- cross-posted to:
- news
- cross-posted to:
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According to CNN, X is the most ideologically balanced of the social media platforms (party affiliation stats are at 1:25).
I’m not saying that this makes X good, I’m saying it makes it interesting. Most social media sites lean left of center or very hard to the right, yet X seems to have found a balance. Or maybe it’s in transition into being a far right platform, idk, but at least as of this moment, it’s pretty balanced. Users are down, but it seems the current userbase is more balanced than it was.
That has little to do with whether X is “toxic,” but I do think it’s an interesting statistic to discuss.
I think this whole concept speaks to how differently we all use social networks. For some, it’s a passive news source. For others, it’s entertainment. For others, it’s a place to be social.
Ideological balance is the least important feature for me in picking a social network. I’m there to joke around and talk to interesting people. In real life, my friends and I don’t go “You know what bar we should go to? That new ideologically balanced one down on 2nd St.” (and then my horny friend says we should go to the bar where he met a hot girl once and we end up at TikTok1, AGAIN).
1 That’s a joke. I’m 40 and my friends pick bars based on proximity, beer selection, and how long they have the baby sitter for.
I’m more interested in ideological balance, because I’m looking for social media to curate news sources for me. If all I’m getting is conservative or progressive articles, it’s not doing its job.
I had a pretty good setup on Reddit with just the right subs to get a good ideological balance (despite Reddit being pretty left leaning), but I bailed when they pulled the API BS and I’m staying away due to their data harvesting. Lemmy is much worse than Reddit as far as bias goes, but it’s better than nothing I suppose. I’ve had to actually go back and follow news sources to rebalance my media consumption, which is a pain because there’s so much BS on news sites.
I don’t want to be social, and if I want entertainment, I’ll play video games or watch a movie/TV show. I just want to stay informed and hear other peoples’ takes on current events, ideally from a diverse set of perspectives. And yet, my main options are left wing or right wing sources, both of whom will misrepresent stuff and nobody will correct them.
I’m probably not going back to Twitter/X because I hate the format, but I am happy to see that at least someone thinks it’s somewhat balanced. I’m working on my own Reddit/Lemmy alternative with the express goal to make it easier to get a balanced feed, so hopefully some day I’ll be able to eat my cake and have it too.
“Journalists flock to yet another proprietary, commercial platform as the last becomes increasingly ‘toxic’ for reasons unknown.”
How many more times am I going to see this same title before X implodes?
Can it implode? Leon can just keep burning money to keep it alive. It’s going to probably be funded by the government soon anyway.
I highly doubt it’ll ever be funded by the government.
It wouldn’t surprise me. He just partners with Truth Social and says that TS and Xitter will be the new government communication method and should be funded by the government. Probably will say it’s more efficient or something.
This is going to be a corruption free for all.
Sure, but there are all kinds of issue with that. First, Trump has significant investments in TS, so having the government fund that would be a massive conflict of interest. Second, conservatives love to rail on places like NPR getting public funding, and funding X is a bit too much of an about-face IMO.
You may be right, but I think it’s more likely than say deporting 10 million immigrants, or cutting spending by more than discretionary spending, or a number of things that people think are likely to happen. It’s not like conservative rags are actually going to tell their readers the truth anyway.
People thought the first Trump presidency was a politically divided time, but maybe we’re now entering an even more divided time, given that social media is now fragmenting along political lines, more prominently than it did before.
I’m glad to see Twitter/X collapsing if only to add to Musk’s problems, but at the same time just changing the corporate logo over the outhouse doesn’t make it smell any better. It’s a better place, but I’m sure it’s temporary, the same people/bots/trolls will just migrate right along with the rest of them.
The difference being that Bluesky has very robust block lists which you can subscribe to to remove these accounts for you.
This seems fine, so long as the journos remember how to pull up stakes once a platform decays. I hope they learn a lesson about the importance of owning your own audience, follower lists, etc.
/glances at substack
I hope that too. It would be nice.
As much as I don’t believe bsky will be any different, and won’t join it myself, the momentum is there. Took a little longer than it should have but the tipping point is here and we should all relish in the bird’s passing.
The bird died years ago. Now we wait for the death of a letter.
I think bluesky and twitter will become politically divided and become their respective echo chamber rather than Twitter going out of fashion.
