Cut Twitter some slack (and stop getting your news from social media).
“If you don’t read the news, you’re uninformed. If you do read the news you’re misinformed” — Mark Twain
In an interview on the podcast The Daily, creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, equated the social media platform to a “wall”. He continued his analogy, stating that the wall was something that anyone could write on, and anyone could read.
That was the beauty and purpose of it. The unfettered access. The unflitered response. An exercise in active participation unlike anything in the history of communication.
Recently, Twitter has come under attack for limiting the circulation of articles they deem to be false or inaccurate. A recent example is the speculation behind Hunter Biden’s emails. This form of unsolicited censorship is not uncommon on social media cites. Depending on who you ask Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram either censor too much, or too little of the information circulating on their platforms.
I offer this easily expressible sentiment that can help solve the problem of social media censorship.
For the love of God.
Stop.
Using.
Social media platforms.
To get.
Your news.
Or, at the very least, stop blaming them for giving you fake news.
Let me explain why.
Credible Sources
Rule #1 of writing; cite your sources. It’s the first thing you get told when you start university English. You have to demonstrate where the information came from, that the source is credible and that the information is relevant. Otherwise, your prof will uncap that red pen and bloody your paper until it looks like the set of a Saw movie.
What constitutes a credible source?
Academic articles, news articles, quotes from experts, these are the cream of the crop.
You know what isn’t?
A tweet.
Even if it came from an expert. And that’s not Twitter’s fault. Or the experts. It’s the reality of the platform.
From the words of the founder and CEO, Twitter was designed to be a wall anyone could write on. Some parts of that wall have been filled with excellent information. Well thought out, well researched, intelligent, profound insights, observations and facts.
Other parts, are akin to high-school bathroom stalls.
That doesn't make the expert less credible. It does ruin the credibility of their tweets.
The tough part about building a credible reputation is it takes a long time to build, and a lot less time to ruin.
You can’t cite an Instagram story, regardless of who’s account or the quality of the message, and expect it to have anymore credibility than a Thirst Trap’s Belfie (bum selfie).
I’m not nocking Insta Thots. I’m sure there are plenty of intelligent ones out there. You can be an expert in your chosen field and still have nice cheeks. That’s allowed.
But if a cite, like Instagram, piles up too much bullshit along with the expert advice, it can’t be regarded as a liable source.
Using a tweet as source material is like calling an expert medical witness to the stand, and finding out he considers vaccines to be the cause autism and believes tide pods were part of a nutritious, balanced breakfast.
The Prose
280 isn’t enough characters to effectively communicated pertinent information. We’ve gotten good, I’ll give us that, but good isn’t good enough, especially when it comes to vitally important subject matter.
Why limit your ability to express and comprehend to an arbitraty number of characters? I know that “writing is easy, all you have to do is cross out the wrong words” — Mark Twain, but we aren’t all so gifted. We can’t afford to shed our verbal baggage.
We haven’t advanced the news coverage quality by dropping the word count. Our economical distribution of letters isn’t the result of our ingenious. It’s the lowering of a standard set by “apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master” — Ernest Hemingway
We’re cognizant of the time it takes to write and read, so we completely disregard entire dimensions, people and paragraphs from a story as if it’s a demonstration of proficiency.
It isn’t.
“it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto- language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.” — Hank Moody, Californication
It’s neglect.
Systemic syllable minimalism.
The Pro’s
What everyone seems to be ignoring, regarding the conversation of platform censorship, is that a lot of these discussions occur after a professional news outlet makes a mistake.
The Hunter Biden email misinformation spread as a result of a New York Post article that was subsequently picked up and distributed by multiple sources.
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” — Winston Churchill
Yet Twitter gets bashed for discouraging its spread while Youtube and Facebook get bashed for allowing it.
AOC makes mince meat out of Zuckerberg and the actual professionals who ran the news coverage get a pass because we’re all mad that a platform ,designed to be unconventionally democratic, is monitoring its content.
Mistakes happen. Redactions exist for a reason. The unfortunate reality of modern news coverage is if you’re not first, you’re last. Hold news publications accountable, but give them a break. Give Twitter a break.
Twitter was never meant to fact check the accuracy of its information, it was meant to contain what you wrote. Accurate or not, the beauty is in the quantity of the content, not (heaven forbid) its quality.
So let’s quit pointing our fingers at social media cites and “silicon valley bilionares”. That’s assanine.
Instead, learn what every first year English student is taught on the first day of class and actually read. Judge the credibility of the source. Take some responsibility for your brain.
And pick up a fucking news paper.
