Journalists’ Twitter use shows them talking within smaller bubbles | Hacker News Reader

Journalists’ Twitter use shows them talking within smaller bubbles

news.illinois.edu

266 pointsdoener163 comments

Having worked at a media firm, I find this very plausible.

At one point I decided to take a look at my journalist coworkers' Twitter profiles. ~95% of the people they were following were not only other journalists, but other journalists of similar, if not identical, political bent. This makes sense, of course, because people will always prefer to hear viewpoints that reinforce their own, but for journalists this is a problem because they're supposed to be providing information, yet they are especially subject to feedback loops created when they fail in attempting to understand viewpoints that aren't intuitive to them. Worse yet, extremism is almost always rewarded on platforms like Twitter, and because journalists are partly driven by a need for fame and brand recognition, they're encouraged to be openly biased.

EDIT: I don't want to paint all journalists in a bad light. What I described just seemed common in my experience.

None of that is particularly surprising or alarming if you consider Twitter to be a networking tool, though. It seems like that's exactly what it is for many, including people in tech. You talk to people in your industry, exchange advice, possibly even look for a job.

The assumption in the study is that journalists are also using Twitter as a source for their journalism but that isn't really substantiated anywhere. Yes, there's plenty of clickbait crap that recycles whatever the latest X is on social media, but in terms of actual original reporting? I'm not so convinced.

Purely anecdotal, but the couple of local journalists I follow on Twitter will directly ask for leads on things they are working, over Twitter.

> but for journalists this is a problem because they're supposed to be providing information,

I do not expect journalists to use their twitter timeline as the foundation of all their reporting.

You would hope not, but given the number of stories these days that are just, “hey look at this Tweet!”, I don’t think we can expect that much.

https://youtu.be/mpHiDsnqOSA

Seems plausible that the information journalists relay is a function of their network, and I don’t have a hard time believing that they are similarly selective about their non-Twitter networks. The degree of bias is certainly an interesting question, but it seems unlikely that it is “low”, especially given what we’ve observed from various antics at the NYT to the same farcical coverage of the Covington Catholic affair across our national media to the farcical coverage of the Damore memo by tech and other media to the Washington Post’s heartfelt eulogy of an ISIS leader and on and on. All signs point to high insularity and intolerance of other ideologies (by which I don’t mean extreme right wing ideologies but rather more moderate progressive or liberal ideologies, for example the attempts by other journalists to “cancel” progressive journalist Lee Fang who erred by interviewing a black man whose opinion wasn’t sufficiently aligned with the orthodoxy). There are many such events that come to my mind, and my perception is that they are increasing in both quantity and gravity; I’m certainly persuaded that more research is merited with respect to the dynamics of both traditional and social media. Maybe that research will correct me and in fact journalists are doing a great job; in that “worst case” scenario, I (and others skeptical of the state of the media) walk away with more trust in the media and our national divide closes a bit.

EDIT: wow, that’s a lot of downvotes for what I thought was a metered, well-supported post. I wonder what objections people have to my appeal for more research on the subject? Do downvoters disagree with my perception about bias in the media? And if so how do we resolve this difference of perception if not with more research? What is so fearful about additional inquiry?

Repeating stuff from Twitter does seem to be how an awful lot of journalists are doing their jobs these days, particularly for local news. Many local news stories I see in my area are just little more than a three-paragraph wrapper around a series of Twitter screenshots.

I expect the reduction of local media to a retweeting engine is probably a function of cratering local news budgets. It's far cheaper to outsource news-gathering to the wisdom of crowds than to pay journalists to do the work directly.

Above the local market, if you follow the right circles on Twitter you stand a very good chance of getting advance notice of what the media will be reporting several hours (or even several days) before the stories are broadcast/published.

> This makes sense, of course, because people will always prefer to hear viewpoints that reinforce their own

They might just be keeping up with competition.

I'm not a journalist, just a rando

I don't follow right-wing types on Twitter or anywhere but I make a point to check foxnews and read the comments and click around on increasingly aggressive right-wing Twitter profiles and read their comments, along with traversing right-wing websites like Breitbart and ZeroHedge pretty regularly.

If you looked at my profile it would also look like I only follow and listen to a small bubble. That's because I don't want their BS cluttering up my life and intruding when I don't want it. I choose when to let their ideologies into my life in a controlled manor, it works much better this way.

This is even worse than not following people on the right. You are just seeking out the worst and most toxic media that will reinforce your view of the right. There are plenty of reasonable people that identify with the right (not necessarily Trump) such as Julius Krein and Ross Douthat and David Frum. Try to seek out the best of the other side instead.

I saw a different study that said on Twitter right-leaning accounts also follow the left-leaning accounts, while left-leaning accounts do not follow the right-leaning accounts.

This matches my experience in the bay area and progressive social media circles where one group has a trend of immediately blocking someone that isn't using the verbatim party line talking points. A "with us or against us" mentality, whether you are actually on the other side of the aisle or not.

Do you mind linking the study? My google scholar searches didn't turn up anything

I'm not the person you're addressing but I seem to remember this pew research article that sort of fits the bill of what he's describing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/03/12/social-netwo...

Thanks! Unless I’m missing something this study doesn’t differentiate between left and right political content.

However, it’s interesting how 75% said they have friends who post political content, but only 35% said they post it themselves

> it’s interesting how 75% said they have friends who post political content, but only 35% said they post it themselves

Care to elaborate? I don't see why those numbers would be more than very loosely connected through the social graph?

Also it seems completely reasonable if everyone is telling the truth. Most people have more than one friend and it only takes one of them posting political content to answer yes to the first question.

It does mention that left-leaning users are twice as likely to block, unfriend or hide those posting political content they do not like:

> Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.

