Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1821189070401249385/p...
Maybe--a lot of folks made the same point in the mid 2010s when news outlets began shutting down comment sections on their sites. They usually said it was the "toxic" atmosphere. But I imagine they really didn't like when the top comment was pointing out some obvious error (of fact, logic, grammar etc) in their article. I actually remember pointing out an error of fact on the gaurdian itself back--some review had made some ridiculous point because they were confusing the Aramaic and Amharic languages--and seeing the article later updated and my comment removed.
Nobody allows that on their website now - that was before many lessons were learned. HN doesn't allow anything like it (and never has, afaik).
Counterpoints are useful to help negate echo chambers where we end up clicking on the articles which validate our world view.
In addition the most upvoted comments (at least on the Financial Times website) are sometimes more informed and nuanced than the articles themselves. The article often gets the debate rolling - come for the articles, stay for the comments (so to speak).
In the comments section of news websites, it wasn't counterpoints. It was just aggression, lies, toxicity, etc.
The Financial Times is pretty rarefied air. Everyone must be subscribed, so no anonymity (I would guesss). How much does a subscription cost? $300+ per year?
I'm find it kind of annoying when you can't comment on an article with obvious things wrong.
What about the example at the head of this comment chain?
I think news sites did lose something without feedback. I can accept a chess pool with a single good comment to make up for it. So it does provide value for me and I disagree with the "lessons learned". Also, the legal risks of showing user content should be scraped for anything that is not explicitly illegal.
We have information bubbles now that are way worse than the occasional comment in bad taste.
Have fun with that.
> the occasional comment in bad taste.
That's a lot different than most social media.
I do, that is the argument.
It would also leave me better informed since the example clearly shows that the statements could benefit from a wider context. And this wouldn't be the only case.
If comments don't provide value for you, you can ignore them. No reason to remove them for everybody else too.
I stopped reading the Guardian a few years ago. It once had really good content. That changed significantly in my opinion.
You do you, but my argument is that it leaves you worse informed:
1) There is a lot of false information, which will mislead you inevitably (you're not that smart; nobody is)
2) There is a lot of noise for the signal, a lot of waste. You are worse informed because you could have spent the time learning from higher quality information.
What they filter out is the utter crap that invariably comes to completely dominate any unfiltered comment section that is open to the general public and takes effectively anonymous submissions via the internet.
Thus, they tend to reflect the biases of the kind of people who most want to (and have time to) write and approve community notes, drawn from the pool of people who use your site.
By your definition those also must not be impartial and maybe that is a fair definition but what does it imply?
Do you similarly distrust democratic outcomes, jury decisions, etc.?
Voters are partial to the candidates they vote for; that's why they vote for them.
Turns out identity politics is a terrible idea. Now the Guardian et al are finding out exactly why when the people they disagree with are doing it too.
Going through the airport between 2001 and 2021 showed that having a Muslim sounding name was going to be a trigger for a random inspection. The Rotherham child rape gangs investigation into the police clearly showed that complaints against South Asians by Whites were ignored for decades to avoid accusations of racism.
The average Guardian reader was only going to be exposed to the first and not the second. So the Guardian went full bore with the basest form of tribalism to explain the things its readers saw.
Now the same people who were gleefully destroying the social fabric in the name of progress are acting shocked at what happens when it unravels completely. I have the worlds smallest violin for them.
Brief googling showed >30 articles in the Guardian on the second.
Which exact groups they are talking about doesn’t really matter for this specific argument.
There are more screenshots of the note in the replies, but none with the complete links to the articles.
>The Guardian have reported on two-tier policing, specifically about on race and sexuality, for decades https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/metropolitan...
There has been widespread use of force by the police against working class (white) protestors. Including random unprovoked attacks on women and the elderly: https://x.com/ashleasimonbf/status/1820088461182812308
>The concept of 'two-tier' policing is contested, it is neither proven nor disproven, therefore it is equally as inaccurate to call it a myth as it would be to say it is fact. The Guardian view is not accepted by all media commentators as fact: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/05/met-chief-grabs-... https://thecritic.co.uk/two-tier-policing/
They all say: Needs more ratings, Not shown on X
I didn't feel inclined to upvote any. The system is there to point out factual errors. Differences of opinion can be posted in the comments (Xed?) as usual. "Two tier myth" seems to be opinion to me. There may have been a public note which disappeared - it's an upvote/downvote type system.
