The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
I mean it was never actually a good place for news, aside from the top five trending stories, if you wanted infinite bad takes on them.
I'd argue it was a good place for FAST news. For a lot of major events you can find posts and videos from users before the media releases anything, which is kind of a first for humanity at least in terms of accessibility.
Now, if you're looking for ACCURATE news...
Yeah, I'd say that it was useful to gather sources that had to be vetted for accuracy. Honestly, I'd also say it made a good source for the media, where they'd have the job of vetting it and putting out material with more delay but also more accuracy.
Its specific speed/accuracy tradeoff made it a very good fit for news which you need to know quickly, but had low stakes if it was incorrect. A great example of this transit delays/cancellations, where you probably don't care about the specific reason why a train is delayed and just want alternative options asap.
It was often much more effective to directly follow transit agencies and/or workers for info, rather than use their official website.
It was good for fast news in the same way that I can multiply long numbers fast by always saying 62 immediately.
You could follow journalists you like or outlets though
The only reason I had a Twitter account was because there was an emergency event in my local area and Twitter was the one place I could get information about it right now. There were locals sharing what they knew, emergency services telling people what measures needed to be taken where, and journalists on the ground saying what they knew in real time. It was invaluable.
When I left Twitter, that ability to follow breaking news as it happens was the thing I was afraid I'd miss out on most. It's bittersweet to find out that I didn't need to worry about that after all.
Exactly, I was the same. This is the News that Twitter was good for, the live events.
I'd always check Twitter for the initial on the scene explanation of what was happening from local people. In my case it was a massive warehouse fire that I could see the smoke in the distance. Obviously there was nothing about it on the traditional news sites, but loads of stuff from local people on Twitter immediately.
Then afterwards you'd just read the proper News outlets for the full official details after the fact.
Similarly, there was a sonic boom over our area in 2016, I kinda knew what it was having an interest in military aircraft but twitter was on fire about an explosion in our area and the military base itself responded with information on what was happening.
Turned out it was Euro fighter typhoons responding to a commercial flight that lost coms.
Last time I used twitter tbf
The sudden influx of random racists on a local space after a tragedy is cliche at this point. They are just waiting in the wings to spread some nonsense and pretend to be from there.
Is it that or is it just bots and trolls? IF they are real people, I'm glad they have a platform to be on so they're recognized for who they really are. Some day, this will all catch up to them all.
Bots and trolls usually
I used to get all my news from Reddit and I, unfortunately, fell into the habit of reading just the headline and then comments. After quitting I started looking for an healthy replacement to my news fix. I looked at many different RSS apps but many of them had monthly fees or the interface just sucked. Eventually I found an amazing one (iOS only) called feeeed that has been incredible. It’s free, no in-app purchases or ads, lovely interface, a simple reader mode, dark mode, and more. I really recommend it for anyone trying to quit Twitter/Reddit for news.
I thought you said news. This just looks like spam?
Yeah sorry, my subscriptions aren’t the best example of the content you can subscribe to. I mostly follow tech news and deals. My intent with the screenshot was to showcase the general layout of the app. You can subscribe to any RSS feed you want though, like traditional news sources about non-tech things.
Here’s an example of what that could look like (I made a folder with 3 traditional news sources and pinned it to the bottom nav bar):
I just gave it a whirl out of curiosity. It’s kind of garbage in, garbage out. Subscribe to good RSS news feeds, and you get good stuff. Subscribe to Gizmodo blog spam, and you get blog spam.
I just read this headline first and your comment second. Yikes. Guilty.
I remember when Reddit was consistently two to three days ahead of the news cycle. Same for Fark
Thanks Aaron Swartz! Reddit might not be working out but RSS has the staying power.
I used to use Twitter as a way of directly following a few sources of news. Follow NPR, BBS, Reuters, Etc. I don’t know anyone who expected to learn of news from “the algorithm”. That’s still true today. Expect to get fed news from whatever is trending and you’ll be bamboozled, fed useless stories a day propaganda.
