I often remind journalists "real people don't use Twitter". It's not entirely true, of course, but it's largely bots, people pretending to be bots, celebrities, people pretending to be celebrities, and journalists. It's performative.
It would be better if journalists treated Twitter as if anyone that they haven't personally laid eyes on behind a Twitter handle, was a bot. And even in those cases, to exercise a great degree of skepticism.
Twitter is great, and I love it, but it is one of the last reserves of chaos and shit-postery on the mainstream internet. It is full of bots, trolls, personas, and just plain crazy people, and any kind of zeitgeist distilled from it should be taken with a pillar of salt.
Normal people are just not aware of what is going on on Twitter, except to the extent that the news interjects their reporting with Twitter controversies.
Journalists participate in Twitter at a rate probably 10-100x the overall population.
Most people don't ever log into Twitter, most journalists do daily.
I think you can look at it this way:
* For normal people, Twitter is not real life.
* For journalists, Twitter is real life.
Journalists then become the vector by which BS Twitter drama becomes mainstreamed.
The main stream media and most people definitely act and talk like it's real. So, maybe just not news to people who hate twitter, but someone should really hire a bot to trend this paper over there.
"What is it about tweets that would mean they're not legitimate expressions of opinion? "
It's not about the legitimacy of the tweet or even factualness.
When journalists want to create a fake narrative, what they do is say "people are saying this" and then show a few tweets to support them. Even though almost nobody really may be thinking in those term.
For example, there's a lot of social justice clamour over things like award shows lately. The thing is, people don't care that-that much. They may a little, they might have some nuanced ideas one way or another, but the 'journalist' reporting will say: "People are really upset about so-and-so's comments" - and then show a few tweets of either random people or celebs.
Individual tweets are not remotely representative of anything, and yet they are used as 'representative' data points all the time.
Not only do journos do this in purpose (i.e. willfully misrepresenting) but I think they are actually influenced by the Twitterverse. I really do think that many in the press think that Twitter is real or representative.
They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.
Twitter is just a glorified internet forum with a few active celebrity (openly) and journalist posters.
I find the fact the majority of the news cycle now runs on collating a bunch of tweets just as absurd as if they were collating a bunch of reddit posts all day.
It is not the real world journalists acting that it is just because they have a 3000-10000 follower count and a checkmark is just as ridiculous as them pretending reddit is the real world because they have 7 figures of comment upvotes and some nuggets of reddit gold.
I agree with the sentiment but a LOT of journalists seem to not only take Twitter seriously enough to report about the nonsense that its users are rambling about, but even use it themselves !
With the recent protests it's been difficult to find local news coverage. But I found tweets, I found livestreams, but I couldn't find any reporters covering some of the most impactful demonstrations in my city in decades. In that moment, Twitter was critical.
There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a wonderful tool. This is one of them.
Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that.
Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored images.
But just imagine if those journalists had to live without twitter ? They would have to report things from "the real world" ! I've been there. It's awfully complicated, and sometimes people disagree with you and you have to talk. Insane.
For journalists, it’s arguably part of the job. Both as personal PR, as well as cultivating sources and being well-informed. A lot of actual news does happen on Twitter these days.
The problem is that on Twitter they’ve become more like activists rather than journalists/reporters.
Maybe one day actual journalists will come to the conclusion that tweeting is antithetical to journalism and may only use it as a tool of discovery rather than engagement.
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