Also that community note just says they have been consistently saying the same thing for decades which sounds okay to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/06/engl...
The myth it is referring to is that there is a two-tiered system targeting white people. That's obviously a myth -- the notes are probably referring to instances where the Guardian has claimed that police treat racial minorities differently which is quite probably the case (happens everywhere else in the old British Empire so not sure why Britain would be any different).
I found the post on ex-Twitter:
https://x.com/guardian/status/1820788959095529653
But that's from 6 August, not 8 August as per the screenshot and there is no community note on it. I can't find a post by the Guardian about this on 8 August, maybe they deleted it? Does seem weird that they would delete one and not the other. It also seems that one would get community noted and not the other (especially since the 6 August post has 1.6m views and the 8 August post screenshotted has 60k views).
I tried to find the articles shown in the community note in the screenshot, and I can find some about two-tier policing that don't really seem directly related to this.
Maybe I can't find the one that's screenshotted because I don't have an account, maybe they deleted that one but not the 6 August one, maybe the screenshot is fabricated.
Either way, I'm quite sure that this "two-tier policing" claim is of the same ilk that equates rejecting racism with being racist; ie. the "leftist bullies" idea. That violent right-wing protests are being "treated differently" because they're white, rather than treated differently because they're a bunch of psychos being whipped into a frenzy by lies spread on ex-Twitter by influencers, including Elon Musk.
I wouldn't say that's the same as claims that, for example, black people are more likely to be subject to police brutality. But right-wingers love to make claims about "reverse racism".
Except… That’s obviously not what Farage et al are saying.
The claim is that white nationalists (verging on fringe(?) neo-nazi) protestors and rioters were treated more harshly than protestors and rioters belonging to other races or subscribing to other (also violent and radical) political (or religious) ideologies.
It does not seem obvious at all to me that this is clearly a myth.
The current claim that current "other race" UK protestors are (oranges to oranges in same circumstances) better treated than white protestors is subjective, it's not suprise that such a claim is being made by Farage and Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon .. it's very much their schtick.
That was more than 40 years ago. I was wondering whether bringing up 2011 might make sense (since it was over 10 years ago, the riots weren’t as politically motivated etc.) but this is just something else..
That’s the problem with the Guardian. They spend a lot of this time writing defensive stories, while missing the real ones.
Didn’t Guardian write a single story about how Kamala Harris got her political start under the patronage of Willie Brown? I don’t recall a single Guardian story critical of anything Kamala Harris did once she became the candidate.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/rashida-tlai...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/kama...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/24/kama...
Edited to be less opinionated / more factual
It means more rigid deadlines - more stories that are half-told to meet the deadlines and longer times to corrections.
Maybe the assertion in the tweet is true and maybe it isn’t, but to me, this is the real reason that X should be abandoned. No one on X can be trusted to engage in honest discourse. I don’t believe anything, whether it’s coming from the right or the left if it’s posted on X. You might as well have posted something from 4Chan.
I'm always skeptical of things I read, the advantage Wikipedia has is that it's easy enough to see what references are used and how active community edits and debate on an article is.
Nuggets of "information" posted to X, Faceook, and the like are often much harder to dig into and peer behind the curtain of.
As a right wing hub they oppose realities which don’t fit their world view.
Using the example you linked there is a long documented history of minorities in the Uk, including the Irish, being treated much more harshly by British police. Stop and search laws and multiple incidents of innocent people being framed for crimes.
The rights which to pretend this is targeted at the white majority, simply because multiply convicted criminals like Tommy Robinson are being jailed, is a myth.
No British policeman can stop you on the street by psychically intuiting your political views. They can stop you if you are breaking windows, chanting slogans, or have a different skin color.
The Guardian publishing real journalism (the paper has broken more significant news stories in recent decades than any other British outlet) into a toilet of right wing opinion doesn’t make sense.
As there is no way to rebut a community note the last word is always with the mob.