Some of these sources can instead be snagged from RSS feeds and Mastodon and besides official apps, those are much better ways to follow news and always have been.
I did find some reliable sources on aggregators like flipboard, but setting aside the best way to follow the news responsibly is still directly following them via browser links and collections. The other risk is following too many things, to the point of obsessing over them. So I decided to give myself a number of good articles instead, and go by quality. I am out of the loop when it comes to social media trends, but it's not a bad thing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The same conspiracy-theory-peddling personalities who spammed X with posts claiming that Tuesday’s Baltimore bridge collapse was a deliberate attack have also called mass shootings “false flag” events and denied basic facts about the Covid-19 pandemic.
A Florida Republican running for Congress blamed “DEI” for the bridge collapse as racist comments about immigration and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott circulated among the far right.
As conspiracy theorists compete for attention in the wake of a tragedy, others seek engagement through dubious expertise, juicy speculation, or stolen video clips.
The boundary between conspiracy theory and engagement bait is permeable; unfounded and provoking posts often outpace the trickle of verified information that follows any sort of major breaking news event.
First, it was happening after a few big shifts in what the internet even is, as Twitter, once a go-to space for following breaking news events, became an Elon Musk-owned factory for verified accounts with bad ideas, while generative AI tools have superpowered grifters wanting to make plausible text and visual fabrications.
Being online during a tragic event is full of consequential nonsense like this, ideas and conspiracy theories that are inane enough to fall into the fog of Poe’s Law and yet harmful to actual people and painful to see in particular when it’s your community being turned into views.
The original article contains 842 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news.
the fuck ? No it never was, the finest info you ever could find there was thinly veiled holocaust denial ? If journalists really think fucking twitter was ever an important source of news that explain the downfall of journalism
What are you talking about? It was the go-to app for journalists for a decade. They could live report from events in a simple, chronological thread, or collect eye witness reports by quote tweeting personal accounts. I followed the Charlottesville and January 6th riots in real time by reading journalists threads. There was a lot of trival or even harmful bullshit on Twitter, but the way journalists used it was a huge positive.
It wasn't the source of the news, but where people would consume news. Most of what the site was actually good for was making a notice with a link to a real article. Like an RSS feed with extra steps.
That's why I never got into it. The main way it was actually useful was still totally unnecessary.
I'm not sure if the Arab spring could have happened without Twitter.
The thing that happened 13 years ago and did nothing but overthrow Gaddafi, a man who, even if all criticism of his regime is valid, was replaced with something much worse because NATO doesn't actually care about democracy for brown people?
I first saw it on YouTube when a local TV station posted the raw video.
I wasn't looking at any other media at the time.
Tbf, I saw the early videos coming from X (and I'm not on X)
i heard about it first in an ibxtoycat video (on his second channel)
I heard about it from television news. I normally only watch TV broadcasts between the time when I turn the TV on and launching an app / turning a HDMI device on. Which is not very long. Does Elon have any idea how unlikely it is for me to pick major news this way?
I saw it on TikTok...
My family sent me TikTok’s. I rarely use it, but have it installed for this purpose.
Thankfully Mastodon seems to be doing a good job at providing news like this for me. I first saw it the morning it happened because I had to approve the trending link that a lot of people were posting.
It’s actually crazy how low the percentage of people under like… forty is now that actually gets their news direct from a news site. Seriously, i don’t know a single person from like 20-35 who actually just goes on the NPR or C-SPAN app or whatever.
It kind of sucks. So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now. And I just feel like there’s something bad about being able to see a comment section on Twitter or Reddit or even Lemmy now on every news event. Makes for a lot more group think rather than just reading the news and going “huh”
Sometimes there's good discussion though, and it's good to hear different takes.
Having comments also gives less power to the writer, like could you imagine if we all took Fox News or CNN headlines at face value and didn't discuss them?
