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[flagged] Twitter no longer serves as a trustful source of information (notes.ghed.in)
15 points by rpgbr on Oct 11, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 25 comments



This is less about being a trustful source of information and just a hit piece slamming X and Elon.

Wish he had at least listed the two notorious sources of information. I am sure they were not great but would have been nice to see what they were so I can at least be a judge of how valid that statement is.


Here's a more informative article about the incident: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/08/israel-...


I think the community notes improve things.

But I can say Twitter is a better source than Tiktok for sure.

I seem many lies and falsehoods being pushed on younger people on Tiktok.


We need more efforts in the schools to investigate information that we consume now that it comes in various formats with incredible volume compared to the past.


I think the effort would be better spent teaching kids how to think and reason about information.

If we keep trying to play whack a mole, we don't really get anywhere.


We all know the rules:

- Trust reluctantly and always always verify.

- Consider the source. X is the medium. It's not the source.

- Once you consider the source, follow the money.

- If it sounds too good - or too bad - to be true, it probably isn't.

- Writing something and publishing it on the internet doesn't make anyone a journalist. There's more depth and breadth to journalism than that.

- Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves to be mindful of what we consume. Whether that's consumption for the mind, for the body, or for the soul. Junk food is junk food.


I have never thought of Twitter as a trustworthy place to get information from.

I find it interesting that people use Twitter as an information crutch (as I gather from this website)


> I find it interesting that people use Twitter as an information crutch

Mostly journalists who can't be bothered (or don't have the wherewithal) to corroborate anything they report.


Twitter changed their algorithm and the way they promote content.

Now if you get verified (pay Musk) - your replies get promoted and get more views and reactions. With effective removal of "old" verification system you have no way to validate whether an account is reliable or not. Everyone can look the same and virality is rewarded.

It has become much worse than in the past.


Yes but seeing as a lot of government agencies put official accounts there, even the POTUS, I assume you can understand that a lot of other people saw it as an official source of information.


Certainly I would still generally trust official accounts of the POTUS or other government agencies. Trust but verify like most things of this nature.


Why not? The previous twitter:

Tweets from blue-checked Reuters/AP - 99% True

Tweets from blue-checked accounts - maybe true, but verify

Tweets from regular accounts - probably untrue, verify

Now the blue-check is a big Elon simp, mostly a right-winger and pushing some sort of scam. It's pretty much a 4chan clone


1) Who ever trusted X about anything at any time period either before or after Musk? The very premise seems absurd.

2) The example given in this article, that Musk posted links to allegedly bad news sources and then retracted them once he realized that he made a bad recommendation, should be seen as a positive sign. Musk is human, and like all humans, he makes mistakes. The important thing is that he realized he was wrong and tried to fix it.

3) The lesson taken from this isn't that "Musk is bad" it's that skepticism about all information should reign, regardless of source. It doesn't matter if Obama, Musk, Biden, Trump, Fauci, Gates, Alex Jones, or whoever tells the world some alleged fact. You should verify everything that anybody tells you about anything and trust nobody to be the sole arbiter of truth.

4) I think a good journalist would post more information about the endorsement that Musk gave by posting screenshots or something. I'd like to get a better sense of Musk's judgement by seeing their feed for myself, but this article doesn't give that important information. I think that a big problem with modern journalism is that it treats you as if you're not a big boy that can be trusted to make up his own mind and have to be told what to think rather than being shown the facts and giving you the opportunity to make up your own mind.

5) Speaking of responsible journalism, I'd like to point out that motives do matter. And while you can't read minds, it does seem that a lot of journalists' feelings about Musk are peppered by having their elite blue checkmark statuses ripped away from them and hypothetically being available to everybody. That should be a factor that weighs into anybody's analysis when reading journalists about Musk's activity.


While I'd agree that stuff on Twitter was never particularly trustworthy, the conversion of the blueticks into a monetisation/paid status thing has certainly made it a bit riskier; Twitter no longer has a clear meaningful form of provenance verification. Is that actually a Reuters tweet, or a 'REuters' tweet with a paid bluetick? Most users will be (and are) fooled by this sort of thing, which was largely impossible under the old regime.

On (2), he should perhaps check _before_ promoting anti-Semitic fake news accounts; absurd to make excuses for him here.


What are the handles of these fake news accounts? I'd like to try and see for myself why Musk made a mistake and if he just made a minor mistake or if he has bad judgement.


Not sure why I should do your homework for you, but here you go, an article about the incident which contains the account names: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/08/israel-...


1) Thank you for the link, however it is pay walled.

2) I'm not asking you to do homework. It should be the journalist's job to provide the relevant facts, but the linked article was lacking.

3) I asked because I thought you knew since you evaluated them closely enough to be certain that they're anti-semitic.

4) Forget the request. I'll look on Twitter and try and find that myself. That's the strategy that everybody should take to look into things that matter to them.


“For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” Musk posted on the platform formerly called Twitter on Sunday morning to 150 million follower accounts


WarMonitors is an incredibly bad source that continously posts misinformation and propaganda.

I follow Ukraine war closely and that is one of very few twitter accounts that I blocked - due to constant misinformation that they posted. This block happened months ago and had nothing to do with recent events. Even clear propaganda accounts are better than that guy. I'd love to find some example but this account posts so much that it is impossible to look up things from months ago.

I have a feeling that Musk was fed these two accounts by someone who he listens to - my guess is David Sacks as Sacks was much more active in Ukraine/Ru Twitter circles - and it would fit that one of his sources is unreliable WarMonitors.

sentdefender account I don't find as problematic.


Here's an un-paywalled example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/09/x-twitter...

On number (3), er, it should be pretty obvious if you take a glance at that article.

This is, generally a fascinating example of a weird tendency in modern personality cults. Musk is, in this system, _both_ a magical super-genius _and_ so incompetent that he can't be expected to identify obvious nonsense before promoting it to a hundred million people, and is thus not culpable. You see this most often for Musk and Trump, but it's pretty widespread.

Perhaps a response to the internet age; in the 20th century it was more common for devotees to simply claim that the cult figure didn't say the thing, but that's so easy to disprove these days that presumably the super-position of visionary leader and helpless incompetent has become necessary.


Thank you for your response.

> On number (3), er, it should be pretty obvious if you take a glance at that article.

Unless I'm missing something though, I'm not completely sure of that.

The following is the only comment about Jews mentioned in the article.

> The @WarMonitors account told a user in June “go worship a jew lil bro”

It's a weird comment, but without context, it's not inherently hateful.


The twitverse was NEVER a source of trusted informaiton.

With millions of users posting billions of posts, how could it be...


The amount of Elon stans here is... unsurprising, actually. HackerNews gonna HackerNews.


Putting aside those who post to X/Twitter and Elon Musk, I like the community notes feature and have built a little trust in it.


Never did.




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