Do you have an example of such flawed community notes? The ones I encountered were pretty sane and middle of the road, often correcting Elon himself.
All i have ever seen on Twitter was posturing and sniping. The fact that many folks consider social media propagation of one-sided polemics posing as news does not persuade me of the value of this sewage flow of emotion and bile.
Elon Musk uses his cudgel to attempt to topple the governments of nations. The vast power he wields is due to a purchase: $70 billion or ao, including $13 billion in investments from an opaque fund we now know includes sanctioned oligarchs and Saudi royalty.
Using the weaknesses of democracy to destroy the democratic world, and funded by repressive types who want us to worship the raw power of money like royalty, no really; those seeking to return humanity to feudalism!
I do not see any positive side to Twitter or Facebook circa 2024.
I find it disturbing that those who seek to destroy our society is running it. This is not populism, but merely zombie pawn-ism.
Why on earth would you stand up for a spineless man that would never stand up for you?
I thought so. I use Twitter daily and, for all its flaws, I think the "community notes" feature is pretty awesome. In fact, I like it so much I would enjoy having in on pretty much any information stream I receive.
Maybe I could even start following and possibly trusting legacy media again - if they would bother adding it.
Then you've been looking very selectively. Also, do you include left-leaning and often hysterically hateful rants by left progressives and the hardcore woke in your idea that Twitter is mostly full of posturing, sniping and one-sided polemics?
Twitter, or now X, certainly has plenty of people doing the above from the right of the so-called spectrum, but it also has many doing the same from the left, and it used to have even more of them (people already seem to forget what kind of identity politics Twitter used to be famous for before being owned by Musk.)
Or does your specific worldview not recognize that such emotional, hysterically ideological attitudes also exist from the left?
>Using the weaknesses of democracy to destroy the democratic world
Another classic from many opponents of Trump (aside from whether one favors him or not, because many who aren't of the left also dislike him) The idea that those who do favor him are automatically "destroying" the democratic world".
Implicit behind this is the notion that democratic processes should only be allowed to count if they give majority votes to people and ideas you happen to favor, and if they don't, then well, democracy is suddenly a danger and those who used it for a certain voter mandate are dangerous ignorants who need their betters to tell them how to think.
>I do not see any positive side to Twitter or Facebook circa 2024.
Really? Nothing? So I suppose the many supporters of the progressive left and their pages/accounts on Facebook and Twitter are also negative?
>I find it disturbing that those who seek to destroy our society is running it.
Have you even paid the least attention to the specific things that many people support from candidates like Trump? For many of them, a rejection of obsessive identity politics and mistrusting claims about immigration or the economy that don't ring true are staples, and far from being unreasonable ideas that mean the end of society.
It's absurd how many people share your apparently, blindly one-side views, while attributing all evils to the supposedly monstrous other side, and then complain about how one-sidedness has taken over politics. Funny too.
Really?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/11/24293920/bluesky-700000-...
If he was still a bumbling nerd with a sympathetic plight then people would have an easier time defending him. But his aimless endorsement of radical nonsense is basically a mirror to Elon's own behavior, unfortunately. I don't trust Dorsey with power anymore.
On the other hand you have a guy who kinda liked crypto.
You call it "basically a mirror"? Do you see the absurdity of comparing the two things as if they're even remotely close to one another?
The damage caused by both owners has been equal, in my opinion. Elon Musk is a fundamentally bigger shithead, but as someone that doesn't have an account on Twitter I genuinely don't feel like this is an issue. This was an inevitability from the very moment Twitter started running a profit deficit it could never pull itself out of.
We forget that there's an easy solution to things being uploaded online that make you angry. "Just Walk Away From The Screen" - @tylerthecreator, 2012
> On the other hand you have a guy who kinda liked crypto.
That last bit, it should be noted, also describes Musk, not just Dorsey.
https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldleaders201...
The Guardian in another article explains that they are annoyed because Musk used twitter to promote his preferred candidate.
The Guardian itself used their own platform to publicly endorse Harris.
This deja-vu of childish antics is just comical in 2024
Isn’t The Guardian a UK publication?
