The tyranny of the supertweeter
omnibudsman.substack.com
omnibudsman.substack.com
The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.
Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.
It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass. The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.
He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is.
The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.
Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes.
1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-...
It doesn't remove the issue though, since the space is so limited - IMHO Twitter is instead a much more fitting space for poets...
If you lie and get caught, ignore it.
If the person who called you out has too much of a following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just interpreted things different.
They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find one? Well a Twitter account is free to make. Boom, the story is now how your critic is inciting violence, sexist, racist, probably voted for Trump, and insurrectionist, a climate change denier, white supremacist, transphobe, etc. That's the story now and you're the victim at the center of it all.
And the people employing these "journalists" don't just shield them from consequence, they reward them for it.
Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not start with Twitter or the internet.
For some reason people think the world is different today.
The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016 onwards)
I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for "identity production" are quite interesting.
Or, more painfully, you'll see a lot of derisive quote-tweets, subtweets, hostile screencaps, the dreaded "ratio"... Twitter users are a catty bunch.
None of it matters. That’s why there’s so much drama.
I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores.
I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias
More seriously, I can see how these are useful in situations where there is just too much content to sort through (hacker news, reddit, slashdot... google ?).
Of course you can also have randomly displayed results, but then this goes against the goal of elevating the quality of the results, at which point you need to pick winners and losers somehow. (Obviously, the traditional way to do it : human editors, has its own issues...)
Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ?
(I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)
This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".
Some are obviously “go out and find what you want someone to be saying”.
This is a very poorly-kept secret in journalism, with certain genres (entertainment, politics, business press-releases, fashion industry) being especially prone. See pg's "Submarine" essay. The practice isn't entirely bad or unethical --- obituaries in particular are frequently written in advance with details filled in on publication. For particularly notable names, they're updated regularly. Similarly election outcomes and major technological events (e.g., space mission launches / milestones). It's much easier to have something prepared than to start from scratch as the event occurs, and these in particular have predictable deadlines.
From the 1980s through the aughts, the term "fake news" applied to VNR and ANR (video and audio newsreels), which were pre-packaged "news" segments for television and radio prepared by corporations and/or PR firms. See: <https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fake_news>
But in other cases, especially where something's being sold, it's at the very least deceptive.
I'm struck by the parallel to typing the right prompt into GPT-3.
It also sounds like a Wikipedia editor's job
If these Twitter journos had better spelling and grammar, they would likely be indistinguishable from GPT-3 output.
News consumers no longer need the journalist middle man, they can go directly to the source of the news.
Journalists should now, more than ever, be focused on traditional journalistic efforts. Succumbing to the temptation to just "find a story on Twitter" is just cementing the fact traditional media is dead and the era of the citizen journalist is here.
If your personal narrative drives clicks it will not be challenged in any way...whether you're a random poster on twitter or a participant in the story itself.
That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, and make note of how the sources are identified. I'd be beyond shocked if "twitter" appeared even once.
IMHO the real reason for "collapse in confidence in journalism" is that this is itself a meme driven by people who, for partisan reasons, simply don't want to have confidence in media reporting things "their side" doesn't want to be true. In a world where truth (about climate change, election results, disease impact, etc...) is a partisan thing, those whose job it is to report the truth become part of the war.
But reporters today are doing the same thing reporters have always been doing.
[1] Except the occasional circumstance where someone specific says something notable and it happens to be on twitter. Trump said lots of weird stuff and it got reported, but it's not like someone went around filtering his otherwise-not-notable tweets for juicy stuff. "He Just Tweeted it Out" is a meme for a reason.
Your point seems to be, what, that people who disagree with you are posting on the internet? Should we make the same criticism of Substack too?
Am I just supposed to know that the string "/culture/" in the URL means it isn't real news and I shouldn't trust it? Even as a big proponent of media literacy, that seems unreasonable. News organizations must be aware that people will believe them when they publish things.
Are you seriously arguing in good faith that you were fooled into thinking that this was a piece of objective journalism?
You are providing a perfect example of my point, which I'll endure the downvotes to point out: rather than see an opnion article with which you disagree and just accept is as an inevitable result of large populations of people living together, you feel the need to explain the disagreement as some kind of existential flaw with the whole field of journalism. Then you feel justified in extending that "mistrust" engendered from Vox authors writing articles you don't like to pieces of real journalism providing real facts with which you also disagree.
