Here's the thing, I agree. But also, you do know that the various news sites have an agenda. It's a fact. And the way you work around it is by reading from multiple sources that have different agendas and form your own opinion based on that.
The random Twitter user though? Who the fuck knows. He might be in just for the lols. Maybe they're just bored. Maybe they're actually knowledgeable. You just don't know.
Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user.
And you can apply the same reasoning to literally everything. You know nothing about this random doctor who's going to perform surgery. Should you perhaps let some other random guy on twitter that claims to be a surgeon do it? After all even doctors from "most respected" universities made some stupid mistakes.
It's good to be skeptical in life, I'm not arguing against it. But at some point you have to trust at least something otherwise it's impossible to go through life.
> Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user.
Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources, moreso than conflicted profit-seeking media outlets. In particular, a lot of them are subject matter experts in a particular field, instead of generalists trying to summarize something they don't really understand or put a partisan spin on it.
There are also more than enough less trustworthy sources. But you shouldn't feel inclined to follow the nincompoops.
> Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources
Some of them are teenagers that pay for a blue "Verified" checkmark with their mom's credit card. Modern Twitter is about as deserving of your trust as an email from a Nigerian prince.
I don’t use Twitter other than – very rarely – following Hacker News links but I still know that being “verified” has no bearing on trustworthiness.
The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful.
Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts – without interference from Twitter’s engagement algorithms. Or if it’s still possible to use third-party software to consume Twitter posts (I used to have an extension that converted Twitter links to Nitter).
> I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts
You should try it, then. Part of the... uh... "appeal" of Twitter is the algorithmic timeline that suggests content from people you've never seen or heard from before in your life.
The timeline has actually been split into two - "For you", which is suggested accounts; and "Following", which are the accounts you are following. I often switch between the two to take advantage of the difference. Following accounts is as easy as it ever was.
But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
I’m not saying there aren’t trustworthy people on Twitter. After all there’s plenty of journalists. But there’s also plenty of shitposters. And random people spewing nonsense.
> But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
Eh. When the set "journalists" contains all the people who work for the likes of 24 hour cable news networks and the National Enquirer it's not obvious this is even the case. But the bigger point is that you don't select sources at random from the entire population of Twitter users, you select the ones you've observed have a track record of getting it right.
It's obvious by the sheer number of people in the two groups. There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The bigger point though is that I'd not pick a random journalist either, I'd select one I observed having a positive track record. We're losing track where this discussion started.
The "pick one at random" is not something I'm suggesting people should do as a strategy. You should invest time and try vet people as best as you can; you should never 100% trust anyone; You should always challenge your own assumptions and biases; You should try as much as you can to find multiple sources on the same story if you care about that particular story.
That's an MO i'd suggest. I personally don't care where people find their sources as long as they're doing their search properly. I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter. Same is true for most news outlets. I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
> There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The population of journalists has adverse selection because the nature of the industry creates an incentive to attempt to influence opinions rather than merely convey factual information. If you pick one at random you're more likely to get a paid propagandist than you are picking randomly from the population at large.
> I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter.
It's not just that. If you take science reporting, for example, even the "quality" journalist outlets will present you with a summary of the results which is often unintentionally inaccurate simply because it's written by someone who doesn't comprehensively understand the research and is under time pressure to publish a story as soon as the research paper is released, even though it's long paper full of domain-specific knowledge that takes time and expertise to digest. Meanwhile they, for whatever reason, consistently fail to link to the original paper, so you have only their inadequate summary.
Whereas there's a decent chance the author of the paper is on Twitter, has posted a short summary of the results which is accurate, and provides the direct link if you want to read it yourself.
And the same with the rest of it. When the major media outlets report the CrowdStrike thing, it's generally along the lines of "an unspecified computer glitch caused flights to be canceled" and then an interview with some rando who tells you to install anti-virus on your PC. When you go somewhere that will give you the full story, you find out the problem was caused by the anti-virus.
> I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
See this is where we disagree. Partisan media outlets employ the lowest quality sources of information, because they're purposely selected to manipulate your opinions. They're not just random rubbish, they're explicitly adversarial to objective truth.
That isn't to say that good journalists don't exist, but they are not a majority of "journalists" to be sure.
Some are pretty verifiable accounts from actual academics, CTOs, journalists, that's the ones I'm interested in. You can get multiple sources on one website with fewer filters, that's what makes it a good source
The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'. Teenagers love to position themselves in such roles due to insecurities, although I don't think anybody is completely immune to this.
Still, don't get why regular folks are so obsessed with getting desperately the news first, unless you ie trade on it or work for Reuters. Life quality is about completely different stuff, but to each their own, maybe its just Sunday chill talking from me
> The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'.
It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since Musk, some have moved to bsky or mastodon, but it's still the best source for me.
I understand your point of view but I don't find your assumption very charitable, there are real reasons for this that have been touched on.
Well, charitable for normal situations IMHO it isn't. Some sort of OCD-ish behavior re info feed. I see it on myself - the less I focus on all crap coming from news, regardless of form or source, and more I focus on my own wellbeing, my close family and friends, the happier I am.
There are truly very few news which are seriously relevant to my life, and I suspect its the same for rest of us. Just because there is a big crowd of similarly-impacted folks I ain't going to normalize such toxic behavior.
Longforms from papers like the Economist actually really interest me, and I look forward to opening them even when my life is pretty happy already. But you need to find non-extreme papers that match your interests and keep reading time under control.
> And the way you work around it is by reading from multiple sources that have different agendas and form your own opinion based on that.
This, especially now that we're approaching the day when everyone could ask their personal AI to build a fake, albeit plausible, image of someone doing something wrong.
Yeah I think the most useful skill we should start teaching is critical thinking. Because it's going to be an absolutel mess navigating the digital space in the near distant future.
That was a good strategy before sites like Twitter existed. Now, I can watch live feeds and info coming in without any journalists filtering it for me, or actually have them adding info while I consume primary sources.
For example, several times in my life I happen to have caught a live stream that was reported on wildly inaccurately by legacy news media. I happened to watch, for example, the "Covington kids"[0] stream because it was trending on Twitter that day. Knowledge of that reporting travesty should be enough to shake anyone from experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and wouldn't have been dispelled by reading several news sites because just so many were involved. Frankly, it was a disgusting and irresponsible response by said journalists and organisations and should lead people to stop reading those publications in their entirety.
That's not the only example, but the idea that powerful "truth seeking" organisations should try and destroy the lives of children because of an agenda and a MAGA hat is an indictment of those organisations. It led to death threats against children.
I'm happy with choosing my own sources of trust, thanks, and it won't be to read from sources that do that kind of thing. I have a thing called basic morality, and encouraging violence against children is a line I'm not willing to cross.
The random Twitter user though? Who the fuck knows. He might be in just for the lols. Maybe they're just bored. Maybe they're actually knowledgeable. You just don't know.