wavey
1931
On Facebook I saw someone saying their engineering laptop had been remote-wiped already, and hasn’t yet received any email. The order of which I guess makes sense from the company’s perspective, but it still all seems pretty swift and brutal from over here. (e.g. in the UK there would be a 45-day minimum consultation period during which those with jobs at risk are selected for dismissal before they are given notice.)
Another (former) employee.
A feature that lets anyone pay for the ability to spam celebrities with private messages?
Also known as “How to get Celebrities to Leave Your Platform” initiative.
Enidigm
1936
Some podcast interviewing the Great and the Good show how they’re kind of terrified of Twitter collapsing. Both in a “how will important people talk to each other” way but also in a “Twitter is how consensus on important topics is reached and then implemented by said important people” way, which feels very millennial and surprising to me.
I’m not sure this is entirely wrong. Media and political figures adopted Twitter as the primary means of mass dissemination of information, views, etc, and you see many of them — media people in particular — engaging in back-and-forth exchanges all the time. For all its flaws, I think Twitter has played a role in shaping their views and building consensus around some of them, and I wonder what will replace it when they all abandon the hellscape that Twitter is going to become.
Aceris
1938
If you watch journalists on twitter this is very real. There isn’t a single group of important people though - multiple interlocking groups have their own ideological spaces. Twitter very much supports in-group ideological conformity because of its ability to connect elites in a place where they can disply their communication to the world.
I can really see why an egotistical iconoclast like Musk has this weird love hate relationship with it.
Enidigm
1939
It’s real for journalists and social media connected taste makers. What i’m not at all certain of is if this isn’t groups of younger smart people in positions of some influence talking to each other as if what they say and do really really matters abstractly, perhaps, let’s say, overestimating their influence.
OTOH, i’m an old fuddy duddy that has tweeted maybe once or twice, follows maybe 10 people, and thinks it’s still just a lot of tech unsavvy people who never were on a forum 20 years ago finding out about internet communication (Twitter is basically internet communication for busy people, people that matter /cough). But what do i know?
I agree that it’s a very real effect but I’m not sure it’s healthy. Our media has essentially adopted the extreme partisanship of the political parties now. You’re left wing or right wing, and there’s no variation. I can read an article on Vox or CNN or Atlantic and it’s all the same slants and opinions. Just like Fox and The Hill and National Review are all the same.
I’m not old enough to really remember what the news was like before social media took over. I didn’t pay attention back then. But I believe breaking up these big echo chambers is for the best. If someone can put up an article on the NYT and not get met with thousands of “Fuck the NYT” and “Fuck this writer!” tweets that’s probably good for us.
Fuck @Wallapuctus!
Heh. Seriously, I agree with you totally.
The idea that CNN or the Atlantic are left-wing versions of Fox News or National Review is mind-boggling.
I mean…I wasn’t gonna say it (as well as lumping in The Hill with Fox News) but yeah. Yikes.
Really? It reads like uninformed screed to me, but maybe I’m missing something in there.
Aceris
1944
I think the point wasn’t that these were sources of similar merit but different slants, but rather that, on either side, there’s not much ideological diversity.
I don’t think his classification is correct (Atlantic and Vox don’t fit well together.) but my experience of UK media is that ideological diversity within any given newspaper, and across newspapers with similar politics, has decreased dramatically.
To what extent that is due to twitter and even the broader category of social media it’s hard to say, I think there is a lot more going on than twitter obviously.
Maybe, but it is hard to read this that way:
My emphasis added. The message here is that Fox and NR have adopted right-wing slants while CNN and Atlantic have adopted left-wing ones.
I guess @Wallapuctus can clear up the confusion.
Exactly. I know what I’m getting when I go to any of these outlets. I’ve read one, I’ve read them all.
To further fan this flame, I’ve found the most objective journalism I’ve heard lately has been from the WSJ. I think their podcast is excellent. It does feel like “just the facts”. Which was what those old timey news reporters used to say. Or maybe that was the detective from Dragnet.
JoshL
1948
Some media report that the 2020 election was stolen, obviously taking the Trump side, and some report it wasn’t, obviously taking the AOC side. Both sides, amirite?
I don’t really do podcasts so I’m not familiar with this one, but it would be surprising to trip over a WSJ channel that didn’t exemplify absence of ideological diversity. It’s a media outlet of the right, and always has been.
Lol!
Honestly, this is all too terrible, but it’s hard not to laugh at this bumbling boob.
Talk about textbook “Something isn’t working out for me, there must be a conspiracy!”
