- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
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It’s actually crazy how low the percentage of people under like… forty is now that actually gets their news direct from a news site. Seriously, i don’t know a single person from like 20-35 who actually just goes on the NPR or C-SPAN app or whatever.
It kind of sucks. So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now. And I just feel like there’s something bad about being able to see a comment section on Twitter or Reddit or even Lemmy now on every news event. Makes for a lot more group think rather than just reading the news and going “huh”
Sometimes there’s good discussion though, and it’s good to hear different takes.
Having comments also gives less power to the writer, like could you imagine if we all took Fox News or CNN headlines at face value and didn’t discuss them?
You can literally just read news from less overtly biased news sources. There are scant few articles that I can think of where I really need a redditors interpretation of it
It’s not so much what their interpretation is of the specific article is, it’s more that you might find more information from someone who has info that was left out, or maybe another source that has conflicting information.
Could you show us a few not so biased news sources? I suppose this will also vary wildly by topic. A news outlet might be narrative/propaganda driven on one topic, but not about another.
It’s so much mess (through corporate ties or money) to sort through, it’s hard to trust any of them anymore
Check out the articles posted on [email protected] . Every article is a summary of facts, followed by an explanation of the narrative being pushed by each side of the story.
In a recent article about Sam Bankman-Fried being sentenced to 25 years for example, there is a “Pro-establishment narrative” and an “Establishment-critical narrative” given. In an article about the FCC and TikTok there’s a Pro-China and Anti-China narrative given. When necessary there will be more than two narratives given.
As a bonus there’s usually a “Nerd Narrative” with a percent chance of occurrence of something related to the story. I don’t know what Metaculus is or who comprises their “prediction community”, but saying shit like this is a bit ridiculous:
There’s a 50% chance that after a (weak) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is created, it will take at least 28.7 months for the first superintelligent AI to be created, according to the Metaculus prediction community.
Thanks, that’s really helpful there lol. Sometimes they can be genuinely informative, but it’s the only thing I view with any real skepticism in any particular article.
Dank, thanks
Could you show us a few not so biased news sources? I suppose this will also vary wildly by topic. A news outlet might be narrative/propaganda driven on one topic, but not about another.
Have you heard of Ground News? It’s basically a news aggregator that shows multiple stories on the same event, but with a bias rating and a factuality score, as well as a ownership category. Also, a blindspot category which shows articles being shown predominantly by one side and not the other.
The Ground News bias ratings are calculated using three independent news monitoring organizations: All Sides, Ad Fontes Media, and Media Bias Fact Check. This score does not measure the bias of specific news articles. It is an assessment of the political bias of the publication. The rating takes into consideration things like the wording, story choices and political affiliation of the outlet.
Looks good. It’s there a free tier?
Unfortunately, not to my knowledge. Cheapest is $9.99/year.
You can just read articles, https://web.ground.news
Clicking in a bit looking for coverage of drumft’s criminal issues, his opening page under election category doesn’t even mention such and displays him as just a candidate.
Just my first look though. I’ll keep trying. The L-R ratings are helpful.
So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now.
Mexico’s new president: 3-year-old Alfredo Pequeño Lobo becomes nation’s youngest elected and first canine leader. But can he be rough on the cartels?
Oh my I’m so invested in this story now.
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Ruff. “Can he be ruff on crime”. It was right there!
Huh…
I’m guilty of doing this (just reading the headlines) as well. I usually do it for these reasons:
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I don’t care enough to want to read more. For example, news about US politics. I don’t live in the US. I feel that reading the headlines is enough to keep me informed about what’s happening, but I really don’t care any more than that.
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The details aren’t valuable to me. For example, the Apple anti-trust lawsuit… Is it important? Yes. I’m already well aware of the horrible anticonsumer practices of Apple. But do I need to know all the particular details about the lawsuit? Not really. In fact, the only thing that matters is the final verdict, which hasn’t happened yet.
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I care, but I already know enough details.
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I don’t feel like the article would bring a lot of value, especially if the title is click-baity. I’ve encountered too many articles that are void of content, just the title repeated in 10x more words.
I don’t like visiting news sites because, in addition to all of them being obnoxious and ad riddled, I feel like I’m wasting a lot of time reading long articles that could be rewritten as 3 bullet points. On platforms like lemmy, users will highlight the important bits in the comments which saves a lot of time.
I have grown to like https://www.axios.com/ for reasons like your last bullet point. Frequently they give 3-4 bullet points that tells you the story without a shit tone of editorializing.
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That’s what places like Lemmy are for though.
Even Lemmy does that, though. You’re still influenced by the headline, the community/moderation and the users.