And so the whole field of journalism is sullied in your mind, simply because (in this case) you don't like the fact that some people think black mermaids and elves are kinda OK and want to defend their casting against those who don't.
But you seem to be saying it's not journalism at all. So what I'm trying to understand is:
* What is the shape of this "not journalism at all" category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't personally think is important?
* Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
* Does the average media-literate person know any of this?
Right now I can't answer any of these questions, which makes the entire edifice seem more like a trick than a real distinction. It's not obvious to me why a news organization would want to publish bad articles which don't live up to their journalistic standards in the first place.
This becomes a problem when they go and put it on the same website as "serious" journalism...
> What is the shape of this "not journalism at all" category? How can I distinguish non-journalism from non-objective journalism or journalism on a topic I don't personally think is important?
For the NYTimes, anything from the opinion section, anything the second half of the category list (Arts, Books, Style, Food, Travel, Magazine, etc.) I would consider is held to a lesser standard than the first half (World, U.S., Politics, N.Y., Business). Also, articles in those sections were less likely to be about current events specifically, and might include reviews, interviews, and other content that isn't "of the day". The Opinion section is actually a nice divider.
> Do news organizations offer any explicit disclaimers that their "non-journalism" has low editorial standards and shouldn't be trusted the same way as their journalism? Or is it just something you have to know?
Outside of explicit tagging of Opinion pieces as such, no. In the old days, in paper form, you generally knew that anything in section A was solid journalism, other than the opinion pieces in the back, and in Column 1 of the front page. Section B (Local news), was usually okay, but could get a little weak further to the back. Section C (Sports) was good on game facts, but other stuff could be weak. Section D (Business) was usually good again, but was much more likely to also include PR fluff pieces and other similar stuff. Section E and beyond (Arts/Calendar, Comics, etc.) was all less serious. Parade Magazine, an insert that showed up in many publications across the US was complete garbage.
> * Does the average media-literate person know any of this?
Most people knew about the opinions section, it was pretty clear back then that the paper didn't stand behind those pieces, and they only represented their author's opinion. The feel of each section and the advertisements included therein did give some sense of the importance of the section.
I have felt for some time that the loss of the metadata around opinion pieces has done real damage to Journalism, and that it would be good for publications to come up with some standard for identifying that, to reduce the instances of breathless reports of "The Washington Post is a socialist rag!" after a single opinion piece by an actual socialist is published.
On a more serious note, Twitter has been a very valuable source of info about the Ukraine War in general, which also makes it ripe for psyops from the Russian and Ukrainian governments. Several people on Twitter are very reliable sources, much moreso than the official state sources, and they get the news out faster. It makes sense for those sources to be used by journalists.
“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
> Throughout the summer, the Network Contagion Research Institute noticed a spike in extremist activity related to the Dutch protests on Twitter, Telegram and 4chan, the message board on which conspiracy theories spread largely unchecked
The source for that statement is quite clearly NCRI. It's reporting news about twitter. It's not looking to twitter for news.
And frankly your attempt to blur the distinction is exactly the kind of memery that I was takling about. The NYT is your enemy, so you feel justified in spinning arguments to "attack" them.
Well said!
Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism rates are much higher than they are:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-p...
The original study said that 50-55% made it back into prison. The new study says it's more like 33% that make it back into prison. Yes, 1 of 3 is better than 1 of 2 but it's still 1 of 3. I'd call that high personally. In what other circumstance would I take a risk of something bad happening if the bad outcome happpened 1 out of 3 times?
The one living journalist in that story was completely amoral, but boy was she willing to go to great lengths to get the story!
The social graph of Twitter journalism is an ephemeron, it means only itself and maps to no other part of reality. This distorts in every direction it can, while giving no useful reference frame in return.
While true, it also distorts reality and leads to mistaken ideas about the world:
https://wonderfulengineering.com/the-authagraph-world-map-is...
I don't believe the authagraph projection is even the best map projection for preserving things like shape and area (other projections such as the Cahill–Keyes projection or Dymaxion projection seem better for both).
But of course, if you want the least amount of distortion, just get a globe.
For what it's worth, I feel like I don't actually come across the Mercator projection that often (I'd say the Robinson projection is more popular in schools, for instance).
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/5/17653122/google-maps-updat...