Yes and no. For many decades they only operated in the UK. More recently they have launched digital-only US and Australia editions, whose editors are based in the US and Australia respectively, creating content aimed at each country’s audience using local journalists, but the three editions share content for stories of global significance. But still their HQ is in the UK, and I believe their UK staff and readerships are significantly larger than their US or Australia operations
That's how newspaper endorsements work. In this case the writer of the endorsement cannot themselves vote, but their opinion can still have weight.
The Economist, another UK-based periodical with a more right-wing stance, explains why it endorses candidates:
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/10/31/...
The American election is special, in that it's the "leader of the free world". What we do here affects everybody, in a way that even the leadership of Germany, France, and England doesn't. Perhaps we'd have an opinion about the leadership in Russia or China, but they don't have free elections.
The government should probably refrain from making an endorsement, but if people can't figure out the distinction between a government and a newspaper, that's their own lookout.
This is somewhat common for British media groups; the Guardian also has Australian and New Zealand versions, and the BBC has _loads_ of regional versions.
Musk can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And he can run Twitter accordingly.
The Guardian can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And they can choose the platforms they use accordingly.
It all seems perfectly reasonable to me.
When a journal is biased... it is biased.
Objectivism is one thing. Bias is another. Bias at the US elections shit is just another level.
I would like to know which newspaper or journal is not biased.
It does not exist, it never will exist, and if Serenity has taught us anything, it's that you can't stop the signal, Mal.
If you lean in to your biases you stop being news and start being entertainment.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/subjective-vs-objective/
I'm not sure why you quoted it, but "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a joke you make at the expense of right wing people for not believing in reality.
For example, take climate change. If you come at it looking only at the facts, you'll recognize we need more renewable energy and climate change poses a threat. Donald Trump, to contrast, in intending to put more money on oil and gas and remove subsidies for renewable energy.
Or, if you prefer, the economy. It's more or less undisputed that tariffs will hurt the GDP and overall economy of the US. However, Donald Trump claims tariffs will help the US economy.
Or, perhaps what the GOP has treasured most of all these past few years, the culture war. For example, gender-neutral bathrooms. From a neutral perspective, forcing trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender at birth will backfire tremendously. Instead of having trans women in women's restrooms, now you will have big burly and hairy trans men. Or look at gender affirming care, we have statistics about gender affirming care lowering the risk of suicide. But the right claims gender affirming care causes suicide and has a high regret rate.
Those are just a few examples, but if you look at popular conservative policies and then try to reason about them you kind of hit a wall.
Don’t take this to mean the democrats are the left and aren’t guilty of the same thing. They’re also right wing, and they lie, but to a lesser extent.
Many news organizations pursue as unbiased a voice as they can. The Guardian is not one of them. Here's an organization attempting an objective rating of media bias, if you're actually interested in the topic: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
It remains to be seen what will happen if Trump goes back to posting on twitter
The Guardian is being direct as far as I can tell about what they do not like and why they are leaving.
I have a strong suspicion that he will, but it'll be because "Truth" Social and Xitter have merged. They're pretty much both the same thing now so why not merge? It would also be a way for Musk to pass a lot of $$$ to Trump.
On the other hand, that's the express goal of the owner of X.
Also, the "nothing else is like twitter" argument is both wrong (lots of social media platforms are bigger) and irrelevant (it assumes that having something like twitter is a net positive -- the validity of which assumption I am not convinced).
That is commitment to maintaining your echo chamber.
(edited to add last part about journalistic integrity)
Back then "media" largely consisted of three, soon to be four channels on your analogue TV and a lot of newspapers and magazines. The media was largely passive except for the letters pages, which mostly featured real people, and the likes of "Readers's Wives" which was mostly bollocks (quite literally).
If we look at the newspapers back then: they all had a clear and well known set of biases - political and otherwise.
The Times was Conservative, so was the Torygraph (Telegraph). The Grauniad (Guardian - yes, that one) was unable to employ editors capable of effective proof-reading. The Independent was not really independent and the Sun and Mirror published pictures of young ladies alongside their biting political satire. The Sunday Sport had even more piccies of scantily clad young ladies and was barking mad - "Elvis piloted Lancaster bomber found on Moon".
We also had and still have titles such as "Private Eye", who are generally acknowledged to be proper journo outlets.
