<story><title>The tyranny of the supertweeter</title><url>https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-supertweeter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bakary</author><text>The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession.&lt;p&gt;The platform is a journalist&amp;#x27;s fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don&amp;#x27;t touch grass. The significance of Twitter users&amp;#x27; opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SamBam</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter&amp;#x27;s Like button&amp;#x27;s effect on journalists. [1]&lt;p&gt;He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it&amp;#x27;s nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth&amp;#x2F;impact by the number of likes you get. It&amp;#x27;s so buit into our minds, we can&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is.&lt;p&gt;The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who &lt;i&gt;already&lt;/i&gt; understand the dangers of climate change, you&amp;#x27;ll get thousands of likes. But the story won&amp;#x27;t be impactful because you&amp;#x27;re preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people&amp;#x27;s minds, you won&amp;#x27;t get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you&amp;#x27;d approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.&lt;p&gt;Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it&amp;#x27;s directly caused by counting likes.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;podcast&amp;#x2F;a-philosophy-of-games-that-is-really-a-philosophy-of-life&amp;#x2F;id1548604447?i=1000552204773&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;podcast&amp;#x2F;a-philosophy-of-games-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The tyranny of the supertweeter</title><url>https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-supertweeter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bakary</author><text>The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession.&lt;p&gt;The platform is a journalist&amp;#x27;s fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don&amp;#x27;t touch grass. The significance of Twitter users&amp;#x27; opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crmd</author><text>&amp;gt;finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms.&lt;p&gt;This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to &amp;quot;report&amp;quot; on &amp;quot;what sources are saying&amp;quot;.</text></comment>