Why is Twitter so popular? Introducing House of the Dragon on Gadget Lab with WIRED Platforms and Power Reporter Vittoria Elliot
No doubt, this line of thought is prevalent now following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The Telsa CEO hasn’t installed his “content moderation council” yet, but the idea that the platform could become a haven of falsehoods and trolling looms large. Every tweet now served up with a grain of salt. That worm smiling at an ET microphone could’ve been a 4chan meme as easily as it was one of the most famous models in the world.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.
You should encourage your male friends that want to fathers children to watch House of the Dragon. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren encourages you to reexamine your relationship with social media.
Solar Keys on GadgetLab: a Podcast from Gabe Ashworth via Overcast, Pocket Casts, and RSS Feeds
Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is a person. Michael Calore is @snackfight. There is a main hotline atGadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Solar Keys is our theme music.
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Klum isn’t a step-and-repeat, but a real freak is a beast. A tale of two idiots and two photographers during a Halloween bash
Klum is prone on the floor on a blue red carpet as photographers take her pictures. It would be a traditional step-and-repeat, except she can barely walk. She is covered in folds of skin that look raw. Yet, when Entertainment Weekly puts a microphone in front of her, the accent is unmistakable as she exclaims “I’m amazing!” Tom Kaulitz, her husband, pretended to use her as bait.
This was not a dream. The scene outside of the Halloween bash was very similar to that of Project Runway star. It could have been a delusion, because it would have been a strange after-effect of illness.
It felt like that when the images and video of the scene came back on social media, instantly becoming a meme. It was unnerving to think that they were real and that they were fake. It was realizing that what’s perceived as “real” is an increasingly nebulous thing.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/end-of-reality/
Are #TrumpIsDead rumors the only lies that can be propagated under Musk’s watch? The case of Paul Pelosi
People are already testing the boundaries of what can be said. Like, for example, #TrumpIsDead. As Musk settled in at Twitter this week, users on the platform started spreading rumors that the former president had died, in an apparent attempt to show just how easily misinformation and conspiracy theories could spread under Musk’s watch. The # TrumpIsDead trend led to at least one fact-check report from Reuters about a CNN headline that was fake.
TrumpIsDead is the most obvious example, something easily proven or disproven through myriad sources. The truly nefarious misinformation is the little lies, the things that seem just close enough to reality to reel you in. Those are the conspiracy theories that turn non-believers into zealots and mess with the gut instincts of even the most tried and true skeptics. The connection between #TrumpIsDead and a deleted article about an attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was not known at the time.
In a reply to Hillary Clinton, Musk wrote that there may be more to the story than meets the eye. This is an old trick. Sow enough doubt and people will start to question the color of their own hair. When everything feels like it could be two or three clicks away from the truth, what is real? What happens if the person running the platform you are on is just asking questions?
But truly, asking more questions is what people should be doing. After Musk’s tweet, New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang published a story about the online quest to politically label Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker, David DePape. The internet detectives were searching his online history for clues to his affiliations after the incident. Some people thought he was a right-winger, others thought he was a left-winger. Kang, though, had a different take, noting that often the connections made between political rhetoric or mental health and violent acts have little bearing on what really happened. People often look for truth online, but they don’t matter what they believe.
The Role of Twitter in Telling People How to Get Their Ideas in the Post-Newtonian Economy: Elon Musk’s Tiny Talk Town
“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new medium you need to find a different way to use it.
A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
It would be easy for an electric car magnate to mistake his own experience on TWA for that of his followers if he followed a lot of extremely active blue checks. For journalists, the same goes. About half of the people who use the social network send less than 5 times a month, and their posts are mostly replies. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. If you’re going to send a tweet, shut it down. During the basketball games you should keep an eye on it. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.
Trump’s Twitter megaphone in Truth Social: Why does it really matter if you’re on Twitter? The case of Musk, Trump, on Twitter, and Facebook
Donald Trump is back on Twitter. The most recent post on his account was from January 2021, so he didn’t get a roaring return to his favorite social network.
