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>RT has had some great coverage of under-publicized issues in the US... issues involving the poor, failing infrastructure, hypocrisy, etc. Yes it's not flatteri

by eduren 9y ago

>RT has had some great coverage of under-publicized issues in the US... issues involving the poor, failing infrastructure, hypocrisy, etc. Yes it's not flattering to the US that these stories are written, but they are true and newsworthy and should absolutely not be suppressed. RT hasn't been blocked from twitter, it is still allowed to do all those things.

grandalf 9y ago
Now that Twitter has an algorithmic feed, perhaps content that is from banned advertisers gets penalized in the algorithm. It's all very shady and disappointing.
- eduren 9y ago
  Okay, but that's a pretty big assumption. You can't go on a large tirade against twitter censoring alternative journalism without something to back it up. If you were worried about this feeding into twitter's algorithm why wasn't that your main point?
  - grandalf 9y ago
    Twitter can control the algorithm indirectly through selective banning of sock puppet or spam accounts, since many exist that help create virality for many different agendas. For years now Twitter has allowed a lot of shady accounts to be created simply because they help its growth and engagement numbers. If a Russian hacker writes a bot that retweets scintillating stories about an American politician, and this leads to more Twitter users scrolling their feed and viewing ads, Twitter wins. This is why the sock puppet ecosystem has been allowed to exist in spite of the very easy detection of various spam rings (they are easily detectable through simple graph analysis). The problem for Twitter is that it can't say "oops the engaged users numbers we've been talking about for the past few years are all massively inflated, we just deleted 100M sock puppet accounts and it turns out that our service is a lot less popular and a lot less engaging than we thought". So I'm not worried about Twitter tuning the algorithm since it has much easier ways of nudging the politics of the average user's news feed in whatever direction it wants. The concern is that Twitter bowed to political pressure from US politicians and penalized a news organization that should be investigated and shut down by an appropriate legal process if it's actually doing something more propaganda-like than other news orgs. Last time I checked, most news orgs (including CNN, the NYT, etc.) were all doing massive clickbait campaigns through many different advertising channels. RT is no exception. This is a dangerous form of scapegoating and censorship that happens to be legal because Twitter is a private firm. But it's very ugly and reveals a fear of or complicity with various elected officials in the US.
    - eduren 9y ago
      >censorship There you go using that word again. I'd like to re-iterate that no longer accepting advertisements != censoring RT journalism.
      - grandalf 9y ago
        NYT, CNN, etc. all use viral clickbait strategies. Using such strategies, one needs to "seed" the content on social media. Ads are an easy way to do this. An increasing number of people get their news from social media, making the process of "seeding" very important to the publication process. Arguably a news org can't exist without this process working. They have to have someone on staff who can write the clickbait headline, and they have to have someone on staff who can place the ads on social media to seed the content. By breaking RT's ability to do this, Twitter is exerting highly targeted editorial control over the content that hits its algorithmic feeds. Shameful stuff.

by eduren 9y ago

grandalf 9y ago

Now that Twitter has an algorithmic feed, perhaps content that is from banned advertisers gets penalized in the algorithm. It's all very shady and disappointing.

eduren 9y ago
Okay, but that's a pretty big assumption. You can't go on a large tirade against twitter censoring alternative journalism without something to back it up. If you were worried about this feeding into twitter's algorithm why wasn't that your main point?
- grandalf 9y ago
  Twitter can control the algorithm indirectly through selective banning of sock puppet or spam accounts, since many exist that help create virality for many different agendas. For years now Twitter has allowed a lot of shady accounts to be created simply because they help its growth and engagement numbers. If a Russian hacker writes a bot that retweets scintillating stories about an American politician, and this leads to more Twitter users scrolling their feed and viewing ads, Twitter wins. This is why the sock puppet ecosystem has been allowed to exist in spite of the very easy detection of various spam rings (they are easily detectable through simple graph analysis). The problem for Twitter is that it can't say "oops the engaged users numbers we've been talking about for the past few years are all massively inflated, we just deleted 100M sock puppet accounts and it turns out that our service is a lot less popular and a lot less engaging than we thought". So I'm not worried about Twitter tuning the algorithm since it has much easier ways of nudging the politics of the average user's news feed in whatever direction it wants. The concern is that Twitter bowed to political pressure from US politicians and penalized a news organization that should be investigated and shut down by an appropriate legal process if it's actually doing something more propaganda-like than other news orgs. Last time I checked, most news orgs (including CNN, the NYT, etc.) were all doing massive clickbait campaigns through many different advertising channels. RT is no exception. This is a dangerous form of scapegoating and censorship that happens to be legal because Twitter is a private firm. But it's very ugly and reveals a fear of or complicity with various elected officials in the US.
  - eduren 9y ago
    >censorship There you go using that word again. I'd like to re-iterate that no longer accepting advertisements != censoring RT journalism.
    - grandalf 9y ago
      NYT, CNN, etc. all use viral clickbait strategies. Using such strategies, one needs to "seed" the content on social media. Ads are an easy way to do this. An increasing number of people get their news from social media, making the process of "seeding" very important to the publication process. Arguably a news org can't exist without this process working. They have to have someone on staff who can write the clickbait headline, and they have to have someone on staff who can place the ads on social media to seed the content. By breaking RT's ability to do this, Twitter is exerting highly targeted editorial control over the content that hits its algorithmic feeds. Shameful stuff.