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Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X (theguardian.com)
244 points by Jimmc414 27 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 331 comments



Real reason: The Guardian can't handle when readers community note them using.. The Guardian.

https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1821189070401249385/p...


This. It's not just The Guardian, though. It's pretty much all moss media. They got too used to an era where they could talk and the public couldn't talk back (or they could but only through letters to the editor which they could conveniently filter to just the voices they wanted to hear).


"They got too used to an era where they could talk and the public couldn't talk back"

Maybe--a lot of folks made the same point in the mid 2010s when news outlets began shutting down comment sections on their sites. They usually said it was the "toxic" atmosphere. But I imagine they really didn't like when the top comment was pointing out some obvious error (of fact, logic, grammar etc) in their article. I actually remember pointing out an error of fact on the gaurdian itself back--some review had made some ridiculous point because they were confusing the Aramaic and Amharic languages--and seeing the article later updated and my comment removed.


ArsTechnica always handled this well. They promote corrections in comments so they’re extra visible.


IME the comments almost universally had no value, and were very often toxic. I wouldn't want that on my website - why? What value do they add for anyone?

Nobody allows that on their website now - that was before many lessons were learned. HN doesn't allow anything like it (and never has, afaik).


> What value do they add for anyone?

Counterpoints are useful to help negate echo chambers where we end up clicking on the articles which validate our world view.

In addition the most upvoted comments (at least on the Financial Times website) are sometimes more informed and nuanced than the articles themselves. The article often gets the debate rolling - come for the articles, stay for the comments (so to speak).


> Counterpoints

In the comments section of news websites, it wasn't counterpoints. It was just aggression, lies, toxicity, etc.

The Financial Times is pretty rarefied air. Everyone must be subscribed, so no anonymity (I would guesss). How much does a subscription cost? $300+ per year?


You get some worthwhile commentary even on trashy sites (eg. Daily Mail, X) You just have to filter a bit.

I'm find it kind of annoying when you can't comment on an article with obvious things wrong.


Most give you an option to contact the author. I've corresponded with a few - most of what they get is death threats, etc.


i think about $600 a year and the comments are much higher quality.


They aren't as good as here though.


> What value do they add for anyone?

What about the example at the head of this comment chain?

I think news sites did lose something without feedback. I can accept a chess pool with a single good comment to make up for it. So it does provide value for me and I disagree with the "lessons learned". Also, the legal risks of showing user content should be scraped for anything that is not explicitly illegal.

We have information bubbles now that are way worse than the occasional comment in bad taste.


> I can accept a chess pool with a single good comment to make up for it.

Have fun with that.

> the occasional comment in bad taste.

That's a lot different than most social media.


> Have fun with that.

I do, that is the argument.

It would also leave me better informed since the example clearly shows that the statements could benefit from a wider context. And this wouldn't be the only case.

If comments don't provide value for you, you can ignore them. No reason to remove them for everybody else too.

I stopped reading the Guardian a few years ago. It once had really good content. That changed significantly in my opinion.


> It would also leave me better informed

You do you, but my argument is that it leaves you worse informed:

1) There is a lot of false information, which will mislead you inevitably (you're not that smart; nobody is)

2) There is a lot of noise for the signal, a lot of waste. You are worse informed because you could have spent the time learning from higher quality information.


Comments are user generated content that you host. They require a certain level of moderation just to avoid spam and illegal or deeply unpleasant comments.


Most mainstream newspapers and magazines publish letters to the editor and guest editorials or opinion pieces from those who disagree with the publication's reporting or editorial opinions.

What they filter out is the utter crap that invariably comes to completely dominate any unfiltered comment section that is open to the general public and takes effectively anonymous submissions via the internet.


To be fair, Social Media is just like the "Letters to the Editor" section, except the social media company is the publisher and is the one doing the filtering.


Right, but that's kind of my point: someone else gets to do the filtering and they can't stand it.


we get lots of direct and unsolicited feedback actually, much more than paper days. a fair amount of it is threats though.


It's difficult to tell because the tweet doesn't link to the original, screenshotting it instead. But the explanation is probably that these are two different meanings of the term "two-tier policing".


I was curious about this. This appears to be the original tweet, but I do not see any notes on it when I view it: https://x.com/guardian/status/1820788959095529653

There are more screenshots of the note in the replies, but none with the complete links to the articles.


Thanks. I think you actually need to be a Community Notes 'moderator' to view them until they're approved—I see them as "proposed Community Notes".


Yeah that confused me. I'm a 'moderator' (community note contributor in X lingo) and can see the proposed ones. Top 3:

>The Guardian have reported on two-tier policing, specifically about on race and sexuality, for decades https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/metropolitan...

There has been widespread use of force by the police against working class (white) protestors. Including random unprovoked attacks on women and the elderly: https://x.com/ashleasimonbf/status/1820088461182812308

>The concept of 'two-tier' policing is contested, it is neither proven nor disproven, therefore it is equally as inaccurate to call it a myth as it would be to say it is fact. The Guardian view is not accepted by all media commentators as fact: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/05/met-chief-grabs-... https://thecritic.co.uk/two-tier-policing/

They all say: Needs more ratings, Not shown on X

I didn't feel inclined to upvote any. The system is there to point out factual errors. Differences of opinion can be posted in the comments (Xed?) as usual. "Two tier myth" seems to be opinion to me. There may have been a public note which disappeared - it's an upvote/downvote type system.


It's exactly the same meaning but with the sign reversed.

Turns out identity politics is a terrible idea. Now the Guardian et al are finding out exactly why when the people they disagree with are doing it too.


Exactly: two completely opposing points! I agree that identity politics is a terrible idea.


But uh... isn't it possible that one exists and the other does not?


Is it possible that "two-tier policing" exists, while "two-tier policing" does not? In a word, no. I know this a priori.


Come on, it's clear they were referring to either my reference to "two different meanings of the term" or the reply's reference to "the same meaning but with the sign reversed"—those are two different meanings.


Were they? They [Guardian] are now claiming that both groups are being treated the same when they were clearly claiming that that wasn’t the case earlier?

Which exact groups they are talking about doesn’t really matter for this specific argument.


I don't think the Guardian article does claim that if you read it.


The headline claims it, isn't that more important than the article claiming it?


The headline is being construed to claim what it does not.


> But uh... isn't it possible that one exists and the other does not?

Going through the airport between 2001 and 2021 showed that having a Muslim sounding name was going to be a trigger for a random inspection. The Rotherham child rape gangs investigation into the police clearly showed that complaints against South Asians by Whites were ignored for decades to avoid accusations of racism.

The average Guardian reader was only going to be exposed to the first and not the second. So the Guardian went full bore with the basest form of tribalism to explain the things its readers saw.

Now the same people who were gleefully destroying the social fabric in the name of progress are acting shocked at what happens when it unravels completely. I have the worlds smallest violin for them.


>The average Guardian reader was only going to be exposed to the first and not the second

Brief googling showed >30 articles in the Guardian on the second.


I don't think that's true. But if it is, can you blame them? Community notes are not impartial and X has become incredibly biased towards the far right.


X is pretty moderate to be honest. At least the popular opinions are the same moderates held in the 00s.


I don't think this is true, popular tweeters, including Elon, often spread misinformation that functions as right-wing propaganda. Typically they just quote tweet someone else, add on nothing like "interesting..." or "wow..." and then post it. Of course, they're quote tweeting actual far-right pundits or sometimes neo-nazis. There're some arguments about plausible deniability - I don't know if someone like Elon is aware that some of the people he's quote tweeted are neo-nazis.


Twitter could make itself real interesting if it took "community notes" web-wide. So many attempts at this have tried and failed, but Elon may just have the itch, audience, and disposable money to do it. Would also necessitate forking a special browser, since there would be no way to support web page comments in a first-class way in stock mobile browsers.


Idk, what Twitter has is much better than this since they are how people find content. Building some special infra and viewer for per-website notes just seems like a downgrade that gets worse and worse the more you try to hash out how exactly it should work.


Discoverability of comments/dissenting views is the key factor. I would bet that most readers of any given article on the Guardian site did not get there from Twitter, and therefore could benefit from a browser that displayed community notes. The details of knowing how to show what comments where are definitely challenging, but certainly worth another attempt with the capable AI techniques that could address previously intractable problems.


My recollection is that Gab made a plugin for browsers called Dissenter that did something like this, but they were banned from the Mozilla and Chrome stores under their moderation/censorship policies. I’ve never used it but I think it created a discussion on top of any URL. They ended up making a browser fork of Chrome but it probably went nowhere.


They said that their content can still be shared there.

Also that community note just says they have been consistently saying the same thing for decades which sounds okay to me.


The community note is saying that they have not been consistent. In the past they seemed to be saying it is real and in the post they are calling it a myth.


Ah okay. So I searched for the article which is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/06/engl...

The myth it is referring to is that there is a two-tiered system targeting white people. That's obviously a myth -- the notes are probably referring to instances where the Guardian has claimed that police treat racial minorities differently which is quite probably the case (happens everywhere else in the old British Empire so not sure why Britain would be any different).

I found the post on ex-Twitter:

https://x.com/guardian/status/1820788959095529653

But that's from 6 August, not 8 August as per the screenshot and there is no community note on it. I can't find a post by the Guardian about this on 8 August, maybe they deleted it? Does seem weird that they would delete one and not the other. It also seems that one would get community noted and not the other (especially since the 6 August post has 1.6m views and the 8 August post screenshotted has 60k views).

I tried to find the articles shown in the community note in the screenshot, and I can find some about two-tier policing that don't really seem directly related to this.

Maybe I can't find the one that's screenshotted because I don't have an account, maybe they deleted that one but not the 6 August one, maybe the screenshot is fabricated.

