The new Twitter is becoming a cesspit of disinformation

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 413 points –
The new Twitter is becoming a cesspit of disinformation — study it now
nature.com
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Wow even nature.com has an article about how bad twitter has become, did not see that one coming.

You could say it's about the nature of Twitter.

they've been posting their dumb political takes for years now.

You’re aware that Nature is a multidisciplinary scientific journal, yes?

If you’re insinuating that Nature is generally overtly political, you should really see someone to get that cranial-rectal inversion checked out.

It's always been bad.

This is overstated.

In the old days, there was a hierarchy of reputability. At the top you had the bluechecks that generally represented reputable sources of information, who had premium billing in the platform. Then you had the normies. Then you had the slush-pit of soft-blocked people that were shoved into the "other replies" box because everybody hated them and they only followed their network of bots.

Now, the hierarchy is reversed. The slush-pit people are now have blue-checks, the algorithmic boost on blue-checks is even stronger, and half of the old reputable blue-checks have left.

This is like saying "Reddit/Lemmy has always been awful" if we made the upvotes/downvotes of all the worst people on the site worth 100X what a normal person's upvote/downvote was worth. Yes, there have always been problems, but they can get worse.

You must not pay attention, I'm new to Lemmy, but Reddit's been garbage for years. Seems like a lot of that garbage made it's way to Lemmy too. Face it anything that you can hide behind a screen and a keyboard with relative anonymity is fucking shit. It outs people for the kind of person they REALLY are when they don't have to face the repercussions of saying shit to someones face.

Yes.

But here's the thing:

Reddit/Lemmy: those people have equal voice to you or me. Of course they can amplify that voice with sockpuppets, but still - one account one vote.

Old Twitter: those people have downmodded influence. Twitter knew everybody hates them and treated them like the garbage they are.

New Twitter: those people rule the roost, because they're willing to pay Elon $8/mo for a megaphone for their jackassery.

You can pay $8/mo and have your own platform too. What's the issue?

Face it anything that you can hide behind a screen and a keyboard with relative anonymity is fucking shit.

Once coined as: John Gabriel's G.I.F.T.

I still reference G.I.F.T. a few times a year. Glad to see someone else doing it.

This isn't pointed out enough, IMO. People act like it went sharply downhill under Musk but this is the platform that enabled extremists for years and only even banned Trump when he literally tried to overthrow democracy. Maybe Twitter was good in like 2010 but I really don't think Musk changed THAT much about it.

Okay, but the new Twitter reinstated him, and a bunch of Nazis.

I mean, old Twitter was jokingly called "the hellsite" by its users but its new Elongated form is quite a lot worse.

It's just because people are being TOLD that it's bad now. It's literally no worse than it was 5 years ago. Twitter has always been a cesspool of human "thought".

Agree completely. I think it might be easier for journalists (et al) to tell themselves "Elon made it bad" than it is to admit they had been contributing their efforts to a bad place all this time. Twitter was never very big, and most people avoided it like the plague, but there is a certain class of person who got addicted easily.

👋 hello fellow trekkie in the wild

🖖 Hello fellow Website user!

Lol I got down voted for saying hi to a fellow trekkie that's also on the same trek instance as me. I'm pretty sure we are a small instance, so randomly coming across another person from our instance is kinda rare.

but it has become much worse in the past year

unrelated to your comment, but demon sword or demon's word?

because you're being told it is. twitter has always been a cesspool.

old twitter at least pretended to fight hate speech and disinformation, the "new" twitter X doesn't give a flying fuck to both issues

Not nearly this bad. Go read the article. It’s much easier to spread crap nowadays, even though you could before.

Twitter's influence has always been overstated by the media type, and the personalized recommendation algorithm it used has always been a black box to be gamed, and what this article really showed is that it is an inheritly unfair game and the people who writes the rules of the platform (in this case, Musk), can push whatever hot take they want to push to influence public opinion, and people who don't have that level of access to Twitter will brute force follower with bots in the hopes that it'll lure more real users to influence.

So, dead internet theory and all, until we fully automate Twitter to bots influencing bots. There is no authenticity anymore, it's all disinformation from all sides.

Nowadays, I like to pretend that I never had a Twitter or Insta. Not a healthy way of coping, I know, but it's way less stressful that way.

So just like old Twitter, who cares, shut it down.

To paraphrase Mitch "RIP" Hedburg: I'm a cesspool of disinformation. I used to be a cesspool of disinformation, but I'm still one, too.

Didn't the mods say they were going to do something about musk/Twitter spam?

This isn't even about something Twitter did

This isn't even about something Twitter might do

This is just a dude talking about what everybody knows about Twitter. And musk fans upvote anything Twitter, and musk haters upvote this out of a sense of validation that is shit.

Voting is not good for this, please ban the musk spam

Block it yourself. Block the words "elon" and "musk". You won't miss anything.

I once read a quote that roughly translates as "Even the greatest wizard of all time can't transform bread into bread".

I always thought it was stupid, but makes more sense now.

I've never used Twitter, nor liked it, but in 2010 I had to observe that it was indeed useful when it became one of the primary ways for people to communicate during the Arab Spring.

Since then I kept not being into it, but at least I thought it had some important value I had not seen.

Now it's all locked up, so it really has become useless (and I haven't even talked about the rampant disinformation)

RIP Twitter

Edit: fixed grammar

“This shitty site is still shitty! Click our article pleeeeease”

The subhead is important in getting the gist of this article "study it now." Meaning the ridiculous amount of research on Twitter was dumb for awhile, but now that it's changing it might be worth looking at.

They also point out why it's not going to happen

Refocusing on studying X won’t be easy. It will require new methods and approaches that do not depend on the large amounts of data that were easily accessible before.

The API access was what made it so heavily studied and the current costs are why this change isn't going to be low hanging fruit for researchers to pump papers out on.