18 ms·

Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? (2018)

200 points by apsec112 6y ago

dotfool 6y ago
(1) I’m curious if part of the problem is that the marginal cost of gathering information through Twitter is so much lower, that it’s practically irresistible for increasingly cash constrained media outlets. Traditional modes of journalism are costly and myopic: traveling a journalist around the country, and interviewing people individual by individual.. it’s no wonder they’re drawn to a (free!) place that aggregates public sentiment from the comfort of your desk (2) Too much in comparison to what. I can assure you they pay too much attention to Twitter in comparison to my preference, but I’m not sure that’s a meaningful comparison. How should journalists decide “how much” attention to pay to any source? I don’t think there’s consensus on this, which is a deeper problem than twitter itself
bruceb 6y ago
Twitter works for them as they can shape the narrative to their own preconceived notions. Just write "twitter users blast X" which in reality is like 5 people. Its a fig leaf for whatever they want to write.
- FillardMillmore 6y ago
  Can you expand on what you mean here? For the extent of the claim, it seems quite unsubstantiated.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Below are examples of recent news stories that amount to nothing more than “someone on twitter said:” https://www.businessinsider.com/people-outraged-elon-musk-calling-us-covid-19-response-fascist-2020-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/people-outraged-elon-musk-ca... https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chance-the-rapper-kanye-west-president-1027821/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chance-the-rap...? https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/07/10/maines-twitter-users-among-top-for-anti-mask-feelings/ https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/07/10/maines-twitter-users... https://news.yahoo.com/us-chinese-ambassadors-spar-twitter-190737360.html https://news.yahoo.com/us-chinese-ambassadors-spar-twitter-1... I have no opinion about any of them, but they’re honestly not that hard to find.
    - matwood 6y ago
      Keep in mind that in your examples, those 'someones' are Musk, Chance, and the US/China ambassadors. Not exactly no bodies. For better or worse, Twitter has become an official communication channel for many, and is news.
  - wolco 6y ago
    To make a statement like that 'quite unsubstantianted' on the one of the most common things is very strange. I feel like something was missed or lost along the way. The parent said articles are quoting tweets more often embedding opinion that match the story they want to tell. This morning I saw a sports story from two different papers both with the embedded tweets both with different replies that were opposite and both presented as majority opinion.
  - GoatHerders2 6y ago
    Nice trolling!
- jaybeeayyy 6y ago
  Oh man that has to be one of the most frustrating things whenever I go somewhere that has the news on...Hell, I saw someone use a twitter thread as a "source" as support for an argument on facebook. Twitter can be such a cesspool...I'm just always surprised at how people can't stop looking at it despite it making them miserable.
redslazer 6y ago
Yes because it is an easy way to craft what ever narrative is desired. There are people with ever possible view point on twitter so once you have the narrative you can find the appropriate tweet to embed. "There was large scale outrage on twitter about decision X..." followed by an embed of one of three tweets. It would be very interesting to chart the rise of twitter citations as compared to other sources.
- FillardMillmore 6y ago
  I've noticed the Twitter embeds becoming more common in mainstream news sources in the last few years. I think I subconsciously attributed it to the fact that the US President uses Twitter as a major tool of communication, and many journalists followed suit (this attribution of causality could be entirely wrong as I'm not a Twitter user myself, just an occasional visitor to the site). Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no?
  - cyphar 6y ago
    > Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no? I'd suggest you read Manufacturing Consent.
    - FillardMillmore 6y ago
      Okay, I'm familiar with Chomsky, point taken, thanks!
  - parineum 6y ago
    > I think I subconsciously attributed it to the fact that the US President uses Twitter as a major tool of communication, and many journalists followed suit I think you've got that backwards. Journalists quoting tweets to construct the desired narrative gave legitimacy to twitter. Trump rode on those coat-tails. His birther campaign should have never gained mainstream traction but the media couldn't help themselves from reporting on a conspiracy theory because Trump is a salacious figure. They Streisand effected his entire campaign and presidency.
NalNezumi 6y ago
Yes. Feel free to pay some attention to the small bubbles that form around like-minded people in their twitter echo-chamber but it is doing frustrating amount of damage to community and individuals when lazy journalist just take an twitter outrage/trends as an estimate of "what's in people's mind". Checking twitter for general consensus, opinions or trending topic is like checking tabloid stand at the gas-station for it. Vast majority of people don't give a single crap about the private affairs of actors nor the new hottest diet/cars/fashion that tabloids makes you believe.
loraa 6y ago
Yes.
foxes 6y ago
Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. I think it is responsible for radicalising many people. People seem to get easily swept up and not apply the same filtering as they do in real life. Not to mention Twitter/Facebook etc actively wage war on their users psyche for extra views and clicks.
- IIAOPSW 6y ago
  Speak for yourself. I've spent 0 hours on twitter.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Yeah, seriously. “Everyone” can’t be correct when the Sentinelese don’t even have Internet.
    - labster 6y ago
      You don't actually know that. It's entirely possible that the Sentinelese were put there by aliens to guard an ancient superweapon, which is why they don't allow outsiders. They could have a galactic subether comm and be getting Internet from Spica. Until they let us in, there's no way to tell.
      - ponker 6y ago
        Hm... maybe you’re onto something. Maybe the Sentinelese are trolling everyone on Twitter to keep everyone too stupid to find the super weapon. Sorry, I didn’t mean everyone, clearly there are some people who have spent 0 hours on Twitter.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- woutr_be 6y ago