Either way, I'm quite sure that this "two-tier policing" claim is of the same ilk that equates rejecting racism with being racist; ie. the "leftist bullies" idea. That violent right-wing protests are being "treated differently" because they're white, rather than treated differently because they're a bunch of psychos being whipped into a frenzy by lies spread on ex-Twitter by influencers, including Elon Musk.

I wouldn't say that's the same as claims that, for example, black people are more likely to be subject to police brutality. But right-wingers love to make claims about "reverse racism".


> there is a two-tiered system targeting white people. That's obviously a myth

Except… That’s obviously not what Farage et al are saying.

The claim is that white nationalists (verging on fringe(?) neo-nazi) protestors and rioters were treated more harshly than protestors and rioters belonging to other races or subscribing to other (also violent and radical) political (or religious) ideologies.

It does not seem obvious at all to me that this is clearly a myth.


It seems clear that the current crop of "white nationalists (verging on fringe(?) neo-nazi) protestors and rioters" were treated with kid gloves in comparison to the treatment of "other race" protestors in the Brixton riots.

The current claim that current "other race" UK protestors are (oranges to oranges in same circumstances) better treated than white protestors is subjective, it's not suprise that such a claim is being made by Farage and Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon .. it's very much their schtick.


> Brixton riots.

That was more than 40 years ago. I was wondering whether bringing up 2011 might make sense (since it was over 10 years ago, the riots weren’t as politically motivated etc.) but this is just something else..


That's because they're nazis not because they're white



So that screenshot is fucking bullshit then. Classic.


There is power to slow news. Taking time to consider what to say next and how to reply, especially if you are wrong, is very important. That also applies to when you should stop commenting, even if you are wrong. Eventually every story needs to end because the resources needed to constantly follow up on old stories, and comments on them, need to be balanced with keeping up with new things. Basically, I am saying that comments sections, even if they occasionally point out important things, can be detrimental to keeping a higher level, slower paced and more thoughtful approach to journalism.


Lower periodicity does not mean taking more time to say things.

It means more rigid deadlines - more stories that are half-told to meet the deadlines and longer times to corrections.


“Journalism” isn’t failing to report a story because of who it might offend. If it happened, it’s valid. Even worse, journalism isn’t telling the opposite story because the real story might offend.

That’s the problem with the Guardian. They spend a lot of this time writing defensive stories, while missing the real ones.

Didn’t Guardian write a single story about how Kamala Harris got her political start under the patronage of Willie Brown? I don’t recall a single Guardian story critical of anything Kamala Harris did once she became the candidate.


Some but certainly not as much criticism as was written about Trump. Mentioned negatives include her support for Israel, lackluster interview performance, poor performance in 2020 primaries, and previous stances as a prosecutor.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/rashida-tlai...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/kama...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/24/kama...

Edited to be less opinionated / more factual


Quantity vs quality. Journalism faces the question of 'how to present in an unbiased way' and the answer often comes out as 'equal coverage' which is, as answers go, terrible. Most of the time one 'side' isn't equal to the other when comparing statistics and doesn't deserved to be covered 'equally'.


Are community notes impartial?


In theory, it is designed to be resistant to being partial to any one side. And is pretty decent at it. However, being a social system it can be gamed, and sometimes is gamed.


Community notes are not impartial, they are written and approved by the users who sign up to do so (and actually take the time to do this unpaid labor).

Thus, they tend to reflect the biases of the kind of people who most want to (and have time to) write and approve community notes, drawn from the pool of people who use your site.


Now do democracy and voting. Or how about serving on a jury. Or serving on a school board.

By your definition those also must not be impartial and maybe that is a fair definition but what does it imply?

Do you similarly distrust democratic outcomes, jury decisions, etc.?


Jurors do not self-select into jury duty, though some try harder than others to get out of it. So the effect is less.

Voters are partial to the candidates they vote for; that's why they vote for them.


I was able to get out of jury duty by saying I tended to agree with police. This was advice given to me by a friend in law enforcement.:.


Yes, it's not difficult to get out of. You could also get out by saying that you don't trust the police, or any number of things that might affect your ability to be impartial in the case before you.


Would you prefer a trial by community notes or by jury.


It works quite well in practice. The unapproved notes are a bit all over the place in terms of bias and or being wrong but the ones that get enough votes to be shown are mostly fairly factually correct.



This is incorrect. The example you give is perfect. Twitters community notes reflect the received wisdom of a mob. Not the truth. They stand when the Twitter user base thinks they should.

As a right wing hub they oppose realities which don’t fit their world view.

Using the example you linked there is a long documented history of minorities in the Uk, including the Irish, being treated much more harshly by British police. Stop and search laws and multiple incidents of innocent people being framed for crimes.

The rights which to pretend this is targeted at the white majority, simply because multiply convicted criminals like Tommy Robinson are being jailed, is a myth.

No British policeman can stop you on the street by psychically intuiting your political views. They can stop you if you are breaking windows, chanting slogans, or have a different skin color.

The Guardian publishing real journalism (the paper has broken more significant news stories in recent decades than any other British outlet) into a toilet of right wing opinion doesn’t make sense.

As there is no way to rebut a community note the last word is always with the mob.


> Twitters community notes reflect the received wisdom of a mob. Not the truth.

Do you have an example of such flawed community notes? The ones I encountered were pretty sane and middle of the road, often correcting Elon himself.


Let's flip your script: The Guardian broke the Edward Snowden story. The Guardian supported Assange before it was hip with the "new right" to do so. The Guardian has more rights to the label "populist" than the recent wave of astroturf turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

All i have ever seen on Twitter was posturing and sniping. The fact that many folks consider social media propagation of one-sided polemics posing as news does not persuade me of the value of this sewage flow of emotion and bile.

Elon Musk uses his cudgel to attempt to topple the governments of nations. The vast power he wields is due to a purchase: $70 billion or ao, including $13 billion in investments from an opaque fund we now know includes sanctioned oligarchs and Saudi royalty.

Using the weaknesses of democracy to destroy the democratic world, and funded by repressive types who want us to worship the raw power of money like royalty, no really; those seeking to return humanity to feudalism!

I do not see any positive side to Twitter or Facebook circa 2024.

I find it disturbing that those who seek to destroy our society is running it. This is not populism, but merely zombie pawn-ism.

Why on earth would you stand up for a spineless man that would never stand up for you?


... so... your answer to my question is "no"?

I thought so. I use Twitter daily and, for all its flaws, I think the "community notes" feature is pretty awesome. In fact, I like it so much I would enjoy having in on pretty much any information stream I receive.

Maybe I could even start following and possibly trusting legacy media again - if they would bother adding it.


>All i have ever seen on Twitter was posturing and sniping. The fact that many folks consider social media propagation of one-sided polemics posing as news does not persuade me of the value of this sewage flow of emotion and bile.

Then you've been looking very selectively. Also, do you include left-leaning and often hysterically hateful rants by left progressives and the hardcore woke in your idea that Twitter is mostly full of posturing, sniping and one-sided polemics?

Twitter, or now X, certainly has plenty of people doing the above from the right of the so-called spectrum, but it also has many doing the same from the left, and it used to have even more of them (people already seem to forget what kind of identity politics Twitter used to be famous for before being owned by Musk.)

Or does your specific worldview not recognize that such emotional, hysterically ideological attitudes also exist from the left?

>Using the weaknesses of democracy to destroy the democratic world

Another classic from many opponents of Trump (aside from whether one favors him or not, because many who aren't of the left also dislike him) The idea that those who do favor him are automatically "destroying" the democratic world".

Implicit behind this is the notion that democratic processes should only be allowed to count if they give majority votes to people and ideas you happen to favor, and if they don't, then well, democracy is suddenly a danger and those who used it for a certain voter mandate are dangerous ignorants who need their betters to tell them how to think.

>I do not see any positive side to Twitter or Facebook circa 2024.

Really? Nothing? So I suppose the many supporters of the progressive left and their pages/accounts on Facebook and Twitter are also negative?

>I find it disturbing that those who seek to destroy our society is running it.

Have you even paid the least attention to the specific things that many people support from candidates like Trump? For many of them, a rejection of obsessive identity politics and mistrusting claims about immigration or the economy that don't ring true are staples, and far from being unreasonable ideas that mean the end of society.

It's absurd how many people share your apparently, blindly one-side views, while attributing all evils to the supposedly monstrous other side, and then complain about how one-sidedness has taken over politics. Funny too.


', or have a different skin color.'.

Really?


that is a screenshot that I can't click on to verify if those community notes at all support what they claim to. this is nonsense.


A screenshot on X? It must be true! I’m sure those links back up the assertion. No one would just post something misleading on X, right? /s

Maybe the assertion in the tweet is true and maybe it isn’t, but to me, this is the real reason that X should be abandoned. No one on X can be trusted to engage in honest discourse. I don’t believe anything, whether it’s coming from the right or the left if it’s posted on X. You might as well have posted something from 4Chan.


And Wikipedia.


Wikipedia isn’t the cesspool that X is, but yeah, it’s not as reliable as many people think it is.


Trust, reliability, bias are things that have a scale.

I'm always skeptical of things I read, the advantage Wikipedia has is that it's easy enough to see what references are used and how active community edits and debate on an article is.

Nuggets of "information" posted to X, Faceook, and the like are often much harder to dig into and peer behind the curtain of.


In related news Bluesky added 700,000 new users in the week after the election. Count me in the group who deleted Twitter as soon as the election was over - (I had planned to do so however the election went)

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/11/24293920/bluesky-700000-...


I deleted Twitter as soon as musk took over because he’s a feudalist


I deleted Twitter back when they changed their community guidelines to carve out exemptions for important people (Trump as president), looks like that was 2019. Figured it was downhill from there...

https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldleaders201...


