
Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? (2018) - apsec112
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-study.php
======
foxes
Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. I think it is responsible for
radicalising many people. People seem to get easily swept up and not apply the
same filtering as they do in real life. Not to mention Twitter/Facebook etc
actively wage war on their users psyche for extra views and clicks.

~~~
theshrike79
Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means they win.

This has been a basic tenet of the Internet for decades - until Twitter and FB
became huge.

Now the regular people don't know or understand this and continue to interact
with trolls (retweeting, subtweeting, basically bringing attention to their
idiocy). This just feeds the anger cycle and shuts down all attempts at sane
discourse.

You don't tell a troll you're not arguing with them, don't block them (that's
a win), you just ignore it completely. If everyone would follow this rule, the
crazies would be left alone shouting into the emptiness.

~~~
wh-uws
I think about this a lot.

Twitter and FB brought a lot of people to the internet who weren't exposed to
cultural things like Rule 14 that I feel went a long way to maintaining
civility.

They also normalized bringing your identity online. Back in the days i.e. when
slashdot would have been HN everyone was anonymous. I feel like it made it
easier to focus on ideas instead of the people saying them.

Ah simpler times...

~~~
snakeboy
It's a bit of a double-edged sword, no? In many contexts, having identity tied
to your online profile should make people act more like humans and less like
they're role-playing their anonymous internet troll persona.

~~~
zozbot234
> In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make
> people act more like humans

That's the point, isn't it? A _person_ can be good or bad, but when you group
_people_ together via social media, you find out just how many of them are
just terrible human beings. People acting like humans is exactly what you _don
't_ want to happen.

~~~
PedroBatista
So.. you want people to act like robots?

The psychologists and drug companies would love that.

------
chronofar
Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. Social media has produced an
environment in which short, highly emotional content reproduces the fastest,
thus the evolution of information in our society has trended toward memetic
oversimplifications and absolutes, driven by vanity and outrage and virtue
signaling. We are optimizing for the worst qualities of discussion at the
largest scales.

And yet it seems hard to imagine it could be any other way. Our evolutionary
biology and inbred tribalism, social proclivities and laziness are what make
the platforms so popular, the evolution of our memes is directly tied to our
evolutionary biology's feedback mechanisms. It's hard to see just how we could
optimize for nuanced, balanced and productive discussion at scale. We have
platforms that could in theory optimize in that direction, but the widest
audiences trend toward the simplest to consume content (reddit is filled with
interesting discussion in the right places, but most of its audience just see
the quick reinforcing memes that occupy the front page).

So do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? Well if we value nuance
and balance in our information then yes, any attention on Twitter is probably
too much. But of course we don't, not at scale, rather we value audience size.
And for that Twitter is a great place to pay attention. Hence much modern
journalism is just a glorified retweet, part of Twitter and Facebook even if
it is posted elsewhere. In the memes arms race the best weapons are those that
can be spread widely and quickly, and for that Twitter provides ample
ammunition.

~~~
collyw
I saw a comment on 4chan recently:

"Social media was a mistake and the creators should be tried for crimes
against humanity"

~~~
waldoh
People on 4chan say dumb shit like that a lot. I'd avoid that place if I were
you

~~~
falsaberN1
The funny thing is that 4chan and twitter aren't that different in terms of
hate and troll. They were at some point, but the lines keep blurring. Sure you
can find places in twitter that aren't toxic cesspools, but you can also find
that in 4chan (/m/ for example).

The weirdest thing is that people in twitter is doing 4chan tier stuff under
their real names and faces, which is just baffling to me. I always thought the
whole 4chan loltroll hate machine thing was because of anonymity, but I'm
starting to reconsider that stance.

~~~
eropple
Anonymity wasn't why the 4chan hate machine would fire up--it was because a
few people could look like a lot of people. It looked like you had a mob right
at hand.

Now, there _are_ a lot of people, and bots besides.

~~~
falsaberN1
Hmm, that's an interesting take. I always thought it was the "I can say
whatever and they'll never know it was me, mwahaha the perfect crimeeee!" or
something.

~~~
eropple
People have never had a problem with their names on atrocities when they had
other people at their back.

The Salem witch trials are an obvious example, to me.

------
redslazer
Yes because it is an easy way to craft what ever narrative is desired. There
are people with ever possible view point on twitter so once you have the
narrative you can find the appropriate tweet to embed.

"There was large scale outrage on twitter about decision X..." followed by an
embed of one of three tweets.

It would be very interesting to chart the rise of twitter citations as
compared to other sources.