Overall the discourse quality will go down at both places.
My bet is that Truth Social buys Twitter in an all-share deal, simultaneously enriching Trump and providing liquidity to Musk.
A lot of people exist on twitter because their favorite celebrity or news cite or company exists on there. The problem is that the lefties and LGBTQ folk create a ton of twitters content and are also a huge majority of those celebrities.
So while I think twitter will become a sort of right wing cesspool, BlueSky will be much different. Especially since BS has the ability to essentially build your own echo chamber on purpose. Which I actually think is fine because some of the echo chambers I’d compare to the instances on here that try to keep people safe and civil like beehaw. But the moment bluesky keeps getting celebs and organizations to make the swap, it’s all over for twitter. There is a critical mass there that will migrate regardless and honestly the echo chamber design means right wing folk would also do well on the platform if they know what they’re doing.
While I would love people to come over to mastodon (or mastodon adjacent) I personally think this is a step in the right direction. Having more fediverse adjacent platforms makes it easier for people to communicate in a much less platform specific conglomeration.
Mastodon is broken as fuck for me. I don’t know if it’s my instance, or the country I’m in, or what. The app mostly just spins and hangs. It’s been like this for a year. I’ve never been able to see who other people are following, which is something I like to do to discover new content. I’ve never been able to view videos that people post. I joined in 2020 and I’m probably just going to delete my account.
journalists flocking to a site built on the backs of trans people and they’ll still refuse to hire/interview trans people when talking about trans issues.
I’m not serially online enough to understand what you mean, can you expand on this?
To call hate speech and harassment “toxicity” downplays both issues.
Wtf is “hate speech”?
A: whatever those in control decide it is, used as a means of suppressing dissent.
Just think about that for a bit. What if I controlled Bluesky and decided your description of “toxicity” was hate speech?
The definition as taken to the courts in the USA is:
“Hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color, sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin.”
It has more rigorous legal definitions in many other jurisdictions where hate speech is explicitly illegal.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-319.html
Canada for example.
You characterizing toxicity and hate speech as being related isn’t a position taken even remotely seriously by anyone who actually write laws on the subject, and many have been written across the world.
Broadly speaking, hate speech isn’t “being mean” in any legal definition… But that is what right-wing talking heads like to strawman it as.
“Hate speech” is defined and outlawed by countries around the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country
Threatening people based on their religion, race or other attributes is not dissent.
Wtf is “hate speech”?
Look it up.
Look up “woke”, “liberal”, ”facism”
Or simply the evolution of “gay”
I know values and meanings that i have come to understand and relate to those respective words. But you wont find a definite definition online.
For every honest academic attempt there is a bad faith troll. Neither actually embodies a literary authority to enforce a meaning to words.
Language is an emergent construct based on human interactions, all of us that use words are maintaining that fickle construct it in real time. Good and bad actors alike.
You’re reading too much into my “look it up”. It was basically “I’m not wasting my time with your rhetorical question”.
I’m aware of what you’re explaining (semantic drift + polysemy), however neither is relevant here.
deleted by creator
Hahaha, they’re just now noticing? Rich.
And how will Bkuesky be any different? It won’t.
Bluesky has far more robust tools for blocking bad actors. You can subscribe to auto updating block lists which take these people off your feed.
You’re measuring Bluesky with a different measuring stick than they are.
You’re measuring it with the “This is decentralized, and therefore not connected to corporate interests, and never can be” stick.
These journalists WORK FOR the corporate interests you left twitter (or maybe never had an account) over. They are measuring the stick by “These current users are just MAGA users in a cult”.
As long as Bluesky doesn’t start shifting right wing MAGA, it IS different for their purposes. It’s just their purposes are not YOUR purposes, and therefore they can still say that it’s different, and not have that be a lie. Doesn’t mean it’ll satisfy you any.
Wow, that’s pessimistic
the same level of toxicity that I left reddit for seems to be permeating Lemmy, now.
Maybe, but not unrealistic. Bluesky has already begun their shift toward enshittification, changing their default sorting algorithm to one that favors the quantity of engagement over the quality. Usually when you see a platform making moves that are meant to drive user activity without adding anything substantially positive to the user experience, it’s a sign that they’re about to start monetizing the platform.
Maybe the goal is to get Musk to buy Bluesky and start all over again 🤷