Is it that one party is more likely to be offended or that one party is likely to be more offensive?

Self-proclaimed moderates block, unfriend and hide the least, so that would suggested left-leaning users are more likely to be offended.

What's the difference? Offense is in the mind of the offendee not the offender. Liberals in NY and SF have taken being offended to an art form I hadn't seen since old church ladies got angry when you didn't say H-E-double hokey stick.

I don't practice moral relativism, and that is likely outside the scope of this discussion.

My point is, it's not just a difference of opinion when a group of people promote racist, neo-Nazi views (alt-right), or peddle in conspiracy theories (Qanon).

Are we just going to ignore the significant presence of these groups on Twitter?

There's a reason why people are blocking and it's not merely disagreement. One side treats the other differently but not for the reasons being presented.

>My point is, it's not just a difference of opinion when a group of people promote racist, neo-Nazi views (alt-right), or peddle in conspiracy theories (Qanon).

    Opinion: A thought or belief about something or someone [0]

If racism and conspiracy theories aren't thoughts or beliefs about something or someone what do you think they are?

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/opinion

They said "it's not just a difference of opinion", not "it's not an opinion".

If one side is transmit-only and never actually reads anything except keywords from the accounts they follow, and the other side is attempting to limit the amount of useless spew in their lives, that would explain the asymmetry.

Each individual asked has multiple friends, presumably, so this isn't a case of "80% of drivers think they're above average." At least not necessarily.

Hm thats from 2012.

I think there is a more recent one, 2017-2019, that even more closely matches the my experience for the last 5 years

Also not the study, but the results would be in line with another study I know about from the book "The Righteous Mind":

"... we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a 'typical liberal' would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a 'typical conservative' would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people's expectations about 'typical' partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?"

"The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predications, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as 'very liberal.' The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as 'One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal' or 'Justice is the most important requirement for a society,' liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree."

Link to the study itself: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Do they differentiate between "following" and "monitoring"? For example, I definitely am leftward, and while I don't follow @realDonaldTrump, I read his posts every day.

My reasoning is that Trump tends to conflate followers with fan base, and I don't want to contribute to his ego, false sense of popular vote, or any of the other optics that he presents when talking about numbers that look good on him.

I suspect I'm not the only person on the left hand side who thinks this way.

If the study is true, why do you suppose that right-leaning folks don’t think the same way?

It indicates there is more of value to following those people and less value to following others.

I'm sure other studies will affirm that certain conspiracy theories like QAnon are blocked more than they are followed.

Sometimes it's not just a matter of different opinions.

If someone is posting about Perl a bunch, I don't write a lot of Perl and my timeline is full of Perl content I would unfollow rather than block.

Yes, almost as if there is something about QAnon that is blockworthy.

Twitter's algo seems to play a significant role by diminishing the reach of less active participants. I've started opening the list of people I'm following to find those I haven't seen in a while, or at all. Nine times out of ten there is recent content available that I'd consider superior to the political whinging that tends to dominate my default feed.

I'm still interested in socially relevant topics, but I value variety as well.

Long before Twitter I'm sure like-minded journalists also spent more time together and had better professional and personal relationships (at least on an intellectual level) than they did with others.

To follow your point: what does it say about journalists that don't use Twitter at all?

> Ng collected all the tweets, retweets and replies posted on most of those accounts over two months in early 2018, using Twitter’s application-programming interface. She winnowed those further to only those sent between or referencing other Beltway journalists. The final data set consisted of 133,529 Twitter posts from 2,015 journalists, about one-third of all credentialed congressional correspondents.

Couple things stood out here:

- they are looking only at tweets/comments, not the people being followed

- they have filtered the dataset to include only journalists, so you wouldn't see any engagement they have with people outside their profession

- What they have found isn't so much "bubbles" but rather "hubs"

- there's no comparison to similar data on other professions. I would expect that almost all professional networking falls into hubs that are either based on exclusivity (eg, FANG employees, ivy league alumni) or professional niche (eg, television producers, startup founders). Are these journalists really exhibiting insular behavior, or is it perfectly aligned with every other segment of society? We really can't tell without any basis for comparison

> they are looking only at tweets/comments, not the people being followed

Journalists have already been called out for this, so it's likely not a useful metric any more. The accounts they choose to follow are likely carefully calculated since they're aware it's visible and people look at these things.

Anyone can have multiple Twitter accounts, so it'd be trivial to have another account that follows a different set of accounts that one scrolls through normally.

To state the obvious, it’s also very easy to follow someone and just mute them so you don’t actually see their content in your feed.

Yes, but people will look at who you follow on twitter to see if you're a white supremacist or not.

It's unfortunate, but I don't think you're wrong.

I don't actually follow anyone on twitter. I just got to three or four specific pages to see what content they've posted. Usually they share an interesting selection of tweets, which gets me exposure to more than just those specific people.

I don't really understand what the purpose of following someone is

What you're describing just sounds like a more labor-intensive method of following those people. The purpose of following people is so you can see that same content aggregated into a feed.

Is twitter an actual linear timeline? I assumed it was the same as a Facebook feed where it's just a random smattering of who knows what.

It has both modes. At the top of your feed, there's an icon that looks like three sparkles. If you click it, you can set your feed to "Home" (the Facebook-ish option where an algorithm creates your feed) or "Latest Tweets" (the linear timeline).

Has this happened to you?

Are you suggesting that journalists should follow white supremacists as part of their general truth-seeking without people assuming they endorse the white supremacist's message?

Or are you suggesting that white supremacists should not be shunned as a matter of course in normal interaction/conversation?