  It's far easier online to find and follow people who have the same opinion as you, and block out people with views that you disagree with. And before you know it, you're sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views.
jvolkman 6y ago
A rare violation of Betteridge's law.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  It’s the CJR, to boot; they should know better :P
duxup 6y ago
I remember app.net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net It seemed like it got enough hype and got a lot of tech media journalists to sign up and then.... It was just them complaining that it was just journalists on there. I think that was a telling tale about what their incentives are .
- docbrown 6y ago
  They’re incentives were an attempt to change social media with a more refined version of interactions. Of course getting big names on it early on would drive interest. That sort of business behavior was not done in bad faith. The problem was that it was subscription based. The interactions between its users were thought out and professional. The trade of journalism itself had nothing to do with its failures — people did not have interest in paying for something they could do for free on Twitter.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I was commenting on the journalists incentives, not the site.
wellpast 6y ago
I was always shocked at the cultural norms (ideas and behavior) manifest on Twitter and was always repeatedly laughed at (by myself, included) for being concerned about that. Twitter was no representation of real life; but then ever year I see real life (ideas and, maybe, behavior) conforming to yesteryear's Twitter. I do think a lot of things start in Twitter and move out into the mainstream; it's not a bad place to look (if you want to know see where we are headed) or it's a terrible place to look (if you care about where we are headed).
- dotfool 6y ago
  This is possibly self fulfilling: journalists or others pay more attention to Twitter than they “should”, which gives Twitter a disproportionate degree of influence, in turn justifying why they pay attention to it
ISL 6y ago
I've always suspected that the big draw of Twitter is that there is never any need to inquire whether or not something on Twitter is quotable. Many Facebook posts, etc. are friends-only, perhaps presenting at least a momentary ethical question. With Twitter, it is clear that the posts are definitively in the wild and in the public square.
- freetime2 6y ago
  And since the tweet itself often is the story, they also don’t need to bother with fact checking or verifying sources. It doesn’t matter if the tweet is factual or not, just that some person of interest said it. It also probably helps that many people have a morbid curiosity about what celebrities are doing and saying, and can’t help but click on those articles.
fullshark 6y ago
They do, but thank you Twitter for congregating all the journalists into a public square to let us see how narratives form and the sausage gets made re: news.
pm90 6y ago
When talking about journalists, HN comments generally seem pretty antagonistic and hostile. Why is that so? Yes, a lot of cable news is driven by outrage cycles, its what attracts views and the ad industry follows the views. Unironically, the online media properties of these firms are huge influential operations precisely due to the adtech industry that Silicon Valley has built/enabled ... Journalists that work for non-cable news outlets generally do a pretty good job of reporting on current events. These are very smart folks, trained in the profession of Journalism who often put themselves at risk to report truth to power. And they present it in ways that are easily understandable for their readers... its not an easy job, and there is a spectrum of capability in journalism. I bet readers of HN would be pretty upset if they were similarly stereotyped based on a narrow but vocal minority (e.g. movie-style hackers?). Both Journalists and people in Tech use twitter to have reasonable discussions about current events. It depends on who you follow: you get to select the corner of twitterscape that you want to inhabit.
- apsec112 6y ago
  "Inside Nick Denton's phony, hypocritical class war against tech workers": https://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/ https://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-d...
- mrweasel 6y ago
  You have a point, but it’s like with tech. The stuff that just grinds away in the corner, doing it’s job doesn’t get reportede on. Same with journalists, only the exceptional, be it good or bad, gets discused. And the journalist who done poor or even wrong reporting far exceed those who are exceptional. The largest group, the boring middle who just grinds away, doing their job, they aren’t interesting enough to be debated.
  - pm90 6y ago
    Yes, maybe only the sensational stuff bubbles up. But that doesn’t invalidate the excellent work that those in the press corps do every day, just like Oracle or Facebooks shenanigans don’t invalidate the good work most software engineers do even if the shenanigans might be what gets all the attention.
delhanty 6y ago
Surely this is the wrong way around! People on Twitter pay too much attention to journalists. Tech Twitter needs some sort of filter to keep them out. From PG’s Twitter a few hours ago: > You can protect anything from unreasonable people by making them build something in order to attack it. Unreasonable people can't build https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1282689679649800196 https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1282689679649800196
- nothal 6y ago
  Twitter has no incentive to change the current structure as their platform now has a massive sway over discourse and an unrivaled ability to create seeming majority opinions. Why would they build tools to make this better?
- pbourke 6y ago
  > Tech Twitter needs some sort of filter to keep them out. Tech Twitter manages to generate a fair amount of de novo BS without any involvement from journalists.
d33lio 6y ago
Journalists looking to twitter for the "pulse" of culture or current "narrative" is akin to creatures of the jungle who sit under mango trees and wait to consume rotting mangoes that fall beneath the tree. After a while, they don't mind the stench, they're lazy and intoxicated without exerting much effort at all.
kevrc 6y ago