CNN has: James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Steven Hall, Phil Mudd, Susan Hennessy, Samantha Vinograd & James Gagliano
MSNBC has: John Brennan, Frank Figliuzzi, Chuck Rosenberg, Malcolm Nance & Jeremy Bash
This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit problematic because that should be based on the merit of the research. The same issues could arise for other experts or famous people, where as you say their opinions are disproportionately echoed due to their presence and activity on Twitter.
But substack is directly tied - so unless people really trust the author and refuse to cancel if they write something they don’t like you’ll be more inclined to avoid going outside the margins.
It’s an interesting personal question to ponder - who of those I read would I read if they wrote something diametrically opposed to what I hold? The lists are often pretty short, sadly.
I wasn't sure what you meant by that. Now I'm really confused:
are blue check marks ever re evaluated or audited, and not just for authenticity of the person being who they claim but for the general validity of what they say or report?
Are there other badges similar to the blue check for other things? My understanding is that the blue check is for verifying people are who they claim, is there another badge to signify "hey this person posts legit things with references as a reporter"?
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 - Sept 2022 (36 comments)
- but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because it tends to split the discussion.
(You did the preferable thing by talking about this in the original thread.)
As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.
Infamously anti-west personality Sima Nan: "Being anti-American is work while visiting the U.S. is life" https://youtu.be/Q0y84Oi3VW8
Short summary, his wife and child are U.S citizens, and he visits them often, but his entire career is made up of bashing the west, western values, and putting the ccp on a pedestal, and he's made a small fortune on this career... until his turn came.
There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.
Terminally online users are the problem. Until we regard their neurosis, addiction, and proclivity for unreality as a real problem, this will only get worse. Pulling on this string will drag several much harder problems along with it, such as equitable access to mental health care.
> There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.
There doesn't have to be a single explanation, though. It can be paid shills and obsessives.
I'd guess it's a mix, with a little straight money, a lot of obsession, and a middling amount of compensated cat herding.
[1] The playbook being basically "discuss reasonable criticism, remove unreasonable criticism" ie "nobody talk too much about that battery fire, but don't make it look suspicious."
[2] "On the Internet, you know everybody who disagrees with you is a dog."
My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left.
Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it.
Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years.
And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care."
It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.
It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago?
I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.
So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.
Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort.
That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?
We’re a social species so a big component of our thinking is in community with others. When that community is healthy our rougher edges are smoothed out, when that community is lopsided or absent altogether then we drift and warp.
Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we’re practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any public communication mechanism.
In writing the story, took all of the crazy conspiracy letters and entertained the idea of "what if every single one were true?"
There is one major difference between then and now though; back in the '90s, those nutty voicemails never made it into the public domain, and thus those "ideas" were unable to spread.
In 2022, political rallies are playing Qanon theme music, because they know exactly how well those ideas have spread.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/politics/trump-rally-q...
Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality.
Quoting comment section of that article:
"This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world."
Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life".
Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most people's references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.
To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary term, rather than an epoch.
Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and capitulated.
In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same mountain as it has since then.
Vonnegut, Pynchon, Wallace etc. are what one should think about when they’re discussing postmodernism. People relating it back to gender or race theory is kinda silly IMO.
And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.
I'm currently following 50 accounts. No journalists (i.e., no news accounts). I get enough new things to think about and gadgets to consider. Quick examples:
When there's an outage, Cloudflare Radar can be useful. When there's a traffic event, my US state's DOT can be useful. When there's a new release of OpenBSD: @OpenBSD.
Not proud of the Hold My Cosmo thing...
Trending for me now is "retrogaming."
If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind.
Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.
"Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes, drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years. Only $495"
It's an acronym used by Trump cultists to describe people who don't want to belong to their cult.
I wouldn't call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should understand and see through the biases. It's a poor model given the realities though.
Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person to be active in multiple internet communities. I've been surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name and beliefs).
The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it's easy to think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these problems).
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
>Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets.
Where did this 60% come from? Did the author really translate survey responses along the lines of a user "sometimes" posting political content and uses Twitter "a few times each week" to a direct percentage of all tweets? This isn't even getting into that "using" Twitter doesn't necessarily mean posting tweets.
it really put me off when twitter started inserting suggested topics and tweets from people i really didnt follow to just fill out my feed. even more offputting was the suggested tweets came interspersed in the tweets of those that i follow. does it happen to others or is it just me because i only follow a few people < 50.
This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced at least that many people.
The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that it's actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the person making this claim isn't either literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what he writes.
And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it massively amplified. Terrifying.