That is due to the fact that the formerUS president has his own megaphone in truth social, the social media platform he helped launch after being banned for inciting a riot at the US Capitol. Truth Social has found a fanbase among conservatives—and seems to garner only more attention as news breaks about Trump and Elon Musk’s Twitter. It would seem Musk’s vows to bring near-absolutist free speech back to Twitter might entice those on Truth Social—a platform that claims to shun “censorship”—to spend more time on Twitter. Users of Truth Social may be satisfied with the conservative community that uses Trump’s alternative app.
A small group of people who are loyal. It is found that about 2 percent of US adults use truth social for news, compared to 14 percent getting news on the internet. They are more likely to support Trump. And about 87 percent of Truth Social users say they expect the news and posts there to be mostly accurate. They also report higher levels of friendliness and satisfaction from using the site than those reported by people who use Twitter or Facebook for news. The case of a man accused of attempting to attack an FBI office and posting threats to the network has been mired in controversy. The Truth Social app became available on the popular mobile operating system in October, after the company agreed to moderate content that violates the company’s policies.
It is not a failure of imagination to think that the social media platforms that we have are our choice. I keep thinking about something that Robin Sloan, a novelist and former Twitter employee, wrote this year: “There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, there’s a lot of potential! It’s a huge shame that the network effect still consumes fuel for other possibilities, otherwise it’d be a lot more efficient.
What Twitter can I learn from Quakers? How I find the courage to speak up when I’m angry at the Quaker’s actions
Permit me a weird turn here. I became interested this year in how Quakers deliberate. As a movement, Quakers have been far ahead of the moral curve time and again — early to abolitionism, to equality between the sexes, to prison reform, to pressuring governments to help save Jews from the Holocaust. The fact that the Quakers have gotten much right does not mean that they haven’t gotten something wrong.
The answer suggested in the book by Rex Ambler is silence. community members stand up to speak at a meeting, only if they are given the green light, and then silent for an hour or so to share some insight which they think will be of use to others. If they must decide an issue collectively, they will wait in silence to see what has to be done. There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. He writes that the Quakers want to go deeper to understand what’s happening in their lives. In order to do this, we need to let go of our active and fretful minds. We let a deeper, more sensitive awareness form after we go quiet.
I see it in myself and find it powerful. I know how I respond when I’m tensed up in an argument. I know how I process hard questions after quiet reflection, when there is time for my spirit to settle. I am aware of which is my better self.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/opinion/what-twitter-can-learn-from-quakers.html
The Odd Sidebar on Twitter.com: Breaking the Rules on Social Media, and How to Stop Worrying About Politics (A Conversation with Brian Feldman)
Democracy is not and will not be one long Quaker meeting. But there is wisdom here worth mulling. We do not make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are most active and fretful. As far as I can tell, the description of being active and fretful is very precise. And having put us in an active, fretful mental state, Twitter then encourages us to fire off declarative statements on the most divisive possible issues, always with one eye to how quickly they will rack up likes and retweets and thus viral power. It’s insane.
From here, it will get worse. OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system that can be given requests in plain language (“Write me an argument for the benefits of single-payer health care, in the style of a Taylor Swift song”) and spit out remarkably passable results.
Brian Feldman began and ended in the same place: the sidebar on the right-hand side of Twitter.com, which keeps a running list of trending topics in fields from sports to politics to entertainment.
The 31-year-old internet culture writer-turned-software engineer told NPR in a phone interview that he has long been fascinated by the sentences that attempt to describe the buzzy topics, as they either highlight seemingly insignificant things or try to boil incredibly complex topics down into just 280 characters. (That work was done by curators and according to an internal style guide).
He said that you can’t state the political state of America in a social media post. I understood that it’s such a weird endeavor, and I appreciated the effort. It’s inherently funny speaking about anything from the White house to users debating which type of ginger beer is best, it’s removed voice. It’s the sort of thing where you don’t have to write a joke, you can just sort of appreciate the oddness of it.”