Imagine selling Twitter just to create it again. Then some desperate billionaire buys this new Twitter as well, because the audience escaped the old Twitter.


Twitter was a public company so basically the shareholders decided to sell it when a good deal came up.


I think you missed my irony. It does not matter. It is just happening, whether there was intent or not.


What ruined Dorsey for me was the crypto nonsense. I didn't use Twitter but it seemed like he was the typical asocial self-loathing nerd for a while. Then he went full on savior-syndrome and tried to use Twitter as a marketing tool for NFTs and cryptocurrency, more or less signing the platform's death warrant. I don't know a single person that actually enjoyed Twitter's brazen embrace of crypto.

If he was still a bumbling nerd with a sympathetic plight then people would have an easier time defending him. But his aimless endorsement of radical nonsense is basically a mirror to Elon's own behavior, unfortunately. I don't trust Dorsey with power anymore.


Jack is no longer involved, he was thrown out in 2023.


On one hand you have the richest man on earth purchasing one of the largest social platforms, and singlehandedly wielding it to subvert American democracy.

On the other hand you have a guy who kinda liked crypto.

You call it "basically a mirror"? Do you see the absurdity of comparing the two things as if they're even remotely close to one another?


> On one hand you have the richest man on earth purchasing one of the largest social platforms, and singlehandedly wielding it to subvert American democracy.

> On the other hand you have a guy who kinda liked crypto.

That last bit, it should be noted, also describes Musk, not just Dorsey.


If American democracy can be subverted by a fucking iPhone app then we deserved it. I'm not going to accept the "psyop steal" accusations this time around any more than I tolerated it in 2020. Misinformation is a perennial issue, and Twitter wasn't protected by some holy ward against hostile takeovers or even government meddling. It's fundamentally flawed, which is why Dorsey had to let it be destroyed with all of it's users being eaten alive inside it.

The damage caused by both owners has been equal, in my opinion. Elon Musk is a fundamentally bigger shithead, but as someone that doesn't have an account on Twitter I genuinely don't feel like this is an issue. This was an inevitability from the very moment Twitter started running a profit deficit it could never pull itself out of.

We forget that there's an easy solution to things being uploaded online that make you angry. "Just Walk Away From The Screen" - @tylerthecreator, 2012


Bluesky was created before Twitter got sold


Yann Lecun is also telling everyone on Twitter very loudly that he won't be posting on Twitter.

The Guardian in another article explains that they are annoyed because Musk used twitter to promote his preferred candidate.

The Guardian itself used their own platform to publicly endorse Harris.

This deja-vu of childish antics is just comical in 2024


Maybe this isn't something you believe, but actual adults can have different opinions and then choose not to associate with one another. There's nothing childish about that.

Help me understand, though: what are you actually proposing? That The Guardian, while feeling they can't get their own message out given how Musk runs Twitter, should stay on Twitter? Should anyone disadvantaged by how Twitter is run stay there?


There’s no proposition in the root comment, and the opinion and judgment is valuable by itself, imo.

Let them do what they do and let us say what we think. It all does something, right?


You're right. I think hypocrisy is an adult thing. Parent's post gives unjust bad reputation for children.


I’m more interested in what it is you’re proposing with your questions. It seems like you’re implying that the way “Musk runs” X would disadvantage media sites like The Guardian operating on their platform.


Is it "childish antics" for the Guardian to have their own political viewpoint?

Musk can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And he can run Twitter accordingly.

The Guardian can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And they can choose the platforms they use accordingly.

It all seems perfectly reasonable to me.


I think the parent is saying that the guardian is being hypocritical.


>Musk can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And he can run Twitter accordingly

Except he'll be going up against Musk 2022 and his tweet below:

>For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally


Antics refers to the passiveaggressiveness.

It remains to be seen what will happen if Trump goes back to posting on twitter


Normally when I think of passive aggressiveness I think of a contradiction in between what someone says and what they mean or only communicating something negative indirectly rather than directly.

The Guardian is being direct as far as I can tell about what they do not like and why they are leaving.


> It remains to be seen what will happen if Trump goes back to posting on twitter

I have a strong suspicion that he will, but it'll be because "Truth" Social and Xitter have merged. They're pretty much both the same thing now so why not merge? It would also be a way for Musk to pass a lot of $$$ to Trump.


It's ridiculous for any media to have a political bias, defeats the entire purpose of the media if it's already skewed when it's consumed.


Let's go back say 40 odd years. I'm from the UK.

Back then "media" largely consisted of three, soon to be four channels on your analogue TV and a lot of newspapers and magazines. The media was largely passive except for the letters pages, which mostly featured real people, and the likes of "Readers's Wives" which was mostly bollocks (quite literally).

If we look at the newspapers back then: they all had a clear and well known set of biases - political and otherwise.

The Times was Conservative, so was the Torygraph (Telegraph). The Grauniad (Guardian - yes, that one) was unable to employ editors capable of effective proof-reading. The Independent was not really independent and the Sun and Mirror published pictures of young ladies alongside their biting political satire. The Sunday Sport had even more piccies of scantily clad young ladies and was barking mad - "Elvis piloted Lancaster bomber found on Moon".

We also had and still have titles such as "Private Eye", who are generally acknowledged to be proper journo outlets.

The media has always had a bias and it was always accepted that you took multiple papers, and watched the BBC and ITN News, if you wanted to appear to have a balanced view and at least appear to be well informed. Note that we forked out dosh for those papers and the UK TV license fee is not trivial.

Back in the day, I didn't have a bunch of Russians trying to spin crap at my front door, pretending to be Jehovah's Witnesses or double glazing salesmen or my work colleague. They bought peerages and sat in the House of Lords or footie teams, but at least they were mostly at a distance! Nowadays the buggers are trying to hack my telly.


This is a great comment. It was really the same kind of landscape in US media, only without the topless women.

NYT, WaPo, Newsweek et al. could be counted on as being liberal, while Wall Street Journal and the New York Post were popular conservative options. You also had a wide range of commentary on the telly, including Firing Line and the McLaughlin Group.


Journalism should have a bias for the truth. But one political camp has spent decades working the refs, calling truth-telling "bias", and even building parallel media ecosystems that project a message completely detached from factual reality. I don't know how we come back from this.


It will never not be wild to me that vast swathes of the American public consume Fox News as news when Fox itself asserted it was merely "entertainment" in court documents/arguments and all but called their own audience idiots for believing what they say, and they somehow are still operating.

That is commitment to maintaining your echo chamber.


Your comment is so vague I can't tell which political camp you're talking about. I suspect you'll get upvotes from all sides :)


There's no such thing as unbiased media. The inescapabilty of bias isn't a problem - the problems are undue bias, lying about one's bias, and letting your bias erode journalistic integrity.

(edited to add last part about journalistic integrity)


What if I specifically want to consume media that is biased towards technological exploration and advancement?


then you're on the right website! ...though maybe not in the right thread...


It’s childish antics to attack a media platform for taking a political position, when they also openly and covertly took a political position. It just happened to be the opposite political position.


> Is it "childish antics" for the Guardian to have their own political viewpoint?

When a journal is biased... it is biased.

Objectivism is one thing. Bias is another. Bias at the US elections shit is just another level.


> When a journal is biased... it is biased.

I would like to know which newspaper or journal is not biased.


This. Goddamn am I sick of people claiming bias on a news organization with tacit expectation that somewhere the platonic form of news information exists which is objectively true and unbiased.

It does not exist, it never will exist, and if Serenity has taught us anything, it's that you can't stop the signal, Mal.


I remembering learning at school, at about the age of 12, that all sources are biased.


Yes but, a new organization should at least _strive_ to be objective, even if the journalists have subconscious bias.

If you lean in to your biases you stop being news and start being entertainment.


"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" There's a difference between being objective and being unbiased.


wtf. Dictionary.com says "Objective most commonly means not influenced by an individual’s personal viewpoint—unbiased (or at least attempting to be unbiased). It’s often used to describe things like observations, decisions, or reports that are based on an unbiased analysis."

https://www.dictionary.com/e/subjective-vs-objective/

I'm not sure why you quoted it, but "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a joke you make at the expense of right wing people for not believing in reality.


What they mean is that if you approach some issues with "[no influence] by [your] individual personal viewpoint" you end up running into a leftist or slightly moderate viewpoint.

For example, take climate change. If you come at it looking only at the facts, you'll recognize we need more renewable energy and climate change poses a threat. Donald Trump, to contrast, in intending to put more money on oil and gas and remove subsidies for renewable energy.

Or, if you prefer, the economy. It's more or less undisputed that tariffs will hurt the GDP and overall economy of the US. However, Donald Trump claims tariffs will help the US economy.

Or, perhaps what the GOP has treasured most of all these past few years, the culture war. For example, gender-neutral bathrooms. From a neutral perspective, forcing trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender at birth will backfire tremendously. Instead of having trans women in women's restrooms, now you will have big burly and hairy trans men. Or look at gender affirming care, we have statistics about gender affirming care lowering the risk of suicide. But the right claims gender affirming care causes suicide and has a high regret rate.

Those are just a few examples, but if you look at popular conservative policies and then try to reason about them you kind of hit a wall.


By the way, not knowing the history of the reality thing I looked it up - it came from a Colbert joke about W Bush's popularity https://youtu.be/UwLjK9LFpeo



They all are. But they can do something like Firing Line, where people of opposing viewpoints are invited to debate. The editorial board can also hire a cross section of political views.


While possible it does not absolve the reader of ensuring that they are consuming information from a range of sources.


Journalism’s responsibility is to the truth, not to some perceived notion of fairness. The right in the US has been living in their own reality for a while now. Media does not owe liars any time of day.

