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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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