“What’s Happening Online”: A Human-Inspired Archive for Trends and Topic Descriptions in Politics and Social Media
“What’s Happening Online” organizes the descriptions both in a calendar view and a scrollable timeline that, as Feldman puts it, “you can read from start to finish if you have the patience and the stomach.”
In a note explaining his motivation and methodology, Feldman says the project serves “both as a reminder of some of the b**t that we endured this year, and as a sort of tribute to the people who powered it.”
The descriptions for the main topics on the site has not appeared in months because of the layoffs of Musk’s team. The project has since taken on new meaning as a memorial to what was lost.
Feldman told NPR that as much as he is poking fun at the impossible effort to describe trending topics, he thinks it’s a shame that people have less information now than they did two months ago.
He says that people should sort of figure it out for themselves rather than looking at what’s happening on the internet. When people do their own research on the internet, it can go quickly.
Some trends reappear over time and it was interesting to see how often conservative political commentator Ben is on his list, but that does not translate into a firm data-driven conclusion.
He stressed that his archive is subjective and that it was designed to be so. He opted to take screenshots manually in order to log his own experience of checking Twitter in 2022 (which also explains why there are some days with multiple entries and some days-long stretches without any).
But he says he wasn’t cherry-picking the funniest or weirdest trends to document — the only requirement was that a topic must have a description. He said his goal was to “emphasize the human elements,” like the written descriptions and the specific times at which he encountered them.
“I guess my big takeaway is, everyone encounters the internet differently, and it’s tough to make broad statements about it for everyone,” Feldman told NPR. “And I think I sort of wanted to capture that sense a little bit.”
Feldman says while he’s glad he took this project on, he was never planning to continue or repeat it, even before the trending topic descriptions stopped.
He saw it mainly as a learning opportunity and an excuse to check Twitter — though he did plan to make his archive public from the outset. You’re not alone if you scroll through it and feel a bit dizzy.
Noting that less than a quarter of the population uses the social networking site, the limited public reaction has been mostly positive. The people told him that they liked it, and that it caused them a bit of a frenzy.
“I think everyone who … has an interest in this tool sort of knows that they enjoy it and it’s also reflective of like, ‘What am I doing with my life that I am interested in a lot of this nonsense?’ ” he says. “So I think people enjoy both the recap and also the sort of reflective nature of it, if I had to guess.”
Brian Feldman has a singular approach to explaining the internet. He’s spent significant time investigating the roots of that one early viral video where a little kid gets absolutely wacked in the head with a basketball. The author of the art is interviewed in the “damn, bitch” song. There is a Goofy meme. His latest project is www. whatshappening.online For the foreseeable future, it will be an archive of every Trend description from the year 2022, in hopes of explaining to people the nature of the conversation and getting them to join in.
You can pick through them on a calendar or a timeline, thanks to the cataloging done by Feldman that was done by hand. It’s … it’s fascinating. Through the uncanny valley of Twitter staff descriptions, the project examines a very human attempt to explain the world. “Very human” in that, well, they are literally humans trying to create clear and helpful mass communication and “very human” in that they absolutely fail.
Flicking through whatshappening.online is a fun house experience. Each moment is recognizable as real, but in the pithy descriptions, all sense and logic gets erased from the moment. A flat affect is both frightening and comforting. The tragedies and fears of the year become a thing of the past. Another moment to get a reaction before being forgotten.
Strangeness, Strangeness and Strangeness: Some Things Strangers Don’t Tell Us About The World (or Their Stories) About Pol Potomac
February 11: “Radio show host Jesse Kelly gave Rep. Lauren Boebert an award for being the ‘hottest woman in Congress,’ which misspelled her name and included a gift card to Red Lobster.”
February 24: “The 1939 German invasion of Poland is discussed after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a ’special military operation’ in eastern Ukraine.”
August 11: “A clip of late wrestler Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage’s response to the question ‘have you ever cried?’ His appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992 was a hit.
But what continues to fascinate Feldman about the Twitter Trends descriptions is that “the hit rate is automatically low. It’ll be either too much of an explanation or not enough of one for 90 percent of people. Familiarity does not scale. Which brings us back to the inherent strangeness of this form.