5 ms·

1) How is it a threat to free speech to give some helpful labels or context to Tweets? Pretty much all controversial social media topics get some kind of discla

1) How is it a threat to free speech to give some helpful labels or context to Tweets? Pretty much all controversial social media topics get some kind of disclaimers, "fact-checking" or labels from sites like YouTube, Twitter, and others. 2) If NPR receives government funding, isn't calling them state affiliated at least in the ballpark of reasonable labels? 3) Personally, I think the labels themselves should probably change. Rather than calling media entities state-affiliated, maybe Twitter could link to whatever public data is available about each media outlet's funding source. Rather than seeing "state affiliated", maybe people should see the percentage of funding a media outlet gets from government sources. If NPR gets ~4% of their funding from government sources, maybe adding that figure in as the label is fine. If RussiaToday gets X% of their funding from the Russian government, knowing that is helpful to assess their posts too.

Pxtl 4y ago
In Canada, the federal government funds all major newspapers. Should they all be flagged as such?
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  Holy crap, yes. Isn't that helpful context for deciding how likely it is that certain news stories are possibly biased or not?
- asynchronous 4y ago
  Based on Canadian media’s relationship with the current regime, unironically yes.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    "regime". And most of the print media is constantly eviscerating the PM, which would be an odd act of they cared which side if the bread was buttered.
    - logicalmonster 4y ago
      Can a media outlet not "dislike" one particular person within government while still generally "taking the government's side" on issues?
KerrAvon 4y ago
The intent of the label was to highlight government propaganda editorial outlets so that consumers understand the source of the information. Funding seems like a problematic metric for this. While it highlights an interesting factoid, funding does not necessarily correlate to editorial control. That information also isn't reliably available for all state broadcasters. And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > Funding seems like a problematic metric for this. I'm not seeing that. Funding is as close to an objective measurement of control as you could ever come up with. A media entity can of course be biased towards a government, whether or not they get anywhere from 0 to 100% of their funding from the government, but the likelihood of government bias almost certainly increases with more funding. If you see 99% of media outlets with < 1% of government funding, but then there's a few outlets with a large percentage of government funding, that's important information for weighing their journalism. > And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone. Honestly, I think this is a jaw-droppingly phenomenal idea. Everybody is a political actor on Twitter, and I'm sure SpaceX and other corporations make tweets that are directly or indirectly weighing in on political and other issues that are relevant to them. Knowing that they have a dog in a particular fight is really important for weighing their tweets fairly.

Pxtl 4y ago

In Canada, the federal government funds all major newspapers. Should they all be flagged as such?

logicalmonster 4y ago
Holy crap, yes. Isn't that helpful context for deciding how likely it is that certain news stories are possibly biased or not?
asynchronous 4y ago
Based on Canadian media’s relationship with the current regime, unironically yes.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  "regime". And most of the print media is constantly eviscerating the PM, which would be an odd act of they cared which side if the bread was buttered.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    Can a media outlet not "dislike" one particular person within government while still generally "taking the government's side" on issues?

KerrAvon 4y ago

The intent of the label was to highlight government propaganda editorial outlets so that consumers understand the source of the information. Funding seems like a problematic metric for this. While it highlights an interesting factoid, funding does not necessarily correlate to editorial control. That information also isn't reliably available for all state broadcasters. And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> Funding seems like a problematic metric for this. I'm not seeing that. Funding is as close to an objective measurement of control as you could ever come up with. A media entity can of course be biased towards a government, whether or not they get anywhere from 0 to 100% of their funding from the government, but the likelihood of government bias almost certainly increases with more funding. If you see 99% of media outlets with < 1% of government funding, but then there's a few outlets with a large percentage of government funding, that's important information for weighing their journalism. > And, for fairness, you'd have to label entities like SpaceX as well -- everybody is a media outlet on Twitter! -- which I don't think helps anyone. Honestly, I think this is a jaw-droppingly phenomenal idea. Everybody is a political actor on Twitter, and I'm sure SpaceX and other corporations make tweets that are directly or indirectly weighing in on political and other issues that are relevant to them. Knowing that they have a dog in a particular fight is really important for weighing their tweets fairly.