Too much of anything happens on Twitter. People evolved to resolve conflicts face-to-face. It's so easy to interact on Twitter in a way that very few ever would in "real" life. It doesn't feel good to be mean to someone's face, especially if they seem like a mostly nice and reasonable person (as most are). Take that away and we naturally fall into toxic shout matches that go nowhere and slowly emit a cloud of intangible tension and stress that hangs over everything.
mrweasel 6y ago
Journalist seem to over estimate how many users Twitter have, I think. It’s even worse outside the US where Twitter is even less popular. It sometimes seems like Twitter is a platform for journalists.
- bickeringyokel 6y ago
  Non US person here. Nobody I know really uses Twitter in any significant way. Instagram is the top around these parts, while previously relegated to FOMO inspiring photos.. it has grown increasingly political since Facebook took over. Not sure if it's a coincidence or some nefarious scheme.
- Traster 6y ago
  Actually, I don't think that's the issue - at least in the UK. I've heard journalists openly talk about the fact that Twitter is absolutely essential for readership numbers on their articles, and that's not an estimate, they obviously have the raw data from their website.
Pinegulf 6y ago
Reminds me of a joke (with kernel of truth) What's the difference between public restroom wall and twitter? Anyone can write what ever they want. Don't follow any links. Some of writing is with $hit.
wfbarks 6y ago
Folks not on twitter have been getting second hand twitter for the past couple of years.
tomgp 6y ago
Journalists like twitter because it allows them to “build a personal brand” i.e. they are less beholden to the publication/broadcaster which they are employed. It allows them a direct line to their audience to promote their work and news orgs see value in employing journalists with large follower counts. I’ve worked for a couple of large news orgs over the years and just by virtue of including them in my Twitter bio And being followed by journo friends my follower count increased to the high hundred/ low thousands— I barely tweet at all. A side effect of all this is that journalists (and others with high follower counts) have a very distorted idea of how Twitter works and feels for most people and tend to ascribe more importance to it than perhaps it deserves. Thing is it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Ps. I haven’t actually read the linked article so apologies if I’m repeating its contents
- pentae 6y ago
  The premise of the article is that they pay attention to Twitter as a source for stories. Not to 'build a personal brand'
  - coffeefirst 6y ago
    True but you can't talk about one without the other. Young journalists have to be active on it in order to establish themselves. But by being active they're overexposed to it. In theory, you can both be there and keep it in perspective: to know it's a dirty pub for angry people and robots to yell at each other, that doesn't represent the real world. But that's hard, and not everyone can do it long-term, especially when more and more people around you spend a lot of time in the same fun house.
_0o6v 6y ago
Journalists used to speak to sources and collate a point of view. Now even the TV channels literally screenshot the tweet and display it. So lazy and a bugbear of mine. If I wanted to see a Twitter feed, I'd just to read Twitter.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Journalism is definitely going downhill. All news organizations are hurting for money and cutting to the bone. Local newspapers are dying, and television news is getting worse. I don’t think it’s laziness, it’s just that they can’t afford real journalism any more.
wilsonrocks 6y ago
I would like a browser extension that removes all articles and links to articles where the only source is twitter.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
A better way to lens it is: If they're paying too much attention to Twitter they are not journalists. While not perfect, this list via Jim Lehrer is an excellent filter for evaluating the quality of an infomation source: https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
- dotfool 6y ago
  I think this sort of thinking oversimplifies the problem. While we experience the deterioration of these norms as “the problem”, the deeper issue is the environment that caused them to deteriorate in the first place. There are systemic and environmental reasons that good journalists following these rules “lost out” to those who didn’t - reducing the root of the issue to a moral failing of modern journalists is, IMO, largely unproductive. Another point I’d add is that these rules are not impervious to abuse by bad actors. If you’re a bad actor, knowing the algorithm used to hold you to account makes it much easier to plan around. Think of this is a Type II error: the journalism system fails to denounce someone it ‘should’ — implicit in these rules is a preference set, how often are we willing to accept Type I v Type II errors. The twitter outrage phenomenon, taken charitably, is frustration with “the standard media algorithm”, because it produces a large and persistent number of Type II errors. They believe bad actors have grown so adept at circumventing these rules that they should be retired. They view the “cost” of a Type I error as less important.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Yes and no. The info consumer needs to more aware of what they are consuming; truth in food labeling if you will. Editorial is not journalism. Deviating from the Jim Leher rules is not journalism. And so on. The root problem is it's the media's job to educate and they are the #1 beneficiary of the market being uneducated. At this point, it's naive to believe the media is going to police itself. Clearly, that's not happening.
peroporque 6y ago
Twitter is mostly angry psychos yelling one-liners to push their ideology. That and "journalists". And then the later think the world is made up entirely of the former. My Twitter block list is probably 10 times as long as my follow list.
OliverJones 6y ago
