Journalism would only be improved if every journalist got off of Twitter tomorrow. It's not representative of mainstream opinion. And the artificially created and cultivated Twitter echo chamber couldn't help but warp anybody's neutrality. Unfortunately, it's still seen as the best way to drive clicks.
Journalism is over. It doesn't matter what journalists do now. It was a by-product of mass media massive ad business which is being quickly taken over by tech companies.
Isn't journalism a pillar of democracy? The well educated professionals who deep, lengthy dives into corruption, raw data, etc. How will democracy survive if no is being paid to spends weeks, years, to go deep on a subject and citizens can't be fully informed?
No. Journalism isn't a pillar of democracy. The ancient greeks who invented democracy didn't have journalism. When the US was founded, we didn't have journalism. Also, dictatorships have journalism. Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Communist China all had journalism.
> The well educated professionals who deep, lengthy dives into corruption, raw data, etc.
Do you think really think this is what journalists do? The older I get and the more I learn about the history of journalism, the more skeptical I get about this claim.
> How will democracy survive if no is being paid to spends weeks, years, to go deep on a subject and citizens can't be fully informed?
How did democracy come into existence without journalism?
You could argue free speech/free press are one of the pillars of modern democracy. If you look at who is attacking free speech/free press, you'll notice it is idealogically driven corporate journalists.
It's more like the veneer of unbiased trustworthy journalism was a by-product of the mass media ad business.
Journalism has reverted back to the journalism mean which was always biased, propagandizing, shoddy, and appealed to the confirmation biases of the target audiences since the 18th century.
That's not to say there are not excellently written and researched articles produced today, but hey, today anyone can be a journalist.
I wonder if there might have only been the appearance of unbiased trustworthy journalism, as the "thought bubble" of a society was so much smaller just 20 years ago, and journalists could get away with much less knowledge on a topic since readers couldn't really fact check them.
Thought Bubbles, Echo Chambers, Circular Sources, Communal Reinforcement, Epistemic Closure, Errors Of Omission, False Consensus Effect, Groupthink, Opinion Corridors, Sleight Of Mouth, Talking Points... all sophistry ("the art of making the lesser argument appear the greater"), call it by whatever name you will, fake news, propaganda, "speaking with a forked tongue" -- or just plain disingenuity...
Media is dead!
Long live the media!
(In case you forgot that old saying, "The King Is Dead... Long Live The King!"... oh forget it! <g>)
There's still very important independent journalism payed using donations that uncover the corruption that's going on in my small country (Hungary).
The government took over all media, they are what's left for us, and this year was the first time that they were able to change the result of local elections.
It's not over. Value might appear diluted because of the ever increasing noise, but people will still look to say a Dexter Filkins for signal. Where else are you going to find that kind of signal?
There is still public broadcasting and it works pretty good in some places. Germany for example. Even though people tend to lament the fact that they have to pay for it and it's always too much if you have to pay for something, it doesn't look like it's going away soon.
Also, it's 97% of political tweets from US adults that mentioned national politics from June 10, 2018, through June 9, 2019, not 97% of all political tweets (many of which are on behalf of organizations).
We inside wonder how many of the political tweets or memes being shared are from Eastern Europe troll farms. I recently read about a Polish troll farm running “Blue lives matter” groups. The purpose was profit not propaganda like the Russian farms.
I linked to that link, where you can see in the first graphic that in 2019, 22% of U.S. adults use Twitter. (73% YouTube, 69% Facebook, 37% Instagram).
A cautionary tale for those who are perennially tempted to think Twitter = "the world" or that Twitter is like sooo super important and that it "matters."
Granted, wishful thinking by said parties is sometimes enough to make it matter. For example a corporation that responds to customer complaints on Twitter faster than the ones that arrive in its customer-service inbox, is making Twitter matter more than it does.
If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools.
It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.
Yes! I am on Twitter and talk to people interested in music performance, computer programming, and math. With judicious following, blocking, and filters, I rarely see anything else.
I've done this by following a small amount of people and being extremely judicious in adding new ones (and quick to remove them: there are a couple writers I enjoy that do nothing but shitpost about politics on Twitter). I will say that my approach has the downside of being very low-volume though
Up until 2015 I had a wonderfully curated comedy Twitter created in this manner. It was selected from the set of my favorite comedians, actors, writers, and internet people with particular focus towards those who posted humorous or insightful things on a regular basis.
Then 2016 happened and the greater half decided they were really closet political pundits all along. Now I don't read Twitter at all.
Comedy writes itself these days. That's why comedians had to find something else to do. You just can't compete with reality when whole continents are run by clowns.
That's exactly why the "mute words" feature is great. Everybody you want to follow on Twitter is going to retweet some political trash sometimes. Curating the people you follow can't fix this, but "mute words" can.
