I haven't really ever used Twitter. I sometimes end up on a developer or product page in doing some web surfing, but I can't think of any information I was able to retrieve through another medium that I would rather have received on Twitter.
For example, some top search results for a developer was a tweet of benchmarks. I read the tweet and then made my way to his site and to a conference video on the subject. I wish his site had been my top search result.
Maybe Twitter is a good forum for "subscribing to notifications" and using it to broadcast external links along with word-bites is a good use of the platform?
I'm interested in how you or anyone think about this, especially about the idea of "translation" and "protection" that various media stamp on issues.
I'm further interested in "live news" and I hold the opinion that live news isn't necessary to me or to be even available to anyone. I'd rather have a transparent recording and processing pipeline that delivers to me newsworthy stories(I can't read everything), but that I could also inspect to see how editorial decisions could have omitted or changed meaning (looking at compiled source material through a search medium designed for that task).
As an example take a magician who can trick you into believing things which are not true simply by being clever about how certain things are framed. Another example are experimental set ups in which false memories were reliably induced (just google it).
I am not taking a strong position in the case of twitter here, but I want to highlight that your premise: „I don‘t need someone to protect me from its content“, might be a little bit naive or overconfident in your own ability to „see the truth“. We are limited in what we can make sense of and we are easily manipulable. Mindfulness, self-awareness and self-reflection might be able to raise the bar a little bit but in the end, I wouldn‘t even trust too much in that. I am still often enough fooled by a magic trick even when I KNOW how the trick works.
That's not what he said. He said he wants to see what people say directly, not filtered through anyone else. Then he can decide for himself what is informative and what is fake news. I feel the same way.
One wouldn't learn physics by seeing what the entire human race had to say on the subject because virtually the whole of humanity knows next to nothing on the topic. We instead filter it by people that are known to be knowledgeable on the topic. People that are paid to teach it, people that work in relevant fields, people that have published papers in journals that themselves act as filters.
When people say they prefer twitter it is because given the entire population of users its trivial for any person to find people who reinforce what they already think no matter how silly. If you believe the flat world was farted out by a goat there are fellow goat worshipers that will by happy to make you feel good by expounding on the topic.
Sure, that's the point. I want to do my own filtering, not depend on someone else's.
> One wouldn't learn physics by seeing what the entire human race had to say on the subject because virtually the whole of humanity knows next to nothing on the topic. We instead filter it by people that are known to be knowledgeable on the topic.
But how do we know who is knowledgeable? There are plenty of websites out there with crackpot content whose authors claim to be knowledgeable.
One common way is to accept some kind of credential that is supposed to correlate with being knowledgeable. For example, person A is a professor of physics, and person B is a random person on the Internet with no credentials, so person A is much more likely to be knowledgeable about physics.
However, that still doesn't mean you should believe everything person A says about physics, because, unfortunately, person A is probably not going to be as careful as they should be about distinguishing actual proven physics, physics that is confirmed by experiment, from their own opinions. Watch a Brian Greene or Michio Kaku special on quantum mechanics and, if you don't know much about physics beforehand, you will come away thinking that Star Trek style transporters are just around the corner. Read a pop science article by a string theorist as a lay person with no background knowledge and you will come away thinking that physicists have experimental proof that a multiverse of 10^500 universes exists.
And this is in physics, a hard science, where we can do experiments that confirm particular predictions of our best current theories, General Relativity and quantum field theory, to thirteen or fourteen decimal places. Imagine what it's like in softer disciplines. And the more important the consequences, the more likely it is that people who are thought to be knowledgeable will fail to distinguish between what's actually known and confirmed and their own opinions. Physicists misleading people about quantum mechanics or string theory is regrettable, but nobody is advocating huge public policy choices based on quantum mechanics or string theory. That's not true in other disciplines.
So the unpleasant fact is that I can't trust others, even experts in their fields, to filter for me. I have to do my filtering for myself. That's why I don't want people to give me their opinions and spin about things. I want to see the raw data so I can decide for myself.
If the (far) right's discourse were aligned to reality and facts, liberal leaning people would have no reason to say reality has a liberal bias.
Beside any political consideration, media, right and left leaning had always bias in the way they present information. Well ahead of social media existence. The difference now is Social Media now gave voice to an army of idiots and the most extreme views, like flat earthers, E.T, far right discourses, once restricted to a few fringe publishing for public exposure, has now find his way to mainstream discourse.