Liars.
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So this, then…
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Twitter is a special case though. They aren’t just reporting the garbage Trump says, they’re providing the pulpit. They are also making a conscious decision to ignore their own rules of conduct to let him spout hateful nonsense that would get any other user—LITERALLY any other user—banned from the service.
CNN or the Washington Post might use the attention Trump creates to sell eyeballs to advertisers, but they don’t just give him unlimited access to say whatever he wants on their platforms.
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The news media are supposed to have an ethical obligation to not publish nonsense from known liars as news. Oh, no, wait, that was bloggers. But anyway, it’s the same game.
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It’s not quite the same, because the news media doesn’t have explicitly stated policies for content that they choose to ignore just to give Trump more attention.
Twitter has explicit rules that regular users are banned for breaking every day. Trump breaks those rules on a regular basis. Twitter gets called on it, then does nothing. There’s nothing directly analogous to this relationship in the way the “mainstream media” treats Trump.
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I pulled the plug on FB a couple of years ago and it was good for my emotional health. It is no longer ubiquitous when you are not on it. =)
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It’s hard when you are distant from family and friends and that is pretty much the only way they communicate. I’ve never been on it, and my wife got off of it for a year or so, but she needed to organize a community activity and basically had to go back for that.
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On the quality of American journalism:
I was intrigued about Scarborough resigning shortly after Klausutis’s death, and was looking for info on the reason/timing. You would think that an AP story about trump’s tweets on the matter would bother to mention that Scarborough announced he was going to step down 3 months before Klausutis died. So trump’s jaqing off about why did Scarborough leave so quickly after her death has an an obvious answer. Quality journalism has never been more needed or harder to find
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But what about conspiracies theories that are proven false but people continue believing them? Like the “moon landing was fake” conspiracy theory? We need a term for that kind of thing.
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In addition to greed/traffic, it seems like it would open an insane constitutional legal can of worms to try to ban the president of the United States. This would be in addition to congressional action a-la “steroids in baseball” level of scrutiny for them and their rules. I imagine Twitter can relatively easily steamroll over any other person who tries to complain about the banhammer, but that would be another level.
Of course, someone with balls would welcome the opportunity to defend removing the president’s account in order to highlight his bullshit on a national stage. The fact that they won’t even remove individual tweets is just beyond spineless.
I don’t see how. Twitter is a private platform. You break the rules, you get banned. That’s how it should work. There’s no constitutional requirement that a president’s remarks be carried on every existing platform.
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But realistically, Twitter can make or break whatever rules they want. It’s their platform. Their rules are no more a force of law than journalistic “ethics” (whatever we imagine those might have once been).
And of course it’s all double-moot when 90% of modern “journalism” is publishing a Trump tweet and calling in a news article because you added the copy of “Trump made a controversial tweet this morning.”
“But ZOMG! You Will be FLABBERGASTED When You See Jerry Lawler’s Response!”
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I’m not saying Twitter guidelines have force of law behind them. I’m saying that Twitter is actively disregarding its own explicitly stated guidelines in a far more egregious manner than any mainstream media organization.
For example, CNN doesn’t have a publicly published, nominally-enforced policy explicitly stating that they will refuse to air a press conference that includes obvious lies.
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It took me a bit of parsing to realise you were talking about mending from the idiocy that Bush and Cheney had wrought. I too had felt that the Grumpy Old Party was spent, but then we had to learn the hard way how Murdoch and the Kochs had harnessed the power of pettiness.
And now Twitter is a steaming pile of shit because Jack Dorsey only cares about staying rich. To hell with that asshole.
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I never was on FB, but my twtr acc lies dormant for getting some info I sometimes want to ask for, and search for. Twitter is the only way to get some up-to-date news about many parts of Africa. Our media just ignores nearly everything there until white people are involved.
To me, that has been of real value more than once. I had a very helpful list of journalists on the ground, tweeting from West Africa, the Congo basin, and some from lesser covered parts of East Africa. I followed a lot of people tweeting about certain events, as long they were ongoing. I was usually two days to two weeks ahead of any mention of rather large events, including a peaceful revolution.
However, the neofascists and trollies… this really got to me after some time. And propaganda, of course. Gladly, West African propagandists were usually quickly to recognise and to ban. (Assholes from Rwanda and Cameroon, however, were more difficult to filter out.)
FB, OTH: I don’t need that shit. Never did. No added value, at all.
ETA: still, I would be rather happy if someone would just kick twitter off the net for a while. Most likely, I would not miss it.
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Twittter should pay us for having to deal with Trump’s twitterstream.
One can’t escape the contents of Turnip’s tweets. Newspapers, radio, web, and streaming.
I’ll too old for this shit.
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NIST Trump Appointee: “The standard is, we’ll tell you when you’ve made an accurate measurement because it’ll flatter the president. If it’s not accurate, then the president didn’t like it.”
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This brings me back to the confusion I’ve always felt when I get the phone error message, “We’re sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service”
And I would always ask myself, what does it mean for a machine to claim to feel anything, especially sorrow?
There are so many ways where consumers have become inured to being lied to, it’s not even questioned. That’s something I won’t miss about capitalism when it’s gone, if I live that long.
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I believe the term you are looking for is ‘ignorance.’
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I’d say it has been sufficient to the degree where Twitter’s effect on humanity has been a net negative. What happened to that “I’m dumping Twitter” campaign a while back? Did that only apply to write mode?
ETA:
And they’ll mean it this time? (See above)
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