~~~
AmericanChopper
News outlets have been doing this since long before Twitter was a thing. Any
time you hear/read “x is facing criticism...”, “x is under pressure...”, “x is
being praised...”, “many people are saying...”, “people familiar with the
issue...”, “inside/anonymous sources...”, “x calls for...”, “experts
say/warn...”, everything you hear/read after that point is 100% curated
editorial opinion, and news outlets have been pedalling that for at least as
long as I’ve been old enough to read the news.

Those kinds of statements are so vague that they’re pretty much always
guaranteed to be true, so you don’t even need to provide a factual basis for
them, but before Twitter news outlets would just go and interview random
uninformed passers by on the street and gather a couple of good common-man
sound bites to reinforce whatever bad opinion it is they’re pushing. My
favourite technique that I’ve seen become more common over the past few years
is to print an article claiming “x is facing online death threats” for anybody
they want to generate some sympathetic support for. Are such headlines true?
Almost certainly. Would that headline be true for any public figure you can
possibly think of? Almost certainly.

~~~
PaulKeeble
Even nobodies on the internet have received death threats, haven’t we all had
at least one at this point? I don't even remember how many I have had now.
Given I have been using the internet since the late 1990s its got to average
at least 1 a year but some years like the Usenet years I received a lot more
than that average. Its probably less than 100 but I have no idea how many it
actually is. I received many of these post about Java (the programming
language) and not objectionable things, I received one for a post showing a no
op stream!

------
bruceb
Twitter works for them as they can shape the narrative to their own
preconceived notions. Just write "twitter users blast X" which in reality is
like 5 people. Its a fig leaf for whatever they want to write.

~~~
FillardMillmore
Can you expand on what you mean here? For the extent of the claim, it seems
quite unsubstantiated.

~~~
dvtrn
Below are examples of recent news stories that amount to nothing more than
“someone on twitter said:”

[https://www.businessinsider.com/people-outraged-elon-musk-
ca...](https://www.businessinsider.com/people-outraged-elon-musk-calling-us-
covid-19-response-fascist-2020-4)

[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chance-the-
rap...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chance-the-rapper-kanye-
west-president-1027821/)?

[https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/07/10/maines-twitter-
users...](https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/07/10/maines-twitter-users-among-
top-for-anti-mask-feelings/)

[https://news.yahoo.com/us-chinese-ambassadors-spar-
twitter-1...](https://news.yahoo.com/us-chinese-ambassadors-spar-
twitter-190737360.html)

I have no opinion about any of them, but they’re _honestly_ not that hard to
find.

~~~
matwood
Keep in mind that in your examples, those 'someones' are Musk, Chance, and the
US/China ambassadors. Not exactly no bodies. For better or worse, Twitter has
become an official communication channel for many, and is news.

------
d33lio
Journalists looking to twitter for the "pulse" of culture or current
"narrative" is akin to creatures of the jungle who sit under mango trees and
wait to consume rotting mangoes that fall beneath the tree. After a while,
they don't mind the stench, they're lazy and intoxicated without exerting much
effort at all.

------
tomgp
Journalists like twitter because it allows them to “build a personal brand”
i.e. they are less beholden to the publication/broadcaster which they are
employed. It allows them a direct line to their audience to promote their work
and news orgs see value in employing journalists with large follower counts.
I’ve worked for a couple of large news orgs over the years and just by virtue
of including them in my Twitter bio And being followed by journo friends my
follower count increased to the high hundred/ low thousands— I barely tweet at
all.

A side effect of all this is that journalists (and others with high follower
counts) have a very distorted idea of how Twitter works and feels for most
people and tend to ascribe more importance to it than perhaps it deserves.
Thing is it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Ps. I haven’t actually read the linked article so apologies if I’m repeating
its contents

~~~
pentae
The premise of the article is that they pay attention to Twitter as a source
for stories. Not to 'build a personal brand'

~~~
coffeefirst
True but you can't talk about one without the other.

Young journalists have to be active on it in order to establish themselves.
But by being active they're overexposed to it.

