> the primary channel for discourse
Primary for whom? If you polled 50 people on the streets of NYC, I bet fewer than 3 would say they actively use twitter. Now do the same for Des Moines, IA and you maybe get 1?
Primary for whom? If you polled 50 people on the streets of NYC, I bet fewer than 3 would say they actively use twitter. Now do the same for Des Moines, IA and you maybe get 1?
Here, I'll give it a go: "Environmentalists are furious that Bill Gates kills mosquitos"
If there's no evidence for my claim it must be evidence of censorship, because certainly I can't be wrong.
The original tweet author did not give permission for her thoughts to be published in so many articles and apparently endured a lot of harassment(She indicated this on subsequent tweets). She eventually deleted the tweet.
This was the original tweet: "Shame on Netflix for this. After this past year especially, to then release a film that is literally white people murdering Asian people based on stereotypes and fetishization??? Hard pass.”
If you google that quote you'll see how many articles quote that tweet.
There were no winners in this whole saga. The movie takes place in Tokyo so of course asian men are going to be the bad guys. So Netflix endured negative press for nothing. The press didn't actually change anything about the film, it obviously pissed off enough people that it caused them to start looking for the tweet author to harass her and finally she deleted her tweet. Who were the winners? The site owners making the money I guess. The whole thing really shows how much of a joke online media is. When regular establishment press is not that good either, what are people to do?
These aren’t ideas that can be peacefully mediated.
Ironically the white female actress who plays the assassin in the film: Mary Elizabeth Winstead was herself a victim of massive online targeting and harassment.
She had already once deleted her public accounts in protest after the famous iCloud hacks in the early 10s because people were ogling her private nude photos and then harassing her about it after she scolded "the internet". She came back a few years later only to delete everything all over again in 2017 when she got non stop barrage after she went through a bad divorce. Its tough for actors who are in the business of selling themselves to just walk away from all public social media.
I think people who weren't into tech and who came of age before the internet became mainstream might be the first people to disconnect from this social media nonsense. She was early 80s and homeschooled to focus all her waking moments on becoming an actress. Gen-Z/Alpha might never disconnect. Have they ever known anything different? It will be interesting to see what happens.
What about twitter makes this situation special?
And it’s possible to cherry-pick people to push any narrative you want. Like the NYT talking about how GenZ is very pro-life, quoting several pro-life youngsters. Meanwhile buried somewhere in that long article is the lede - only 20% of GenZ is pro-life.
Twitter has a lot of journalist users so, yes, it does tend to move the whole dog.
Facebook is a great platform for actually getting normal people to see our content and invite them along to our meetings and such. Twitter, on the other hand, has a far more niche audience - but I know for a fact that the niche audience includes several state legislators who follow us and interact with our tweets, and we've gotten several press stories via contacts we've made with journalists over Twitter.
If you've got a message to get out there, it's a highly strategic platform.