Don’t take this to mean the democrats are the left and aren’t guilty of the same thing. They’re also right wing, and they lie, but to a lesser extent.


This lazy "everyone is bias, therefore bias doesn't exist" argument is nonsense, and is just FUD thrown about to cover for extremists when people point out their extremism.

Many news organizations pursue as unbiased a voice as they can. The Guardian is not one of them. Here's an organization attempting an objective rating of media bias, if you're actually interested in the topic: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart


That chart doesn't show any one organisation being 'less biased' than any other. It shows every organisation being biased in a different direction. Centrism is no 'less biased' than the far left or the far right.


The poster never implied that bias's ubiquity means bias doesn't exist.


It only seems reasonable until this thinking eventually gets you to the point where the next platform you choose to leave is called Earth. It's pretty dumb because there is nothing like X at the moment. Just for context, the Guardian had almost 11 million followers on X and Bluesky has only just crossed 15 million total users, of which many signed up months ago when it was opened to the public and never logged back in since again.


> eventually gets you to the point where the next platform you choose to leave is called Earth

On the other hand, that's the express goal of the owner of X.


And who exactly controls the Earth, such that I would want to leave the platform due to mismanagement?

Also, the "nothing else is like twitter" argument is both wrong (lots of social media platforms are bigger) and irrelevant (it assumes that having something like twitter is a net positive -- the validity of which assumption I am not convinced).


The richest man in the world using his own social media company to get someone elected President so he can benefit personally from writing his own regulations is something EVERYONE should be very VERY concerned about. The US is on the path to Russian style oligarchic kleptocracy.


Not quite the same.

There’s a bit of difference between encouraging votes for the good of the people and encouraging votes to help you personally.

But if I’m mistaken and Harris promised the Guardian a govt position they could use to pass laws to help them personally, do tell.


Generally, when newspapers endorse a candidate that runs on the editorial page.

How did Musk use Twitter to promote his candidate? Was it on whatever the Twitter equivalent of editorial pages are? Was it promoting posts favorable to that candidate in people's feed and/or demoting posts favorable to other candidates?

Details matter in these things.


The discussion in here is infuriatingly childish. Saying a news site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing trolls') soapbox...


As an external observer, it’s all sites working as -ist soapboxes to me. The fact that you call a politically superaffined site “a news site” alone, man. A news site doesn’t promote specific candidates by definition. Seems like some people forget what “news” means.

Saying a leftwing site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing users) soapbox...

Ftfy


It sounds like you're unfamiliar with the split between the news desk and the editorial desk, two separate functions in the same org. Last I checked the Fox News news desk was a pretty reliable source of info. All the editorial programming on the other hand, wackadoodle partisan hackery.


Op eds have always been a component of news.


> The Guardian itself used their own platform to publicly endorse Harris.

Isn’t The Guardian a UK publication?


> Isn’t The Guardian a UK publication?

Yes and no. For many decades they only operated in the UK. More recently they have launched digital-only US and Australia editions, whose editors are based in the US and Australia respectively, creating content aimed at each country’s audience using local journalists, but the three editions share content for stories of global significance. But still their HQ is in the UK, and I believe their UK staff and readerships are significantly larger than their US or Australia operations


It has a US version, with its own editor and some of its own reporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US

This is somewhat common for British media groups; the Guardian also has Australian and New Zealand versions, and the BBC has _loads_ of regional versions.


Yes, they are a UK publication. But they cover a lot of US news and have a significant American readership. So, like American newspapers, they have an informed opinion and an audience that wishes to hear that opinion.

That's how newspaper endorsements work. In this case the writer of the endorsement cannot themselves vote, but their opinion can still have weight.

The Economist, another UK-based periodical with a more right-wing stance, explains why it endorses candidates:

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/10/31/...


At least here in America, endorsement of foreign politicians is seen as election interference, and generally not done.


Newspapers don't generally do it, but I've never seen it as a matter of avoiding interference. Rather, it's just that we simply don't have much interest one way or the other in most elections. The newspapers don't spend a lot of time covering them and would not consider themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to make an endorsement.

The American election is special, in that it's the "leader of the free world". What we do here affects everybody, in a way that even the leadership of Germany, France, and England doesn't. Perhaps we'd have an opinion about the leadership in Russia or China, but they don't have free elections.

The government should probably refrain from making an endorsement, but if people can't figure out the distinction between a government and a newspaper, that's their own lookout.


It's the Grauniad.



The Guardian is not a platform, it is editorialized content.


I think it's much more reasonable for a news outlet to have a political opinion than a social platform.


I agree, and this comes with the responsibility of being a "publisher" rather than a "carrier".


The social platform doesn’t have a political opinion. Its owner does. Every owner of every company ever has had political opinions.


You're implying said owner doesn't influence the workings of the platform. He does.


I think you should be explicit about what it is you’re suggesting. I can’t be arsed trying to read your mind.


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Endorsements for political candidates are done via the editorial boards which are different from the newsrooms. The editorial boards of news organizations have always had opinions and publish them as such. There is nothing problematic with this approach.


> There is nothing problematic with this approach.

A. You assume the editorial board does not have a significant influence over the newsrooms. By endorsing a candidate, they demonstrate which direction the pressure on the newsroom is coming from.

B. This was not why freedom of the press was granted. I was not arguing whether it is a good or bad thing now; merely that this was directly opposed to the role envisioned for them.


> This was not why freedom of the press was granted

Not about this specific point but people making these decisions back in the 1700s and 1800s were at least as flawed as us (arguably much more) and made some extremely horrible/stupid choices in hindsight.

Treating them as effectively infallible religious figures is well.. just that.

Especially if we consider that the interpretation of what freedom of speech (and press) meant was extremely narrow by modern standards well into the late 1800s and beyond.


Can you explain further the mechanism to be used for "checking their authority" without contradicting them or calling out their bad behavior? (Either of which is nowadays apparently considered "political opinion".)


I feel like this is a rose tinted view of media based on Hollywood movies...

News media has always been biased and often had some form of agenda, sometimes even driven by the government.

What you used to be able to do though was acknowledge the bias and read with that lense.

What I think was true is that there was an effort of fairness and truth telling that today is far less true. Many media companies are owned by very few billionaires and they explicitly see them as propaganda.

That said, I'd always marked the Guardian as one of the remaining old schoolers. They have some weird and dangerous views, but their ownership structure gives some confidence there is an effort of fairness overall.

(I am also lost on how a foreign media company could publish a political opinion illegally in that country under US election law??)


The Guardian, note, isn't a social network, it's a newspaper. The idea that social networks and newspapers should be held to different standards is reasonable, because they are different things. It is _legal_ for Carface to use Twitter to promote ol' minihands, but, yeah, I mean, not everyone's going to like it and some people are going to leave due to that (or due to many other problems with Twitter over the last two years).


X doesn't control algorithms that promote content and suppress dissenting views on a major social network.


No, its owner does that.


That's a very silly conflation.

The Guardian is a newspaper. They broadly have two sections: reporting and editorial. Reporting is basically that. Now you can (correctly) argue that there is bias on the reporting side in how they choose to cover certain stories, how they choose what stories to cover, etc but there are still minimum standards they adhere to, like they won't knowingly print anything objectively false. They'll issue corrections and retractions if necessary.

The editorial side is quite literally opinion. The Guardian, like any publication, can issue their opinion on a given political race. But you know that's opinion. They'll argue why for their position. You can agree or disagree with their reasoning or conclusions. But it's intellectually honest.

Now compare that to Elon and Twitter. It's not even remotely the same. Twitter has an algorithm to decide what to show people. He's used it to push his own posts [1]. His own posts have openly pushed conspiracy theories [2], things that are provably false. This can go as far as pushing literal Nazi conspiracy theories (aka the Great Replacement [3]) and make sure as many people as possible see it.

It is utterly disingenuous to conflate the two.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/20/23730607/elon-musk-...

[3]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...


Musk claims he is trying to be an open and free speech town square. I don’t have an opinion on whether he did this or not but it is certainly the case that if he put his finger on the scales that goes against his claims.


I just created an account on X and the list that pops up to follow: Elon, Terrence Williams, Sebastian Gorka, Dinesh D'Souza, Rand Paul, Dan Bongino, Leo Terrell, Tom Fitton, Mark Levin, Tiffany Smiley, Breitbart News, Matt Gaetz... not a single "left leaning" account other than Joe Biden and maybe Neil Degrasse Tyson, but I chose sports and science as my interests. Open and free speech, right..


Since it’s the platform that takes freedom of speech the most seriously, it caters to people who are for freedom of speech.



Oh yeah this thing that went against X rules?

https://x.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1839463404286746770

To be fair they could censor a million differing opinions and still be the free speech platform among competitors.


'Freedom of speech', in this context, should be read as 'stuff Musk likes'.


The above example was a case of their rules against doxing - publishing JD Vances address and phone number, which is applied pretty evenly to all doxing.


I don't even know why they bother with that kind of research. It's obvious that Trump can just lie and all his supporters believe it because they have a propaganda arm that's perceived as "news". The Trump believers all think that "MSM" is lying to them but for some reason they think that Fox and NewsMax and Alex Jones aren't (when the exact opposite is true).

It's like the whole hush money thing. Turns out it just doesn't matter, they should have let Stormy Daniels say whatever she wants because Trump just has to go on stage and make stuff up and then Hannity will repeat it and it becomes right-wing canon.


The Michael Moore Human Molotov Cocktail speech explains a lot https://youtu.be/TEHekdQSiXg


He’s going with the old classic: the opposite side is brainwashed and dumb!

Another home run.


/s


Did X suppress support of the other side? The Hunter Biden laptop story is a prime example of the difference between X and Twitter. The suppression of Covid debate is another example.