The media has always had a bias and it was always accepted that you took multiple papers, and watched the BBC and ITN News, if you wanted to appear to have a balanced view and at least appear to be well informed. Note that we forked out dosh for those papers and the UK TV license fee is not trivial.
Back in the day, I didn't have a bunch of Russians trying to spin crap at my front door, pretending to be Jehovah's Witnesses or double glazing salesmen or my work colleague. They bought peerages and sat in the House of Lords or footie teams, but at least they were mostly at a distance! Nowadays the buggers are trying to hack my telly.
NYT, WaPo, Newsweek et al. could be counted on as being liberal, while Wall Street Journal and the New York Post were popular conservative options. You also had a wide range of commentary on the telly, including Firing Line and the McLaughlin Group.
Except he'll be going up against Musk 2022 and his tweet below:
>For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally
Apparently this is going to be the Trump administration's justification for trying to kill offshore wind power.
Of course as is par for the course the people who actually study and work with Right whales say that theory is wrong and there is little evidence of serious harm to the whales from such projects.
Great point, and I think that's totally true. However, an organisation has to make the judgement call between staying on a failing (as they see it) platform in an attempt to rescue it, and leaving for an alternative that is less flawed. Clearly the Guardian thinks they stand little chance in affecting X in any meaningful way.
And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-modifies-twitter-cod...
On old Twitter you could call someone a Nazi and accuse them (falsely) of genocide. But if you “dead name” a celebrity, you’d get banned.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91198871/why-x-suspended-journal...
However in answer to this question:
> Did X suppress support of the other side?
If you have 2 options and you promote one artificially then that is the same as suppressing the other option, in either case you're making sure more people see one option than the other.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41662702
Fun times
It's like the whole hush money thing. Turns out it just doesn't matter, they should have let Stormy Daniels say whatever she wants because Trump just has to go on stage and make stuff up and then Hannity will repeat it and it becomes right-wing canon.
Another home run.
https://x.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1839463404286746770
To be fair they could censor a million differing opinions and still be the free speech platform among competitors.
Help me understand, though: what are you actually proposing? That The Guardian, while feeling they can't get their own message out given how Musk runs Twitter, should stay on Twitter? Should anyone disadvantaged by how Twitter is run stay there?
Let them do what they do and let us say what we think. It all does something, right?
1) The party which has been kvetching the most about being deplatformed and canceled by mainstream media and colleges etc. is now in power and in the name of promoting free speech promises to go after institutions in academia etc. that are full of their political opponents (who lean left) for “claming down on free speech and calling it disinformation”
2) One man bought Twitter and controls everything about the platform, some things definitely increase freedom of speech (eg proliferation of neo nazi and openly antisemitic viewpoints) and some of his own decisions clamp down on it (eg overnight declaring that “cis”, the opposite if “trans”, is a slur and cannot be said on Twitter anymore)
3) The same man will now be heading up D.O.G.E., the bureau of government efficiency, together with another private sectir billionaire (who got public sector money) to defund many public sector things, or at least make them more efficient
To sum up, we’ll be in the strange situation where the party in power is concerned about increasing freedom of speech (usually the counterculture wants this freedom while the ones in power want to repress dissent). We will have the world’s “most free social network” actually OWNED AND CONTROLLED by one guy, who happens to also work for the government, in fact head up a new government agency tasked with defunding others, and is a super-Fed.
People on the left will start to question the optics and unusualness of all this. Will the MAGA party (the acronym GOP seems very outdated) in good faith encourage speech against themselves, and will the owner of X, while heading up a major new agency in the federal government, also encourage loud criticism of their own activities?
Or will their algorithms — which one man will continue to ultimately control — silently (and maybe only as an emergent behavior) prioritize what they want and suppress what they don’t?
As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”), and a few on the top control Google, YouTube, TikTok etc. I do not see true power for the people. “Freedom of speech” is just another expression the owners and corporations co-opted and hijacked to mean “controlling a platform” and “owning an audience”.
Why do we simply donate our audience and content to these platforms? Because they have the backend software infrastructure and we don’t.
