Until then that's just a grey blob of hearsay and may very well be "true" but doesn't represent reality. We need to see the raw data.
I'm surprised that someone as interested in this as you has not followed up to try and see whether Taibbi's worrying thesis has any merit.
He, and Shellenberger and the other writers at "Public" are slowly revealing the outlines of something disturbing. Namely that social media companies take the direction of state surveillance and espionage actors -- including those of foreign (Israeli and Ukrainian secret services) governments, currently considered allies. This is being revealed to be effected through a sinister network of supposed "civil society" NGOs and 501c3s. That's a worrying idea to anyone that considers themself a democrat or a republican (in the non-partisan sense).
If you had followed up on this you would have noticed that although Taibbi rapidly admitted conflating CISA and CIS a further look suggests that the CIS is deeply inter-twined with the DHS and that Taibbi was correct about the CISA's involvement with the EIP. Taibbi is good at admitting his errors and correcting them publicly and rapidly: https://www.racket.news/p/lee-fang-vs-mehdi-hasan-round-2
With regard to the 22 million versus 3000 , Taibbi's co-author Michael Shellenberger notes that:
“Stamos & EIP worked to get entire NARRATIVES banned outright,” explained Mike Benz, the State Department official-turned-whistleblower. “Those narratives, by EIP’s own math, had millions of associated posts.”
Taibbi pointed out that the 3,000 number was chosen to hide the full extent of the censorship. “They're playing games with terms like ‘unique original URL,’” tweeted Taibbi, “where more than 1000 tweets can be "collapsed" into one ‘incident.’”
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how many posts they censored. No amount is acceptable.
Again, as stated in my original response to this: yes, the full dump would be ideal, but it is definitely worth considering what Taibbi says. If he's right this needs to be stopped now, if he's wrong then trying to safeguard against the massive abuses and manipulation will not cause harm.
I've never been a Twitter user, never have and never will, so I can't comment on whatever the previous regime was doing, but I see people talking about Twitter much less than they did a year ago, which is kind of what the headline article is about.
Twitter was a dumpster fire before Musk, but Musk has decided to pour gasoline in that dumpster.
I don't care if Twitter succeeds or fails, but I think that if the media and other entities stop using Twitter as their sole method of communication, that can only be a great thing for everybody.
If people stopped using Twitter as a source for reporting, that would also be a great thing. Twitter is a unique world, not representative of the larger world.
One of the benefits of being so incredibly unbelievably wealthy, pay no rent to live in many people’s heads AND buy a letter of the alphabet. Personally I would have chosen Z but with the line through the middle. X is too edgey for me. X is associated with sex, drugs, rock and roll and death. Z is my favorite, calm, pleasant to pronounce and rarified. I enjoy seeing it out in the wild when it decides to make a foray.
I know he’s owned the domain for a while but still now X is becoming his. Side note; I only started understanding Twitter after musk bought it. Can’t say my life is for the better but I can see some of the use of it. - Z