On old Twitter you could call someone a Nazi and accuse them (falsely) of genocide. But if you “dead name” a celebrity, you’d get banned.


Yes, a user was banned for sharing the Vance dossier

https://www.fastcompany.com/91198871/why-x-suspended-journal...


I'm not sure about the veracity of your claims of bias pre-Musk (I have heard of the NY Post story issue, as far as I'm aware they suppressed it on advice from law enforcement that it was foreign propaganda, which was later withdrawn and the block removed).

However in answer to this question:

> Did X suppress support of the other side?

If you have 2 options and you promote one artificially then that is the same as suppressing the other option, in either case you're making sure more people see one option than the other.


I mean, new!Twitter went through a phase of banning people for merely uttering the dread word 'mastodon'. They also, briefly, hilariously, memory-holed the word 'Twitter' (any occurrence of the string 'twitter' on the mobile app would be replaced with 'X', leading to a rare 2020s outbreak the Medireview Problem: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview). And various other deranged petty nonsense.


The Guardian is a newspaper with a long-proclaimed left-wing bias. Musk has claimed that X is politically neutral.


Well, it is the Guardian leaving rather than being banned. If they think the site is unbalanced, then they’ve just made it worse.


> If they think the site is unbalanced, then they’ve just made it worse.

Great point, and I think that's totally true. However, an organisation has to make the judgement call between staying on a failing (as they see it) platform in an attempt to rescue it, and leaving for an alternative that is less flawed. Clearly the Guardian thinks they stand little chance in affecting X in any meaningful way.


> Musk has claimed that X is politically neutral

And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-modifies-twitter-cod...


Musk claims a lot of things. Amplifying right wing propaganda and conspiracy theories, often from his own twitter account, is not politically neutral.


It's not even amplified just from his account but the site itself. Create a new account and follow something like sports or entertainment.. then see what floods your feed. I logged in first time today, and it's quite shocking actually. Not a single left leaning account, just all maga that outnumbers the sports or whatever you clicked as interests.


Is it even strange, considering that elections just happened and who’s gonna be the new president?


At least it provides some entertainment in seeing conspiracy theories I'd never heard of. Just now Twitter showed me a tweet about how offshore wind energy projects will lead to the rapid extinction of Right whales.

Apparently this is going to be the Trump administration's justification for trying to kill offshore wind power.

Of course as is par for the course the people who actually study and work with Right whales say that theory is wrong and there is little evidence of serious harm to the whales from such projects.


Exactly, that's my point. The Guardian makes no claims to be politically neutral.


X is hundreds of millions of people so it’s hard to claim it’s anything


X refers to the company itself, not every user. And by extension naturally it should refer to the algorithms developed by the company.


The algos are public information so if there was bias it seems like it’d be fairly straightforward to show it


Did the Guardian also use lies and fear mongering like Trump and Musk did?


Looking past the childish antics, don’t you think it’s kind of rich that;

1) The party which has been kvetching the most about being deplatformed and canceled by mainstream media and colleges etc. is now in power and in the name of promoting free speech promises to go after institutions in academia etc. that are full of their political opponents (who lean left) for “claming down on free speech and calling it disinformation”

2) One man bought Twitter and controls everything about the platform, some things definitely increase freedom of speech (eg proliferation of neo nazi and openly antisemitic viewpoints) and some of his own decisions clamp down on it (eg overnight declaring that “cis”, the opposite if “trans”, is a slur and cannot be said on Twitter anymore)

3) The same man will now be heading up D.O.G.E., the bureau of government efficiency, together with another private sectir billionaire (who got public sector money) to defund many public sector things, or at least make them more efficient

To sum up, we’ll be in the strange situation where the party in power is concerned about increasing freedom of speech (usually the counterculture wants this freedom while the ones in power want to repress dissent). We will have the world’s “most free social network” actually OWNED AND CONTROLLED by one guy, who happens to also work for the government, in fact head up a new government agency tasked with defunding others, and is a super-Fed.

People on the left will start to question the optics and unusualness of all this. Will the MAGA party (the acronym GOP seems very outdated) in good faith encourage speech against themselves, and will the owner of X, while heading up a major new agency in the federal government, also encourage loud criticism of their own activities?

Or will their algorithms — which one man will continue to ultimately control — silently (and maybe only as an emergent behavior) prioritize what they want and suppress what they don’t?

As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”), and a few on the top control Google, YouTube, TikTok etc. I do not see true power for the people. “Freedom of speech” is just another expression the owners and corporations co-opted and hijacked to mean “controlling a platform” and “owning an audience”.

Why do we simply donate our audience and content to these platforms? Because they have the backend software infrastructure and we don’t.

I believe that we need open source alternatives that anyone can host, that no one can own the entire network. Not even Durov. Mastodon and Matric and Bluesky are a good start. I’m working on my own too:

https://community.qbix.com/t/growing-your-community/305

And yes, it is possible for the entire ecosystem to make money serving the people with open source infrastructure, just like Wordpress, Drupal etc. Here is how it could work:

https://qbix.com/ecosystem


As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”),

off topic, but one thing I always wonder is why the press goes along with company re-branding? If everyone knows it as Twitter or Meta, wouldn't the easiest thing be to just keep referring to it that way in your articles etc and not help the company in its massive undertaking of changing everyone's name for the product?


Yeah the Google -> Alphabet, Facebook -> Meta, Twitter -> X happened all pretty close to one another.

I mean hey, I can understand why someone like Blackwater renamed themselves to the more innocuous-sounding “Academi” LOL. But why does the media go along with it?

For the same reason they go along with other things, like covering Trump 24/7 in 2015-2016 even though they hated him. The incentives push them that way. A lot of things just go on autopilot. “This is what everyone is doing so we must too. This is the controversy so we must cover it before others do”.

I had a conversation about Capitalism and Freedom of Speech with Noam Chomsky twice on my show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_JtMSpMrOw

(Earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo)

It’s an emergent behavior of the system. Here is George Carlin with a darker take than me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0OJEFlq7A


Very disappointing to see that overt bias from Yann LeCun. Makes me wonder how much Meta and Llama can be trusted on AI.


Dunno - X/Twitter, at least at the leadership level, has switched from neutral to MAGA. I find it quite reasonable for him to want to move somewhere more neutral.


Corporatism is en route to USA. Cyberpunk, big time. Watch it unfold.


If for no other reason, this is good news in that it encourages a larger number of platforms with a diversity of information and opinions. Being centralized on any one platform serves no one except for the platform's ownership.


When they were on x, nothing stopped then from posting on bluesky and hosting their own mastodon instance.


When they were on X, people on X had no incentive to go to other places for Guardian content. Now they do. I don't believe that they'll meaningfully change people's behaviors on their own, but's a step.


It's comical reading the referenced post[1]. It sounds identical to the posts I would read some years ago (when it was still Twitter), except it was from the opposite party (although we later found out actual censoring was happening).

I'm a staunch independent, so it's really just fascinating to watch the pendulum swing so hard.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/04/elon-musk...


And from a slightly different angle, it's pretty amusing to watch all the people that were shocked that a platform could be so partisan as to consider suppressing a story allegedly involving a foreign power trying to swing an election totally not bothered as Twitter's new CEO runs Trump PACs whilst accounts running Harris fundraisers find themselves mysteriously blocked.

Things I haven't heard on the internet: "I was truly hoping that Musk would bring about free speech and political neutrality so now I'm pretty disappointed at the outcome"...


About time. Any organization or person actively posting on that platform is just lending it undue credibility.


But why haven't they posted on Mastodon in two years https://mstdn.social/@TheGuardian


Because Mastodon and the entire Fediverse is infested with the most rabid sort of users that even Twitter couldn't stomach and has turned a blind eye to this fact? I mean, there's a reason why they keep getting brought up over and over and people continually nope out of signing up over there. They've got a demographic problem, they refuse to acknowledge it, and it's killing growth. Why would any media outlet want to participate knowing that?


> Why would any media outlet want to participate knowing that?

Presumably for the same reason they find the optics of X acceptable but what do I know.


Pretty sure there's a massive difference in both the breadth and scope of the demographics of X and Mastodon/the Fediverse.


Are the Nazis more or less courteous on X? I'm not sure which distinction you're trying to make here.


If you think everyone on X is a "nazi" then clearly you've got problems. Twitter appeals to a massive audience, whereas alternatives do not. Media outlets will go where the eyeballs are... and that's not to Bluesky, to Mastodon, to the Fediverse... but to Twitter... which is populated by people, not nazis.


> most rabid sort of users

Rabid in what way?


Half of Mastodon seems to be an obsession with what's in your trousers or what you prefer to sleep with.


Mastodon does not have an automated feed like Twitter does, so what you see in your feed is people you follow and their boosts. Just don't follow people who are interested in your sex life.


Personally, I don't want to follow people, I want to follow subjects. I want to read Jay Expert's posts on their speciality without their posts on politics and breakfast. Maybe Bluesky feeds will make that possible (in which case Bluesky kills Reddit).


That's why I follow hashtags instead of people on Mastodon. It gives me a very high signal to noise ratio.


Agreed. Politics on micro logging sites is terrible.


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Most of the degeneracy I see is on Twitter, not Mastodon.


They're both terrible echo chambers, one created by Musk and the other created by random instance admins.


Different strokes for different folx.


I'm the other half, I use mastodon for my vanilla news and X for my trouser and sleep news.


that doesn't look official and doesn't have a verified url. some random person just put up a bot


I have yet to be on a social media platform that isn't toxic in some form.

I think it's more likely that they'll find people who agree with their biases on Bluesky, and that's the real reason they're switching.


Are you including Hacker News in that?