I believe that we need open source alternatives that anyone can host, that no one can own the entire network. Not even Durov. Mastodon and Matric and Bluesky are a good start. I’m working on my own too:
https://community.qbix.com/t/growing-your-community/305
And yes, it is possible for the entire ecosystem to make money serving the people with open source infrastructure, just like Wordpress, Drupal etc. Here is how it could work:
off topic, but one thing I always wonder is why the press goes along with company re-branding? If everyone knows it as Twitter or Meta, wouldn't the easiest thing be to just keep referring to it that way in your articles etc and not help the company in its massive undertaking of changing everyone's name for the product?
I mean hey, I can understand why someone like Blackwater renamed themselves to the more innocuous-sounding “Academi” LOL. But why does the media go along with it?
For the same reason they go along with other things, like covering Trump 24/7 in 2015-2016 even though they hated him. The incentives push them that way. A lot of things just go on autopilot. “This is what everyone is doing so we must too. This is the controversy so we must cover it before others do”.
I had a conversation about Capitalism and Freedom of Speech with Noam Chomsky twice on my show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_JtMSpMrOw
(Earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo)
It’s an emergent behavior of the system. Here is George Carlin with a darker take than me:
The Guardian is a newspaper. They broadly have two sections: reporting and editorial. Reporting is basically that. Now you can (correctly) argue that there is bias on the reporting side in how they choose to cover certain stories, how they choose what stories to cover, etc but there are still minimum standards they adhere to, like they won't knowingly print anything objectively false. They'll issue corrections and retractions if necessary.
The editorial side is quite literally opinion. The Guardian, like any publication, can issue their opinion on a given political race. But you know that's opinion. They'll argue why for their position. You can agree or disagree with their reasoning or conclusions. But it's intellectually honest.
Now compare that to Elon and Twitter. It's not even remotely the same. Twitter has an algorithm to decide what to show people. He's used it to push his own posts [1]. His own posts have openly pushed conspiracy theories [2], things that are provably false. This can go as far as pushing literal Nazi conspiracy theories (aka the Great Replacement [3]) and make sure as many people as possible see it.
It is utterly disingenuous to conflate the two.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/20/23730607/elon-musk-...
[3]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
There’s a bit of difference between encouraging votes for the good of the people and encouraging votes to help you personally.
But if I’m mistaken and Harris promised the Guardian a govt position they could use to pass laws to help them personally, do tell.
How did Musk use Twitter to promote his candidate? Was it on whatever the Twitter equivalent of editorial pages are? Was it promoting posts favorable to that candidate in people's feed and/or demoting posts favorable to other candidates?
Details matter in these things.
Saying a leftwing site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing users) soapbox...
Ftfy
I'm a staunch independent, so it's really just fascinating to watch the pendulum swing so hard.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/04/elon-musk...
Things I haven't heard on the internet: "I was truly hoping that Musk would bring about free speech and political neutrality so now I'm pretty disappointed at the outcome"...
Presumably for the same reason they find the optics of X acceptable but what do I know.
Rabid in what way?
I think it's more likely that they'll find people who agree with their biases on Bluesky, and that's the real reason they're switching.
I haven't seen any of the things the Guardian mentions on my feed -- it's mostly startup related, software related, finance news, and science/medical stuff with maybe ~10% of posts I come across having a political tinge (I do not seek out any political discourse in my feed). But this ratio hasn't changed much in the last few years, except that the flavor of political content has moved rightward (it started off pretty left, which I also did not seek out).
The notion that I’m meant to ingest some unfiltered firehose of utter garbage because of some incorrect notion of “all opinions are equally valid” is complete and utter bullshit.
Lol. Same way as you or anyone else calling it utter garbage.
As another comment on this thread points out, this is exactly what the Community Notes feature is for, and it's the real reason why the Guardian has been having such a rough time on X.
I don't know the true reason the Guardian left X. But I do know X is overrun with disinformation, racism, and outright reality denial. I left twitter a while ago, so I'm not in a position to judge the guardian.
As someone who purports to care so much about facts, how can you open with this statement? This sort of behavior is why Trump won in a landslide -- people are voting against this sort of cognitive dissonance disguised as arrogance, not for Trump.
