{"id":15016,"date":"2014-07-18T15:43:54","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T22:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=15016"},"modified":"2014-07-19T09:45:40","modified_gmt":"2014-07-19T16:45:40","slug":"thinking-about-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=15016","title":{"rendered":"Thinking About Twitter (Updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t use Twitter the way I use Facebook. Maybe because I’m old and came to social media late in the game? Whatever, for me Facebook is about\u00a0friends and\u00a0family\u00a0while\u00a0Twitter is about\u00a0news and events. Facebook friends are people I know.\u00a0I’ve never met the people I follow on Twitter and probably never will.<\/p>\n

Who do I follow on Twitter? Journalists, bloggers, authors, experts in various fields. Through them I\u00a0follow\u00a0what’s going on in the world. The 300 or so people in my net\u00a0have nets of their own; when they\u00a0read something interesting they retweet it. In effect, then, I\u00a0follow thousands.<\/p>\n

Twitter’s great for breaking news and events. I learned about bin Laden’s capture and execution on Twitter a full twenty minutes before the first television news alerts. Ditto the latest events in Israel and Gaza, ditto the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine. Twitter’s also good for getting the feel of how ongoing events affect people on the ground:\u00a0through retweets I read first-hand reports\u00a0from men and women on the street, soldiers, statesmen, refugees, protesters, counter-protesters … well, you get the idea.<\/p>\n

You’re probably about to warn me that tweets from sources like these\u00a0are rarely objective, that the “news” I\u00a0get\u00a0from Twitter is slanted, incomplete, partisan, propagandistic, sometimes intentionally\u00a0false. Don’t worry, I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that the “news” we\u00a0get from conventional\u00a0media sources is likewise\u00a0slanted, incomplete, partisan, propagandistic, sometimes intentionally false. I hope you know that as well.<\/p>\n

I’ve found that\u00a0Twitter, in addition to being a great heads-up source for events\u00a0conventional news will soon be reporting, is helpful in filling\u00a0in the gaps in\u00a0conventional news reporting. Obviously you have to use your critical thinking skills when you’re reading tweets about fast-breaking events like the Israeli invasion of Gaza or the Malaysian Airlines shootdown, but you quickly develop\u00a0a feel for what’s real and what is not. When you can’t tell, you step back.<\/p>\n

\"OB-XE787_aphack_G_20130423132512\"<\/a>
This credible-looking Tweet caused a stock market slump last year; it was a hoax.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Or take the current crisis in Israel and Gaza. So many tweets, from partisans on both sides, some quite\u00a0hysterical. What is true and what is not? Israel says it\u00a0went\u00a0into Gaza to find and close\u00a0tunnels used by Hamas terrorists. But according to several tweets posted by Gaza residents last night, the IDF also knocked down a geriatric hospital in Gaza. This clearly doesn’t square with official\u00a0statements about the purpose of going into Gaza, but did it really happen? Remember the reports of invading Iraqis stealing baby incubators from hospitals in Kuwait during the lead up to Desert Storm? Those reports turned out to be bullshit,\u00a0so I’ll remain skeptical until I learn more.<\/p>\n

Early yesterday an NBC reporter delivered\u00a0an emotional report about\u00a0the bombing deaths of four Palestinian children whom he had been playing soccer with on a beach just moments before; later in the\u00a0day, according to tweets from news industry insiders, NBC pulled that reporter and flew in\u00a0Richard Engle to replace him. When I watched NBC news last night, there was Richard Engle … and\u00a0no mention of the previous reporter being replaced. More info has come out on Twitter today; it’s said that\u00a0NBC executives felt the previous reporter\u00a0might get them in trouble with pro-Israel interests\u00a0… call me a cynic, but this bit of background detail has the ring of truth.<\/p>\n

Clearly there’s much more to the story than what is being\u00a0reported by conventional news sources. Twitter … so long as I remember to take my daily grain of salt … helps me understand what’s really going on. Certainly I feel better informed than I would be\u00a0if my only news sources were NPR and NBC.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0downside to Twitter is mob rule and public shaming. From the poor woman who\u00a0lost her PR job for tweeting an insensitive joke about AIDS, to Michelle Shocked who tried to fight back as the Twitter tide turned against her (she is no longer on Twitter), to the multiple casualties of the Mia Farrow\/Woody Allen wars,\u00a0Twitter has\u00a0claimed many a scalp. The place is a witch hunter’s paradise, a haven for trolls and racists. This is the chaff, though, not the wheat, and it’s easy enough to ignore … as long as you stay out of the various fights, which are sometimes good entertainment.<\/p>\n

Now if I can just figure out how to say all this with 149 characters (including spaces) I’ll turn it into a Tweet.<\/p>\n

Update (7\/19\/14):<\/strong><\/span><\/em> A friend\u00a0read this via a\u00a0Facebook link and commented that he wouldn’t trust many people to apply skepticism\u00a0or\u00a0critical thinking to what they read on Twitter, particularly with regard to emotional topics like Israel and Gaza.\u00a0I agree. On Twitter, everyone immediately took either the Palestinian or Israeli side and then retreated behind ideological\u00a0barricades. If you’re not following people on both sides\u00a0you’re stuck in an epistemic bubble. In this case conventional news sources trump Twitter: on MSNBC last night, for example,\u00a0Chris Hayes\u00a0conducted a spirited interview\u00a0with an Israeli spokesman<\/a>; anyone watching would have gotten\u00a0a much clearer view of where each side is coming from.<\/p>\n

I try hard to avoid becoming\u00a0epistemically\u00a0isolated. I follow a few conservatives and libertarians (same thing IMO), even when they piss me off. The only people I block outright are the stupids and the racists (ditto); they have nothing\u00a0to contribute and shouldn’t even have a seat at the table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t use Twitter the way I use Facebook. Maybe because I’m old and came to social media late in the game? Whatever, for me Facebook is about\u00a0friends and\u00a0family\u00a0while\u00a0Twitter is about\u00a0news and events. Facebook friends are people I know.\u00a0I’ve never met the people I follow on Twitter and probably never will. Who do I follow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16,827,6],"tags":[1607,1609,1608,181,1455],"class_list":["post-15016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-media","category-social-media","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-israel","tag-malaysia-flight-17","tag-palestine","tag-twitter","tag-witch-hunts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15016"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15032,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15016\/revisions\/15032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}