Maybe this isn't something you believe, but actual adults can have different opinions and then choose not to associate with one another. There's nothing childish about that.
Help me understand, though: what are you actually proposing? That The Guardian, while feeling they can't get their own message out given how Musk runs Twitter, should stay on Twitter? Should anyone disadvantaged by how Twitter is run stay there?
I’m more interested in what it is you’re proposing with your questions. It seems like you’re implying that the way “Musk runs” X would disadvantage media sites like The Guardian operating on their platform.
Normally when I think of passive aggressiveness I think of a contradiction in between what someone says and what they mean or only communicating something negative indirectly rather than directly.
The Guardian is being direct as far as I can tell about what they do not like and why they are leaving.
> It remains to be seen what will happen if Trump goes back to posting on twitter
I have a strong suspicion that he will, but it'll be because "Truth" Social and Xitter have merged. They're pretty much both the same thing now so why not merge? It would also be a way for Musk to pass a lot of $$$ to Trump.
Back then "media" largely consisted of three, soon to be four channels on your analogue TV and a lot of newspapers and magazines. The media was largely passive except for the letters pages, which mostly featured real people, and the likes of "Readers's Wives" which was mostly bollocks (quite literally).
If we look at the newspapers back then: they all had a clear and well known set of biases - political and otherwise.
The Times was Conservative, so was the Torygraph (Telegraph). The Grauniad (Guardian - yes, that one) was unable to employ editors capable of effective proof-reading. The Independent was not really independent and the Sun and Mirror published pictures of young ladies alongside their biting political satire. The Sunday Sport had even more piccies of scantily clad young ladies and was barking mad - "Elvis piloted Lancaster bomber found on Moon".
We also had and still have titles such as "Private Eye", who are generally acknowledged to be proper journo outlets.
The media has always had a bias and it was always accepted that you took multiple papers, and watched the BBC and ITN News, if you wanted to appear to have a balanced view and at least appear to be well informed. Note that we forked out dosh for those papers and the UK TV license fee is not trivial.
Back in the day, I didn't have a bunch of Russians trying to spin crap at my front door, pretending to be Jehovah's Witnesses or double glazing salesmen or my work colleague. They bought peerages and sat in the House of Lords or footie teams, but at least they were mostly at a distance! Nowadays the buggers are trying to hack my telly.
This is a great comment. It was really the same kind of landscape in US media, only without the topless women.
NYT, WaPo, Newsweek et al. could be counted on as being liberal, while Wall Street Journal and the New York Post were popular conservative options. You also had a wide range of commentary on the telly, including Firing Line and the McLaughlin Group.
Journalism should have a bias for the truth. But one political camp has spent decades working the refs, calling truth-telling "bias", and even building parallel media ecosystems that project a message completely detached from factual reality. I don't know how we come back from this.
It will never not be wild to me that vast swathes of the American public consume Fox News as news when Fox itself asserted it was merely "entertainment" in court documents/arguments and all but called their own audience idiots for believing what they say, and they somehow are still operating.
That is commitment to maintaining your echo chamber.
There's no such thing as unbiased media. The inescapabilty of bias isn't a problem - the problems are undue bias, lying about one's bias, and letting your bias erode journalistic integrity.
(edited to add last part about journalistic integrity)
It’s childish antics to attack a media platform for taking a political position, when they also openly and covertly took a political position. It just happened to be the opposite political position.
This. Goddamn am I sick of people claiming bias on a news organization with tacit expectation that somewhere the platonic form of news information exists which is objectively true and unbiased.
It does not exist, it never will exist, and if Serenity has taught us anything, it's that you can't stop the signal, Mal.
wtf. Dictionary.com says "Objective most commonly means not influenced by an individual’s personal viewpoint—unbiased (or at least attempting to be unbiased). It’s often used to describe things like observations, decisions, or reports that are based on an unbiased analysis."
I'm not sure why you quoted it, but "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a joke you make at the expense of right wing people for not believing in reality.
By the way, not knowing the history of the reality thing I looked it up - it came from a Colbert joke about W Bush's popularity https://youtu.be/UwLjK9LFpeo
What they mean is that if you approach some issues with "[no influence] by [your] individual personal viewpoint" you end up running into a leftist or slightly moderate viewpoint.