It's wild how much most people rely on being in an echo chamber. It takes a psychological toll being confronted with opinions that challenge your worldview on a regular basis, especially if you cannot easily dismiss them.

I haven't seen any of the things the Guardian mentions on my feed -- it's mostly startup related, software related, finance news, and science/medical stuff with maybe ~10% of posts I come across having a political tinge (I do not seek out any political discourse in my feed). But this ratio hasn't changed much in the last few years, except that the flavor of political content has moved rightward (it started off pretty left, which I also did not seek out).


I’m sick to death of everything being described as “opinions that challenge one’s worldview”. There are opinions and there are opinions. There are also philosophical differences of opinion vs things that blatantly factually untrue. Remember “alternative facts”? from the last US election? That was a thing that someone legitimately said in response to specific tangible factually incorrect statements being made about the nature of election fraud. Not wanting to be exposed to content from a news organisation that so aggressively promotes this “worldview” is not the same thing as being a thin-skinned snowflake that only wants to consume content that doesn’t challenge them.

The notion that I’m meant to ingest some unfiltered firehose of utter garbage because of some incorrect notion of “all opinions are equally valid” is complete and utter bullshit.


Is your X feed an unfiltered firehose of utter garbage? Mine isn't. That really only speaks to the fact that the algorithm finds that you are more likely to engage with garbage.


You really need to think this through more than "my feed is fine"


There're multiple problems here. If your feed was utter garbage, would you be able to tell? How often do you fact check tweets? For most people, I suspect it's close to never.


> If your feed was utter garbage, would you be able to tell?

Lol. Same way as you or anyone else calling it utter garbage.

As another comment on this thread points out, this is exactly what the Community Notes feature is for, and it's the real reason why the Guardian has been having such a rough time on X.


Right, by fact checking. If you fact check Elon's tweets and retweets, pretty much none of them are true. He, however, still has a large backing because the propaganda he promotes happens to be popular.

I don't know the true reason the Guardian left X. But I do know X is overrun with disinformation, racism, and outright reality denial. I left twitter a while ago, so I'm not in a position to judge the guardian.


> If you fact check Elon's tweets and retweets, pretty much none of them are true

As someone who purports to care so much about facts, how can you open with this statement? This sort of behavior is why Trump won in a landslide -- people are voting against this sort of cognitive dissonance disguised as arrogance, not for Trump.

> But I do know X is overrun with disinformation, racism, and outright reality denial. > I left twitter a while ago

Okay. I'm picking up on a common theme amongst all the armchair experts on X -- they aren't on it and only know what has been cherry picked by their own hyper-partisan media outlets.

Let's assume Elon is quite right wing and the vast majority of his personal posts are opinions masquerading as facts. Did you know you can unfollow him? How is this worse than where you get your news? I'll tell you -- in many cases, you don't know who owns your news source of choice and you don't know their agenda, but they surely have one. So basically, X is a more decentralized information system with more transparency.


> As someone who purports to care so much about facts, how can you open with this statement?

You just answered it, lol. Because I care about facts.

> people are voting against this sort of cognitive dissonance disguised as arrogance, not for Trump.

Right, the arrogance of pointing out things that are blatantly untrue. If you're trying to paint your side as anything but bumbling idiots, you're not doing a very good job.

The really fun thing about Trump supporters this go around is that they pretty much shoot themselves in the foot whenever they can.

Virtually every Trump supporter I know considers him a liar. The leftists I know don't - they actually have more respect for him. But Trump supporters will defend him constantly with "he doesn't mean that" or "he meant it as a joke" or whatever.

Your defense is that the person you support is not evil, but just a liar? In fact, they vote for him under the assumption that he won't be able to execute most of his plans, and they'll fall through. Their faith in him is paradoxically based on complete non-belief. It's very interesting to me.

Musk is in a similar position. His defenders proclaim his innocence by requiting his crimes on the grounds of abject stupidity. That doesn't do much to convince me.


Ironically, you're attacking someone who is neither a Trump apologist nor voter. There are more than 2 uniform perspectives in the global stage of ideas. I imagine it's easier to argue with an imaginary Trump supporter (like you spent most of your comment doing) than engage civilly with the questions I posed you. Maybe you could use a break from the comments sections...


I never attacked you, I said, quote "trump supporters" and "musk defenders". Do you identify with that? Because on one hand you say no, and on the other you say yes.

I answered your questions as best I could, but to be honest, I have very little patience on account of how stupid the questions were. I mean, it's not exactly groundbreaking news that Twitter is a dumpster fire and algorithms purposefully boost the most toxic content.

I'm working under the assumption you're playing stupid, which is actually rather charitable of me. The alternative would that you just are stupid.

But, because today I feel extra generous, I'll answer your incredibly naive question:

> Did you know you can unfollow him? How is this worse than where you get your news?

Social Media like X is specifically engineered to keep you on it via engagement. This means rage bait.

I know this because I've tried, very hard, to scrub my socials of politics. I am very disciplined, but even for me it is impossible. No matter what, I will get some pinhead saying women shouldn't vote or black people are genetically inferior. I can unfollow, I can click "not interested", doesn't matter.

The algorithm will, eventually, go back into showing me the most vile content imaginable, almost always extreme right-wing content.

The reason why is obvious - this content is extremely controversial and garners the most retention. Nobody cares about rainbows and butterflies, they care about skinheads and rapists.

The news, at least, does not feature this kind of content. The news, also, typically does not outright lie. Musk outright lies, almost always, but he's one example. If you go through the timeline of the typical right-wing pundit, almost none of their tweets are true.

The news isn't going to tell me Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. Twitter, and evidently the president elect, will.


> Twitter is a dumpster fire and algorithms purposefully boost the most toxic content

Proceeds to be extremely toxic.

@dang


I can't high-five this enough.


> It's wild how much most people rely on being in an echo chamber. It takes a psychological toll being confronted with opinions that challenge your worldview on a regular basis, especially if you cannot easily dismiss them.

I can easily dismiss antisemitic conspiracy theories, queerphobia, bigotry, and racism. There's an infinite stream of garbage positions, why would would I engage with them?


As I mentioned in a sibling comment, your feed is only toxic insofar you are likely to engage with it. I have never seen a single post on my feed of the vein you are describing.

By the way, there is equally ridiculous garbage on the left, if you go looking for it. You are doing the same thing that every partisan media outlet does, the oldest trick in the book: arguing against a strawman. Just because there is some leftist out there who wants to subsidize transgender operations for illegal immigrants or who wants to cancel anyone who assumes your gender, should I generalize that opinion to you and every left-leaning person on HN?


Elon endorsed antisemitic comments (https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-row-uk-rishi-sunak...) and conspiracy theories. Several studies found that there was a substantial increase in hate speech (https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/twitter-misinf...) after the acquisition. He substantially manipulated opinions on X to serve his own ends, most recently during the election. It's grossly misleading to compare this to a strawman.


> your feed is only toxic insofar you are likely to engage with it.

Right, and bigotry raises engagement. This isn't rocket science. Garbage opinions get popular because of how garbage they are. It's the same reason why traffic slows down when there's a car wreck on the other side of the interstate.


>Garbage opinions get popular because of how garbage they are

What a neatly convenient and circular argument for completely dismissing anything that gains appeal but you happen to dislike. It must be popular because it's garbage, and couldn't possibly have any parts worth examining.


It's just the truth, sorry to be the one to tell you.

The more garbage an opinion is the more outrage it causes. This means more engagement, more comments, more replies, more stitches, more views, more everything. This means creators are incentivized to make this content, and the "algorithms" purposefully promote this content too. Because, objectively, it does very well. Much better than tame or normal content.

It's not just "what I happen to dislike", lol, it's everything. Sure, there's skinheads and such on the right who say blatantly racist or sexist stuff. Some of them are even in Congress (MTG). But on the left, you have those cringe compilations with "blue hair" feminists. I'm a feminist, but I don't agree with those people.

Of course, neither is truly representative of "their side" or, really, anyone. They're just insane wackos. But those opinions garner A LOT of attention, because they're garbage.


You say "it's wild" and then give a reasonable explanation in the next sentence. Is it wild, or not?

And are you implying that the Guardian is being "run off" because it wants X to be an echo chamber? You don't think it's a bot-infested hellhole of hate, but some den of thoughtful, nuanced, balanced discussion?


For me it's not about the content. What would take a psychological toll is knowing I'm supporting the orange idiot's #1 fluffer.


I don't mind opinions that challenge my worldview. I despise complete lies like what Alex Jones spews.


Opinions are one thing. X has become a bastion of conspiracy theories and outright fabrications with it's hyper-partisan owner leading the charge.


I don't follow Musk on any social media, do not engage with any of his posts, or any even mildly related posts. Yet everytime I login, there he is again at the top of my timeline usually promoting some inane conspiracy theory. Does he think so little of my intelligence that he doesn't think he needs to be even a little bit subtle about manipulating the content I consume or he just doesn't care? Yeah I too have left for good. Not that anyone cares, but maybe someone will care about the Guardian.


I don't think he needs to care. The election demonstrated that most people will believe anything they're told.


Like the proles in 1984.


I don't have a problem with Musk supporting one candidate or the other. But I do have a problem with Musk apparently tweaking the algorithm to specifically promote one candidate and to bombard me with political content that skews a certain way even when I selected other interests or never used the platform to engage in political discourse. This while bellowing about X being a platform for free and open speech.

I realize that in this epoch we are living in the only rule is that money and power gives you the right to do as you please. This may be old school but I think that values, honesty and ethics matter too and should guide our behaviors in life and in business. Kudos to the Guardian for taking a stand even if it costs them a few dollars.


