"media"
EDIT: lots of discussion around this. Twitter is literally a social media company. You can split hairs on whether the “media” part of “social media” agrees with your bias here.
Tech companies: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter.
Some companies are even both. But in the main, Twitter is the thing that employs developers and writes code and not the thing that employs reporters and writes stories.
Here we go again...under this view, every company is a "tech" company. Does GE or John Deere write software for their hardware? Absolutely. Are they colloquially considered "tech" companies? No.
Twitter is a media company (they distribute media). Tech is their operating model to deliver media. As is Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. etc.
Because tech is not their primary line of business.
> Twitter is a media company (they distribute media).
A media company is the thing that produces media, not the thing that distributes it. Cogent is not a media company.
Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
So you're conceding that Twitter isn't the entity generating the content.
> Meanwhile, some Deere buyers are there for the tech.
By your analogy, John Deere is a food company, because people aren't there for the tractors, they're there for the harvested crops. But that doesn't work because John Deere and Conagra are not the same kind of operation.
Deere's customers are there for the tech. They're handing over money for it.
Twitter's customers are there for the audience. The audience is there for... the rest of the audience. Their tech is entirely incidental to their value. Calling twitter a tech company is like calling Deere a factory company—one uses tech and one uses factories, but that's not what they are.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not saying we should call John Deere a tech company—I don't think it's the best label, even as a very broad one, for what they do—but I do think Twitter is so not one that it'd make more sense to call Deere a tech company than Twitter.
John Deere designs their own tractors. Their customers want tractors. They could outsource the manufacturing and still sell to the same customers.
Foxconn is a factory company. The thing people want from them is manufacturing. Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple. If they had no factories they would have no business.
Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates. Their users want to talk to each other, in the same way as John Deere's customers want harvested crops. But the way Twitter provides that service is through computers and software.
Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Are new users (or actual customers—advertisers, blue-checks these days, which, LOL) signing up because they want access to the technology?
If another company cloned 100% of Twitter's proprietary technology, perfectly, how would investors react to that company, if that's all they've got?
If that company offered that tech for sale, outright, straight-up IP transfer, a single bidder owns the whole thing, what percentage of Twitter's value would that tech command on the market?
I'd go with:
1) No,
2) No,
3) They'd practically ignore it,
and 4) probably not even 1%
Twitter could completely outsource their software development and still sell advertising to its customers.
> Foxconn is a factory company.
Wtf does this even mean? Foxconn is a semiconductor manufacturer...
> Their customers are the likes of Dell and Apple.
Oh great, so Apple isn't a tech company anymore? Don't they write code that powers the back-end of virtually every iPhone in existence (backup, iCloud, iMessage, App Store, etc. etc.).
> Twitter operates servers and writes code. That's who they employ and how their business operates.
So how do you explain all of the sales people? Or the content regulation? Or the support? fun fact - when it was publicly traded Twitter spent nearly equally on R&D as it did S&M.
> Notably, the way they provide that service is not through employing reporters to write stories.
Because this is OUTSOURCED. It's user generated content.
Because "tech" isn't a business. You don't sell "tech". Microsoft as an example is heavily diversified and as a software publisher they sell ERP software, operating system software, business productivity software, etc. Technology is what allows them to produce and run that software.
> A media company is the thing that produces media
"Tech" is a fairly broad category that includes both computer hardware and computer software, but these are definitely things that companies produce and sell for money, or produce and offer as services.
But why are we talking about what counts as a tech company when the issue is what counts as a media company? If Microsoft was a "Cloud Services" instead of a "tech" company, Azure still wouldn't be a media entity.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media#Internet
The internet, like broadcast television and cable, is a medium of transmission. But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC, not Panasonic.
No it doesn't. That's my point. Tech isn't an industry or a category. It's an operating model. The delineation of it being an industry adds nothing of value to any discussion because its so ill-defined.
> But when people talk about media companies, they're talking about NBC
Guess what...NBC merged with Comcast and Comcast is a telecomm company, which guess what...distributes media.
> Panasonic.
Panasonic is a hardware manufacturer...
Alice is a lawyer and Bob is a doctor and a lawyer. Why would that imply that Alice is a doctor?
> Panasonic is a hardware manufacturer...
And Twitter is a communications service.
They're not in the same line of business as the entities that employ reporters.
Ok so they're not a tech company. Glad we solved that. /handshake-emoji/
It’s a mess of a company for sure, but just because their software isn’t common on the web, I’d still classify them as a tech company.
I think of Twitter as a media outlet. They don’t directly employ news writers, but just about all media flows through Twitter in some form or fashion. They’re intrinsically linked to the media landscape.
I do, because the definition is so loose that it gets manipulated by investors / the overall market. Great example:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-cogan-8627b955_dtc-stockm...
And it makes sense for the label to be applied specifically to media entities because journalists are supposed to be unbiased, as opposed to e.g. Raytheon which is objectively state-affiliated but nobody expects to be doing objective reporting.
If a media outlet is being funded by the government then readers should know that because it could affect their coverage if they fear losing that funding as a result of critical reporting. This directly applies to NPR because Republicans regularly threaten to remove its public funding in response to their coverage.
The better criticism is, why is the label applied to NPR but not e.g. MSNBC? Pretty sure at least Comcast (MSNBC's parent company) receives a significant amount of government funding.
close, if there is evidence their coverage is actually being affected, readers should know that because that is what should inform their decision
in some cases, where the funding constitutes a large portion of total funding, it may be appropriate to add a disclaimer
Meanwhile case-specific evidence is largely unavailable. Reporters would be loathe to admit to being cowed, but are also aware that corporate executives make decisions on things like promotions and timeslots based on the bottom line, or in less well-funded entities that a loss of funding can directly lead to a loss of employment.
How about statistical evidence? Well, if Republicans are threatening NPR with the loss of funding, they could slant their coverage to placate the legislators criticizing them, or they could slant it the other way to bolster their support from the other party. In either case it compromises their neutrality, but now you can find "evidence" of this in any divergence from neutrality in either direction. Since they couldn't reasonably be expected to be infallible in the alternative, that doesn't prove anything.
So you make people aware of the incentive, because that's all you're really going to know about in practice.
an example of evidence of such a conspiracy theory would be internal emails telling a reporter to go easy on the US government because a small portion of funding comes from it, or to attack X because the US government wants them to
statistical evidence would work too if it proves the claims of bias somehow, I leave it to you to figure out some examples
Ad Fontes tries to rate news media on the type of reporting it does and the general political skew. This doesn't capture everything, but it can be done. Except for specific topics I think it's slightly better than incentives in general, though incentives are important too.
And social media companies are more like convenience stores that also carry newspapers. The large majority of tweets are not by media outlets.
This has never been the case. Never. While some journalism sources operate in a facts-only manner, all journalistic sources have bias as to which stories they research. And historically, the press has been about propaganda, editorials, and selling papers at least as much as about reporting.
Labeling news organization as "government-funded" is less informative than labeling them as "propaganda" or "editorializing". The major reason to so label them is, itself, propaganda. With the second reason being a warning to the reader to practice even more diligence than normal.
By your own reasoning, those other labels would be redundant. Whereas "government-affiliated" makes the reader aware of a specific kind of bias that not all media entities are subject to.
Clair Cameron Patterson famously took money from the leaded gasoline industry to help fund his research demonstrating the harms of leaded gasoline.