I don't care for this Tristan Snell person, an obvious political shill. But your protestations ring hollow. The psychological manipulation in this example and a recent Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio (music playing over the speech, similar coordinated gestures of religiosity in the audience) are screamingly obvious.
It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity. It seems to me that if you're in a culture where people are widely familiar with Nazi iconography, and you're not exploring Nazism in some fictional or educational context, then you'd want to avoid doing and saying things that make you look and sound like a Nazi, such as training a crowd of people to do a stiff-arm salute at a political rally for theatrical effect, the same way it's a bad idea to hold up swastika flags and claim you were being 'ironic' or 'trying to provoke a discussion'.
In the sense of what? Raising your right hand? That's basically the only part that overlaps. From wikipedia:
>The salute is performed by extending the right arm from the shoulder into the air with a straightened hand. Usually, the person offering the salute would say "Heil Hitler!" (lit. 'Hail Hitler!', IPA: [ˌhaɪl ˈhɪtlɐ] (listen)),[3] "Heil, mein Führer!" ('Hail, my leader!'), or "Sieg Heil!" ('Hail victory!').
Also, in the video a prayer was performed and afterwards they slammed their hand while saying "as one", both of which are not part of the nazi salute.
>it serves the same psychological purpose
Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as "symbol of support in a political rally"?
>but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK
I'm certainly not defending the actions that were taken by the participants of the rally, and I suspect neither is the other poster (thepasswordis). The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not. The problem with this is that words have meaning, and if you start using in cases that clearly does not fit the original meaning, then it gets watered down. eg. "nazi" nowadays is synonymous with "white supremacist" (which itself has also been watered down), which is far from the original meaning of "member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party". That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?
>It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity.
I'm not against taking note of the similarity. I'm against calling it a "nazi salute" with no qualifiers.
It's collective, coordinated, and directs attention toward an individual on stage, as opposed to an individual expression of support like clapping or cheering - which many people might do simultaneously but isn't normally coordinated outside of a music performance. The 'as one' hand slamming you mentioned emphasizes the coordination here; it's novel, but basically an iteration on the original gesture.
> The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not.
The tweet is somewhat hyperbolic and sensationalized, but while it's not exactly the same I really think it's more similar than different - it's a choreographed gesture of support for a political figure at a political rally involving a straight arm salute. As I said earlier, harping on the cosmetic differences sidesteps the very obvious question of 'does this look like a nazi rally to a casual observer?' And that matters, because political rallies aren't intellectually rigorous exercises in philosophical inquiry, they are theatrical performances designed to motivate political behavior through emotional arousal.
> That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?
Groypers (this is an in-joke). We also have open neo-nazis who are explicitly aligned with the historical national socialist movement to the point of fetishizing it. The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains in multiple countries at present can be generally described as fascism without any loss of precision or clarity. This doesn't have to refer to the-Italian-party-once-headed-by-Benito-Mussolini. Obsessing over typologies is sometimes a coping mechanism to avoid engaging with an issue, like having an argument about meteorology to avoid admitting you should have brought an umbrella.
But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi rally"? If you go around saying that a politician just held a "nazi rally", what pops in your head? You seem to think that the answer to both is something along the lines of "collective, coordinated, and directs attention toward an individual on stage", but I doubt most people believe that. This sort of behavior isn't limited to just political rallies for white supremacists, it's used by basically everyone. Calling right-wing or even white supremacist rallies as "nazi rallies" makes as much sense as calling left wing rallies as "Bolshevik rallies".
>The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains in multiple countries at present can be generally described as fascism without any loss of precision or clarity
You don't see the problem here? You just equated "right wing authoritarianism" with "nazis" and "fascism". What does "right wing authoritarianism" mean, anyways? Is it just people who are more right wing and authoritarian than you by some arbitrary amount? If a politician is called a "nazi" or a "fascist", his policies could be anywhere between "more funding for the police and stricter immigration enforcement" and "round up minorities and send them to death camps".
A combination of Nazi-style iconography and right wing/reactionary rhetoric. I've yet to see a 'left wing rally' in the US but I suppose that could take in center-left rallies by politicians like Bernie Sanders. And people do label such events as a bunch of commies.
I'm not sure what you have in mind with 'Bolshevik rallies'. I can't think of anything visually distinctive about historical examples, and when I think of Communist party events I think of very formal affairs in auditoriums as you might see from China or North Korea. I'm having trouble imagining an American equivalent.