> I do have a problem with Musk apparently tweaking the algorithm to specifically promote one candidate and to bombard me with political content that skews a certain way even when I selected other interests

He has been doing that since almost a year. The "For you" page would be filled with content you don't like, and clicking "not interested" doesn't help. The only solution I found was to mute the accounts that were showing up there that I didn't like. This was a major factor that led me to leave X / Twitter


I do have a problem with musk supporting a political candidate. Not for any kind of high minded reason. Just because I am uneasy that someone has so much power. It is simply a threat. And people get too wrapped up in the argument to notice that.


I do not know if Musk tweaked the algorithm in favor of Trump as I've left Twitter several years ago due to getting tired of propaganda bots. But what I do know is that Google and Facebook (as well as previous Twitter owners) practicing targeted propaganda for years already, pushing political agenda in your throat no matter how you ask them to not recommend you specific authors, channels or topics. I don't think we actually have any social platform for free and open speech.


Don't forget youtube. Of course, when they were doing that, it wasn't "pushing political agenda" it was just "doing what's right" and "respecting the rights of others".

Are there books recounting the history of editorial positions put forth by these platforms? I really had no idea where google stood on political issues in the 2000s. I remember thinking they were quite pro-free speech sometimes callously so through that decade. I do remember them putting forth issues on gay marriage when it was a live political issue, though.


I watch a lot of YouTube, often without an ad blocker, and I see almost no political content on my home page. The only place I regular saw political content was in the in-video ads which appeared to be just normal paid ads purchased by the campaigns.


It depends on what country you live in. Youtube was throwing Navalny and his friends videos into my feed no matter the "don't recommend videos from this channel" button. It somewhat lowered the intensity, but they still tried to mix their political agenda into my feed.


> I don't have a problem with Musk supporting one candidate or the other. But I do have a problem with Musk apparently tweaking the algorithm to specifically promote one candidate and to bombard me with political content that skews a certain way [...]

But for some reason, it was okay the other way around a few years ago?


> X users will still be able to share our articles, and the nature of live news reporting means we will still occasionally embed content from X within our article pages.

I wonder if that'll turn out to be true. There's no reason Musk has to let them, and I could see him just blocking links from The Guardian in retaliation.

For the record, I don't support temper tantrums on either side, and it feels like this is a very politely stated temper tantrum. But, I also think everyone should get off Twitter. Maybe what I don't like is just that everybody should have gotten off Twitter many years ago, because it's bad for journalism and the human brain in general, and not suddenly pretend to realize it's a bad place now that it's coincidentally less popular, and there's less incentive to hold your nose and stay. Seems hypocritical.


The issue is that a huge chunk of journalists have been horrifically addicted to Twitter from long before Musk's time.

Realistically everyone in that field should've bailed the second subscribers got bumped to the top of replies across the website.


This is really good news. Despite all the comments here, standing up to Must is a necessity. People like us leaving and using Mastodon is not significant, big corporations leaving is the thing. (For whatever reason) I'm happy to see people not playing along with Musk.


Regardless of what you think of The Guardian, if you are posting on X, then you may as well be posting on 4-Chan at this point.


I am wondering if the actual reason is the recent change in the terms of service:

New terms of service that will take effect on 15 November specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the US district court for the northern district of Texas or state courts in Tarrant county, Texas.


That doesn't feel likely. 1 because Guardian isn't really in a position to enter a legal battle vs ~unlimited spiteful money. 2 because this is likely not enforcible if anyone actually has a reason to sue them abroad where the company has presence. It's just terms of service rather than a contract binding you in other ways - they can deny you service after you sue.


Do business accounts have the same ToS as regular users?


The reason is their lack of engagement. Take a long scroll through their timeline: 11m followers and they have single/double digit likes and retweets. It’s been like that for many years.


Why would the Guardian expect to have to sue X?


Unauthorized AI training on their content?


> New terms of service that will take effect on 15 November specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the US district court for the northern district of Texas or state courts in Tarrant county, Texas.

Is this even something TOS can legally enforce?


Google's Terms of Service state that "California law will govern all disputes arising out of or relating to these terms, service-specific additional terms, or any related services, regardless of conflict of laws rules. These disputes will be resolved exclusively in the federal or state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA, and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts." [1]. So I suppose as much as any TOS is enforceable.

[1] https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-problems


Bluesky is still a very leftist bubble, much better than mastodon, but still not good enough.

For me i like the hypothetical decentralization and being able to actually create an anonymous account.


I haven't used social media in years, so it's a trip to me that people still voluntarily wade into a cesspool of inane quips on a daily basis


It's really hard to find serious journalism being done out there, and The Guardian is definitely not helping on that.


Breaking the Snowden story wasn't serious journalism for you? I get that their culture/lifestyle take is a bit of a culture war outrage session, but their core journalism is some of the strongest in the world.


Sure it is! I am talking in general. I was a paid user and stopped it. I could not ignore the opinionated garbage factory it became.


It makes a lot of sense.

Twitter is not the community that it used to be. Twitter used to provide me with new updates and cool communities of people.

Since the platform got repurposed to become X, the feeds became a negative in my day— so much ragebait, violence and other negative content that pushed me away.

Apart from the fact that the algorithm was tweaked to become Elon and Trump biased [1] and that link load times to “undesired” websites got artificially increased [2], the whole monetisation strategy attracted cheap, ragebait content [3]. The platform started paying out for 5M+ impressions. This incudes negative and positive impressions and essentially drives up polarising content more than anything.

I believe the issue isn’t about community notes at all, as some suggest, that is such a small thing and critical replies were always a thing. In contrast I believe the real problem is: 1) there’s no point engaging on a platform where every feature can and will be manipulated to serve personal agendas that you do not have control over. 2) Maintaining a presence on X has become a liability– it’s damaging to a set of brands both now and likely in the future.

I’m glad the Guardian and other accounts are moving away from X.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-trump-x-algorit... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130060 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230714080253/https://help.twit...


Long overdue. There is no good reason for any jounalists, honest organizations ... or people ... to use twitter.com (you can call it "X" ... but it's still twitter.com).


Most sane people left the platform several years ago.


The traditional news in their assessments on why the Democrats lost and Trump won seem to be focusing on platforms and sites. They think the content of a message and where the message appears is more important than the messaging or how a message is conveyed.

The guardian will no longer post to twitter but they will keep on harvesting news from it and about it.

On average every 3 days someone submits to HN an article against Elon Musk written by The Guardian. I imagine there are more articles written than are submitted. Musk and Twitter provide a huge amount of material for them.

Past year HN submissions (111): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...


I think the main effect of social media is just in neutralising emotion and real world action. It give people a place to vent. And then they get angry when nothing in the real world changes. The power is still in the hands of a few geriatrics that can be bothered to go outside and do something. For the moment this benefited trump but it could just as easily swing in another direction.


Social media largely feeds the petty culture war that substitutes for political dialog.

I would say it's a strong net negative.


Social media is not the PUBLIC, but billionaires busy brainwashing and fleecing the public.


[flagged]


> Someone on X summarised it pretty accurately

That screed sounds less like it was aiming for accuracy and more like it was aiming to be inflammatory. But what do I know, I haven't had a Twitter account since 2014.


Likely that passes for analysis on Twitter, these days.


X is not a place for "debate". It's designed to optimize for rumor mongering and mob outrage. Which is not a good recipe for a "signal" useful for any kind of decision making.


[flagged]


Is there anything concrete that would suggest this or is this just a gut feeling you’re sharing here?


Without being the conspiracy fool. I think there is a lot of biased information on British news outlets. It is certainly not the worst one. That award goes to the Daily Express.


Yes.


As opposed to to users on other social networks fact checking their articles? I find their US politics coverage to be more balanced and factual than other news outlets.


[flagged]


Does that include going extinct?


Yes, exactly.


[flagged]


More like the fact that Elon Musk literally bought himself a cabinet position and basically the president himself in almost the most blatant and transparently corrupt way possible.

> it's sad

Even more sad when people lack the concept of nuance and see the world as entirely black and white.


How is Elon Musk any different from the plethora of famous people endorsing democrats? I am guessing you don't think they are corrupt?

This double standards is what people are fed up with and people just don't care what mainstream news have tp say anymore because we can listen to the people we want to listen to directly without journalists as a filter.

There used to be some kind of honor in media but like in everything else that has evaporated so now they have made themselves irrelevant.


> How is Elon Musk any different from the plethora of famous people endorsing democrats?

They don't want cabinet positions, lol. Trump has spoken on choosing pretty awful unqualified people for his cabinet and various agencies.

This isn't some unknown secret, it's his strategy. Of course, he's going to appoint the dude who doesn't believe in climate change to run the EPA. There's no point in denying this flavor of corruption, because it's intentional and obvious GOP strategy and has been for decades.


I'm wondering if it's just economics. Are they losing money from X existing? Are they trying to start some "let's all move away from X" trend?


I deleted my Twitter account when I drew the analogy of: imagine a magazine, that your friends can subscribe to, to read your thoughts. By contributing to this magazine you contribute to your friend's desire to "buy copies" of it, and you contribute to its ability to sell ads. I decided I didn't want to do that any more.

Maybe it's the same with the Guardian. Although when I left, Elmo hadn't bought it and it actually had legitimate businesses buying ad space.


Have you stopped buying magazines entirely then? It would seem any other "magazine" would have the same property.


> Are they trying to start some "let's all move away from X" trend?

Can not think of a reason that would not have applied before musk took over.


[flagged]


This tired and unfunny 'joke' might at least be relevant when it's a little-known individual announcing their departure, but less so when it's a national newspaper with 11 million followers.


[flagged]


They were stating a technical reality for those that have less of an understanding of how the internet works. The target audience is more than…you.


[flagged]


>Anyone else notice that CNN dialed down the hyperbole right around the time it became obvious Orange Man was going to win again?