Yes, journalists should absolutely follow white supremacists and tell me what they're up to so I don't have to. That is their job.

I don't think anyone is suggesting journalists should go to a white supremacists house for dinner and pet their dog. But if journalists are going to insist that Twitter is the place where their job happens then they should be following all the sources they need to deliver the news accurately on that service.

We're not the ones telling them that Twitter is the real world and not just another internet forum, they're the ones telling us that, they're the ones who hold value in that service because it serves to elevate them, not us.

If a journalist isn't following an individual because they're worried the follower count gives that individual value then I'd say that's a much bigger concern that the journalist holds so much value in follower count on an internet forum. Probably time for them to put the phone down and talk to some real people outside their apartment.

It seems a bit rash to take as a given that journalists "insist that Twitter is the place where their job happens" while at the same time rejecting the common assumption that follower count is generally a proxy for importance.

As far as I am aware, it is easy to read anyone's public statements on Twitter without following them and private messages are obviously inherently private. It seems fairly reasonable for journalists to conduct their work in that public forum without without tacitly endorsing white supremacy.

With that said, I am not really sure what your point is. Could you please clarify?

If you use Tweetdeck, following means literally nothing (in literal's traditional sense). Everything is based on lists, which are unrelated to follows.

> The accounts they choose to follow are likely carefully calculated since they're aware it's visible and people look at these things.

Aren't the replies and retweets they make also carefully calculated?

Sure, but it’s a lot easier to make a list of accounts to follow that suggests you’re impartial or well-rounded. It’s a lot tougher to spend every day ensuring your replies and retweets do the same.

I'm a pretty big user of Twitter, including in the capacity of a journalist. But I'm highly skeptical of this reasoning. When I look at the Twitter profile of any given mainstream (e.g. ostensibly left-leaning) journalist, I'll find that I have dozens if not hundreds of mutual followers (e.g. "Followers you know"). If I look at the profile of an ostensibly right-leaning journalists (e.g. a Daily Caller reporter), the number of mutual followers is inevitably fewer [0].

I think you misestimate a few variables. For starters, journalists and most mainstream Twitter users are not inclined to doing gruntwork, such as curating a list of people to follow and then mute. Similarly, the use of Twitter lists, which also involves the manual gruntwork of curation, is very rare among the many personal accounts I follow. For 99% of everyday use (i.e. not specifically investigating someone's social media activity), journalists and mainstream users also lack the interest in analyzing a given user's followings list. Occasionally I see people mention FollowersAudit/BotOrNot. Can't remember the last time I've seen someone mention a purported political audit tool. In fact, I can't remember the last time I've seen someone mention tools like https://doesfollow.com/.

You also underestimate the perceived value of following-to-followers ratio. Almost all of the big name Twitter accounts (again, not just journalists) follow a relative handful of accounts versus followers count. It's widely perceived that a small accounts-followed number is a signal of prestige, or at least self-importance. Thus, an even lower incentive to pad that number in hopes of boosting a hard-to-perceive impartiality metric.

Anyway, the proof should be in the pudding. Are there any notable accounts that obviously stuff their followings with people they politically dislike/hate, for the purpose of pretending to be non-partisan? Shouldn't we see this in the brand accounts, like @nytimes [1], which have a desire to be seen as fair and also have no obligation/expectation to actually engage via retweet/reply?

[0] In this case, I don't think the reason is primarily caused by ideology; the number of right-leaning news outlets are far and few between, which reduces the potential of direct personal/professional ties. I find that the few former DCaller reporters who have moved to larger outlets and who I follow do not have a disparity in mutuals)

[1] Here's a CSV dump of @nytimes ~900 followed accounts, which are almost all NYT employees: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sW_ZmgONfsAIy1IKsETJ...

> Journalists have already been called out for this

This makes it even worse. They were called out for living in an echo chamber and refused to acknowledge or fix it.

> Anyone can have multiple Twitter accounts

This is a generous assumption. Considering we're here talking about cold hard facts scraped from Twitter, a blanket assumption like this to disregard everything found is poor form. You sound like a journalist.

I’ve been wondering what would happen if enough people and companies simply ignored Twitter, entirely. Pretended that it didn’t exist, that tweets are on the same level of relevance as graffiti messages scribbled on sidewalks or the headlines on grocery store checkout conspiracy magazines. As in, nonsense.

I have a feeling that essentially nothing would change, and that in the long run, totally disengaging from Twitter would make sense from a cost-benefit point of view for most people and organizations. It really seems like it isn’t an accurate indicator of anything except a very tiny percentage of the population.

Depends on the product and on the people. If a twitter mob is large enough to influence your bottom line it matters.

But... "if enough people and companies simply ignored Twitter, entirely" ... then that mob is just a bunch off assholes screaming into a void. So the only difference is the void.

The void is not nothing though, it's other people, who may be influenced and then in many cases influence others on other platforms. I think ignoring a platform of 330 million users when a good chunk of those are on a witch hunt for your product or brand would be asking for trouble.

Assuming those numbers are accurate 4.2% of the global population is on Twitter. Which seems highly suspect.

But for the sake of argument, if 4% of your customers are on the platform it’s highly unlikely for those users to be influenced about your product. Aka, how much does Twitter inform people choice of paper towels etc.

Now, that possibly changes for hype or fad based industries. If you’re creating buzz around a new movie sure Twitter might be relevant.

If your customers make up almost 100% of the population of the earth then yeah you can probably ignore anything said anywhere including twitter.

But for the sake of argument, if your customers overlap significantly with that 4% of earth's population that use twitter, then it is highly likely for those users to be influenced about your product.

Aka, how much does Twitter inform people's of choice of news website, blockbuster movie, tech blog, etc.