Tweets are not news. Journalists today who base a story on a tweet are no better than the journos of yesteryear who wrote their stories by "pasting up" press releases from their subjects. They're shills. (The same might be said for political reporters who sit around the office watching C-SPAN and writing stories. But, no digression.) If a tweet announces (for example) a move to change a particular government regulation, that might be news. But the Twitter medium is NOT the message. It's closer to something scrawled on the wall in a public toilet than it is to even a press release. A competent journo will follow up to obtain more or deeper sources, and background. Here's an over-the-top idea: Twitter should introduce a feature that randomly attributes one tweet in a thousand to the wrong account. And Twitter should publicize that change and include it in their terms of service. The effect: journos risk their reputations who don't follow up to verify the source and content of tweets they report. Twitter will never make this change. But putting the burden on journos to distrust and verify restores a part of that profession that's been fading away along with newspaper revenue. Maybe there's another way to reduce the trustworthiness of Twitter content just enough to make verification necessary, and to put the burden on journos. They're trained to verify, hopefull. Now, a certain 45th holder of a certain visible job tweets a lot. Stories saying that person tweeted something inflammatory may be news. But they're old and boring news. McDs has golden arches. Pope's Catholic. DJT spews rubbish on twitter.
thinkingemote 6y ago
Journalists pay attention to Twitter because their readers are the most enthusiastic users of it. These readers used to be called The Chattering Classes.
benlumen 6y ago
Politicians and journalists alike use it to gain influence. Which would be fine in and of itself. But they absolutely do pay too much attention to it. My problem is how many of them then mistake the screaming extremists in the comment threads on there for "public opinion" and the rest of us have to suffer this nonsense - until there's a vote on something that doesn't go anything like the way they thought it would, time and time again (there have been several examples in the UK in recent years).
moeadham 6y ago
Yes
barrenko 6y ago
Just what do journalists do exactly is the question of this decade.
charliebrownau 6y ago
Anyone actually meet a REAL JORNIST in the last 5-10-15 years , that didnt turn out to be a Global LEFTIST political activist and is willing to speak uncensored truth , even if they are fired ..............................
nigerian1981 6y ago
A lot of journalism now days seems to consists of just regurgitating tweets
- chasd00 6y ago
  my wife started her career as a journalist (she's now a teacher). I was telling her the other day that it isn't fair someone who signs up at twitter and wordpress all of the sudden gets to call themselves a Journalist. she just looked at me sorta aggravated and said "no shit."
mola 6y ago
Problem is Twitter is heavily manipulated by actors with the money. Journalists weakened position as laborers created a generation of journalists without real mentorship. This in turn made us lose knowledge of consequences and thus ethics. Finally neo journalists just watch Twitter all day long, which makes it their main source. This amplifies the adverserial content farms employed by centralized money. In a sense, mass "social" media is the modern incarnation of royalty's replacement for religion.
chronofar 6y ago
Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. Social media has produced an environment in which short, highly emotional content reproduces the fastest, thus the evolution of information in our society has trended toward memetic oversimplifications and absolutes, driven by vanity and outrage and virtue signaling. We are optimizing for the worst qualities of discussion at the largest scales. And yet it seems hard to imagine it could be any other way. Our evolutionary biology and inbred tribalism, social proclivities and laziness are what make the platforms so popular, the evolution of our memes is directly tied to our evolutionary biology's feedback mechanisms. It's hard to see just how we could optimize for nuanced, balanced and productive discussion at scale. We have platforms that could in theory optimize in that direction, but the widest audiences trend toward the simplest to consume content (reddit is filled with interesting discussion in the right places, but most of its audience just see the quick reinforcing memes that occupy the front page). So do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? Well if we value nuance and balance in our information then yes, any attention on Twitter is probably too much. But of course we don't, not at scale, rather we value audience size. And for that Twitter is a great place to pay attention. Hence much modern journalism is just a glorified retweet, part of Twitter and Facebook even if it is posted elsewhere. In the memes arms race the best weapons are those that can be spread widely and quickly, and for that Twitter provides ample ammunition.
- collyw 6y ago
  I saw a comment on 4chan recently: "Social media was a mistake and the creators should be tried for crimes against humanity"
  - waldoh 6y ago
    People on 4chan say dumb shit like that a lot. I'd avoid that place if I were you
    - falsaberN1 6y ago
      The funny thing is that 4chan and twitter aren't that different in terms of hate and troll. They were at some point, but the lines keep blurring. Sure you can find places in twitter that aren't toxic cesspools, but you can also find that in 4chan (/m/ for example). The weirdest thing is that people in twitter is doing 4chan tier stuff under their real names and faces, which is just baffling to me. I always thought the whole 4chan loltroll hate machine thing was because of anonymity, but I'm starting to reconsider that stance.
whatsmyusername 6y ago
I only use Twitter for porn.
collyw 6y ago
First time I find an exception to Betteridges law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Twitter is just a glorified internet forum with a few active celebrity (openly) and journalist posters. I find the fact the majority of the news cycle now runs on collating a bunch of tweets just as absurd as if they were collating a bunch of reddit posts all day. It is not the real world journalists acting that it is just because they have a 3000-10000 follower count and a checkmark is just as ridiculous as them pretending reddit is the real world because they have 7 figures of comment upvotes and some nuggets of reddit gold.
problybob88 6y ago
If the context is politics, probably as only a minority of the user base is responsible for most of the political content: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-politics-on-twitter-small-share-of-u-s-adults-produce-majority-of-tweets/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-pol... Email is still the best for text based discourse, IMO. Asynchronous especially. I can synchronously connect to groups via messenger and iPhone built-in email a link to grandma. No social media account required to connect to friends and family. One touch video/voice chat are accessible and disposable enough, not all of them require logins or drag all the features of Slack along. Facebook and Twitter take up the same conscious space for me as MySpace and AIM.

