
Twitter’s Misguided Quest to Become a Forum for Everything - raleighm
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/magazine/twitters-misguided-quest-to-become-a-forum-for-everything.html
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Tycho
The establishment press is panicking because they can no longer effectively
perform the role of narrative gatekeepers. Information will simply route
around them via internet services. Hence their current hypocritical attacks on
all alternative media outlets and failure to champion the cause of real
journalism (eg. Assange). In 2003 they helped launch an illegal and murderous
invasion of Iraq, but these days any narrative they try to push will be
obliterated by the internet in days.

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything
else is public relations.”

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duskwuff
There are many names for what Assange has done with Wikileaks, but "real
journalism" is not one of them.

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leereeves
Why not? Like any journalist, he confirms and publishes stories given to him
by sources while protecting their anonymity.

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spiderfarmer
Journalist? The sort of information he publishes, his timing and the people he
chooses to defend make him nothing more than a political activist.

It's not difficult to see why: he has broken laws and is now stuck in a cage
and the only way to get out of it is to cosy up to the politician who is most
likely to pardon him.

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not_weev
How do such tactics differ from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and
MSNBC? Are those operations not journalists? Assange is in a cage because,
after being cleared of any wrongdoing vis-a-vis the sexual assault complaints,
a "special prosecutor" decided she had to speak to him in person, i.e. get him
in a venue subject to U.S. extradition.

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meowface
Everything you just said is completely irrelevant to Assange's credibility as
a journalist. Just because he's a martyr doesn't mean he's a good, ethical, or
honest person.

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zaarn
Twitter has lots of problems, shadow banning and their rather annoying
attempts to drive out all third party developers will be their eventual
downfall. I wonder how many people genuinely use Twitter to be social and how
many use it to stir up hate mobs, to drive people into suicide, to breed
hatred and tribalism or to spam the "latest breaking news".

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Rjevski
I used Twitter to be "social" around 2013. I noticed that the social aspect of
it seems to have died out by 2014 or so, and so I left the platform (also due
to their other changes).