> You don't see the problem here? You just equated "right wing authoritarianism" with "nazis" and "fascism". What does "right wing authoritarianism" mean, anyways?
If you're struggling with very common political theory terms used in a wholly conventional way, perhaps you should consult a dictionary instead of asking me to stand in for one.
So a rally with people raising their fists[1] and arguing for state expropriation and/or redistribution would be a "communist rally"?
>And people do label such events as a bunch of commies.
And you think that's a fair label?
>If you're struggling with very common political theory terms used in a wholly conventional way, perhaps you should consult a dictionary instead of asking me to stand in for one.
Sounds like you're trying to dodge the issue, which is that politics lies on a spectrum and there isn't an obvious point between "wants more funding for cops and tighter border control" and "wants to round up and kill a particular ethnic group" that defines "right wing authoritarianism". Even if you were somehow able to come up with a principled definition, I doubt that it's something that most people would agree with, which means practically speaking all these phrases essentially boil down to "people with politics that I find too extreme".
It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.
Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.
I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about.
I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about.
If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
Every time I’ve tried to cultivate a nice list of feeds it has been constant hassle to manage it.
I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt to it, in the long run probably for the better.
The Twitter experience depends mostly on who you follow and how.
The "who" is self-explanatory, and for the "how" I recommend solely using Twitter Lists almost exclusively.
You can also create a list of people who you are consistently interested in hearing from.
However, I agree that you’re probably better off without Twitter. It’s a time sink.
How about leaving it at shutting down and be done with it.
The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives.
My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with "cancel" bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it.
If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).
Very well put.
Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.
Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on the internet :)
Which potentially has implications if your area of interest isn't inherently tied to the main polarization axis.
I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all.
I'm left a bit confused.
Tweeting merely requires a toilet break at work.
Once I started viewing all online media as the equivalent of the graffiti on toilet stalls the world started making sense again.
If people start talking all the time in real life people will first start ignoring them, and then isolate them.
It is a giant echo chamber of very few, where the media buys in to the echo as "everyone" and reverberate outside of the chamber as the truth.
I get:
- The tyranny of structurelessness
- ... of merit
- ... of tears
- ... of the dark
- ... of metrics
- ... of weakness
and I'm sure they'd just keep going if it could display more entries at once. While typing, it brought up an article complaining about Millennial design aesthetics containing the phrase, "the tyranny of terrazzo".
It's like "goto considered harmful" but with a longer history, and way more popular—familiar to a much wider set of readers than "... considered harmful", that is.
The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is full of people who agree with you.
This very far from my experience. I've pretty much never met an avid Twitter user who doesn't think Twitter is a personal and societal problem. As I said, it's banked into the culture and there are tons of memes about it. You won't even find journalists not speaking in this self-deprecating way...
What grandparent commentator is talking about is, to me, more about realizing that Twitter isn't Taco Bell: It's arsenic. Or lead in makeup: Actively, immediately harmful. Not just 'bad for you'.
Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow` user @A.
Ideally:
> twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A
Edit: API Review Time!
I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.
Pretty crappy to limit people’s ability to curate.
Go one step further and support block groups, so if NFT’s become interesting you can enable them.
> Don't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click.
Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
And if you look at the graph below, it does seem to show Twitter users who post political opinions skew liberal.
* influential politicians
* journalists
* Jerome powell "... though there's some evidence that Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for ideas on monetary policy"
* College educated people (94 million americans)
I don't think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't need people to watch as many ads as possible. So perhaps the solution is a version of Twitter that can exist without monetization.
I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
The word "liberal" means exactly that - showing preference and deference to private enterprise - in the overwhelming majority of the world, as it refers to economic liberalism.
> The word "liberal" means exactly that - showing preference and deference to private enterprise - in the overwhelming majority of the world, as it refers to economic liberalism.
Except in America, where it took on a somewhat narrower, variant meaning that focuses on "social liberalism."
Right and you'll find large populations of both Democrats and Republicans fall under the "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" banner with Democrats generally skewing one way a bit and Republicans the other. But ultimately, both sides headed the same direction just at different speeds and priority.
I think the woke left and MAGA types have made more noise lately and it has disturbed some of the balance we've had the last 70 years where everyone is essentially onboard with the New Deal Regime.
Weird that the mainstream gets to claim this when they advocate against anything resembling any of it any opportunity they get.