> But I do know X is overrun with disinformation, racism, and outright reality denial. > I left twitter a while ago
Okay. I'm picking up on a common theme amongst all the armchair experts on X -- they aren't on it and only know what has been cherry picked by their own hyper-partisan media outlets.
Let's assume Elon is quite right wing and the vast majority of his personal posts are opinions masquerading as facts. Did you know you can unfollow him? How is this worse than where you get your news? I'll tell you -- in many cases, you don't know who owns your news source of choice and you don't know their agenda, but they surely have one. So basically, X is a more decentralized information system with more transparency.
You just answered it, lol. Because I care about facts.
> people are voting against this sort of cognitive dissonance disguised as arrogance, not for Trump.
Right, the arrogance of pointing out things that are blatantly untrue. If you're trying to paint your side as anything but bumbling idiots, you're not doing a very good job.
The really fun thing about Trump supporters this go around is that they pretty much shoot themselves in the foot whenever they can.
Virtually every Trump supporter I know considers him a liar. The leftists I know don't - they actually have more respect for him. But Trump supporters will defend him constantly with "he doesn't mean that" or "he meant it as a joke" or whatever.
Your defense is that the person you support is not evil, but just a liar? In fact, they vote for him under the assumption that he won't be able to execute most of his plans, and they'll fall through. Their faith in him is paradoxically based on complete non-belief. It's very interesting to me.
Musk is in a similar position. His defenders proclaim his innocence by requiting his crimes on the grounds of abject stupidity. That doesn't do much to convince me.
I answered your questions as best I could, but to be honest, I have very little patience on account of how stupid the questions were. I mean, it's not exactly groundbreaking news that Twitter is a dumpster fire and algorithms purposefully boost the most toxic content.
I'm working under the assumption you're playing stupid, which is actually rather charitable of me. The alternative would that you just are stupid.
But, because today I feel extra generous, I'll answer your incredibly naive question:
> Did you know you can unfollow him? How is this worse than where you get your news?
Social Media like X is specifically engineered to keep you on it via engagement. This means rage bait.
I know this because I've tried, very hard, to scrub my socials of politics. I am very disciplined, but even for me it is impossible. No matter what, I will get some pinhead saying women shouldn't vote or black people are genetically inferior. I can unfollow, I can click "not interested", doesn't matter.
The algorithm will, eventually, go back into showing me the most vile content imaginable, almost always extreme right-wing content.
The reason why is obvious - this content is extremely controversial and garners the most retention. Nobody cares about rainbows and butterflies, they care about skinheads and rapists.
The news, at least, does not feature this kind of content. The news, also, typically does not outright lie. Musk outright lies, almost always, but he's one example. If you go through the timeline of the typical right-wing pundit, almost none of their tweets are true.
The news isn't going to tell me Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. Twitter, and evidently the president elect, will.
Proceeds to be extremely toxic.
@dang
And are you implying that the Guardian is being "run off" because it wants X to be an echo chamber? You don't think it's a bot-infested hellhole of hate, but some den of thoughtful, nuanced, balanced discussion?
I can easily dismiss antisemitic conspiracy theories, queerphobia, bigotry, and racism. There's an infinite stream of garbage positions, why would would I engage with them?
By the way, there is equally ridiculous garbage on the left, if you go looking for it. You are doing the same thing that every partisan media outlet does, the oldest trick in the book: arguing against a strawman. Just because there is some leftist out there who wants to subsidize transgender operations for illegal immigrants or who wants to cancel anyone who assumes your gender, should I generalize that opinion to you and every left-leaning person on HN?
Right, and bigotry raises engagement. This isn't rocket science. Garbage opinions get popular because of how garbage they are. It's the same reason why traffic slows down when there's a car wreck on the other side of the interstate.
What a neatly convenient and circular argument for completely dismissing anything that gains appeal but you happen to dislike. It must be popular because it's garbage, and couldn't possibly have any parts worth examining.
The more garbage an opinion is the more outrage it causes. This means more engagement, more comments, more replies, more stitches, more views, more everything. This means creators are incentivized to make this content, and the "algorithms" purposefully promote this content too. Because, objectively, it does very well. Much better than tame or normal content.
