Cliff

It's wild that journalists loved Twitter. I think because it helped them feel like they were connected to the populace and learning about what people cared about.

But in reality, journos were being manipulated by the algorithm. Some journalists talked about that a lot, but maybe that never made it through to the mainstream journalists' feeds...

The "popularity" of Trump, the Republican party, and the constant Red Wave narratives all come from the Twitter algorithm. Not reality. But journos boosted those narratives in their stories because that's what they read from the algorithm that was designed to feed them the most outrageous stories.

The journalistic hubris here, in spite of the yelling done by many, is what I hope will be highlighted and corrected for. But I'm not holding my breath.

Nov 20, 2022 at 10:30pmWeb
Show threadmoby dickgirlNov 20, 2022

@klfjoat mmm, I dunno about that. I agree that this is part of it, but I think the popularity of Trump, the Republican Party, and the constant Red Wave narratives have other sources:

1) Trump and the Republican Party's neofascist turn are popular because, *as well as* the Twitter algorithm, economic conditions are arising which work to their advantage;

2) constant red wave narratives are arising partly because pollsters' methodologies have either accidentally or deliberately failed to keep up with technological changes, meaning polls are only surveying an increasingly intensely Republican segment of the population;

3) both of the above are amplified by the fact that newspapers do what their owners tell them to.

I don't think Twitter *helped,* but I wouldn't assign it too much influence

Show threadCliffNov 20, 2022

@estrapade
I think we're talking cross-purposes here.

I know about and agree with you that the underlying issues you mentioned also exist.

My point is how Twitter and its algorithm led journalists astray. Led them to believe that those real-world actions had larger support than they really did. Pushed them to believe they were seeing the results of regular Twitter users talking about those things, rather than the domestic and international influence operations that some of those tweets undoubtedly were.

There's a reason the term Twitterati was created. People who think Twitter is the "town square" of the Internet are not going to get a realistic view of what real people care about.

Show threadAaron Ross Powell ☸️Nov 20, 2022
@klfjoat While I think Twitter has caused problems for journalism, all the journalists I know on there would switch Twitter to the chronological feed, and so weren't looking at the algorithmic one.
Show threadCliffNov 21, 2022

@arossp
Changing a setting doesn't make journalists any less human. It doesn't excuse the breathless coverage of every Trump tweet, every current Musk tweet, entire articles written about tweets or threads by other people as though it's news.

Twitter did what most social media has to do in order to survive as a free product: engage eyeballs. The journalists were manipulated by that engagement. Whether directly by being exposed to the algorithm, or indirectly by sorting chronologically and following those who WERE exposed to the algorithm. And they provided content that the algorithm fed to others no matter what.

Twitter puts a spotlight on things, but it doesn't encourage exploration, thought, and consideration. Its job is to engage for ad revenue, not to be a "town square" like many journos believed it to be; like many stated in various articles and reporting.

The culture that Twitter created always looked weird to me... People seemed to think they were part of something different from other social media. It isn't. It's all manipulation of outrage by the nature of the platform. It's an algorithmic implementation of what the GOP has done since W--using manufactured outrage (and by extension, the journalists in the media) to make fools out of the "reality-based community".

Show threadCliffNov 21, 2022
@arossp Well, the GOP has done that since Reagan's "welfare queens". But they got systematic and coalesced the party around it by W's time.