Only something like 10% of users tweet regularly. I wouldn't be surprised if most twitter accounts are run by PR firms, bots and blue check marks. The other active ones are probably alts of power users who were self aware of their behavior and decided to be anonymous.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/22/21148516/twitter-suspends...

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990946/twitter-russian-trol...

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

I don't see much influencing -- it's mostly businesses caving in to the first lunies that complain - not because their bottom end was hurt due to the lunies actual influence...

> I think ignoring a platform of 330 million users

How many are active? of those how many tweet even once a month?

It's not as all encompassing as you think

Has that ever really happened? Recently?

The only way to deal with an outraged Twitter mob is to ignore them. They can never be appeased.

It seems to me like Twitter is the new Tumblr. Full of crazy people.

>> They can never be appeased

And if you do then appease them, you'll face an equal but opposite backlash for appeasing them. If America's not headed for a civil war, it's definitely headed for a society where red people patronize red businesses, blue people patronize blue businesses, and everything else is a people boycotting or third-parties not caring to play.

"Separate but equal"

I hear it works out great.

Headed for? It has been that way for decades if not centuries or millenia! (Eastern Roman Empire sports politics say hi.) There aren't exaxtly many self proclaimed communists hanging out at Bubba's BBQ Bar and Grill - with demographics always comes politics implicitly.

Worrying about it is the same undue hysteria as thinking Citizen's United means that Pepsi and Coke support is more significant than any voter issues because they have large ad spends.

That's why I wrote "If" and " influence your bottom line ".

It's practically just turning it upside down: instead of assuming twitter needs to be paid attention to because it's twitter, it is far more practical to say: "things that have a significant influence on us/our bottom line/our brand need to be paid attention to". If there is a case where that's a twitter mob, then that is a case. If not, then you ignore them.

I found this to be true. I was involved in selling a newspaper, and Twitter speculation from the journalists involved was rife and, frankly, full of bullshit.

I decided there was no way to rationally deal with this. So I stopped looking at Twitter. That turned out to be the best thing to do. People still said things, but as I wasn't listening it didn't matter. The gossip and malicious slander reached a crescendo as the sale went though, but ultimately had zero impact on what actually happened.

As far as I can work out, what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter, and if you don't pay it any attention it really doesn't matter.

However, the caveat to that is that journalists are on Twitter, pay a lot of attention to Twitter, and report it as reality. Getting dogpiled on Twitter may not matter, but having it reported in newspapers may make it matter.

I have a few tech people I want to follow as they use it as a blog. But I do not want an account on twitter as it is too easy for me to get dragged into conversations that are unproductive for everyone involved. So I picked a method where I link about 5 people created a folder in firefox and linked to their pages. Then if I am wanting to 'see what is going on'. I open all links in that folder. I do that maybe once a month. Twitter is an attention machine. It feeds on getting your attention. Outrage does that quite nicely so they boderline openly encourage it.

This is a good idea. Unfortunately other social media sites have started to force logging in to see content (Instagram, for example) so I worry that Twitter will do something similar soon.

Do they let you log in and 'remember' or is it every time?

I don't think Instagram lets you view any pages without logging in.

My solution to this was to set my Twitter account to private and kick out almost all my followers. So if I do get tempted to tweet a reply to something, no one will see it anyway.

I unfollowed everything on twitter and few other sites yesterday. I got tired of manufactured content on my timeline.

(I found some newsletters and trend sites that happened to be the cause of everyone doing the same things at the same time)

I do this using Feedbin for Twitter follows and (gasp) RSS. I find it useful.

You may want to try rss-bridge so you can just get tweets from those people into a feed reader

>However, the caveat to that is that journalists are on Twitter, pay a lot of attention to Twitter, and report it as reality. Getting dogpiled on Twitter may not matter, but having it reported in newspapers may make it matter.

And how many people read newspapers?

The only thing that matters to a business is when people show up with placards in front of the business, or the CEOs house. The cases where that happens are so few and far between that by ignoring everything a newspaper writes you improve your business's performance by the simple fact you're not paying someone to waste time. The rest of it can be summed up as "don't get caught putting babies in blenders".

Well, investors get jittery if there's a lot of noise. Deals have failed because of controversy started by Twitter dogpiles.

And you really don't need to go as far as a baby-blender interaction to generate a Twitter storm. Just hint at anything that might be construed as limiting a journalist's right to publish wtf they feel like publishing ;)

I am a person not a company, but I do often forget that twitter exists. And when I'm reminded it does exist, I have about as low an opinion of it as you describe.

> if enough people and companies simply ignored Twitter, entirely

They already do, it's only journalists who have convinced themselves it's actually relevant.

The people who keep Twitter turning are actually a tiny fraction of it's userbase who are so embarrassingly addicted to it that Twitter had to hide tweet counts because if you divided hours since start date / total tweets far too many were encroaching on horrifying figures like nearly a tweet an hour for 8+ years solid and it just made it's most engaged users look bad.

The thing is though, I want accessible, rapid, widespread, index-able-ish (tagging), extra-short form communication.

I really want what twitter is promising but I hate what twitter is currently providing.

We might see what happens over the coming years. I think there's probably going to be a mass exodus from Twitter and social media generally, unless the platforms change at a very fundamental level.

But currently they're so profoundly unhealthy for both individuals and society at large that they'll end up with the same kind of fate as cigarettes.

Same fate as cigarettes how? Getting lawyers addicted to chasing dragons of large class action lawsuits regardless of any harm or wrongdoing actually existing? (Hello physics-illiterate cell phone cancer lawsuits.) Used as a way for organized crime to generate profits due to exploiting disparate tax codes? Used as a cliche when they are a vastly stretched metaphor at best?

