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I still think the underlying premise of Twitter's importance to the "public discussion" and "public square" isn't challenged enough. https://www.calnewport.com

I still think the underlying premise of Twitter's importance to the "public discussion" and "public square" isn't challenged enough. https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/05/03/the-real-problem-with-twitter/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/05/03/the-real-problem-... > The real outrage, I conclude, is not the details of how Elon Musk might change Twitter, but the fact that so many people in positions of power — politicians, business leaders, journalists — still pay so much attention to these 240-character missives. > “Twitter’s increasingly heated wrangling is not just far from a considered democratic debate,” I write, “but has truly become a spectacle driven by a narrow and unrepresentative group of elites.” Why do we care so much about what happens to Twitter?

scotuswroteus 4y ago
Because it's a central node in a potential disinformation network that wields immense power over American elections. Should it? No. Is it pathetic that it is? Yes. But is vs. ought. It IS a powerful platform but ought not be.
- jrockway 4y ago
  It's easy to blame Twitter for election misinformation, but getting rid of Twitter will never be the solution. The problem will keep showing up until we fix the root cause. (I'm certain that people were upset about the invention of the printing press for the same reason.) At some point, to have a functioning democracy, the populace has to be educated. Then when there's misinformation, they'll just ignore it. In the past, we've gotten around this by it being expensive to broadcast ideas to large numbers of people. You had to be a newspaper or TV network, and newspapers and TV networks employed people worried about their reputation, so nobody ever published op-eds about how Bill Gates is injecting us with 5G microchips or whatever. This weeded out quite a lot of conspiracy theories and whatnot. But the reality is that the Internet changed the calculus there; anyone can publish anything to a large number of people. With that floodgate open, there is no going back and we have to teach people to critically analyze what they hear on the Internet. It's the last line of defense. This means that all the bluster over Facebook and Twitter and free speech needs to translate to increased funding for schools, and that if we start right now it will probably take a couple generations to get to a better place. There is no quick fix to make democracy work, only hard work and time.
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    > At some point, to have a functioning democracy, the populace has to be educated. Then when there's misinformation, they'll just ignore it. How do you ignore misinformation that you don’t know is misinformation?
wollsmoth 4y ago
Twitter is fun to read but it's a warped version of reality. So many people post absurd takes on there and find their little corners where other people actually agree with their craziness. A lot of people brashly tweeting stuff that they would likely never say out loud with polite company.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > Twitter is fun to read but it's a warped version of reality. That's true of pretty much all social media, including HN (though HN is better than most).
seydor 4y ago
Journalists do, because it makes their job easier. You can literally be called a journalists because you write long form articles about tweets. Journalists tend to obsess over their own profession and its tools
- remarkEon 4y ago
  This is sort of the elephant in the room, and it's why I find the arguing over how many bots exist on the platform to be pretty boring. It misses the point. Twitter is a platform and coordination mechanism for elite opinion. That's what makes it valuable, and this is completely separate from whether or not "twitter makes money".
dfxm12 4y ago
I don't, but I can see why people in/seeking power do: it's just another nebulous thing to point to as a distraction or scapegoat. Like there's tons legitimate talking points that people can make for or against Kamala Harris' body of work as a politician, but once people start talking about the KHive on Twitter in those discussions, it totally distracts from those points. So by pretending Tweets about someone matter more than what someone actually does, they can try to control or shift the narrative away from someone who actually has power (Harris) to something else that doesn't (people using a particular hashtag).

scotuswroteus 4y ago

Because it's a central node in a potential disinformation network that wields immense power over American elections. Should it? No. Is it pathetic that it is? Yes. But is vs. ought. It IS a powerful platform but ought not be.

jrockway 4y ago
It's easy to blame Twitter for election misinformation, but getting rid of Twitter will never be the solution. The problem will keep showing up until we fix the root cause. (I'm certain that people were upset about the invention of the printing press for the same reason.) At some point, to have a functioning democracy, the populace has to be educated. Then when there's misinformation, they'll just ignore it. In the past, we've gotten around this by it being expensive to broadcast ideas to large numbers of people. You had to be a newspaper or TV network, and newspapers and TV networks employed people worried about their reputation, so nobody ever published op-eds about how Bill Gates is injecting us with 5G microchips or whatever. This weeded out quite a lot of conspiracy theories and whatnot. But the reality is that the Internet changed the calculus there; anyone can publish anything to a large number of people. With that floodgate open, there is no going back and we have to teach people to critically analyze what they hear on the Internet. It's the last line of defense. This means that all the bluster over Facebook and Twitter and free speech needs to translate to increased funding for schools, and that if we start right now it will probably take a couple generations to get to a better place. There is no quick fix to make democracy work, only hard work and time.
- Jcowell 4y ago
  > At some point, to have a functioning democracy, the populace has to be educated. Then when there's misinformation, they'll just ignore it. How do you ignore misinformation that you don’t know is misinformation?

wollsmoth 4y ago

Twitter is fun to read but it's a warped version of reality. So many people post absurd takes on there and find their little corners where other people actually agree with their craziness. A lot of people brashly tweeting stuff that they would likely never say out loud with polite company.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> Twitter is fun to read but it's a warped version of reality. That's true of pretty much all social media, including HN (though HN is better than most).

seydor 4y ago

Journalists do, because it makes their job easier. You can literally be called a journalists because you write long form articles about tweets. Journalists tend to obsess over their own profession and its tools

remarkEon 4y ago
This is sort of the elephant in the room, and it's why I find the arguing over how many bots exist on the platform to be pretty boring. It misses the point. Twitter is a platform and coordination mechanism for elite opinion. That's what makes it valuable, and this is completely separate from whether or not "twitter makes money".

dfxm12 4y ago

I don't, but I can see why people in/seeking power do: it's just another nebulous thing to point to as a distraction or scapegoat. Like there's tons legitimate talking points that people can make for or against Kamala Harris' body of work as a politician, but once people start talking about the KHive on Twitter in those discussions, it totally distracts from those points. So by pretending Tweets about someone matter more than what someone actually does, they can try to control or shift the narrative away from someone who actually has power (Harris) to something else that doesn't (people using a particular hashtag).