It's not just "what I happen to dislike", lol, it's everything. Sure, there's skinheads and such on the right who say blatantly racist or sexist stuff. Some of them are even in Congress (MTG). But on the left, you have those cringe compilations with "blue hair" feminists. I'm a feminist, but I don't agree with those people.
Of course, neither is truly representative of "their side" or, really, anyone. They're just insane wackos. But those opinions garner A LOT of attention, because they're garbage.
I realize that in this epoch we are living in the only rule is that money and power gives you the right to do as you please. This may be old school but I think that values, honesty and ethics matter too and should guide our behaviors in life and in business. Kudos to the Guardian for taking a stand even if it costs them a few dollars.
Are there books recounting the history of editorial positions put forth by these platforms? I really had no idea where google stood on political issues in the 2000s. I remember thinking they were quite pro-free speech sometimes callously so through that decade. I do remember them putting forth issues on gay marriage when it was a live political issue, though.
He has been doing that since almost a year. The "For you" page would be filled with content you don't like, and clicking "not interested" doesn't help. The only solution I found was to mute the accounts that were showing up there that I didn't like. This was a major factor that led me to leave X / Twitter
But for some reason, it was okay the other way around a few years ago?
I wonder if that'll turn out to be true. There's no reason Musk has to let them, and I could see him just blocking links from The Guardian in retaliation.
For the record, I don't support temper tantrums on either side, and it feels like this is a very politely stated temper tantrum. But, I also think everyone should get off Twitter. Maybe what I don't like is just that everybody should have gotten off Twitter many years ago, because it's bad for journalism and the human brain in general, and not suddenly pretend to realize it's a bad place now that it's coincidentally less popular, and there's less incentive to hold your nose and stay. Seems hypocritical.
Realistically everyone in that field should've bailed the second subscribers got bumped to the top of replies across the website.
New terms of service that will take effect on 15 November specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the US district court for the northern district of Texas or state courts in Tarrant county, Texas.
Is this even something TOS can legally enforce?
For me i like the hypothetical decentralization and being able to actually create an anonymous account.
Twitter is not the community that it used to be. Twitter used to provide me with new updates and cool communities of people.
Since the platform got repurposed to become X, the feeds became a negative in my day— so much ragebait, violence and other negative content that pushed me away.
Apart from the fact that the algorithm was tweaked to become Elon and Trump biased [1] and that link load times to “undesired” websites got artificially increased [2], the whole monetisation strategy attracted cheap, ragebait content [3]. The platform started paying out for 5M+ impressions. This incudes negative and positive impressions and essentially drives up polarising content more than anything.
I believe the issue isn’t about community notes at all, as some suggest, that is such a small thing and critical replies were always a thing. In contrast I believe the real problem is: 1) there’s no point engaging on a platform where every feature can and will be manipulated to serve personal agendas that you do not have control over. 2) Maintaining a presence on X has become a liability– it’s damaging to a set of brands both now and likely in the future.
I’m glad the Guardian and other accounts are moving away from X.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-trump-x-algorit... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130060 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230714080253/https://help.twit...
The guardian will no longer post to twitter but they will keep on harvesting news from it and about it.
On average every 3 days someone submits to HN an article against Elon Musk written by The Guardian. I imagine there are more articles written than are submitted. Musk and Twitter provide a huge amount of material for them.
Past year HN submissions (111): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
I would say it's a strong net negative.
Guardian leaving X is reducing that amount of misinformation.
Countless examples of Guardian contradicting themselves.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/04/is-trump-a-f...
Stanley continued: “Trump and the people behind him have already promised to replace the government at all levels with loyalists. [LGBTQ+] citizens, particularly trans citizens and their families, will have to leave the country. Political opponents will be targeted in some way ranging from financial penalties to prison.”
Dear Guardian: Hitler got to power in large part because of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the paramilitary SA organization who was openly gay. Hitler supported Röhm's LGBTQ membership until 1934, when the size of the SA surged to 4,000,000 and Röhm became too powerful. Himmler and others intrigued against Röhm, purged him and then suddenly LGBTQ was persecuted. Selectively persecuted, since well-known gay people like Reichsminister Rudolf Hess, who was known gay, stayed in power.
All I get is AI and rockets now.