Twitter has always been a refuge of the small minded and the most superficial aspects of our society. Couple that with raging narcissism, dog-whistle politics, racism, and you have a weaponized platform. This is the dark side of the tech.
/u
The light side is that it allows almost real-time reporting of current events, crowdsorcing, and sentiment feedback to allow for responsible action by people who pay attention.
Almost real-time reporting and rumor mill. The amount of half truths, lies, doctored / out of context imagery is staggering. Not convinced that having a real-time rumor mill in times of crisis and social discord helps anyone other than cynical political actors.
I'm not sure it is. Twitter is short form by design. Most issues are complex. I would suggest that short form dissertation on complex issues is pointless at best and more often than not simply stokes conflict.
Have Twitter (and Facebook) provided valuable information to the world? Sure. Have they also harmed democracies? I think it's fairly obvious they have.
The quality of conversation on facebook is not higher than twitter, just more verbose. Twitter’s short form is not the cause for its deficiencies, the low threshold for reaching a wide audience is.
I like to compare twitter to current modern language prediction models. Instead of seeding the ML model with a sentence and getting an output tree, you are seeding the social consciousness of people and getting an organic output.
This is why intention is so important when interacting with new technologies.
Twitter is horrible, but at least it's not Facebook. After a while on the site, it's fairly easy to see what's organic and what's promoting something. Lots of insightful commentary you don't see elsewhere.
yeah, because twitter is the land of brain farts I allocate it the same level of focus, but FB.. its deeper and more insidious. personally I wont touch it.