Assuming that everyone clicks through to the article, and doesn’t comment before reading the headline, anyhow.
And at the news organization, you are influenced by the editors and framing by authors.
Lemmy is massively biased though. While that doesn’t mean the articles aren’t factual, you’re still only ever hearing one side of the story. What I find time after time is that majority of people who have strong opinions about current events are completely uncapable of fairly steelmanning the opposing side’s argument.
I’m not sure why you think that news orgs aren’t also biased. Everything and everyone is biased, even those that genuinely try to not let it show through and be fully impartial.
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So what are you implying? That it doesn’t matter where you get your news because all sources are biased anyway?
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There’s still a massive difference between news sources like NY times and Breitbart. It matters where you get your news from and even if it’s coming from a biased source you should atleast be aware of the bias. Some sites atleast try to counter their bias while others embrace it. These things matter. It’s not binary.
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Sure, but you find out about things hours days or even weeks after they happen.
I’d read more articles if they weren’t paywalled.
APNews.com, relatively low bias, no paywall.
Try explaining that to a rightist, though. It’s not right-wing propaganda, therefore it is left-wing propaganda. 😔
Reuters is also good and less USA Centric (at least for their notifications) which is a good thing for me because I am not from the USA, but AP is excellent too). I don’t think you can even disable USA news in your “interests” with AP.
Both Reuters and AP are news agencies that sell news (and stuff like photos) to other news companies. So it’s very likely that everyone here has read at least some content from them.
Both are also often regarded as among the most reliable and least biased news sources available. AFP is also in that group.
Yes agreed, Reuters is my other go-to. Both great options in a sea of disinformation.
I use 1440, which sums up daily news in a fact-based way and leaves out all opinion. It’s magical. It takes 10 minutes to read and I’m not bombarded by why “libtards are destroying america” or why “this ties back to trump destroying democracy” somehow.
Highly recommend it for daily news.
For me it’s RSS, Lemmy, and suprisingly YouTube as I can get the major news sources( eg BBC, CNN, FT, DT, MSNBC) chunked up into specific topics so I don’t have to sit through a bunch of garbage to get to the topics I care about. And I get it from more sources.
That’s how I get my news. I visit the Finnish equivalence of BBC once or twice a day and that’s my news diet. If they don’t report on it, I don’t need to know. Something like what a VOX journalist thinks about Twitter I couldn’t care less so I don’t even bother reading it. I’m proudly unaware of most of the things that non-serious news organizations report on.
Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.
This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.
That’s not my point. What I’m saying is that I knowingly limit my news diet to what is the most important/interesting and this is neither so I’m not bothering my mind with it. I don’t need to know and not knowing has zero effect on my life.
A few months back, i subscribed to the news aggregator Ground News. Although there are more expensive options, i pay about $6/year and I love it. You get news stories from lots of different sites and gives you a good idea of biases. I highly recommend it!
I started building an aggregator “start page” that has become my new news homepage - https://s.marko.tech - just to solve this problem
Cool. Is there a guide to using it? A way to customize feeds, etc?
yea definitel! - working on a site for that with docs etc, prolly a week or two - currently rebuilding the user settings / models - just a preview till then ^^
Watching CSPAN is weird now. It used to be more boring but some the more recent ones have felt I was watching a behind the scenes show where each person was saying things so perfectly crafted for sound bites they seem incongruent with what someone else would say.
The dark forest of the Internet is driving this migration of human Internet traffic. It is not a fault but rather a result.
Honestly I think a big part of people looking at headlines and pictures is closely related to people’s attention span. Why read many words when less is better. Those same people can’t hold conversations for more than a minute or two on the subject then it spirals into speculations which is where the misinformation starts to take place. Society is bombarded with so much information hour by hour people don’t want to miss anything so they skim through an immense amount of partial information. It’s wild and I’m guilty of it myself so I’m in no place to speak ill of anyone.
I highly prefer getting my news from independent journalists/investigators. You think everyone reading the same news sites is going to be better for groupthink?!
None of your independent journalists / investigators are independent.
Right, news corporations owned by oligarchs are for more independent. of course, how silly of me
You’re going to have to tell me what oligarchs own NPR, C-span, and the associated press
I see, let’s just all get our news from 3 sources. That’ll definitely help with the groupthink
I think you might be an idiot my man.
Wow you get backed into a corner and resort to middle school name calling. Like, maybe you need to get out of your comfort zone. Maybe you need to put on your big boy pants and accept that your original premise is incoherent
Why go to propaganda source
I mean it was never actually a good place for news, aside from the top five trending stories, if you wanted infinite bad takes on them.