Yea, you can't just read the news and go huh. anymore, because the news is no longer "this is what happened." Now it's "OMG YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS YOU'RE GONNA HATE THAT this happened AND EVERYONE IS PISSED"
You can literally just read news from less overtly biased news sources. There are scant few articles that I can think of where I really need a redditors interpretation of it
Mexico's new president: 3-year-old Alfredo Pequeño Lobo becomes nation's youngest elected and first canine leader. But can he be rough on the cartels?
The term may be 4 years but it will feel like 28 for him.
Oh my I'm so invested in this story now.
Ruff. "Can he be ruff on crime". It was right there!
I think we saw how that goes in a Rick and Morty episode - Lawnmower Dog.
Huh...
I'm guilty of doing this (just reading the headlines) as well. I usually do it for these reasons:
I don't like visiting news sites because, in addition to all of them being obnoxious and ad riddled, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time reading long articles that could be rewritten as 3 bullet points. On platforms like lemmy, users will highlight the important bits in the comments which saves a lot of time.
I have grown to like https://www.axios.com/ for reasons like your last bullet point. Frequently they give 3-4 bullet points that tells you the story without a shit tone of editorializing.
That’s what places like Lemmy are for though.
Great for seeing a headline and then finding an article yourself. Less great for finding articles. Half of you people here have a penchant for linking super weird news sources.
Even Lemmy does that, though. You're still influenced by the headline, the community/moderation and the users.
Assuming that everyone clicks through to the article, and doesn't comment before reading the headline, anyhow.
You can find out the event from the news, but then get the facts from industry experts. It's much better these days.
I think the bigger issue is how bad news sites have gotten. I'm sure part of the reason for that is people getting news online from alternative sources, but mainstream sources are significantly worse than they once were which just pushes things further in that direction.
That said, I don't know which caused more group-think. Was it having a few mainstream sources and that's it or having many worse quality but more diverse sources? People relate to the new version more probably, which encourages them to follow along and not think for themselves, but I don't know if that's better or worse than not really having any dissenting opinion available at all.
Yeah, bad news sites is the reason I didn't follow any news for years, I got burnt out verifying just about every article. Most bended the story one way or another, headlines usually not quite what the article read...
I'd read more articles if they weren't paywalled.
APNews.com, relatively low bias, no paywall.
Honestly I think a big part of people looking at headlines and pictures is closely related to people's attention span. Why read many words when less is better. Those same people can't hold conversations for more than a minute or two on the subject then it spirals into speculations which is where the misinformation starts to take place. Society is bombarded with so much information hour by hour people don't want to miss anything so they skim through an immense amount of partial information. It's wild and I'm guilty of it myself so I'm in no place to speak ill of anyone.
A few months back, i subscribed to the news aggregator Ground News. Although there are more expensive options, i pay about $6/year and I love it. You get news stories from lots of different sites and gives you a good idea of biases. I highly recommend it!
I get my news from a paper and it is a decent blend of good and bad news. Quality journalism. I gift articles often just to kinda fight back against the whole title-and-picture-only news.
FYI if you do so on !nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz you'll reach several hundred people.
Why go to propaganda source
For me it's RSS, Lemmy, and suprisingly YouTube as I can get the major news sources( eg BBC, CNN, FT, DT, MSNBC) chunked up into specific topics so I don't have to sit through a bunch of garbage to get to the topics I care about. And I get it from more sources.
I started building an aggregator “start page” that has become my new news homepage - https://s.marko.tech - just to solve this problem
Cool. Is there a guide to using it? A way to customize feeds, etc?
Watching CSPAN is weird now. It used to be more boring but some the more recent ones have felt I was watching a behind the scenes show where each person was saying things so perfectly crafted for sound bites they seem incongruent with what someone else would say.
I used to use news sites (BBC, Guardian mainly), but the coverage is seriously limited and quite biased.
The dark forest of the Internet is driving this migration of human Internet traffic. It is not a fault but rather a result.
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I highly prefer getting my news from independent journalists/investigators. You think everyone reading the same news sites is going to be better for groupthink?!
None of your independent journalists / investigators are independent.