In theory, you can both be there and keep it in perspective: to know it's a
dirty pub for angry people and robots to yell at each other, that doesn't
represent the real world.

But that's hard, and not everyone can do it long-term, especially when more
and more people around you spend a lot of time in the same fun house.

------
NalNezumi
Yes.

Feel free to pay some attention to the small bubbles that form around like-
minded people in their twitter echo-chamber but it is doing frustrating amount
of damage to community and individuals when lazy journalist just take an
twitter outrage/trends as an estimate of "what's in people's mind".

Checking twitter for general consensus, opinions or trending topic is like
checking tabloid stand at the gas-station for it. Vast majority of people
don't give a single crap about the private affairs of actors nor the new
hottest diet/cars/fashion that tabloids makes you believe.

------
mrweasel
Journalist seem to over estimate how many users Twitter have, I think. It’s
even worse outside the US where Twitter is even less popular. It sometimes
seems like Twitter is a platform for journalists.

~~~
bickeringyokel
Non US person here. Nobody I know really uses Twitter in any significant way.

Instagram is the top around these parts, while previously relegated to FOMO
inspiring photos.. it has grown increasingly political since Facebook took
over. Not sure if it's a coincidence or some nefarious scheme.

------
benlumen
Politicians and journalists alike use it to gain influence. Which would be
fine in and of itself.

But they absolutely do pay too much attention to it. My problem is how many of
them then mistake the screaming extremists in the comment threads on there for
"public opinion" and the rest of us have to suffer this nonsense - until
there's a vote on something that doesn't go anything like the way they thought
it would, time and time again (there have been several examples in the UK in
recent years).

------
fullshark
They do, but thank you Twitter for congregating all the journalists into a
public square to let us see how narratives form and the sausage gets made re:
news.

------
wellpast
I was always shocked at the cultural norms (ideas and behavior) manifest on
Twitter and was always repeatedly laughed at (by myself, included) for being
concerned about that. Twitter was no representation of real life; but then
ever year I see real life (ideas and, maybe, behavior) conforming to
yesteryear's Twitter. I do think a lot of things start in Twitter and move out
into the mainstream; it's not a bad place to look (if you want to know see
where we are headed) or it's a terrible place to look (if you care about where
we are headed).

~~~
dotfool
This is possibly self fulfilling: journalists or others pay more attention to
Twitter than they “should”, which gives Twitter a disproportionate degree of
influence, in turn justifying why they pay attention to it

------
ISL
I've always suspected that the big draw of Twitter is that there is never any
need to inquire whether or not something on Twitter is quotable.