You could follow journalists you like or outlets though
I used to get all my news from Reddit and I, unfortunately, fell into the habit of reading just the headline and then comments. After quitting I started looking for an healthy replacement to my news fix. I looked at many different RSS apps but many of them had monthly fees or the interface just sucked. Eventually I found an amazing one (iOS only) called feeeed that has been incredible. It’s free, no in-app purchases or ads, lovely interface, a simple reader mode, dark mode, and more. I really recommend it for anyone trying to quit Twitter/Reddit for news.
I just read this headline first and your comment second. Yikes. Guilty.
I thought you said news. This just looks like spam?
Yeah sorry, my subscriptions aren’t the best example of the content you can subscribe to. I mostly follow tech news and deals. My intent with the screenshot was to showcase the general layout of the app. You can subscribe to any RSS feed you want though, like traditional news sources about non-tech things.
Here’s an example of what that could look like (I made a folder with 3 traditional news sources and pinned it to the bottom nav bar):
I just gave it a whirl out of curiosity. It’s kind of garbage in, garbage out. Subscribe to good RSS news feeds, and you get good stuff. Subscribe to Gizmodo blog spam, and you get blog spam.
I remember when Reddit was consistently two to three days ahead of the news cycle. Same for Fark
Thanks Aaron Swartz! Reddit might not be working out but RSS has the staying power.
I used to use Twitter as a way of directly following a few sources of news. Follow NPR, BBS, Reuters, Etc. I don’t know anyone who expected to learn of news from “the algorithm”. That’s still true today. Expect to get fed news from whatever is trending and you’ll be bamboozled, fed useless stories a day propaganda.
Some of these sources can instead be snagged from RSS feeds and Mastodon and besides official apps, those are much better ways to follow news and always have been.
I did find some reliable sources on aggregators like flipboard, but setting aside the best way to follow the news responsibly is still directly following them via browser links and collections. The other risk is following too many things, to the point of obsessing over them. So I decided to give myself a number of good articles instead, and go by quality. I am out of the loop when it comes to social media trends, but it’s not a bad thing.
I first saw it on YouTube when a local TV station posted the raw video.
I wasn’t looking at any other media at the time.
I saw it on TikTok…
My family sent me TikTok’s. I rarely use it, but have it installed for this purpose.
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Are you thinking of a timeshare? I know some people who love having an HOA take care of all their shit for them
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I wouldn’t went another HOA home, but I know people who like them, small community pool, lawn service, etc. My experience went downhill with the “nextdoor” app and neighbors with too much time.
I was reading an article the other day about a couple who bought an ocean view home to retire.
It was perfect, but the neighbours driveway ran along the beach between their home and the beach - and they thought it would be nice to have a garden there instead… so they spoke to their new neighbour about maybe buying the land for the driveway, and selling him an equal sized strip of land on the other side of their property. Basically, no change to their neighbour’s home at all - but the neighbour’s driveway would go between two houses instead of along the beach.
All perfectly reasonable, but somehow it fell to shit when the neighbour… turned out to be a nutcase and bought two huge rusty shipping containers, an old bulldozer, cars that had been crashed, etc and dumped all of them along his driveway right next to their house. And when they complained, he added huge a canvas tarp sections between all that mess and the ocean. So now they can’t even see the ocean at all from their home - all they can see is a huge white wall and a bunch of rusty old crap along their fence line.
If they were in a HOA… they would be able to force him to remove all of that junk. But they’re not, so there’s nothing they can do. They tried taking it to court, but the judge said “yeah, he’s obviously an asshole… but it’s his land. He is allowed to have shipping containers and ruined cars on his land”.
If you’re in a HOA, you might occasionally be forced to do something you’d rather not do. But you will never have to deal with totally unreasonable neighbours like that example. Living in a HOA definitely isn’t something I’d want - but I can see why some people like them.
But anyway… I fail to see how that is any way like X. If anything X is exactly the opposite of a HOA… it’s like buying a house in a suburb that’s full of trolls and assholes. A “HOA” social network is a place where everyone is boring and if you’re not boring, you get kicked out.
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Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news.
the fuck ? No it never was, the finest info you ever could find there was thinly veiled holocaust denial ? If journalists really think fucking twitter was ever an important source of news that explain the downfall of journalism
What are you talking about? It was the go-to app for journalists for a decade. They could live report from events in a simple, chronological thread, or collect eye witness reports by quote tweeting personal accounts. I followed the Charlottesville and January 6th riots in real time by reading journalists threads. There was a lot of trival or even harmful bullshit on Twitter, but the way journalists used it was a huge positive.