Twitter is a dumpster fire of user interface (their only remotely right features are infinite scroll and hashtags) and dynamics but calling it is trivializing literal cancer and externalized deaths because idiots make asses of themselves. The problem with society at large has always been society at large.

Probably the most important part of a journalist's work is building sources and chasing stories, which is largely done privately (DMs, etc) for obvious reasons. This analysis misses that.

The public face of journalists on twitter is primarily to build personal brand, broadcast, and generate leads for private scoops via their brand and strategically discussion of particular topics. Much of the reason for journalists smaller bubble is they're building each other up professionally, rather than just hanging out and chatting like most other twitter users. I think this study might be confusing these two very different use cases.

Agreed, though I would add that spending a lot of time on Twitter may well distort people’s idea of general sentiment of the wider population. Something like 0.1% of the society tweets actively with a following, you then narrow it down further to people with very similar background, you may well lure yourself into thinking it’s a semi-representative group.

Definitely. It depends on the industry though, some are well represented on twitter and others are not, and hopefully journalists are good enough to understand their beat and where signal really is. Politics twitter might be an especially bad example since that beat is so all-encompassing.

From a design perspective, twitter really is an amazing distillation of the media mindset and approach to the world, focused on soundbites, building a following, 24 hour news cycle, etc. It's totally catnip for people in media, I'm not sure a product could be much better designed for them.

My impression of twitter was of an insular bizzaro-world where communities that are essentially invisible in meatspace become enormous and have outsized influence; k-pop fans are huge on twitter and almost always trending, but are barely known outside of their own circles elsewhere, not to mention all the incredibly granular political groups (the long and bloody trad-cath-leninist vs pinetree-eco-fash wars are so drawn out you'd be forgiven for not realising it's only 20 people per side, posting 24/7)

It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.

> trad-cath-leninist vs pinetree-eco-fash

I'm intrigued and baffled by this. Would you so kind as to expand it into something I can at least google?

I mean - I think I can guess the meaning but I might be wildly wrong so I'm not going to try without some further elucidation from yourself.

The term "trad-cath-leninist" probably refers to folks like this (unless there's a hardcore Leninist faction of trad-caths socialists that I am unaware of):

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jappersandjanglers/2016/09/an-...

And "pinetree-eco-fash" refers to ecofascism, which is not uncommon among fascist groups:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism

I was unaware they were feuding on Twitter (since I follow no one in either of those groups), but it doesn't surprise me.

I think the exact conjunction is a bit tongue-in-cheek. While there are certainly leftist infighting on Twitter, I don't think Catholicism or pine trees has much to do with it. The joke is that ideological names can be like genre names---ridiculously fine-grained but also absurdly concatenated.

There's actually a decent amount of fighting between leftists and trad caths in twitter, if spend too much time there I guess. I'm off twitter now, thankfully.

And I wouldn't be surprised to find trad cath socialists there either.

trad-cath and ecofascists imply right-wing infighting

Yeah, I get it was tongue-in-cheek (eg, "pinetree"). I was just explaining who they were referring to in their tongue-in-cheek manner. And there definitely are traditional Catholic leftists, and there definitely are ecofascists.

And ecofascists are not left-wing.

I personally parsed the "trad-cath-leninist" as the most doomed communist-fascist" type of an overly insular specific subgroup of uneducated workers who inevitably are immediately purged if either fascists or communists take over whether they assist in a coup or not. There is no good outcome for the fools unless you count "dying in obscurity because the nation was too stable for them to do anything".

Pine tree I could see as Lebanese nationalist and/or Pacific Northwest ecofascists who are similiar groups. The two would get on like a dumpster fire as the trad-caths wouldn't prioritize the environment and would be bigoted towards them. The eco fascists would find them abominable and feel no affinity since they aren't contributing to their central justifying ideal - even though anybody with sense knows the object of fascism is fascism and the eco would inevitably wind up lipservice at best. While tongue in cheek they are perfect useless idiots who would just get a bunch of innocent people killed if they got remotely close to what they wanted.

Pine tree eco-fascists are specifically white supremacist/asatru eco-fascists

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=canonical&q=eco+fascism&iax=images...

The norse rune mask cut out over a pine forest being the referent.

Pinetrees are eco fascists (mostly admirers of the unabomber) who use the pinetree emoji in their names.

Trad-cath-leninist is more straightforward: traditional (I.e. Reactionary/fundamentalist) Catholic (as in the church) + marxist-leninist.

If someone I follow re-tweets an annoying hot take by someone I don't care about, I'll just block the random person they retweeted and move on with my life.

But what's really surprising to me is how often I see those few randomly blocked annoying people show up again in totally unrelated twitter threads with "This tweet is by someone you blocked". It really seems like the same few people just roam around the twitter universe spreading outrage and contention everywhere they go. It's like a playground for society's most unbearable people.

I have very similar experiences on twitter with blocked people, and have observed the effect in other communities. There are few really toxic people online, but they have a huge negative impact on discourse. This is why I think deplatforming and other moderation activities are useful and not just drops in the ocean.

Maybe that says more about -your- bubble and usage than about twitter.

I've rarely had that experience. Maybe once in 5 years.

It actually suggests you hate your bubble, lol.

What do you use twitter for? I remember seeing Jack on the colbert report in the 2000s talking about being profitable as company. In those 20yrs I've never felt the need to tweet or read tweets. What's the appeal?

I imagine it's horses for courses.

I detest / deleted Facebook with an ungodly passion ... but I can see how some people find some use for it.

I like twitter, apart from the political loons ... but, of course, everything is a function of what you put in and who you follow.

To answer your question: timeliness, access to "top" thinkers, a bubble created and curated without baby pictures.