"The cannibal has come out of his lair"

"The Corsican Ogre has landed at Golf Juan"

"The Tiger has arrived at Gap"

"The monster has spent the night at Grenoble"

"The Tyrant has crossed Lyon"

"The usurper has been seen 60 leagues from the capital"

"Bonaparte is advancing with great strides, but will never enter Paris"

"Napoleon will be under our ramparts tomorrow"

"The Emperor has arrived at Fontainbleu"

"His Imperial & Royal Majesty has made his entry into the Tuileries yesterday, amid his faithful subjects."


[flagged]


"some people having their feelings hurt that they don’t censor opposing views like they used to."

This is an extremely dishonest take on what is happening.

What is ACTUALLY happening is the world's richest man using his media company to manipulate an election.


Like it was any different during previous elections. Only the people change, behavior stays the same.


Yes? To an almost extreme degree?

I don’t recall Zuckerberg ever buying himself a cabinet position. Do you?


The level of dishonesty and brazenness in Musk's lying tweets is very much new.


“All the people flocking to Bluesky — were you outraged at the Covid censorship and Hunter Biden laptop election interference in October 2020?”

And the same gaslighting was echoed here on HN as well, don’t hold your breath for any such acknowledgement though.


1. nobody cares about Hunter's laptop. Even the GOP doesn't care, they just pretend to care for outrage, meaning it's just rage bait. Hunter Biden isn't related to anything to do with politics

2. Covid censorship. In case we've all forgotten, over 500,000 Americans died due to Covid. There was a lot of misinformation spread around Covid. This misinformation costs lives. Now, granted, it's not necessarily intentional misinformation because Covid was novel. So, our understanding was constantly changing. But telling people to, say, inject bleach or take horse tranquilizers is legitimately irresponsible.


1. Maybe you don’t care but if nobody else cared then the entirety of legacy media would not have gone into overdrive to gaslight the American public about its existence.

2. I’m not aware of anyone telling people to inject bleach or horse tranquilizers. Have a citation for that? If not, you’re the one spreading misinformation.


1. No it's not just me, nobody cared. It was feigned outrage. The GOP has been much more focused on Hunter Biden's large penis and crack addition. It's media fodder, nothing more.

2. You're not aware of Trump? I have next to no patience for those who intentionally play stupid. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/ivermectin-an...

My mistake, I've gotten ivermectin and ketamine mixed up. It's a horse dewormer, not a horse tranquilizer.


1. According to you

2. Bleach was debunked: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-inject-bleach-covid-...

It's not playing stupid, you're just not getting a free pass with this sort of rhetoric.


1. According to anyone paying attention. Again, if you actually look at the media coverage and what GOP members choose to talk about, it's mostly penis and crack.

Does penis and crack relate to democracy? No. Then this is objective. Additionally, Hunter is not even in politics. I mean, come ON now.

2. It was not "debunked". Many people believed that's what he said, and they spread that information around - this is called misinformation.

This isn't the only misinformation around Covid. There were people saying masks kills brain cells because of CO2 (false). There were people saying masks don't work and raise your risk of Covid (false). There were people saying the Covid vaccine makes you more likely to get Covid (false). There were people saying there are microchips in the Covid vaccine (false). And on and on.

Nobody is trying to censor conservatives. It's just that, well, 99% of the people saying this stuff are conservative. So where does that leave us?

> It's not playing stupid, you're just not getting a free pass with this sort of rhetoric.

No, it's playing stupid. None of this is groundbreaking information and I know that you already know it. If I have to tell you things you already know, that means you're playing stupid.


This is obviously going nowhere, but things are a little different now anyway.

What was tried in 2020 and 2021 ultimately didn't work and it won't work going forward. Censorship is being deprecated.

You're free to say and think whatever you want. The good thing is, we all are.


To be clear, I'm not pro-censorship. And, to further be clear, there is zero first amendment infringement when private corporations silence your voice. This is the free market at play.

I'm merely demonstrating why private companies chose to censor. Misinformation during a health crisis isn't free - it costs lives. They don't want to be responsible; they don't want that on their shoulders. So they just silenced the "vaccines cause autism!" crowd and moved on.

The reason conservatives are "targeted" is not because they're conservative, but rather because their platform is being based on lies more and more as time goes on. Science denial, conspiracy theories, a lack of care for human life - these tendencies are rampant in some conservative communities.

This isn't fixed going forward, it's only getting worse. It's gotten so bad that a lot of conservatives won't even listen to Trump. Seriously, they think quoting Trump is misinformation. This abject detachment from reality is very concerning to me. It's absolutely unnerving that you can't even ask conservatives for their own platform and beliefs anymore.


"And, to further be clear, there is zero first amendment infringement when private corporations silence your voice."

Couldn't agree more!

If you don't like it, just go build your own multi-billion dollar private tech company funded also by taxpayer money.


[flagged]


>tries to undermine the free flow and dissemination of information

Maybe I'm out of the loop here, where did the Guardian try to undermine the free flow of information?

They even went out of their way to clarify that:

>"X users will still be able to share our articles"

And

>Our reporters will also be able to carry on using the site for news-gathering purposes, just as they use other social networks in which we do not officially engage.


> Maybe I'm out of the loop here, where did the Guardian try to undermine the free flow of information?

"given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism"

Disturbing to who? far-right compared to what point of reference? Which theories are conspiracy and which are legit? What is the definition of racism , who are racist people and why is it a bad thing?

Discussion about any of the above points happen in a "free" environment in which all parties can express their views.


That is them stating their opinion.

That is not them "undermining the free flow of information".

>Discussion about any of the above points happen in a "free" environment in which all parties can express their views.

You are free to discuss the article on twitter, or, as you are already doing, here. The Guardian isn't stopping you.


Well from their post alone it seems they would impose their particular world-view in their comment section. Isn't Guardian a "news" outlet, by which being "neutral" and "accommodating to a plurality of ideas" is a inherent virtue?

Also it appears their editorial board and "community" is not able to defend their political stances on a free playground.

>The Guardian isn't stopping you

I think they would have, if there was a technical way to do so. And it's not just about Guardian at this point.


You haven't made any kind of case that The Guardian is "undermining the free flow of information"

> it seems they would impose

This is your opinion, freely expressed. It's neither evidence nor was it undermined by The Guardian.

> Isn't Guardian a "news" outlet

"strawman framing" with "a side of airquotes".

Even so, can you point to any regulations in the UK or US that define what a "news" outlet is and how they are even required to have a comment section?

> which being "neutral" and "accommodating to a plurality of ideas" is a inherent virtue?

Core news reporting is about "just the facts", editorial stances are another thing that good organisations have and identify when in play - there is no requirement to be neutral about, say, Hitlers poltics (as evidenced by The Daily Mail at the time).

> I think they would have,

Again that's literally just your opinion.


>You haven't made any kind of case that The Guardian is "undermining the free flow of information"

I view it as an attempt by a group of left-leaning media/news outlets hoping to de-crown X out of its popularity as a neutral forum for expressing political views.

Yes, these are my opinions or ... "comment replies". People can post their comments or fact-checks, the things Guardian people don't like to engage with.


Some might hold a popular delusion that X is a neutral forum for expressing political views.

X is not a neutral forum.


Except it can’t happen in that environment. Twitter always was and is inherently unsuitable for any semi-productive discussion due its format.

However that is besides the point any discussion in such “free” environment will be drowned by noise and bigotry (from both sides). Pretending otherwise is silly.


There is a great deal of misinformation on X.

Guardian leaving X is reducing that amount of misinformation.

Countless examples of Guardian contradicting themselves.


So, the Guardian is probably community-noted on beautiful hit pieces like this one:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/04/is-trump-a-f...

Stanley continued: “Trump and the people behind him have already promised to replace the government at all levels with loyalists. [LGBTQ+] citizens, particularly trans citizens and their families, will have to leave the country. Political opponents will be targeted in some way ranging from financial penalties to prison.”

Dear Guardian: Hitler got to power in large part because of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the paramilitary SA organization who was openly gay. Hitler supported Röhm's LGBTQ membership until 1934, when the size of the SA surged to 4,000,000 and Röhm became too powerful. Himmler and others intrigued against Röhm, purged him and then suddenly LGBTQ was persecuted. Selectively persecuted, since well-known gay people like Reichsminister Rudolf Hess, who was known gay, stayed in power.


That seems largely irrelevant to the core thesis of the article.


Went to Bluesky too, at the moment too much "orange man bad" and not really anything else in Discover. At least on Twitter you can still find some nice technical discussion after you weed out the "orange man good" parts.


I highly recommend taking a look at some tech starter packs, as i've found them to be very helpful in moving away from that feed. I agree that the political discussion is definitely still in that stage though


Sometimes, the orange man just is bad.


You can hide all political crap using muted words. Just exclude any tweets with the words election(s), Biden, Trump, Kamala, Bitcoin, trading and you're good.

All I get is AI and rockets now.


I haven’t muted anything on Bluesky but I have been careful to never follow anybody who talks about #uspol in their first few posts, or their own or somebody else’s gender identity, “fascists”, etc. Also I always hit “less like this” on divisive politics. My “Discover” feed had 1 divisive politics post out of 20, my “Following” feed had 4 out of 20. Gotta prune my following list a little.


What a uselessly glib way to summarize the state of politics today


The Guardian isn’t posting there because they get called out all the time on their bad and biased reporting. The notes feature has been a nightmare for them. Also their bias is apparent based on their own messaging when they ask for donations - and this move is just another action that falls under the same bias.


Musk has one of the highest community note rates on his tweets. Has not stopped him one bit.


Exactly, says a lot about the fragility of the Guardian


Or the community notes are not actually the reason.


Can you explain that?


Musk is stress testing his service's features /s




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