200 points by apsec112 6y ago

(1) I’m curious if part of the problem is that the marginal cost of gathering information through Twitter is so much lower, that it’s practically irresistible for increasingly cash constrained media outlets. Traditional modes of journalism are costly and myopic: traveling a journalist around the country, and interviewing people individual by individual.. it’s no wonder they’re drawn to a (free!) place that aggregates public sentiment from the comfort of your desk (2) Too much in comparison to what. I can assure you they pay too much attention to Twitter in comparison to my preference, but I’m not sure that’s a meaningful comparison. How should journalists decide “how much” attention to pay to any source? I don’t think there’s consensus on this, which is a deeper problem than twitter itself

bruceb 6y ago

Twitter works for them as they can shape the narrative to their own preconceived notions. Just write "twitter users blast X" which in reality is like 5 people. Its a fig leaf for whatever they want to write.

FillardMillmore 6y ago
Can you expand on what you mean here? For the extent of the claim, it seems quite unsubstantiated.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Below are examples of recent news stories that amount to nothing more than “someone on twitter said:” https://www.businessinsider.com/people-outraged-elon-musk-calling-us-covid-19-response-fascist-2020-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/people-outraged-elon-musk-ca... https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chance-the-rapper-kanye-west-president-1027821/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chance-the-rap...? https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/07/10/maines-twitter-users-among-top-for-anti-mask-feelings/ https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/07/10/maines-twitter-users... https://news.yahoo.com/us-chinese-ambassadors-spar-twitter-190737360.html https://news.yahoo.com/us-chinese-ambassadors-spar-twitter-1... I have no opinion about any of them, but they’re honestly not that hard to find.
  - matwood 6y ago
    Keep in mind that in your examples, those 'someones' are Musk, Chance, and the US/China ambassadors. Not exactly no bodies. For better or worse, Twitter has become an official communication channel for many, and is news.
- wolco 6y ago
  To make a statement like that 'quite unsubstantianted' on the one of the most common things is very strange. I feel like something was missed or lost along the way. The parent said articles are quoting tweets more often embedding opinion that match the story they want to tell. This morning I saw a sports story from two different papers both with the embedded tweets both with different replies that were opposite and both presented as majority opinion.
- GoatHerders2 6y ago
  Nice trolling!
jaybeeayyy 6y ago
Oh man that has to be one of the most frustrating things whenever I go somewhere that has the news on...Hell, I saw someone use a twitter thread as a "source" as support for an argument on facebook. Twitter can be such a cesspool...I'm just always surprised at how people can't stop looking at it despite it making them miserable.

redslazer 6y ago

Yes because it is an easy way to craft what ever narrative is desired. There are people with ever possible view point on twitter so once you have the narrative you can find the appropriate tweet to embed. "There was large scale outrage on twitter about decision X..." followed by an embed of one of three tweets. It would be very interesting to chart the rise of twitter citations as compared to other sources.

FillardMillmore 6y ago
I've noticed the Twitter embeds becoming more common in mainstream news sources in the last few years. I think I subconsciously attributed it to the fact that the US President uses Twitter as a major tool of communication, and many journalists followed suit (this attribution of causality could be entirely wrong as I'm not a Twitter user myself, just an occasional visitor to the site). Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no?
- cyphar 6y ago
  > Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no? I'd suggest you read Manufacturing Consent.
  - FillardMillmore 6y ago
    Okay, I'm familiar with Chomsky, point taken, thanks!
- parineum 6y ago
  > I think I subconsciously attributed it to the fact that the US President uses Twitter as a major tool of communication, and many journalists followed suit I think you've got that backwards. Journalists quoting tweets to construct the desired narrative gave legitimacy to twitter. Trump rode on those coat-tails. His birther campaign should have never gained mainstream traction but the media couldn't help themselves from reporting on a conspiracy theory because Trump is a salacious figure. They Streisand effected his entire campaign and presidency.

NalNezumi 6y ago

Yes. Feel free to pay some attention to the small bubbles that form around like-minded people in their twitter echo-chamber but it is doing frustrating amount of damage to community and individuals when lazy journalist just take an twitter outrage/trends as an estimate of "what's in people's mind". Checking twitter for general consensus, opinions or trending topic is like checking tabloid stand at the gas-station for it. Vast majority of people don't give a single crap about the private affairs of actors nor the new hottest diet/cars/fashion that tabloids makes you believe.

loraa 6y ago

Yes.

foxes 6y ago

Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. I think it is responsible for radicalising many people. People seem to get easily swept up and not apply the same filtering as they do in real life. Not to mention Twitter/Facebook etc actively wage war on their users psyche for extra views and clicks.