I ran a block chain script on a couple of obnoxious celebrities with big followings. All the most drawn out and angry discussions under tweets now involve 1-2 people arguing with a bunch of blocked accounts. And they have no idea they're arguing with a group identity instead of people who invest in cultivating a personality.

> k-pop fans are huge on twitter and almost always trending

Maybe the real question is why k-pop is completely invisible everywhere else. Why the places with gatekeepers tend to ignore k-pop audience.

Money. K-pop doesn't have the same mass audience as other genres of music. Also, people who are into k-pop are generally really into k-pop (at least in the States). Its an audience that stays informed by themselves

>>> K-pop doesn't have the same mass audience as other genres of music.

As a VERY casual consumer of either genre, I find that baffling. My personal assessment is that K-pop is heavier on "sexy" style[1][2][3] vs J-pop's "cute" style[4][5]. Sex sells, and IMO K-pop girl groups sell it better than J-pop. So it's strange that they don't attract the same sort of universal fanbase as other international female entertainers.[6][7]

[1]https://youtu.be/pOmTdFpIDX8 [2]https://youtu.be/HfySji7kNi0 [3]https://youtu.be/n3IwCiSgl-Q <--a "top 10" list

[4]https://youtu.be/1WTy2yqKI4w [5]https://youtu.be/sAerCLnlShg [6]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU [7]https://youtu.be/LDZX4ooRsWs

I am more a fan of jpop but also enjoy kpop, and I have looked into this.

Japan is the second largest music market in the world. They don't need to export their music to sustain itself and through a combination of region locked music and less focus on worldwide appeal it hasn't had the same global reach as south korea's music industry, which is smaller and relies on worldwide consumption

>It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.

Well a lot of it is because it makes content production so damn easy. Take a real example which reached the BBC front page a while back [1].

The entire story is :

1. A Korean actress was cast for some role in something Harry Potter related.

2. Some people on Twitter were unhappy about this

3. JK Rowling defended the casting (also on Twitter).

4. Then there's some mention of some other story about Dumbledore not being shown as gay.

5. A couple of still photos + a clip from a movie

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45666350

OK, this is entertainment "news" so it's a pretty low bar but the reason this stuck in my mind was what a non-story this all was - even by the standards of the subject matter. There's not even an attempt to gauge whether these complaints represented a decent chunk (or the majority) of the Harry Potter fanbase - it's just a quote from a couple of random people annoyed about it. Imagine if national broadcasters could get away with quoting random people they overheard in the pub and this would constitute a story.

Of course, the thing giving the story some legitimacy is that Rowling has responded to this alleged controversy. And that's the other main reason (which is kind of reinforcing) - enough companies/famous people use Twitter as their method of communicating with the public (and by extension the press) that the press continue to use it.

The BBC is a shadow of its former self unfortunately

What proportion of journalists are building sources and chasing stories verse the proportion that are just pumping generic clickbait to generate views? I prefer to get my news from user selected sources, such as Hackernews, for a variety of topics than rely on mainstream journalism. Too many articles that have very little substance.

Yes. But in many cases even before a DM people send each other replies publicly (e.g, request to follow so they can DM).

People who build "personal brands" on twitter should be condemned. It should not be recognised as a valid use case. There is a reason why people like dril came onto the platform to lampoon and confront the absurdity of brand twitter: that corporate twitter accounts obliviously chose to cohabit the same space that everyone else uses to discuss ass eating and gender politics, and that there's assuredly nothing more pathetic than being a "personal brand".

Journalists are the absolutely the most egregious examples of personal brand twitter. This use of twitter exemplifies the problem identified in this study.

You say that it shouldn't exist but don't elaborate in the assumptions of why. There are some major unspoken assumptions to their illegitimacy.

My best guess is the sheer tackiness of self-promotion involved? The control of corporate brands being antithetical and clashing to the "rawness" of talking about being hit on by old men before menarche and thus deeply phony and "uncool".

Are the objections moral (it is wrong even if it works), functional (it just doesn't work), or both (it is wrong and doesn't even work)?

The other huge factor that people miss is just straight-up socializing. A lot of journalists are on Twitter because they think it's fun, and they follow people they personally enjoy reading things from. Not everything a journalist does, is done with professional intent.

I have worked on systems for large media companies back in 2008-2010. The main feature they always wanted were as follows:

1. The ability to create a poll on their website, but only count votes that aligned with the desired outcome they wanted. So they could create a poll and before posting on their site they could set a target outcome of the various options.

2. For comments if it was flagged they wouldn't hide it or notify the user, instead it would be removed from everyone else's view except the users.

There were a few other very eye opening requests as well. Since that time I have assumed all media is in the business of manipulating and forming opinions. Trying to tell this to regular people seemed to only get me labeled as a conspiracy nut and that there was no way their beloved institutions would behave in such a way.

Twitter, in and of itself, isn't exactly a platform for useful discourse. A journalist leaning to a certain end of a political spectrum starting a civil conversation with a journalist on the other end of the spectrum would likely lead to both of them getting accosted by readers asking why they're talking to "the enemy" or something like that.

I do think journalists need to mix with circles that are out of their bubble. I don't, however, find Twitter to be the most crucial platform for that. Talk in person, communicate in opinion pieces and clash ideas. Just don't let it be filtered through hundreds of users shouting about how the other side is bad.

I believe you're right: most Tweet that are ostensibly talk to somebody aren't meant to be read by them. They're meant to be read by the followers of the person tweeting.

You could probably make it much more peaceful while losing nothing of what people use it for by putting all accounts into follower-only-mode. The different groups could scream at each other (and have their ingroup-rituals completed) without the other side ever even noticing that they're being screamed at.