Many Facebook posts, etc. are friends-only, perhaps presenting at least a
momentary ethical question. With Twitter, it is clear that the posts are
definitively in the wild and in the public square.

~~~
freetime2
And since the tweet itself often is the story, they also don’t need to bother
with fact checking or verifying sources. It doesn’t matter if the tweet is
factual or not, just that some person of interest said it.

It also probably helps that many people have a morbid curiosity about what
celebrities are doing and saying, and can’t help but click on those articles.

------
_0o6v
Journalists used to speak to sources and collate a point of view. Now even the
TV channels literally screenshot the tweet and display it. So lazy and a
bugbear of mine. If I wanted to see a Twitter feed, I'd just to read Twitter.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Journalism is definitely going downhill. All news organizations are hurting
for money and cutting to the bone. Local newspapers are dying, and television
news is getting worse. I don’t think it’s laziness, it’s just that they can’t
afford real journalism any more.

------
OliverJones
Tweets are not news. Journalists today who base a story on a tweet are no
better than the journos of yesteryear who wrote their stories by "pasting up"
press releases from their subjects. They're shills. (The same might be said
for political reporters who sit around the office watching C-SPAN and writing
stories. But, no digression.)

If a tweet announces (for example) a move to change a particular government
regulation, that might be news. But the Twitter medium is NOT the message.
It's closer to something scrawled on the wall in a public toilet than it is to
even a press release. A competent journo will follow up to obtain more or
deeper sources, and background.

Here's an over-the-top idea: Twitter should introduce a feature that randomly
attributes one tweet in a thousand to the wrong account. And Twitter should
publicize that change and include it in their terms of service. The effect:
journos risk their reputations who don't follow up to verify the source and
content of tweets they report.

Twitter will never make this change. But putting the burden on journos to
distrust and verify restores a part of that profession that's been fading away
along with newspaper revenue.

Maybe there's another way to reduce the trustworthiness of Twitter content
just enough to make verification necessary, and to put the burden on journos.
They're trained to verify, hopefull.

Now, a certain 45th holder of a certain visible job tweets a lot. Stories
saying that person tweeted something inflammatory may be news. But they're old
and boring news. McDs has golden arches. Pope's Catholic. DJT spews rubbish on
twitter.

------
wfbarks
Folks not on twitter have been getting second hand twitter for the past couple
of years.

------
mola
Problem is Twitter is heavily manipulated by actors with the money.
Journalists weakened position as laborers created a generation of journalists
without real mentorship. This in turn made us lose knowledge of consequences
and thus ethics.

Finally neo journalists just watch Twitter all day long, which makes it their
main source. This amplifies the adverserial content farms employed by
centralized money.

In a sense, mass "social" media is the modern incarnation of royalty's
replacement for religion.

------
kevrc
Too much of anything happens on Twitter. People evolved to resolve conflicts
face-to-face. It's so easy to interact on Twitter in a way that very few ever
would in "real" life. It doesn't feel good to be mean to someone's face,
especially if they seem like a mostly nice and reasonable person (as most
are). Take that away and we naturally fall into toxic shout matches that go
nowhere and slowly emit a cloud of intangible tension and stress that hangs
over everything.

------
delhanty
Surely this is the wrong way around!

People on Twitter pay too much attention to journalists.

Tech Twitter needs some sort of filter to keep them out.

From PG’s Twitter a few hours ago:

> You can protect anything from unreasonable people by making them build
> something in order to attack it. Unreasonable people can't build

[https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1282689679649800196](https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1282689679649800196)

~~~
pbourke
> Tech Twitter needs some sort of filter to keep them out.

Tech Twitter manages to generate a fair amount of de novo BS without any
involvement from journalists.

------
chiefalchemist
A better way to lens it is:

If they're paying too much attention to Twitter they are not journalists.

While not perfect, this list via Jim Lehrer is an excellent filter for
evaluating the quality of an infomation source:

[https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-
journalism-1](https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1)

~~~
dotfool
I think this sort of thinking oversimplifies the problem. While we experience
the deterioration of these norms as “the problem”, the deeper issue is the
environment that caused them to deteriorate in the first place.

There are systemic and environmental reasons that good journalists following
these rules “lost out” to those who didn’t - reducing the root of the issue to
a moral failing of modern journalists is, IMO, largely unproductive.

Another point I’d add is that these rules are not impervious to abuse by bad
actors. If you’re a bad actor, knowing the algorithm used to hold you to
account makes it much easier to plan around. Think of this is a Type II error:
the journalism system fails to denounce someone it ‘should’ — implicit in
these rules is a preference set, how often are we willing to accept Type I v
Type II errors.

The twitter outrage phenomenon, taken charitably, is frustration with “the
standard media algorithm”, because it produces a large and persistent number
of Type II errors. They believe bad actors have grown so adept at
circumventing these rules that they should be retired. They view the “cost” of
a Type I error as less important.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yes and no.

The info consumer needs to more aware of what they are consuming; truth in
food labeling if you will.

Editorial is not journalism.

Deviating from the Jim Leher rules is not journalism.

And so on. The root problem is it's the media's job to educate and they are
the #1 beneficiary of the market being uneducated. At this point, it's naive
to believe the media is going to police itself. Clearly, that's not happening.

------
duxup
I remember app.net

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net)

It seemed like it got enough hype and got a lot of tech media journalists to
sign up and then.... It was just them complaining that it was just journalists
on there.

I think that was a telling tale about what their incentives are .

~~~
docbrown
They’re incentives were an attempt to change social media with a more refined
version of interactions. Of course getting big names on it early on would
drive interest. That sort of business behavior was not done in bad faith.

