5 ms·

I'm not an american so can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? (At least in our par

by izacus 6y ago

I'm not an american so can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? (At least in our part of the world that media seriously outstrips any kind of influence FB and Twitter yelling has.)

redis_mlc 6y ago
The camps are Facebook/Twitter/MSM (far left/Marxist), Youtube (left), NTD/Joe Rogan/Rubin (center), Fox (center-right.) Leftists do not watch center or center-right, so they don't know anything about Jan. 6 facts, Hunter Biden, election fraud, #blm fraud, CCP non-kinetic warfare or political Islam.
indigochill 6y ago
> can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? More people get their news from social media than from... let's call it "big media" (CNN, Fox, etc). Sometimes that's from people linking content from those sources, but the point being people are spending a -lot- more time trawling social media than they are specifically checking their news media feeds.
- tqi 6y ago
  That's like saying people don't get their news from Fox, they get it from their TV... Most of the time spent in SM is consuming/sharing content from news media and their affiliated contributors.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    There are some crucial differences between Facebook and your TV, though. Your TV shows you content from a set list of channels which content providers like Fox have made commercial arrangements to broadcast on. So if you want to watch Fox, you go to their channel. Facebook has profiles so you can still go to Fox's profile page, but the default way of interacting with it is via a stream that Facebook's algorithm tailors through magic algorithm pixie dust. More importantly, this pixie dust could hypothetically decide that one party is spreading misinformation that doesn't belong on their platform while another party speaks only truth. And they'd technically be within their rights to do so as an online community, but since we've let them become the online community, that power in the hands of a single company poses problems for society. Because media self-censorship (such as on TV) is bound only by the minimal legal requirements rather than the whims of some algorithm concocted by Silicon Valley, the desire of this upcoming bill seems to be to give legacy media special privileges/negotiating power with online media platforms to enforce the legacy media status quo online.
mlac 6y ago
I’m providing the numbers below for context, but cable news has a lot less daily active users than Twitter or Facebook. In my view, though, the daily news watchers are much more entrenched in their views, less likely to change, and believe strongly that the rest of the country watches the news like they do. I’ve had family members on both sides of the isle be extremely passionate and get physically worked up that the world was ending because they relied on cable news as their source of truth. The Fox follower was miserable when Obama was in office and the MSNBC follower was miserable more often than not when Trump was in office. “Over the first full week of 2021 (Jan. 4 through Jan. 10), CNN ranked first among cable networks (roughly 2.8 million viewers per day; 4.2 million in primetime) followed by MSNBC (2.3 million per day ;3.8 million in primetime) and Fox News in third (1.7 million per day; 3.2 million in primetime).”[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/16/fox-news-viewership-plummets-first-time-behind-cnn-and-msnbc-in-two-decades/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/16/fox-news-v...
slibhb 6y ago
Since Trump was banned from Twitter have you heard anything that he has said? Whether or not you use Twitter and Facebook, that's what journalists spend their time doing, so one way or another it's affecting the news.
- srswtf123 6y ago
  This seems like a massive problem. Instead of going out and getting a story, they let trendy topics on Twitter & Facebook dominate? Well that doesn’t seem like their job to me —- it seems lazy and self-serving. Not sure what else to expect; they’re human after all.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    How many hours of work/travel would you do for a median plus or minus a standard deviation of a journalist’s wage?
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
What I've noticed over the past couple of years is that almost every article or news segment of importance is talking about, and quoting, Tweets. Whether Twitter has more influence than cable news now, I don't know, but it has embedded itself like a tick into the news rubric.
- izacus 6y ago
  But the news writer actually chooses which tweets to highlight to drive the narrative right? I've rarely seen news media just copy ALL the tweets, but they pretty much pick the ones that fit their partisan leanings.
jfengel 6y ago
It's hard to measure. It's part of a network of feedback loops. There's no good way to single out any piece of it. Fox News pumps legitimacy into it. It's explicitly partisan but done in the style of a conventional news broadcast. That helps normalize and smooth the echo chamber that comes from the generalized outrage machine of social media. That allows the extreme wing and the supposedly moderate wing to coexist, while slowly shifting the Overton window away from the latter and towards the former. So there's no way to say which is more important. They use each other, not always in ways that they like but ultimately towards keeping them pointed in the same direction. The combination is so much more effective than any of them alone, while simultaneously having enough redundancy that you could remove any one of them but quickly reroute around that damage.

