A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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The really stupid thing is that even though I ditched Twitter long before Elon bought it and started turning it into a dumpster fire it still gets shoved in my face constantly because shitty "journalists" continually link and quote some dumb random on there and spin whatever their dumb ass says into "people are saying/doing/boycotting/protesting/etc etc etc ad nauseum..."
I'm really sick of it.
I'm not on X so why are you yelling at me without checking your facts? Spread misinformation much!?
Hah?
Arguably, twitter has more users, so more opportunities to produce and spread lies.
I agree it's got more lies than truth social based on its number of users, but It also has the best opportunity for unregulated truths. I think in order to have a platform we can be sure holds the truth, unfortunately, you're going to open the doors to untruths, too. There is no good without letting in some bad, because in order to force good, you have to become authoritarian, and authoritarian spaces are easily manipulated with no way for us to figure out if it's true or not.
So, I'll stay on X/Twitter for now.
Link mastadon
Isn't Mastadon more a loose conglomeration of independent self-hosted instances? Sort of the Lemmy to Twitter's Reddit? Might be good to cite a few high quality Mastadon instances than just point people to "Mastadon" as a generic source.
Also should note that there's still the Garbage-In / Garbage-Out problem. Mastadon is only as good as its user base. Twitter's admin went from bad to nightmarish under Elon, but it was still choke full of annoying, manipulative bullshit. Mastadon has all the same problems, just on a smaller scale because of its lighter userbase. Get the environment up to 400M users and you're going to see the exact same basket of incentives for manipulation and abuse.
Hell, just look at Threads. Same exact problems, just skewed towards Facebook friendly corporate influencers rather than Twitter friendly Groypers.
Even worse is that Twitter/X still has an air of mainstream legitimacy since others built it into a household name before musk decided to vaporize billions of dollars to be able to enshittify it.
It was never a good platform. Mainstream media just liked it because they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying "thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem". Their audience didn't realize that those thousands is the same as one belligerent drunk at a bar who won't shut up.
A lot of creators are still there, and outright dismissed even alternatives like bluesky, let alone Mastodon, which many of them call a "tech-bro infested hellscape" (most of the techbros moved back to Xitter the moment thez were allowed to say the N-word).
I'm not parasocial to follow creators on twitter. I'd like it if they'd post their schedule to an RSS feed, but the lack of that isn't enough for make a twitter account.
they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”
A lot of the time they don't put any number on the people, and then it turns out they wrote a whole-ass article on what dozens of people on twitter are saying.
But we're there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.
You could always NOT use social media as a news source. Short form media is just ripe for manipulation.
Yeah I was never really a user, or considered it particularly good. But I think the mainstream legitimacy was definitely there. Any company, media personality, celebrity, brand, etc was pretty much expected to have a presence there, and you’d see their @usernames displayed prominently even outside Twitter. Or even just the little bird icon so you knew to look for them there.
So people should switch to truth social?
Less lies overall due to a smaller userbase, but more lies per post
As mediocre as Twitter is these days, I'm pretty fucking sure there are more lies in Truth Social.
Twitter has 150x more active users. Not only are there more liars, but lies spread farther and faster.
Truth Social is just Trump's uncensorable mouthpiece. Name a single prominent account on Truth Social that isn't Trump...
Name a single prominent account on Truth Social that isn’t Trump…
I think its got at least a couple of Congresspeople / Gubernatorial accounts on it. There are lots of prominent names within MAGA world (Laura Loomer, Michelle Malkin, etc). Also, there's whatever madman is still posting under Herman Cain's account.
I think the lies per person are probably higher, but the total number of lies might be fewer.
I think the OP is factoring in number of users. Lies that no one sees don't matter as much.
Yeah it's all about orders of magnitude. X has over 100 million daily users while Truth Social has around half a million (and that's the highest estimate I saw). Even if only one percent of X users are spreading misinformation that's more users than if everyone on Truth Social is spreading misinformation.
More in proportion, but less in actual numbers
I won’t even click links there anymore. No traffic if I can help it.
I used to click breaking news to see what others were saying, then they did the "you have to create an account to see this" and all the sudden, I didn't care anymore.
There's a bot that just reposts X posts to Lemmy; so much, it is essentially just spam.
Thank god for the ability to block accounts and communities.
But how do we know this statistic is not fake news too?
X probably has far more traffic. I don't find it particularly hard to believe that there is a higher quantity of misinformation there. Maybe not a higher concentration though.
I had a 2fa on shitter and then I factory reset my phone and the 2fa app stored shit locally, so all of my 2fas were gone. One of them was shitter. Tried to log in, but they wanted me to call them and go through hoops and loops to retrieve my account. It was for the better. I let it go for good. It has absolutely nothing anyway, I was just a lurker. Fuck Elon.
No shit right?
All levels of government need to stop using that shit.
I don’t want to be forced to sign up to a man-child’s vanity project so I can get updates on emergencies.
The government using it for bulletins, especially for emergency announcements, is such ridiculous bullshit. Like what in the actual fuck?
There is literally no reason this can't be done with an RSS feed which is an open standard that has been around since 1999.
The reason is because average people don't know anything that some company didn't benefit from teaching them. So, most people don't know what the fuck RSS is.
I work in local government. We post everywhere Neenah the information is important. Yeah, we have our own self-hosted feed, and we have a grand total of 7 non-employee/non-official subscribers versus thousands on Twitter and Facebook.
We go where the people are.
And it's easier than ever before for governments to host their own Mastodon instance on their government domain.
Which, to be clear, can also be followed without an account by just using the RSS feed of it.
It drives me nuts that it’s used for diplomacy too.
Not in relative terms - 100% is a rough percentage to top.:-P
As much as I hate reddit users, x users are by far worse. Judgement passed.