IIAOPSW 6y ago
Speak for yourself. I've spent 0 hours on twitter.
- ponker 6y ago
  Yeah, seriously. “Everyone” can’t be correct when the Sentinelese don’t even have Internet.
  - labster 6y ago
    You don't actually know that. It's entirely possible that the Sentinelese were put there by aliens to guard an ancient superweapon, which is why they don't allow outsiders. They could have a galactic subether comm and be getting Internet from Spica. Until they let us in, there's no way to tell.
    - ponker 6y ago
      Hm... maybe you’re onto something. Maybe the Sentinelese are trolling everyone on Twitter to keep everyone too stupid to find the super weapon. Sorry, I didn’t mean everyone, clearly there are some people who have spent 0 hours on Twitter.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
woutr_be 6y ago
It's far easier online to find and follow people who have the same opinion as you, and block out people with views that you disagree with. And before you know it, you're sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views.

jvolkman 6y ago

A rare violation of Betteridge's law.

dvtrn 6y ago
It’s the CJR, to boot; they should know better :P

duxup 6y ago

I remember app.net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net It seemed like it got enough hype and got a lot of tech media journalists to sign up and then.... It was just them complaining that it was just journalists on there. I think that was a telling tale about what their incentives are .

docbrown 6y ago
They’re incentives were an attempt to change social media with a more refined version of interactions. Of course getting big names on it early on would drive interest. That sort of business behavior was not done in bad faith. The problem was that it was subscription based. The interactions between its users were thought out and professional. The trade of journalism itself had nothing to do with its failures — people did not have interest in paying for something they could do for free on Twitter.
- duxup 6y ago
  I was commenting on the journalists incentives, not the site.

wellpast 6y ago

I was always shocked at the cultural norms (ideas and behavior) manifest on Twitter and was always repeatedly laughed at (by myself, included) for being concerned about that. Twitter was no representation of real life; but then ever year I see real life (ideas and, maybe, behavior) conforming to yesteryear's Twitter. I do think a lot of things start in Twitter and move out into the mainstream; it's not a bad place to look (if you want to know see where we are headed) or it's a terrible place to look (if you care about where we are headed).

dotfool 6y ago
This is possibly self fulfilling: journalists or others pay more attention to Twitter than they “should”, which gives Twitter a disproportionate degree of influence, in turn justifying why they pay attention to it

ISL 6y ago

I've always suspected that the big draw of Twitter is that there is never any need to inquire whether or not something on Twitter is quotable. Many Facebook posts, etc. are friends-only, perhaps presenting at least a momentary ethical question. With Twitter, it is clear that the posts are definitively in the wild and in the public square.

freetime2 6y ago
And since the tweet itself often is the story, they also don’t need to bother with fact checking or verifying sources. It doesn’t matter if the tweet is factual or not, just that some person of interest said it. It also probably helps that many people have a morbid curiosity about what celebrities are doing and saying, and can’t help but click on those articles.

fullshark 6y ago

They do, but thank you Twitter for congregating all the journalists into a public square to let us see how narratives form and the sausage gets made re: news.

pm90 6y ago

When talking about journalists, HN comments generally seem pretty antagonistic and hostile. Why is that so? Yes, a lot of cable news is driven by outrage cycles, its what attracts views and the ad industry follows the views. Unironically, the online media properties of these firms are huge influential operations precisely due to the adtech industry that Silicon Valley has built/enabled ... Journalists that work for non-cable news outlets generally do a pretty good job of reporting on current events. These are very smart folks, trained in the profession of Journalism who often put themselves at risk to report truth to power. And they present it in ways that are easily understandable for their readers... its not an easy job, and there is a spectrum of capability in journalism. I bet readers of HN would be pretty upset if they were similarly stereotyped based on a narrow but vocal minority (e.g. movie-style hackers?). Both Journalists and people in Tech use twitter to have reasonable discussions about current events. It depends on who you follow: you get to select the corner of twitterscape that you want to inhabit.

apsec112 6y ago
"Inside Nick Denton's phony, hypocritical class war against tech workers": https://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/ https://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-d...
mrweasel 6y ago
You have a point, but it’s like with tech. The stuff that just grinds away in the corner, doing it’s job doesn’t get reportede on. Same with journalists, only the exceptional, be it good or bad, gets discused. And the journalist who done poor or even wrong reporting far exceed those who are exceptional. The largest group, the boring middle who just grinds away, doing their job, they aren’t interesting enough to be debated.
- pm90 6y ago
  Yes, maybe only the sensational stuff bubbles up. But that doesn’t invalidate the excellent work that those in the press corps do every day, just like Oracle or Facebooks shenanigans don’t invalidate the good work most software engineers do even if the shenanigans might be what gets all the attention.

delhanty 6y ago

Surely this is the wrong way around! People on Twitter pay too much attention to journalists. Tech Twitter needs some sort of filter to keep them out. From PG’s Twitter a few hours ago: > You can protect anything from unreasonable people by making them build something in order to attack it. Unreasonable people can't build https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1282689679649800196 https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1282689679649800196

nothal 6y ago
Twitter has no incentive to change the current structure as their platform now has a massive sway over discourse and an unrivaled ability to create seeming majority opinions. Why would they build tools to make this better?
pbourke 6y ago
> Tech Twitter needs some sort of filter to keep them out. Tech Twitter manages to generate a fair amount of de novo BS without any involvement from journalists.

d33lio 6y ago

Journalists looking to twitter for the "pulse" of culture or current "narrative" is akin to creatures of the jungle who sit under mango trees and wait to consume rotting mangoes that fall beneath the tree. After a while, they don't mind the stench, they're lazy and intoxicated without exerting much effort at all.