by izacus 6y ago

redis_mlc 6y ago

The camps are Facebook/Twitter/MSM (far left/Marxist), Youtube (left), NTD/Joe Rogan/Rubin (center), Fox (center-right.) Leftists do not watch center or center-right, so they don't know anything about Jan. 6 facts, Hunter Biden, election fraud, #blm fraud, CCP non-kinetic warfare or political Islam.

indigochill 6y ago

> can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? More people get their news from social media than from... let's call it "big media" (CNN, Fox, etc). Sometimes that's from people linking content from those sources, but the point being people are spending a -lot- more time trawling social media than they are specifically checking their news media feeds.

tqi 6y ago
That's like saying people don't get their news from Fox, they get it from their TV... Most of the time spent in SM is consuming/sharing content from news media and their affiliated contributors.
- indigochill 6y ago
  There are some crucial differences between Facebook and your TV, though. Your TV shows you content from a set list of channels which content providers like Fox have made commercial arrangements to broadcast on. So if you want to watch Fox, you go to their channel. Facebook has profiles so you can still go to Fox's profile page, but the default way of interacting with it is via a stream that Facebook's algorithm tailors through magic algorithm pixie dust. More importantly, this pixie dust could hypothetically decide that one party is spreading misinformation that doesn't belong on their platform while another party speaks only truth. And they'd technically be within their rights to do so as an online community, but since we've let them become the online community, that power in the hands of a single company poses problems for society. Because media self-censorship (such as on TV) is bound only by the minimal legal requirements rather than the whims of some algorithm concocted by Silicon Valley, the desire of this upcoming bill seems to be to give legacy media special privileges/negotiating power with online media platforms to enforce the legacy media status quo online.

mlac 6y ago

I’m providing the numbers below for context, but cable news has a lot less daily active users than Twitter or Facebook. In my view, though, the daily news watchers are much more entrenched in their views, less likely to change, and believe strongly that the rest of the country watches the news like they do. I’ve had family members on both sides of the isle be extremely passionate and get physically worked up that the world was ending because they relied on cable news as their source of truth. The Fox follower was miserable when Obama was in office and the MSNBC follower was miserable more often than not when Trump was in office. “Over the first full week of 2021 (Jan. 4 through Jan. 10), CNN ranked first among cable networks (roughly 2.8 million viewers per day; 4.2 million in primetime) followed by MSNBC (2.3 million per day ;3.8 million in primetime) and Fox News in third (1.7 million per day; 3.2 million in primetime).”[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/16/fox-news-viewership-plummets-first-time-behind-cnn-and-msnbc-in-two-decades/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/16/fox-news-v...

slibhb 6y ago

Since Trump was banned from Twitter have you heard anything that he has said? Whether or not you use Twitter and Facebook, that's what journalists spend their time doing, so one way or another it's affecting the news.

srswtf123 6y ago
This seems like a massive problem. Instead of going out and getting a story, they let trendy topics on Twitter & Facebook dominate? Well that doesn’t seem like their job to me —- it seems lazy and self-serving. Not sure what else to expect; they’re human after all.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  How many hours of work/travel would you do for a median plus or minus a standard deviation of a journalist’s wage?

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

What I've noticed over the past couple of years is that almost every article or news segment of importance is talking about, and quoting, Tweets. Whether Twitter has more influence than cable news now, I don't know, but it has embedded itself like a tick into the news rubric.

izacus 6y ago
But the news writer actually chooses which tweets to highlight to drive the narrative right? I've rarely seen news media just copy ALL the tweets, but they pretty much pick the ones that fit their partisan leanings.

jfengel 6y ago

It's hard to measure. It's part of a network of feedback loops. There's no good way to single out any piece of it. Fox News pumps legitimacy into it. It's explicitly partisan but done in the style of a conventional news broadcast. That helps normalize and smooth the echo chamber that comes from the generalized outrage machine of social media. That allows the extreme wing and the supposedly moderate wing to coexist, while slowly shifting the Overton window away from the latter and towards the former. So there's no way to say which is more important. They use each other, not always in ways that they like but ultimately towards keeping them pointed in the same direction. The combination is so much more effective than any of them alone, while simultaneously having enough redundancy that you could remove any one of them but quickly reroute around that damage.