Why do you think this?

my gazillion percent is <mostly> jokey.

social media is a pain and the rage it creates is a 'mare. its easy to fake news and build manipulate popular opinion

specifically for twitter, the usability is also very counter intuitive and kinda sucks.

And I kinda find Musk a tool, so, him facing a massive loss has some pleasant schadenfreude

I do like funny tweets that are curated in to other media though

what type of outlets do you find makes news harder to fake?

We shouldn't talk about twitter in an absolute sense. We have to see it as the death of a media outlet leaving us with fewer to choose from. A further concentration of information exchange to fewer and fewer massive companies.

So sure twitter can be toxic and awful.

But when twitter dies it's not that its the "death of twitter", its that now anyone who may have received information via twitter has to turn somewhere else.

Are we saying its a good thing that many of those people now will receive their news from MSNBC? Fox news? The Washington Post?

Twitter is clearly very cooperate controlled. Just discussing it from the pre-Musk standpoint, it had tons of algorithms that controlled what you saw and what you consumed. It targeted advertisements, tracked your behavior, followed what you shared, etc.

There is no doubt all of that is awful. But Musk running it into the ground isn't a case of "twitter is being replaced by this great new alternative". It's just being replaced by what I would consider the "old money" super corporate rehearsed imperialist media conglomerates.

Because there isn't anything better to hope for-- world peace isn't realistic.

It'll probably be replaced by something 'new'ish not something explicitly like fox news

Reddit or tiktok news feed or something

Maybe twitter should have only allowed famous people to have accounts

Any company or person with a twitter strategy also has strategies across all social media. It going will just be replaced by more.

Anywhere you know who is saying the message, and why they are saying it is better.

The events part of big corp news is generally true I find. Its how people spin it thats a problem. Whereas in twitter you can't even be sure the first parts true.

I did some work with a charity who helped check whether purported human rights abuses actually happened. Its so hard wading through whats going on to verify. Thats just magnified with other types of "news" on social media.



But I really doubt people will go from twitter to any of the outlets you name. they'll probs just find the next big place and focus there

or more likely it just won't get replaced and media will be further concentrated

like what?

not really sure what you mean by this. "The events part"?

what is magnified? Are you saying it is easier to verify stuff you hear on CNN than stuff you hear on twitter?

what do you mean? What is "the next big place"?

You said if twitter died it would be "one of the best things we could hope for"

Why would it be a good thing if twitter died?

My biggest gripe with twitter is I need an account to scroll twitter or it has some obnoxious popup.

A banks corporate messaging you know is couched in the fact they are responding to their stakeholders + customer. So anything they report as news (e.g. via PR) you know comes from that and can trust it as you will

A dictatorships state news you know is being reported to help prop up the dictatorship. You can analyse it as such.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. News will generally be pro his agenda (which is really obvious in how its changed since he took over.)

You can get that and see that when you can trace ownership/management and what they are talking about

Like when you see on BBC News that the train workers are on strike.
You know for a fact that yes, they are on a strike. And that there is a dispute.
Thats the event, and, what you know is true

Whats different is how they spin it. In the UK, we're having a train strike and all major news outlets spin the anti-strike narrative- i.e. the train strike workers are greedy, its all about pay, they get paid more than nurses etc.

In the UK the big news corporations are hugely pro business, and anti labour, and we can trace that easily and can predict how they'll respond each time.




Yes. The "event" part.

If twitter dies there will be a replacement. There might be many. They'll find another place where they can get the type of news in the type of ways they like.

its so freaking annoying.

I don't really understand what any of this has to do with Twitter. Do you think this applies to mainstream media but not to twitter? If so, how?


Once again I am not sure why you think this applies to mainstream media but not twitter. Sorry if you don't want to elaborate. But if you are up for it I would enjoy hearing what you have to say in a little more depth.

A couple things about this argument:

1) Maybe not

2) if you are saying that there will be a replacement for twitter which is good, why do are you saying its so good for it to die in the first place? I don't really understand this line of thinking. Do you think in general having a marginally more decentralized information dissemination platform like twitter relative to MSM is a bad thing?

Point 1

With Twitter, you struggle to verify who is saying what they are saying.

With people like Trump, or Elon you know where the message is coming from. But with lots of other "news" it comes from unverified people, but, if the message resonates, its shared and shared again as if its fact.

You get organisations/people "acting" like news organisations, or, trusted people spewing crap. and its hard to trace back.

so thats the issue.



With mainstream media, or, other media, you know who's saying it and why. you can trace motivation with relative ease. with twitter its much harder


Point 2

I'm not saying the replacement is good. I'm saying it'll have one.

Like I said, "my gazillion percent is <mostly> jokey."

I dont like twitter. I don't like social media driven news. I am happy when one dies. But twitter dying won't do much to change the general malaise.

Twitter dying = good
The fact that it's probably going to be replaced by something similar, or, people will go to some other social media source = bad

There's optimism in that twitters death might cause some people to realise its a corporate mouthpiece...but thats unlikely.

To me this seems like an incredibly pro-establishment paradigm. You are basically saying "news organizations" (here a new organization is basically a massive corporation controlled by billionaires) is somehow more reliable than a random twitter account.

I know that paradigm is made to seem like common sense, but its actually wrong. A random twitter account actually is a better source of news. I think there is some nuance, like a random person on the internet does not have reporters and cameras to film something all the way across the world like the MSM does. But I definitely would trust a random twitter accounts opinion and analysis over some ******* on MSNBC.

But of course even that is a false comparison, because most twitter users are not getting information from some "random" twitter account. It's often a well known public account or some other account that has a verifiable history.

Ok so just in general you are saying you prefer centralized, corporate controlled media dissemination over more decentralized media dissemination.

I am very surprised you (or anyone) thinks that. But of course you are entitled to your opinion.

I am not sure how that results in anything but pro-capitalist ideas being pushed into the minds of the public.

I'm saying that social media, especially twitter, is just centralised controlled media where people with power (corporates, political parties, pressure groups etc.) control the message.

There is definitely "random twitter accounts" or random social media accounts that do find and report things, and, social media does mean this news goes round faster.

But, the the majority of news that goes viral is controlled by the powerful almost always.

Its like that "blackout Tuesday" thing on Social media where everyone just posted black boxes instead of content. It was corporate controlled milquetoast messages that slowed down the fight against racism.

So overall my position is:
1) Social media has enabled people to expose information faster than ever. this is good
2) Social media is not decentralised. What goes viral and is seen by people, is controlled by powerful groups
3) "Old media" is definitely pro-establishment, but, you know what they are doing and why. This is harder to see than with social media where the pro-establishment nature is still there but harder to identify

That said, I'm not dogmatic about this.

I don't think either are particularly good methods of finding information, but, they're whats easily accessible

We gotta save democracy! hahaha, yeah right.

WOAT campaign theme or pretty close to it. Is that all you folks got?

I figured it was just a bit of tongue in cheek whimsy and bad things dying is good

Do many people actually use twitter for news? Or just gossip?

I assume there is some good data about twitter out there.

Democracy dies in darkness

Half of people in the UK get their news from social media now

What counts as news isn't checked though

Twitter also a good source for claiming there is a movement when it's like three people or just a guy with alt accounts

Yeah I would say I get my new from reddit, but it's pretty topical like 'coolio died', and kathy something banned from twitter