I think there’s some about of misinformation or wrong facts that you’ll believe when you read enough things. Maybe twitter users who use it for news etc. end up with a higher % of incorrect views about the world, but I think anyone who reads the news regularly if only just from reputable sources (ie. print) will have weird beliefs
This framing underplays the degree to which the site is designed to produce misleading propaganda. The primary content creators are people who literally do that as a full time job.
Like, I’ll show you a common pattern of how it happens. It’s an extremely unfortunate example because a person involved has just died, but it’s the first one I found, and I feel like it’s representative of how political discourse happens on the platform:
First I’ll explain what’s actually misleading about this so I can make my broader point. The quote tweeted account, “Right Angle News Network”, reports that “The official black lives matter account has posted a video stating that black people ‘have a right to violence’ amid… the slaying of Iryna Zarutska”. The tweet is designed so that, while technically correct, it appears to be saying the video is about Iryna’s murder. But actually:
The video the account posted is taken from a movie made forty years ago.
The account doesn’t reference the murder at all. The only connection that the post has to the murder is that it was made a few days after it happened, which I guess means that it was posted “amid” the murder.
As is typical, the agitator’s tweet (which was carefully designed not to be an explicit lie), is then “quote tweeted” and rephrased by a larger account, who attempts to package the message for more virality. In this case the person just says “Official Black Lives Matter account justifying the murder of Iryna Zarutska”. But that’s not actually established at all! The quote tweeter is just reading a certainty into a tweet that was deliberately engineered to be misread.
This pattern happens everywhere, for every socially charged topic, on every side. “Your enemies are saying X horrible shit” is possibly the most common form of slander on Twitter. It happens especially often when people are posting about stuff that happens on other platforms, because there it’s extremely easy to lack context or mislead people about what’s going on.
“Your enemies are saying X horrible shit” is possibly the most common form of slander on Twitter
Possibly, but it’s probably also simply true most of the time. Usually, you can simply quote tweet them (or post screenshots) saying the thing you’re accusing them of saying. Sure, sometimes, it’s missing relevant context, but that’s relatively rare: normally, your enemies really are saying the horrible things.
I think there’s some about of misinformation or wrong facts that you’ll believe when you read enough things. Maybe twitter users who use it for news etc. end up with a higher % of incorrect views about the world, but I think anyone who reads the news regularly if only just from reputable sources (ie. print) will have weird beliefs
This framing underplays the degree to which the site is designed to produce misleading propaganda. The primary content creators are people who literally do that as a full time job.
Like, I’ll show you a common pattern of how it happens. It’s an extremely unfortunate example because a person involved has just died, but it’s the first one I found, and I feel like it’s representative of how political discourse happens on the platform:
First I’ll explain what’s actually misleading about this so I can make my broader point. The quote tweeted account, “Right Angle News Network”, reports that “The official black lives matter account has posted a video stating that black people ‘have a right to violence’ amid… the slaying of Iryna Zarutska”. The tweet is designed so that, while technically correct, it appears to be saying the video is about Iryna’s murder. But actually:
The video the account posted is taken from a movie made forty years ago.
The account doesn’t reference the murder at all. The only connection that the post has to the murder is that it was made a few days after it happened, which I guess means that it was posted “amid” the murder.
As is typical, the agitator’s tweet (which was carefully designed not to be an explicit lie), is then “quote tweeted” and rephrased by a larger account, who attempts to package the message for more virality. In this case the person just says “Official Black Lives Matter account justifying the murder of Iryna Zarutska”. But that’s not actually established at all! The quote tweeter is just reading a certainty into a tweet that was deliberately engineered to be misread.
This pattern happens everywhere, for every socially charged topic, on every side. “Your enemies are saying X horrible shit” is possibly the most common form of slander on Twitter. It happens especially often when people are posting about stuff that happens on other platforms, because there it’s extremely easy to lack context or mislead people about what’s going on.
Possibly, but it’s probably also simply true most of the time. Usually, you can simply quote tweet them (or post screenshots) saying the thing you’re accusing them of saying. Sure, sometimes, it’s missing relevant context, but that’s relatively rare: normally, your enemies really are saying the horrible things.