- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
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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”
So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now.
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?
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.
That’s what places like Lemmy are for though.
Lemmy is massively biased though. While that doesn’t mean the articles aren’t factual, you’re still only ever hearing one side of the story. What I find time after time is that majority of people who have strong opinions about current events are completely uncapable of fairly steelmanning the opposing side’s argument.
I’m not sure why you think that news orgs aren’t also biased. Everything and everyone is biased, even those that genuinely try to not let it show through and be fully impartial.
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So what are you implying? That it doesn’t matter where you get your news because all sources are biased anyway?
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There’s still a massive difference between news sources like NY times and Breitbart. It matters where you get your news from and even if it’s coming from a biased source you should atleast be aware of the bias. Some sites atleast try to counter their bias while others embrace it. These things matter. It’s not binary.
Difference in quality? Yes. Difference in bias? No. The NYT has an extreme neo liberal US oriented business empire bias that as a refugee of the Iran Iraq war and victim of US foreign policy they supported that I don’t trust. I also don’t trust Breitbart.
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.
And at the news organization, you are influenced by the editors and framing by authors.
Sure, but you find out about things hours days or even weeks after they happen.
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.
Try explaining that to a rightist, though. It’s not right-wing propaganda, therefore it is left-wing propaganda. 😔
Reuters is also good and less USA Centric (at least for their notifications) which is a good thing for me because I am not from the USA, but AP is excellent too). I don’t think you can even disable USA news in your “interests” with AP.
Both Reuters and AP are news agencies that sell news (and stuff like photos) to other news companies. So it’s very likely that everyone here has read at least some content from them.
Both are also often regarded as among the most reliable and least biased news sources available. AFP is also in that group.
Yes agreed, Reuters is my other go-to. Both great options in a sea of disinformation.
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!
That’s how I get my news. I visit the Finnish equivalence of BBC once or twice a day and that’s my news diet. If they don’t report on it, I don’t need to know. Something like what a VOX journalist thinks about Twitter I couldn’t care less so I don’t even bother reading it. I’m proudly unaware of most of the things that non-serious news organizations report on.
Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.
This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.
That’s not my point. What I’m saying is that I knowingly limit my news diet to what is the most important/interesting and this is neither so I’m not bothering my mind with it. I don’t need to know and not knowing has zero effect on my life.
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?
yea definitel! - working on a site for that with docs etc, prolly a week or two - currently rebuilding the user settings / models - just a preview till then ^^
You can find out the event from the news, but then get the facts from industry experts. It’s much better these days.
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.
The dark forest of the Internet is driving this migration of human Internet traffic. It is not a fault but rather a result.
Why go to propaganda source
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.
You could follow journalists you like or outlets though
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.
I saw it on TikTok…
My family sent me TikTok’s. I rarely use it, but have it installed for this purpose.
Tbf, I saw the early videos coming from X (and I’m not on X)
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.
Xitter (and all of Musk’s endeavors) are like purchasing a home in an HOA.
You were told not to. A cursory internet search would have confirmed it. Or you are fucking stupid.
You get what you deserve … Fuck off.
Are you thinking of a timeshare? I know some people who love having an HOA take care of all their shit for them
I don’t know a single person who would ever consider owning an HOA home, even the investors. I know two who have owned an HOA home, both sold them. No I’m speaking of HOAs.
Are Timeshares still a thing? (Googling) … Man I would have thought that they would have died out by now. Nope
I was reading an article the other day about a couple who bought an ocean view home to retire.
It was perfect, but the neighbours driveway ran along the beach between their home and the beach - and they thought it would be nice to have a garden there instead… so they spoke to their new neighbour about maybe buying the land for the driveway, and selling him an equal sized strip of land on the other side of their property. Basically, no change to their neighbour’s home at all - but the neighbour’s driveway would go between two houses instead of along the beach.
All perfectly reasonable, but somehow it fell to shit when the neighbour… turned out to be a nutcase and bought two huge rusty shipping containers, an old bulldozer, cars that had been crashed, etc and dumped all of them along his driveway right next to their house. And when they complained, he added huge a canvas tarp sections between all that mess and the ocean. So now they can’t even see the ocean at all from their home - all they can see is a huge white wall and a bunch of rusty old crap along their fence line.
If they were in a HOA… they would be able to force him to remove all of that junk. But they’re not, so there’s nothing they can do. They tried taking it to court, but the judge said “yeah, he’s obviously an asshole… but it’s his land. He is allowed to have shipping containers and ruined cars on his land”.
If you’re in a HOA, you might occasionally be forced to do something you’d rather not do. But you will never have to deal with totally unreasonable neighbours like that example. Living in a HOA definitely isn’t something I’d want - but I can see why some people like them.
But anyway… I fail to see how that is any way like X. If anything X is exactly the opposite of a HOA… it’s like buying a house in a suburb that’s full of trolls and assholes. A “HOA” social network is a place where everyone is boring and if you’re not boring, you get kicked out.
Your last sentence sums it up perfectly. Conform to social norms or suffer. No thank you. People who trade freedom for security have neither and deserve neither.
I hope your properties do well and your roof(s) last 10 years over estimates.
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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.
I’m not sure if the Arab spring could have happened without Twitter.
