On his blog, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, explains how social media - particularly Twitter - 'throttles' news they don't want disseminated, or that offends against their particular world view. He calls it 'The Social Media Hive Mind'.
This morning I tweeted a link to a great video that describes in detail how Twitter “throttles” the tweets of any content that disagrees with their political views. The video describes how Twitter gives a fake message that some tweets are no longer available, to discourage you from clicking to them. The tweets still exist, and you can access them by directly clicking the links in the tweets, but most people would not think to do that.
If you don’t think that’s a real thing, here’s my tweet about the video. They did it to me. And this is common for my tweets about Trump or climate science. They throttle me to prevent them from going viral. And it only happens with certain types of content.
There's more at the link.
Scott links to this video, which explains things in more detail. LANGUAGE ALERT - it's very profane, with lots of four-letter words flying around. I almost decided not to embed it here, because I try to keep this blog family-friendly, but the subject's important enough that I decided to go ahead, albeit with a warning flag. I highly recommend watching this, to learn how social views are imposed and/or censored by most of the major media companies out there.
That's happening even more since President Trump's election. All the major social media companies, without any exception of which I'm aware, are doing this. That's one reason why my only social media account (apart from this blog) is at Gab, a recent startup which explicitly promises not to censor anything or anybody, leaving it up to the individual user to decide (and control) for themselves what they'd like to see or hear. For that reason, I recommend Gab as a Twitter replacement.
Peter
9 comments:
Yep, lots of 'hidden' algorithms run in the back office. One of many reasons I don't use Twitter or any of the other stuff out there. Facebook only to put out book related stuff and blog links. And the blog.
That's why I closed my Twitter account years ago.
The thing they did to me is what I'm calling "Unthreading" where your comments are converted to stand alone tweets. I was in a thread spawned by some tweet about terrorism or the temporary travel ban by Justin Trudeau. Some twit said there was no Terrorism in Canada, and I pointed out the guy who attacked the parliament and was taken down by the sergeant-at-arms. That tweet got thousands of impressions and a fair number of replies, and a couple of conversations spawned from it. A couple of days later, if you click on any of those tweets, it doesn't appear in a thread. It still SAYS it was a reply to someone at the top, and it still has a number next to the reply arrow that says it was replied to, but every single one of them was broken out of the threading, which means, of course, nobody will see them.
Google has been doing this for years and years.
I hope you understand that Facebook does so as well. And don't leave out Macroslopt and Crapple. They all love them some One World Government, agree how to get there, and use their power to insure that march continues unimpeded.
Like many others, I no longer participate in any of the so-called social media, as they lost my trust years ago.
If I want or need to talk to one of my friends, I pick up the phone and call them, or make arrangements to meet.
Re that GAB reference. Went to sign up and found I am ONLY number 450774 on the waiting list. Should get an account around the time of my funeral.
The GAB waiting list moves fast, but if you are anxious, email me at actual.lpdbw -at- gmail dot com and I'll send you one of my invitations.
Update re GAB.
Well... Talk about impressive. Am now a member. lpdbw was correct.
Another side of this, which has been documented, is that social media sites try to feed you stories that you're going to click on - and that's decided based on what else you've clicked on. It quickly becomes that your "news feed" is turned into an echo chamber. Lefties get only lefty news; righties get only righty news. That increases the isolation in society.
While I'm thankful the days of the three networks deciding what we need to know are over, what we have now is two different groups stories seen by two different groups of people. If you talk to a lefty and mention a story everyone on the right knows about, odds are they probably never have heard about it and will think you're crazy. Same goes for lefties telling a right-leaning person about a story only appearing in "their" media. I've seen this done as an experiment and it's almost funny.
Post a Comment