One of the odd things about the news business is the kind of omerta that prevents journalists directly going at each other as political actors. There are a few exceptions; everyone feels comfortable abusing Owen Jones, for example. But even journalists and newspapers that get censured for inaccurate or distorted stories (e.g. https://hackinginquiry.org/press-release-islamophobia-times/ ) don't become the story as much as they should.

This is especially relevant when Spectator journalist Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, but evaded being interviewed on the BBC by Spectator chairman and BBC journalist Andrew Neil; or when Russian media oligarch and "Independent" owner Evgeny Lebedev was appointed to the UK's permanent unaccountable legislature, the House of Lords. In the UK, there is no boundary between journalism and party politics.

There is plenty of criticism of Boris Johnson, and I do remember some of it from all the way back when he launched his run as mayor of London.

If you are specifically asking for criticism of his columns at the time when he was a writer exclusively, I don't remember that part of ancient history. But it could see why there would be hesitation to engage with a columnist on a regular basis: it would be seen as attacking a rival, thus exposing you to accusations of financial motivations; it would be somewhat "meta", reinforcing accusation such as the one about the "journalistic bubble" isolated from the world. And his columns were clearly opinion pieces: if you're willing to publish a certain number of critiques of others' journalism, focussing on straight-news items with issues would seem to be more useful.

It's precisely because Owen Jones openly acts as a political activist (speaking at party rallies etc) that criticism of him is fair game.

I can see why people may be uncomfortable with these "dual loyalties", although it's not quite the end of democracy it is sometimes made out to be: all journalists have opinions, so what they seem to be arguing for is for those opinions to be hidden from view, which doesn't strike me as an improvement.

Journalism being a route to political office makes a lot of sense, since these are obviously people interested and knowledgeable in it, trained in the specific skill to quickly familiarise themselves with new subjects, to remain conscious of the limits of their knowledge, and to find and recruit subject matter experts where necessary.

Every country has its own set of common paths to political office. Law is very common for obvious reasons. Teachers figure prominently in some countries, possibly because they have the time, fall-back guarantees, and lots of local contacts. The US, alone among western country, has a tradition of military brass continuing into politics.

Among all of these, journalism strikes me as the least problematic.

Wow, I was completely unaware of this. I had read of similar things in spy novels, but didn't think it actually happens in real life. Any other scandals/stories I should look up other than Evgeny Lebedev?

In my opinion, the real scandal is the elevation of Claire Fox to the House of Lords.

Former revolutionary communist and IRA supporter Claire Fox? Well, I guess that's in the past now and the real thing she was nominated for was support of Brexit.

> read of similar things in spy novels

It's not really a spy novel when you do it in the open.

You could try the "Russia report": https://docs.google.com/a/independent.gov.uk/viewer?a=v&pid=...

If you like spy stuff, https://spyblog.org.uk/ should be a regular read.

Then there's the various murders; the Salisbury poisonings, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Magnitsky (for whom the Magnitsky act is named) etc.

Probably useful to remember https://www.axios.com/trump-associates-convicted-mueller-inv... and of course everyone associated with Maria Butina.

I take your point, but it should be pointed out that Evgeny Lebedev is a (dual) British citizen. He has lived most of his life in the UK and was entirely educated here. His father was a Russian oligarch; he is a run-of-the-mill media baron.

Where did he get the money to buy the Independent?

His father was a Russian oligarch

Journalism as a public media profession is highly dependent on social currency for professional prospects. It’s one of the -last- professions that can risk being associated with the wrong tribe, in the current context of culture war.

And I see little evidence that journalists are anything but bought-in.

Please note that this is not about personal filter bubbles, but rather professional ones. I find this interesting and disturbing, as it would no doubt improve reporting if journalists were more aware of all viewpoints across the political (or otherwise) spectrum and what issues seem to matter in different circles, not just their own.

What they do during their spare time is of course up to them. But their professional ability to report on the news would surely benefit from a wider range of perspectives.

Imo, they would achieve this better by reading what those other journalist write rather then following them on twitter. The latter would most likely to just lead to more ridiculous late night feuds.

The issue IMO isn't about challenging their views in general; it's about developing a skewed perspective of what's normal. There are a lot of common opinions, even majority opinions, that journalists tend to write about as though they're weird fringe beliefs, and I think this substantially misinforms people about the state of the world.

Note that some journalistic organizations have strong rules on social media use[0]. Not to mention many unwritten ones. Interacting outside the bubble could come with repercussions. I'd wager that if you'd look at people in other public facing professions you'd get similar results.

[0] Example: https://www.ap.org/assets/documents/social-media-guidelines_... "However, friending and “liking” political candidates or causes may create a perception among people unfamiliar with the protocol of social networks that AP staffers are advocates. Therefore, staffers should try to make this kind of contact with figures on both sides of controversial issues. "

In an ideal case they should be able to express their opinions and people wouldn't extrapolate them to the respective employer.

Journalists not able to express themselves freely because of guilt by association would be a huge problem and being able to do so provides extra information that can put articles in context.

Another fact worth mentioning is that large publishers all have a direct business relationship with social media companies, primarily Facebook I believe. Some better newspapers were transparent about it and lamented this fact as a necessity in the current news market.

Thanks to companies generally having no backbone and disciplining employees for social media use or generally for their opinions, we are at this bad situation. If they just had ignored the complaints...

All that said, the opinions of the most outspoken journalists often seem very predictable and in many cases they actually argued in favor of accountability by social media use by writing their outrage articles about some random tweets. I think a lot of those have missed their profession... Didn't take disclaimers like "opinions are my own" too seriously, but apparently they might be needed for some journalists at least.

