The random Twitter user though? Who the fuck knows. He might be in just for the lols. Maybe they're just bored. Maybe they're actually knowledgeable. You just don't know.
You also don't know this about random newspaper reporters. Even the "most respected" outlets have let print some real whoppers.
And you can apply the same reasoning to literally everything. You know nothing about this random doctor who's going to perform surgery. Should you perhaps let some other random guy on twitter that claims to be a surgeon do it? After all even doctors from "most respected" universities made some stupid mistakes.
It's good to be skeptical in life, I'm not arguing against it. But at some point you have to trust at least something otherwise it's impossible to go through life.
Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources, moreso than conflicted profit-seeking media outlets. In particular, a lot of them are subject matter experts in a particular field, instead of generalists trying to summarize something they don't really understand or put a partisan spin on it.
There are also more than enough less trustworthy sources. But you shouldn't feel inclined to follow the nincompoops.
But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
I’m not saying there aren’t trustworthy people on Twitter. After all there’s plenty of journalists. But there’s also plenty of shitposters. And random people spewing nonsense.
Eh. When the set "journalists" contains all the people who work for the likes of 24 hour cable news networks and the National Enquirer it's not obvious this is even the case. But the bigger point is that you don't select sources at random from the entire population of Twitter users, you select the ones you've observed have a track record of getting it right.
It's obvious by the sheer number of people in the two groups. There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The bigger point though is that I'd not pick a random journalist either, I'd select one I observed having a positive track record. We're losing track where this discussion started.
The "pick one at random" is not something I'm suggesting people should do as a strategy. You should invest time and try vet people as best as you can; you should never 100% trust anyone; You should always challenge your own assumptions and biases; You should try as much as you can to find multiple sources on the same story if you care about that particular story.
That's an MO i'd suggest. I personally don't care where people find their sources as long as they're doing their search properly. I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter. Same is true for most news outlets. I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
The population of journalists has adverse selection because the nature of the industry creates an incentive to attempt to influence opinions rather than merely convey factual information. If you pick one at random you're more likely to get a paid propagandist than you are picking randomly from the population at large.
> I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter.
It's not just that. If you take science reporting, for example, even the "quality" journalist outlets will present you with a summary of the results which is often unintentionally inaccurate simply because it's written by someone who doesn't comprehensively understand the research and is under time pressure to publish a story as soon as the research paper is released, even though it's long paper full of domain-specific knowledge that takes time and expertise to digest. Meanwhile they, for whatever reason, consistently fail to link to the original paper, so you have only their inadequate summary.
Whereas there's a decent chance the author of the paper is on Twitter, has posted a short summary of the results which is accurate, and provides the direct link if you want to read it yourself.
And the same with the rest of it. When the major media outlets report the CrowdStrike thing, it's generally along the lines of "an unspecified computer glitch caused flights to be canceled" and then an interview with some rando who tells you to install anti-virus on your PC. When you go somewhere that will give you the full story, you find out the problem was caused by the anti-virus.
See also Gell-Mann Amnesia:
https://loricism.fandom.com/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
> I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
See this is where we disagree. Partisan media outlets employ the lowest quality sources of information, because they're purposely selected to manipulate your opinions. They're not just random rubbish, they're explicitly adversarial to objective truth.
That isn't to say that good journalists don't exist, but they are not a majority of "journalists" to be sure.
Some of them are teenagers that pay for a blue "Verified" checkmark with their mom's credit card. Modern Twitter is about as deserving of your trust as an email from a Nigerian prince.
The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful.
Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts – without interference from Twitter’s engagement algorithms. Or if it’s still possible to use third-party software to consume Twitter posts (I used to have an extension that converted Twitter links to Nitter).
You should try it, then. Part of the... uh... "appeal" of Twitter is the algorithmic timeline that suggests content from people you've never seen or heard from before in your life.
Still, don't get why regular folks are so obsessed with getting desperately the news first, unless you ie trade on it or work for Reuters. Life quality is about completely different stuff, but to each their own, maybe its just Sunday chill talking from me
I can feel the mental strain of trying to keep up with everything that’s happening and it’s not healthy.
It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since Musk, some have moved to bsky or mastodon, but it's still the best source for me.
I understand your point of view but I don't find your assumption very charitable, there are real reasons for this that have been touched on.
There are truly very few news which are seriously relevant to my life, and I suspect its the same for rest of us. Just because there is a big crowd of similarly-impacted folks I ain't going to normalize such toxic behavior.
This, especially now that we're approaching the day when everyone could ask their personal AI to build a fake, albeit plausible, image of someone doing something wrong.
For example, several times in my life I happen to have caught a live stream that was reported on wildly inaccurately by legacy news media. I happened to watch, for example, the "Covington kids"[0] stream because it was trending on Twitter that day. Knowledge of that reporting travesty should be enough to shake anyone from experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and wouldn't have been dispelled by reading several news sites because just so many were involved. Frankly, it was a disgusting and irresponsible response by said journalists and organisations and should lead people to stop reading those publications in their entirety.
That's not the only example, but the idea that powerful "truth seeking" organisations should try and destroy the lives of children because of an agenda and a MAGA hat is an indictment of those organisations. It led to death threats against children.
I'm happy with choosing my own sources of trust, thanks, and it won't be to read from sources that do that kind of thing. I have a thing called basic morality, and encouraging violence against children is a line I'm not willing to cross.
YMMV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confront...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...