I hate these kinds of articles because they never actually point to anything concrete.
> Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022
That's great, now where are the receipts? Anytime I ever hear about "misinformation on Twitter" it's always just that blanket statement that were supposed to believe.
I'm not exactly interested in discussing what exactly constitutes an "explosion" or what's "hateful" or "misinformation," but those are fine starting points for garnering more receipts as you put it.
I can only add an anecdote in an area where I know the lay of the land:
I live near the war, am aware of the propaganda from both sides, and now when I search for Ukraine the misinformation/Russophile volume is off the previous charts.
This article is based off of interviews with climate scientists. If you want their sources, look up the scientists on your favorite search engine, Twitter, or Mastodon.
Al Jazeera is a news journal, not a science journal, usually news journal don’t publish sources in the same way as science journals do. If you are lucky, and the news is about one study in particular, they might link to the study, but most of the time they simply publish the story and it is up to the reader to seek out more details.
I think we are disagreeing about how they should work. I understand that they currently don’t do this. My point is that they should be doing it. It costs the news agencies 5 seconds of their time. But it saved the readers and independent fact-checkers many multiples of that.
I guess that is the point—as well as the value—of posting news articles like these to forums like HN. An ancestor of yours posted a few studies by the ADL which back up a similar point.
Perhaps it is not ideal, but this way the writers of Al Jazeera can focus on their most obvious target audience—people who just want the story—while the more curious among us can find the sources and share on these forums.
I saw that. But I don’t want similar points. I what the exact points put forth by the article.
But again, they already have the sources. They know exactly what reference they are using for facts they bring up. The extra work involved is Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V.
The exact same argument could be said about scientific papers. The benefit of the community is that they will do the detective work of finding the references. I don’t know about you, but I would see this as a serious step backward.
Business documents also have to back up their statements. Even 15 year olds in school are expected to include references.
Let’s look at what they do include links for:
> In another analysis, prominent climatologist Katharine Hayhoe monitored responses to a tweet on climate change that she published twice, as an experiment, on separate dates before and after Musk’s takeover.
The italics are mine and they are a hyperlink in the article. Reading that sentence I, and I suspect many others, would expect the hyperlink to take us to something related to Katharine Hayhoe‘a work. But it doesn’t. It takes us to [1], which is talking about Musk making himself the sole director. That link is basically irrelevant as a reference for that paragraph.
I’m actually not sure the Al Jazeera writer has the sources, as this piece is done by interviewing the scientists. The journalist simply asked the scientists and reported on what they said. Surely the journalist could ask the scientists for sources, and maybe they should have, and maybe they did but the scientist didn’t have them at hand at that exact moment.
In journalism it is often more important to find sources which back each other up, rather then finding original research. In this case the journalist interviews a few scientists that all tell a similar story. I think the journalist here is simply doing what they have been trained to do.
The link you provide unfortunately cannot be the source. The article discusses an A/B test on an identical tweet that they put out. The tweet is talking about follower changes (research that was done by Ketan Joshi "and a few other climate folks", which based on Katharine's wording of the tweet it doesn't look like she had a part in).
> Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022
That's great, now where are the receipts? Anytime I ever hear about "misinformation on Twitter" it's always just that blanket statement that were supposed to believe.