This seems like extremely wishful thinking. Say one silly thing, or something that could be interpreted wrong, you could lose your job from an indignant mob.

It's not worth the risk.

Some big journals also punish open disagreements and fights with other writers writing for the same journal. I am talking about the guardian or new yourk times here.

And these are just the public bubbles. There have also been leaks of private groups such as JournoList (and its successor, Cabalist), and GameJournoPros.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList

https://ggwiki.deepfreeze.it/index.php?title=GameJournoPros

Recommend - Niall Ferguson's book The Square and the Tower about how the same networks exist in all communities - science, business, politics etc etc.

As to the journos, human behavior doesn't change so easily by just showing people their issues.

In fact if they feel judged too much, they can get more defensive about their behavior or aggressively attack those pointing at it. The fact that analysis of behavior happens publicly, makes unproductive outcomes even more likely. It just creates spiraling reaction counter-reaction cycles.

You can see how well the approach has worked with changing Trump's behavior, even though there are huge armies of people pointing out and documenting his issues day and night seemingly without any awareness that all that work has not changed outcomes.

Plus expecting behavior change on top of a social media architecture skewed to self promotion and engagement is unrealistic.

So cut the journos some slack. The possible solutions are half baked or constrained by the operating environment, with barely any examples of solutions that have produce good outcomes.

> You can see how well the approach has worked with changing Trump's behavior, even though there are huge armies of people pointing out and documenting his issues day and night seemingly without any awareness that all that work has not changed outcomes.

Trump is arguably the exception, in that he either doesn't care about re-election or (more likely) at some level misunderstands exactly why he won on the first place. Public opinion often does have a significant impact on government policy, though, especially in parliamentary democracies (where it's easier to u-turn without showing that much weakness by simply sacrificing a minister).

This is the silo effect. Sorry for the parochial comment, but I think about this in HN's context a lot, because it's one of the rare cases of an internet community site (possibly the largest? at least that I'm aware of) which is non-siloed: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all.... That is, everyone's in the same big room and sees the same things.

This leads to paradoxical effects, such as people subjectively experiencing the community as more fractious when objectively it is less so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

I don't think this is really a sensible interpretation - the clustering is derived by tracking twitter interactions and relationships on twitter. You could do something similar for HN and identify some clusters, although you'll be missing things like 'follows' which twitter makes public and explicit.

I assume those relationships are based on who people choose to follow, which is what I mean by 'silo'.

People use social media to talk to their friends more than to strangers; news at 10.

Exactly. I doubt the validity of "who follows who on Twitter" as useful data in the first place, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of other demographics followed the same pattern, not just journalists.

This is a cursory criticism but this seems to be suggesting that journalists who, say, specialise in Middle Eastern politics talk to other journalists who specialise in Middle Eastern politics than others. And that’s supposed to be surprising/vaguely interesting?

I've really been enjoying this guy's little viewed YouTube channel. It mostly consists of his journalism school lectures but it hits so many of the ideas I've been considering about journalism lately and takes them places I hadn't been able to.

https://www.youtube.com/user/robertwilliamjensen

It's really brought me back to a pre-aocial media mindset of journalism. The important things about the journalism we consume are somewhat irrelevant to social media. So I'm fully off Facebook, mostly off Twitter and am consuming as much as I can through periodicals and books.

P. S. Several of the videos of Anthony Shadid's conversations about the U.S. involvement in Iraq are very compelling as well.

And also how long do they spend on a topic. I believe journalists use to take their sweet time because to uncover / understand anything substantial you need not to speed.

I think there have always been dual competing interests of thoroughness and deadline.

Though probably the internet has made deadline a stronger interest at the moment.

web clearly made fast pace a semi conscious desire

also I believe people mistake lots of quick verified fact with information

That's a good point. Brute facts strung together often get mistaken for analysis or synthesis.

Not to be funny, but for anyone with even a slightly high profile, Twitter is horribly broken. You fix it by muting everything. So yeah, I’m not surprised that the only people they speak to are ones they know professionally or personally.

No wonder there's so much division in the world considering people live in their own echo chamber, and consume media that's an echo chamber comprised of journalists creating their own echo chambers.

Just think how small their bubbles were 20 years ago! /s

Was that a bad thing? Journalists seeking information from hard to contact sources versus journalist instantly finding 1000 random people with the same warped view on life as their own?

That's exactly the point I was making :)

That explains so much

But how does one know they are in a bubble?? For example, am I in some tech info bubble with the sites I regular visit or is it diverse enough?

This reminds me of a piece Glenn Greenwald wrote after Trump won the election. He'd been saying the same thing for a while but Clinton's loss finally proved his point:

> opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-...

Many of the most influential journalists and politicians are shockingly out of touch with (and often hostile towards) the everyday people they're supposed to represent. It's now painfully clear that the media has little or no interest in reporting the truth, they want to create it themselves.

Trump's win was the product of an antiquated electoral process, not some "will of the people" or he wouldn't have received 5million fewer votes.

Journalism is just retweeting, and writing articles about tweets, these days.

Titles like this make me realize how awful english language is. Actually readable title would be: "Twitter usage of journalists' show them talking within smaller bubbles"

Take this conversation to clubhouse.

Wonderful article for any software eng to read. I certainly see some issues (most will), but a great place to start.

So, like tech twitter...

Here's a great video on exactly this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sWcSxVjXcY

Are journalists not supposed to have friends? Is Twitter use indicative of a person's entire communication pattern? Perhaps Twitter is best used as a tool for communicating with close aquaintences than with the broader world. Everyone is a dickhead on Twitter, so how can you blame anyone for muting/blocking the hell out of everything on there?

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