The problem was that it was subscription based. The interactions between its
users were thought out and professional. The trade of journalism itself had
nothing to do with its failures — people did not have interest in paying for
something they could do for free on Twitter.

~~~
duxup
I was commenting on the journalists incentives, not the site.

------
dotfool
(1) I’m curious if part of the problem is that the marginal cost of gathering
information through Twitter is so much lower, that it’s practically
irresistible for increasingly cash constrained media outlets. Traditional
modes of journalism are costly and myopic: traveling a journalist around the
country, and interviewing people individual by individual.. it’s no wonder
they’re drawn to a (free!) place that aggregates public sentiment from the
comfort of your desk

(2) Too much in comparison to what. I can assure you they pay too much
attention to Twitter in comparison to my preference, but I’m not sure that’s a
meaningful comparison. How should journalists decide “how much” attention to
pay to any source? I don’t think there’s consensus on this, which is a deeper
problem than twitter itself

------
nigerian1981
A lot of journalism now days seems to consists of just regurgitating tweets

~~~
chasd00
my wife started her career as a journalist (she's now a teacher). I was
telling her the other day that it isn't fair someone who signs up at twitter
and wordpress all of the sudden gets to call themselves a Journalist. she just
looked at me sorta aggravated and said "no shit."

------
peroporque
Twitter is mostly angry psychos yelling one-liners to push their ideology.

That and "journalists".

And then the later think the world is made up entirely of the former.

My Twitter block list is probably 10 times as long as my follow list.

------
whywhywhywhy
Twitter is just a glorified internet forum with a few active celebrity
(openly) and journalist posters.

I find the fact the majority of the news cycle now runs on collating a bunch
of tweets just as absurd as if they were collating a bunch of reddit posts all
day.

It is not the real world journalists acting that it is just because they have
a 3000-10000 follower count and a checkmark is just as ridiculous as them
pretending reddit is the real world because they have 7 figures of comment
upvotes and some nuggets of reddit gold.

------
thinkingemote
Journalists pay attention to Twitter because their readers are the most
enthusiastic users of it.

These readers used to be called The Chattering Classes.

------
wilsonrocks
I would like a browser extension that removes all articles and links to
articles where the only source is twitter.

------
barrenko
Just what do journalists do exactly is the question of this decade.

------
jvolkman
A rare violation of Betteridge's law.

~~~
dvtrn
It’s the CJR, to boot; they should know better :P

------
collyw
First time I find an exception to Betteridges law.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
moeadham
Yes

------
problybob88
If the context is politics, probably as only a minority of the user base is
responsible for most of the political content:

[https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-
pol...](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-politics-on-
twitter-small-share-of-u-s-adults-produce-majority-of-tweets/)

Email is still the best for text based discourse, IMO. Asynchronous
especially.

I can synchronously connect to groups via messenger and iPhone built-in email
a link to grandma. No social media account required to connect to friends and
family.

One touch video/voice chat are accessible and disposable enough, not all of
them require logins or drag all the features of Slack along.

Facebook and Twitter take up the same conscious space for me as MySpace and
AIM.

------
whatsmyusername
I only use Twitter for porn.

------
Pinegulf
Reminds me of a joke (with kernel of truth)

What's the difference between public restroom wall and twitter? Anyone can
write what ever they want. Don't follow any links. Some of writing is with
$hit.

------
pm90
When talking about journalists, HN comments generally seem pretty antagonistic
and hostile. Why is that so? Yes, a lot of cable news is driven by outrage
cycles, its what attracts views and the ad industry follows the views.
Unironically, the online media properties of these firms are huge influential
operations precisely due to the adtech industry that Silicon Valley has
built/enabled ...

Journalists that work for non-cable news outlets generally do a pretty good
job of reporting on current events. These are very smart folks, trained in the
profession of Journalism who often put themselves at risk to report truth to
power. And they present it in ways that are easily understandable for their
readers... its not an easy job, and there is a spectrum of capability in
journalism. I bet readers of HN would be pretty upset if they were similarly
stereotyped based on a narrow but vocal minority (e.g. movie-style hackers?).

Both Journalists and people in Tech use twitter to have reasonable discussions
about current events. It depends on who you follow: you get to select the
corner of twitterscape that you want to inhabit.

~~~
pjc50
People speaking truth to power are doing a difficult job that's worth
defending.

These days most "news content" is speaking power to truth instead. No real
effort to uncover truth is made, instead a "both sides" narrative is
manufactured and awful people given platforms to lie.

~~~
pm90
Generalizations don’t help with anything, as I’ve pointed out in my original
comment.