kevrc 6y ago

Too much of anything happens on Twitter. People evolved to resolve conflicts face-to-face. It's so easy to interact on Twitter in a way that very few ever would in "real" life. It doesn't feel good to be mean to someone's face, especially if they seem like a mostly nice and reasonable person (as most are). Take that away and we naturally fall into toxic shout matches that go nowhere and slowly emit a cloud of intangible tension and stress that hangs over everything.

mrweasel 6y ago

Journalist seem to over estimate how many users Twitter have, I think. It’s even worse outside the US where Twitter is even less popular. It sometimes seems like Twitter is a platform for journalists.

bickeringyokel 6y ago
Non US person here. Nobody I know really uses Twitter in any significant way. Instagram is the top around these parts, while previously relegated to FOMO inspiring photos.. it has grown increasingly political since Facebook took over. Not sure if it's a coincidence or some nefarious scheme.
Traster 6y ago
Actually, I don't think that's the issue - at least in the UK. I've heard journalists openly talk about the fact that Twitter is absolutely essential for readership numbers on their articles, and that's not an estimate, they obviously have the raw data from their website.

Pinegulf 6y ago

Reminds me of a joke (with kernel of truth) What's the difference between public restroom wall and twitter? Anyone can write what ever they want. Don't follow any links. Some of writing is with $hit.

wfbarks 6y ago

Folks not on twitter have been getting second hand twitter for the past couple of years.

tomgp 6y ago

Journalists like twitter because it allows them to “build a personal brand” i.e. they are less beholden to the publication/broadcaster which they are employed. It allows them a direct line to their audience to promote their work and news orgs see value in employing journalists with large follower counts. I’ve worked for a couple of large news orgs over the years and just by virtue of including them in my Twitter bio And being followed by journo friends my follower count increased to the high hundred/ low thousands— I barely tweet at all. A side effect of all this is that journalists (and others with high follower counts) have a very distorted idea of how Twitter works and feels for most people and tend to ascribe more importance to it than perhaps it deserves. Thing is it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Ps. I haven’t actually read the linked article so apologies if I’m repeating its contents

pentae 6y ago
The premise of the article is that they pay attention to Twitter as a source for stories. Not to 'build a personal brand'
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  True but you can't talk about one without the other. Young journalists have to be active on it in order to establish themselves. But by being active they're overexposed to it. In theory, you can both be there and keep it in perspective: to know it's a dirty pub for angry people and robots to yell at each other, that doesn't represent the real world. But that's hard, and not everyone can do it long-term, especially when more and more people around you spend a lot of time in the same fun house.

_0o6v 6y ago

Journalists used to speak to sources and collate a point of view. Now even the TV channels literally screenshot the tweet and display it. So lazy and a bugbear of mine. If I wanted to see a Twitter feed, I'd just to read Twitter.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
Journalism is definitely going downhill. All news organizations are hurting for money and cutting to the bone. Local newspapers are dying, and television news is getting worse. I don’t think it’s laziness, it’s just that they can’t afford real journalism any more.

wilsonrocks 6y ago

I would like a browser extension that removes all articles and links to articles where the only source is twitter.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

A better way to lens it is: If they're paying too much attention to Twitter they are not journalists. While not perfect, this list via Jim Lehrer is an excellent filter for evaluating the quality of an infomation source: https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1

dotfool 6y ago
I think this sort of thinking oversimplifies the problem. While we experience the deterioration of these norms as “the problem”, the deeper issue is the environment that caused them to deteriorate in the first place. There are systemic and environmental reasons that good journalists following these rules “lost out” to those who didn’t - reducing the root of the issue to a moral failing of modern journalists is, IMO, largely unproductive. Another point I’d add is that these rules are not impervious to abuse by bad actors. If you’re a bad actor, knowing the algorithm used to hold you to account makes it much easier to plan around. Think of this is a Type II error: the journalism system fails to denounce someone it ‘should’ — implicit in these rules is a preference set, how often are we willing to accept Type I v Type II errors. The twitter outrage phenomenon, taken charitably, is frustration with “the standard media algorithm”, because it produces a large and persistent number of Type II errors. They believe bad actors have grown so adept at circumventing these rules that they should be retired. They view the “cost” of a Type I error as less important.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Yes and no. The info consumer needs to more aware of what they are consuming; truth in food labeling if you will. Editorial is not journalism. Deviating from the Jim Leher rules is not journalism. And so on. The root problem is it's the media's job to educate and they are the #1 beneficiary of the market being uneducated. At this point, it's naive to believe the media is going to police itself. Clearly, that's not happening.

peroporque 6y ago

Twitter is mostly angry psychos yelling one-liners to push their ideology. That and "journalists". And then the later think the world is made up entirely of the former. My Twitter block list is probably 10 times as long as my follow list.