However, during the 1800s and early 1900s, the word "conservative" continued to hold its monarchist overtones, and therefore it was rejected by all American politicians, regardless of their party. The first presidential candidate to describe himself as a "conservative" was Barry Goldwater in 1964.
I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-left-liberal distinction.
But in case it helps explain, at least in America, "liberal" has the basic connotation of "individual equality". Originally this meant equality before the law, often called "classical liberalism" which both left and right generally endorse.
But then the left become associated with a greater expanded equality -- more social programs, safety nets, education, etc. The left therefore became associated with the term "liberal" while the right with "conservative" -- liberals interested in greater social equality, conservatives believing in more of a natural social hierarchy (still on top of legal equality). Then conservatives came up with the moderately-used term "neoliberal" to promote their market-based economic policies based on classical liberalism, in opposition to the left-wing expanded equality social policies. There's also the term "libertarian" which refers to classical liberalism without anything added -- no social equality of the left, and also no conservative cultural values of the right.
But nevertheless, I'm extremely curious to know what you call liberal that is distinct from both right and left?
Leftists (so called) economically challenge the idea that markets are inherently good, asserting that many industries should not be market based. Health insurance, prisons, schools, and so on. They tend to be more open to universal social programs which don't require stringent needs testing.
Leftists tend to distinguish themselves from liberals more than distinguish liberals from conservatives in my experience. I would say liberals in America have much higher respect for marginalized groups, and they seem to have a desire to solve problems, as opposed to Republicans.
edit at 1636 UTC: My above comment is quickly thought out and from mobile. I think "party alignment" would be somewhat more complex if our voting system allowed more than two parties to exist.
I quite like the definitions here[0] honestly, and to quote from that:
> We believe markets are astonishingly good at creating wealth but less good at distributing that wealth. We support a market-based economy that promotes economic growth and nurtures innovation, while also supporting a safety net that shares the gains of that growth with everyone.
In the UK, I would contrast that with a left who are skeptical of free markets, and a right who are skeptical that anyone who doesn't accumulate wealth under free markets should be entitled to any.
Assuming you're American, and assuming my memory of their positions is correct, Elizabeth Warren is a liberal where Bernie is a leftist.
I would say that in the US, what you're calling liberal would translate to "centrist/mainstream Democrats" who believe in the market but also in a social safety net. In other words, the majority of Democrats. But we also just call that the left, because it's the mainstream political viewpoint that is opposite to the right.
What you are calling the left, we call "progressive", which is why you see so many references to the "progressive wing" of the Democrats. Which includes Bernie and also AOC, who also call themselves "socialists", but in the US this doesn't mean communist -- it's not about government ownership, but vastly stronger regulation, protection, and government action generally.
While Elizabeth Warren is really her own idiosyncratic category. She's doing her own thing that isn't really aligned with mainstream Democrats or with the progressives, or with anybody else particularly. If anything, you might call her more "technocrat" than anything else.
But at the end of the day I hope I've answered your question as to why liberal = left in the US. Because liberal means pro-equality, and for whatever historical reasons, equality moved from mere legal equality to a more robust equality of opportunity. And we use "classical liberal" to distinguish the old liberal from the new.
America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought have any relationship to "left." In Australia, the right-wing party is called the Liberal Party.
"Liberals" are free market advocates who support change through competition and a hands off approach by government. "Conservatives" prefer the government support of firm moral values and established traditional institutions.
Somehow the US thinks that "liberal" means having a concerned look on your face, and that it's somehow related to communism, which takes the exact opposite position on the liberal's only defining belief. Communism shares so much more with conservatism, starting with an absolute belief in the importance of morality and institutions. Communism's major difference from conservatism is that it believes that the traditional institutions were created and controlled by a small group of inbred people for a small group of inbred people (which is undeniable, but also when conservatives get off the bus.)
That's simply not true. Because "liberal" is a word that means many different things in many different countries, it's a famously malleable term.
For example, Wikipedia says (emphasis mine):
> The definition of liberal party is highly debatable... This is a broad political current, including left-wing, centrist and right-wing elements. All liberal parties emphasise individual rights, but they differ in their opinion on an active role for the state. This list includes parties of different character, ranging from classical liberalism to social liberalism, conservative liberalism to national liberalism... [1]
Indeed, a quick search for the term "left" on that page shows that "liberal" is used to describe leftist parties in the Bahamas, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Croatia, and North Macedonia at least. It's not just an American thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_parties_by_country