Mine is actually fairly political (lots of economists). I can see how my comment was misleading, but it's the shitposting I mind, not the politics. People like Noah Smith write decent columns but consistently embarrass themselves on Twitter with low-effort dishonest nonsense.
I've done the same thing. And I agree it is low-volume, but I have come to the conclusion that it isn't so bad to be a little "bored" and not get lost in twitter rabbit holes.
Marketing, It's great for brands or anybody that has something to sell (a book, a product, an idea,...).
It kind of replaced RSS for many people, expect it's a centralised tool.
Unfortunately "journalists" use it way too often to make up news out of nothing, gather random photos/videos without fact checking and spread rumors and falsehoods as truth. Something like the Covington Catholic school fiasco heavily relayed by the media, based on a footage where people saw what they wanted to see, would have never happened without the viral aspect of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter ended up banning the person that spread it, but none of the Twitter verified people that called for the murder of school students.
Eh. I dated a nationally recognized journalist / writer. They use it to network and follow trends. Or, if they're working on a story someone else has covered, to see if there is anything that that person could share that didn't make it into the article (background conversations, etc).
When it comes to the actual work though she spend 99% of her time at the library, archives, prison, or on the phone with sources.
Similar to Hacker News for me: interesting tech articles and discussions, but with a different feel. I follow a bunch of graphics programmers and machine learning researchers. There's a lively community with a bunch of famous people participating as well as lesser known people who are really good in certain niches.
Particularly in machine learning it seems like thousands of papers are published every week, impossible to sort through. I find that the few I see people talking about on Twitter are the most interesting and worthy of attention.
I've made more friends and acquaintances on Twitter than any other social network. It's also easily the most intellectual social network. If you care deeply about something, you will find your people on Twitter.
For me and many others it is a place where we can share what we consider beautiful and sacred, what we find compelling and carefully thought. It is an agora shimmering with such things.
Even though much of the good web has retreated to private spaces like email lists and secret slacks, I am in some of those things because someone was able to find me on Twitter.
(And yeah we all need to vent, and have our human bouts of melancholy. But if you use twitter solely to participate in the negative, you are really missing out!)
At a minimum, for me it's been a very high-quality personal RSS. If I were so inclined, the fact that I can engage in the fascinating conversations I'm seeing is a bonus. This does rely on keeping a tightly curated following list
“... only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.”
This is why “social listening” companies (which often amount to “Twitter listening” companies) present a very warped picture of reality when they try to extrapolate general consumer interests from the content and frequency of posts by a tiny minority of Twitter’s users. I also discussed this a little in “Twitter’s growth conundrum”: https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-conundrum-8339eda1...
I've measured this directly several times across several sites myself.
Google+'s low regular-engagement rates (0.16% of all profiles) actually starts to look more reasonable given:
1. Google created G+ profiles for EVERY Android, Gmail, and YouTube user from ~2012 - 2016 (may have been 2015), or about 3 billion accounts in all.
2. The 1% rule.
I'd made that measurement in 2015, Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting followed up with a much larger sample but the same basic methodology, to confirm and expand on my findings:
When G+ was shutting down, I had the opportunity to look at data concerning its 8-million-plus Communities. The vast majority of those had at best one user. Even in the final months of the site communities were being created and removed (or deleted) at a furious rate -- thousands per day. From November 2018 - January 2019, several hundred net new communities were created.
The most hyperactive communities (and posters) were almost entirely spam. There were numerous of what I considered legitimate and healthy communities, most with anywhere from a handful of members to a few thousand. More than 10k tended to peter off into noise territory quickly, and based on overall engagement, the sweet spot seemed to be somewhere in the 2k - 3k range, if some of my analysis bears out.
Given the 90/9/1 rule, that would mean about 200-300 actual active users, and a dominent core group of 20-30, which seems to be where most online discussions find themselves most "real", for want of a better term.
Quantity-based measures of quality can be exceedingly misleading. And based on the headline of this article alone, the impression that it's Twitter itself that is somehow unusual or remarkable in this story is quite misleading. This is a general trait of any social discussion.
Not really a surprise - is it? I bet [small-percentage]% of Americans produce [very-large-percentage]% of tech tweets too. Same with sewing tweets. Same with porn tweets.
Being very active in politics is either a career choice or a hobby. And very active in this case means talking about it. It's like knowing about celebrity gossip at this point because that's practically what it is for a lot of this stuff.
The most surprising thing to me is the split in age distribution among user base vs. overall tweeting vs. political tweeting. Users 18-49 were 73% of the user base and produced 72% of tweets, but only 27% of political tweets. Users 50+ were only 26% of the user base and produced only 28% of tweets, but 73% of political tweets.
I'm pretty sure this is not true. They probably just haven't captured the way younger people speak about politics because it's largely in culture wars terms, not mentions of national politicians, institutions or groups, as well as civic behaviors such as voting.
