It's the CB radio of social media and I find huge value in that.
Amazing analogy, far better than any other metaphor I've previously heard applied to Twitter
Take for instance the recent tornado we had off the Oregon coast. I had video/pictures/reports showing up even ahead of the local NOAA site or google news.
Granted, it was the first time I ever went to Twitter for something like this, but I knew that it was /the/ place for the most up to date information.
And I try to avoid Twitter as much as possible, too annoying to read in there.
Generally speaking, it's great for aggregating witness accounts of a real-time event that's going on.
The person you replied to was responding to the idea that Twitter is a good source of news.
We had that. It's called Usenet and IRC.
Look up "eternal September" if you want to understand the demographic of Usenet...
The skill (and motivation) gap between using something like IRC and Twitter is massive.
Usenet, IRC, Twitter, neither is really important for anyone besides are rather limited subsection of the general population.
You might not know people personally, but certainly you're aware of Twitter's role in the Arab Spring. And you've heard of Black Twitter, right?
I had 12000 followers for a twitter account about a specific football club - a specific subsection but not a technical or media one.
I used to randomly look at my followers and while many were "highly invested tech and media people" - the majority were just people who wanted to stay up to date (in particular I used to live-tweet during games which lots of people really enjoyed).
That was a few years ago though - personally I rarely use Twitter any more.
Twitter also very selectively enforces rules about what it judges as hate speech and abuse. Certain people can repeatedly tweet "kill all police", or advocate jihad, or advocate violence towards those who support a particular political candidate, but the moment anyone does even a fraction of the same towards any group that Twitter is in bed with, that person gets shadow banned or permabanned. Note: I'm not advocating hate speech, merely pointing out that Twitter allows it more often than not when it aligns with their politics.
Twitter had a chance to be a platform for open discussion, but its brownshirt employees chose to make it a censorship shithole. Never-turned-a-profit Twitter can go fuck itself – it's not essential and highly filtered.
Last time it was only left wing extremists...
Disclaimer: I'm in the worst spot, since I'm right in the centre, so both leftists and rightists can hate on me all day
The problem is, that is not Twitter(the company)'s goal. For the last several years, their main focus, through user complaints, has been to limit the unfettered flow of information, to produce curated feeds, etc. This is quickly converging with Facebook functionality. A recent major development (from outside Twitter itself) has been the introduction of blocklists, directly contradicting the author's utopia of "incorrect tweet followed by a correction". Meanwhile, Twitter has been introducing similar features for "celebrity" accounts.
Given that the article's stated reason for saving Twitter does not align with the company's goals, the only way to save it would be to get rid of the company currently managing it. However, I don't see any other company actually looking to maintain the model described in the article. News sites are shutting down comments sections, removing the possibility of corrections. College campuses, normally a bastion of open debate and conversation, are looking more and more into punishing "hateful" speech and creating "safe spaces". Social media is heavily invested into curation.
The article states "Twitter must be saved". By who? Even Twitter itself does not want Twitter to remain the way the article writer envisions it, and the other major actors are tripping over themselves to go faster than in the opposite direction.
There are in fact places dedicated to disseminating information with as little filter as possible, unlike Twitter. Off the top of my head, I can think of liveleak and 4chan. Neither of them is extremely popular, and 4chan has an awful reputation. I'm surprised that the author is not extending their support to them, instead of trying to support a company that is actively trying to run away from his vision.
https://about.twitter.com/safety/council
After a cursory glance (it's a long list) I don't think any of the organisations strike me as particularly left wing, certainly not in the traditional economic sense.
Unless you can meet the source in person every time you need a medium to get information, and Twitter serves that purpose.
Twitter doesn't meet that standard.
What did we actually do before Twitter? There was a shooting at my university's library late at night a few years back and I only found out about it because of Twitter. I know about 50 people that were actually physically in the library at the time and a handful of them were live-tweeting. I not only knew what was going on, and that they were safe, I was warned not to go about 200m south at the moment (which happened to be the plan, the bar my SO and I were going to was on the opposite side of campus).
When I looked the next morning, there was one (1) article about it on a local website and nothing in national or regional media. Later that afternoon a ton of info came out and hit the media, but until then, there really wasn't anything. That showed me the power of Twitter (however stupid and cliche I sound saying that [look typing?]).
Just because something isn't necessary to survive as a human being, or to allow society to function properly, doesn't mean it shouldn't be fought for (again, not necessarily saying Twitter as a company, but the idea of a social network that allows for immediate sharing of ideas and news) or at the very least appreciated.
Do you not see the utility or are you just being a cynic?
It's the easiest way for a random person to hold their own press conference. People can easily ask short questions, and get short answers. All from their phone
The Internet serves that purpose. You don't need Twitter, there's a ton of other ways to get news directly from the source. If you're arguing that "Twitter makes it visible", then yes, if you follow the right people or other share you interests, but in that case even Facebook would work.
I don't know about "human", but being "biased" is something like "consistently straying from the truth in spite of available information", but there's nothing right there that says that everyone must be biased. In so far as someone is biased, they cannot be free from their "own biases" only in the same sense that I cannot think anyone's thoughts but my own. Still, nothing stops them from trying to improve.
Now, if you mean that we cannot avoid living in some particular information bubble, that's not a bias (at least in the psychological sense). That's an issue of incomplete information.
of course, thats my biased opinion.
So, your statement, "Twitter isn't public discussion, unless you consider the following examples of discussion:", does not follow. You also say that "unless you consider" the aforementioned quotations to be public discussion, you therefore can not possibly view Twitter as a tool for public discussion, which is a false dilemma.
I agree with your last line though about Twitter being censored in a similar fashion to Facebook.
All you have to do to confirm this is to visit their homepage and see all the left wing political ideology on it day in and day out.
I haven't seen anything on the Clinton email saga that has dragged on for months now and not a peep on the home page about the rising costs of the ACA premiums. Nope, just love and happiness about having the first female president. Besides that, it was a constant stream of Trump hit pieces from traditional Liberal newspapers and media outlets. It's like they didn't even try to be objective.
If you want to make your platform about public discussion, then maybe you aught to give a slightly more balanced view then the completely slanted, partisan garbage you post on your homepage. It might just give the appearance that you see things in a slightly more objective light.
That's not to say that Twitter was useful for wikileaks, but I don't believe that it was instrumental.
And yet it is Twitter that has reaffirmed itself as the most powerful antidote to Facebook’s algorithm: misinformation certainly spreads via a tweet, but truth follows unusually quickly; thanks to the power of retweets and quoted tweets, both are far more inescapable than they are on Facebook.
What is the evidence of this? Even if "truth" follows misinformation on Twitter, there's so much noise, how do you find it?
that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty,
Twitter isn't public discussion, unless you consider the following examples of discussion:
Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up! - Trump
Delete your account. - Clinton
Riveting.
Don't tell me that Twitter is a vital part of discussion when public discussion has gotten worse over the past 9 years. This is a long blog post and only the last few paragraphs even begin to touch on "why Twitter must be saved", but there's not arguments beyond the sentimental.
Twitter has existed for less than a decade and society got along just fine without it. It's not as important as people think it is. The author is also absolutely wrong if they believe that Twitter isn't censored similarly to FB.