The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
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”
The only reason I had a Twitter account was because there was an emergency event in my local area and Twitter was the one place I could get information about it right now. There were locals sharing what they knew, emergency services telling people what measures needed to be taken where, and journalists on the ground saying what they knew in real time. It was invaluable.
When I left Twitter, that ability to follow breaking news as it happens was the thing I was afraid I'd miss out on most. It's bittersweet to find out that I didn't need to worry about that after all.
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 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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The same conspiracy-theory-peddling personalities who spammed X with posts claiming that Tuesday’s Baltimore bridge collapse was a deliberate attack have also called mass shootings “false flag” events and denied basic facts about the Covid-19 pandemic.
A Florida Republican running for Congress blamed “DEI” for the bridge collapse as racist comments about immigration and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott circulated among the far right.
As conspiracy theorists compete for attention in the wake of a tragedy, others seek engagement through dubious expertise, juicy speculation, or stolen video clips.
The boundary between conspiracy theory and engagement bait is permeable; unfounded and provoking posts often outpace the trickle of verified information that follows any sort of major breaking news event.
First, it was happening after a few big shifts in what the internet even is, as Twitter, once a go-to space for following breaking news events, became an Elon Musk-owned factory for verified accounts with bad ideas, while generative AI tools have superpowered grifters wanting to make plausible text and visual fabrications.
Being online during a tragic event is full of consequential nonsense like this, ideas and conspiracy theories that are inane enough to fall into the fog of Poe’s Law and yet harmful to actual people and painful to see in particular when it’s your community being turned into views.
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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.
Tbf, I saw the early videos coming from X (and I'm not on X)
Thankfully Mastodon seems to be doing a good job at providing news like this for me. I first saw it the morning it happened because I had to approve the trending link that a lot of people were posting.