> Users 18-49 were 73% of the user base and produced 72% of tweets, but only 27% of political tweets.
> Users 50+ were only 26% of the user base and produced only 28% of tweets, but 73% of political tweets.
By these numbers, users 15-17 are <1% of the user base and produce 0% of political tweets. (And even more dramatically, despite being more than 0% of users, they also produce 0% of tweets.) Even after allowing for rounding, this can't possibly be correct.
I calculated the percentages for two groups from a chart of four groups, so maybe there's more possible rounding error than you anticipated? The user base numbers in that chart do only add up to 99%, though.
Looking at the graphic in the article, it looks like their denominator is "all tweets from US adults". In other words, users 15-17 make 0% of "tweets" by definition. But of course, they are well over 0% of tweets in the ordinary sense.
I see no particular reason why tweets from 18-year-olds are especially more interesting than tweets from 17-year-olds.
Both the headline fact, and your addendum are interesting, but to me not fully surprising. I found the most surprising tidbit to be:
"Tweets from users who strongly disapprove of Trump are especially prominent: This group generates 80% of all tweets from U.S. adults and 72% of tweets mentioning national politics."
I didn't realise how one-sided Twitter was, but then, maybe that 'makes sense' in hindsight as well.
People generally, especially in younger generations need to accept that the internet != the real world.
I’ve had a number of friends on both sides of the isle fall into the internet trap of politics, existential dread and dilution. A few to the extent of developing serious mental health problems, even college educated people.
It’s scary to watch this happen to people you know and love. Some might label me, but I enjoy not wasting time following the mainstream media / social media noise.
On a much larger scale, nothing equals the real world because the real world is endlessly complicated. To take in the breadth and depth of human perspectives and experiences is simply impossible. This is only a problem when people fail to realize they are only seeing as tiny, unrepresentative sliver so they can adjust their reactions accordingly.
I think if more people had an elementary understanding of statistics the values you mentioned would be better understood and considered in common discourse. It’s really kind of sad.
It's baffling why people think it's OK to retweet political stuff just because everyone else does it. If your profile says "data expert" or anything, why then do i get political propaganda when i follow you? At least have the decency to add "and political commentator" to your profile
Twitter accounts, like many other venues, are generally the person. And while the person might be known to you through one slice of their life (the part that has value to you), that doesn't deny them having other beliefs and opinions. Unless you're paying for their tweets, your opinion on what they should be limited to talking seems remarkably irrelevant.
Having said that, twitter is a profoundly destructive force that is overwhelmingly people just preaching and clucking at each other's cleverness. I absolutely revile it as a platform, but I get and appreciate that it provides value for others.
i don't buy this argument. Most prominent people go on twitter for a reason - to disseminate their work or something, the days of salad photos are over. They get something out of it.
> Prolific political tweeters make up just 6% of all Twitter users but generate 20% of all tweets and 73% of tweets mentioning national politics.
I feel like this wording is disingenuous when the methods state:
> The analysis of Twitter users in this report is based on a nationally representative survey
conducted from Nov. 21 to Dec. 17, 2018, among a sample of 2,791 U.S. adults ages 18 years and
older who have a Twitter account and agreed to allow researchers to follow and report on that
account. This study examines only the subset of respondents (N=2,427)
I grepped for "bot" on this, the source and their methodology page. Bot activity on Twitter is especially high and not at least mentioning how they accounted for that kinda voids this whole effort. It'd be very interesting to identify the political leanings of automated posts. I bet they could analyze the messages to determine bot networks. Disappointed this wasn't considered.
Twitter is to political thought what advertising slogans are to consumer goods or soundbites are to news stories. "It's the real thing" tells us nothing meaningful about Coca Cola. "Just do it" tells us nothing meaningful about Nike sneakers. Slogans, tweets, and soundbites are designed to influence our thinking with catchy thoughts INSTEAD OF informed thought. The ability to create concise content is different than the ability to analyze and understand on a deep level; not mutually exclusive of course, but it doesn't really matter: the masses will be overwhelmingly influenced by the former rather than the latter.
Only a small share of people who use twitter actually tweet and yes a smaller share of those people tweet on a specific subject. I'm no sure how this is news. "Only a small share of U.S. adults product majority of tweets on ______." Fill in the blank.. only those interest in a topic will tweet about it.
that is a poor analogy at best. Everyone is intuitive on the amount of friction it takes to get content onto broadcast or cable TV. No one is delusional.
There is relatively zero amount of friction for a twitter user to post political content to twitter. The fact that people are not posting political content, is not due to insurmountable friction.
I thought that went without saying. My point is, why would anyone be surprised that not everyone speaks up? The fact that everyone can tweet doesn’t mean that they do. Friction of calling radio talk back is low, but I’ve never done it. Letters to the editor also.