OliverJones 6y ago

Tweets are not news. Journalists today who base a story on a tweet are no better than the journos of yesteryear who wrote their stories by "pasting up" press releases from their subjects. They're shills. (The same might be said for political reporters who sit around the office watching C-SPAN and writing stories. But, no digression.) If a tweet announces (for example) a move to change a particular government regulation, that might be news. But the Twitter medium is NOT the message. It's closer to something scrawled on the wall in a public toilet than it is to even a press release. A competent journo will follow up to obtain more or deeper sources, and background. Here's an over-the-top idea: Twitter should introduce a feature that randomly attributes one tweet in a thousand to the wrong account. And Twitter should publicize that change and include it in their terms of service. The effect: journos risk their reputations who don't follow up to verify the source and content of tweets they report. Twitter will never make this change. But putting the burden on journos to distrust and verify restores a part of that profession that's been fading away along with newspaper revenue. Maybe there's another way to reduce the trustworthiness of Twitter content just enough to make verification necessary, and to put the burden on journos. They're trained to verify, hopefull. Now, a certain 45th holder of a certain visible job tweets a lot. Stories saying that person tweeted something inflammatory may be news. But they're old and boring news. McDs has golden arches. Pope's Catholic. DJT spews rubbish on twitter.

thinkingemote 6y ago

Journalists pay attention to Twitter because their readers are the most enthusiastic users of it. These readers used to be called The Chattering Classes.

benlumen 6y ago

Politicians and journalists alike use it to gain influence. Which would be fine in and of itself. But they absolutely do pay too much attention to it. My problem is how many of them then mistake the screaming extremists in the comment threads on there for "public opinion" and the rest of us have to suffer this nonsense - until there's a vote on something that doesn't go anything like the way they thought it would, time and time again (there have been several examples in the UK in recent years).

moeadham 6y ago

Yes

barrenko 6y ago

Just what do journalists do exactly is the question of this decade.

charliebrownau 6y ago

Anyone actually meet a REAL JORNIST in the last 5-10-15 years , that didnt turn out to be a Global LEFTIST political activist and is willing to speak uncensored truth , even if they are fired ..............................

nigerian1981 6y ago

A lot of journalism now days seems to consists of just regurgitating tweets

chasd00 6y ago
my wife started her career as a journalist (she's now a teacher). I was telling her the other day that it isn't fair someone who signs up at twitter and wordpress all of the sudden gets to call themselves a Journalist. she just looked at me sorta aggravated and said "no shit."

mola 6y ago

Problem is Twitter is heavily manipulated by actors with the money. Journalists weakened position as laborers created a generation of journalists without real mentorship. This in turn made us lose knowledge of consequences and thus ethics. Finally neo journalists just watch Twitter all day long, which makes it their main source. This amplifies the adverserial content farms employed by centralized money. In a sense, mass "social" media is the modern incarnation of royalty's replacement for religion.

chronofar 6y ago

Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. Social media has produced an environment in which short, highly emotional content reproduces the fastest, thus the evolution of information in our society has trended toward memetic oversimplifications and absolutes, driven by vanity and outrage and virtue signaling. We are optimizing for the worst qualities of discussion at the largest scales. And yet it seems hard to imagine it could be any other way. Our evolutionary biology and inbred tribalism, social proclivities and laziness are what make the platforms so popular, the evolution of our memes is directly tied to our evolutionary biology's feedback mechanisms. It's hard to see just how we could optimize for nuanced, balanced and productive discussion at scale. We have platforms that could in theory optimize in that direction, but the widest audiences trend toward the simplest to consume content (reddit is filled with interesting discussion in the right places, but most of its audience just see the quick reinforcing memes that occupy the front page). So do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? Well if we value nuance and balance in our information then yes, any attention on Twitter is probably too much. But of course we don't, not at scale, rather we value audience size. And for that Twitter is a great place to pay attention. Hence much modern journalism is just a glorified retweet, part of Twitter and Facebook even if it is posted elsewhere. In the memes arms race the best weapons are those that can be spread widely and quickly, and for that Twitter provides ample ammunition.

collyw 6y ago
I saw a comment on 4chan recently: "Social media was a mistake and the creators should be tried for crimes against humanity"
- waldoh 6y ago
  People on 4chan say dumb shit like that a lot. I'd avoid that place if I were you
  - falsaberN1 6y ago
    The funny thing is that 4chan and twitter aren't that different in terms of hate and troll. They were at some point, but the lines keep blurring. Sure you can find places in twitter that aren't toxic cesspools, but you can also find that in 4chan (/m/ for example). The weirdest thing is that people in twitter is doing 4chan tier stuff under their real names and faces, which is just baffling to me. I always thought the whole 4chan loltroll hate machine thing was because of anonymity, but I'm starting to reconsider that stance.

whatsmyusername 6y ago

I only use Twitter for porn.

collyw 6y ago

First time I find an exception to Betteridges law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Twitter is just a glorified internet forum with a few active celebrity (openly) and journalist posters. I find the fact the majority of the news cycle now runs on collating a bunch of tweets just as absurd as if they were collating a bunch of reddit posts all day. It is not the real world journalists acting that it is just because they have a 3000-10000 follower count and a checkmark is just as ridiculous as them pretending reddit is the real world because they have 7 figures of comment upvotes and some nuggets of reddit gold.

problybob88 6y ago

If the context is politics, probably as only a minority of the user base is responsible for most of the political content: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-politics-on-twitter-small-share-of-u-s-adults-produce-majority-of-tweets/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-pol... Email is still the best for text based discourse, IMO. Asynchronous especially. I can synchronously connect to groups via messenger and iPhone built-in email a link to grandma. No social media account required to connect to friends and family. One touch video/voice chat are accessible and disposable enough, not all of them require logins or drag all the features of Slack along. Facebook and Twitter take up the same conscious space for me as MySpace and AIM.