For example, take climate change. If you come at it looking only at the facts, you'll recognize we need more renewable energy and climate change poses a threat. Donald Trump, to contrast, in intending to put more money on oil and gas and remove subsidies for renewable energy.
Or, if you prefer, the economy. It's more or less undisputed that tariffs will hurt the GDP and overall economy of the US. However, Donald Trump claims tariffs will help the US economy.
Or, perhaps what the GOP has treasured most of all these past few years, the culture war. For example, gender-neutral bathrooms. From a neutral perspective, forcing trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender at birth will backfire tremendously. Instead of having trans women in women's restrooms, now you will have big burly and hairy trans men. Or look at gender affirming care, we have statistics about gender affirming care lowering the risk of suicide. But the right claims gender affirming care causes suicide and has a high regret rate.
Those are just a few examples, but if you look at popular conservative policies and then try to reason about them you kind of hit a wall.
They all are. But they can do something like Firing Line, where people of opposing viewpoints are invited to debate. The editorial board can also hire a cross section of political views.
Journalism’s responsibility is to the truth, not to some perceived notion of fairness. The right in the US has been living in their own reality for a while now. Media does not owe liars any time of day.
Don’t take this to mean the democrats are the left and aren’t guilty of the same thing. They’re also right wing, and they lie, but to a lesser extent.
This lazy "everyone is bias, therefore bias doesn't exist" argument is nonsense, and is just FUD thrown about to cover for extremists when people point out their extremism.
Many news organizations pursue as unbiased a voice as they can. The Guardian is not one of them. Here's an organization attempting an objective rating of media bias, if you're actually interested in the topic: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
That chart doesn't show any one organisation being 'less biased' than any other. It shows every organisation being biased in a different direction. Centrism is no 'less biased' than the far left or the far right.
It only seems reasonable until this thinking eventually gets you to the point where the next platform you choose to leave is called Earth. It's pretty dumb because there is nothing like X at the moment. Just for context, the Guardian had almost 11 million followers on X and Bluesky has only just crossed 15 million total users, of which many signed up months ago when it was opened to the public and never logged back in since again.
And who exactly controls the Earth, such that I would want to leave the platform due to mismanagement?
Also, the "nothing else is like twitter" argument is both wrong (lots of social media platforms are bigger) and irrelevant (it assumes that having something like twitter is a net positive -- the validity of which assumption I am not convinced).
The richest man in the world using his own social media company to get someone elected President so he can benefit personally from writing his own regulations is something EVERYONE should be very VERY concerned about. The US is on the path to Russian style oligarchic kleptocracy.
Generally, when newspapers endorse a candidate that runs on the editorial page.
How did Musk use Twitter to promote his candidate? Was it on whatever the Twitter equivalent of editorial pages are? Was it promoting posts favorable to that candidate in people's feed and/or demoting posts favorable to other candidates?
The discussion in here is infuriatingly childish. Saying a news site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing trolls') soapbox...
As an external observer, it’s all sites working as -ist soapboxes to me. The fact that you call a politically superaffined site “a news site” alone, man. A news site doesn’t promote specific candidates by definition. Seems like some people forget what “news” means.
Saying a leftwing site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing users) soapbox...
It sounds like you're unfamiliar with the split between the news desk and the editorial desk, two separate functions in the same org. Last I checked the Fox News news desk was a pretty reliable source of info. All the editorial programming on the other hand, wackadoodle partisan hackery.
Yes and no. For many decades they only operated in the UK. More recently they have launched digital-only US and Australia editions, whose editors are based in the US and Australia respectively, creating content aimed at each country’s audience using local journalists, but the three editions share content for stories of global significance. But still their HQ is in the UK, and I believe their UK staff and readerships are significantly larger than their US or Australia operations
This is somewhat common for British media groups; the Guardian also has Australian and New Zealand versions, and the BBC has _loads_ of regional versions.
Yes, they are a UK publication. But they cover a lot of US news and have a significant American readership. So, like American newspapers, they have an informed opinion and an audience that wishes to hear that opinion.
That's how newspaper endorsements work. In this case the writer of the endorsement cannot themselves vote, but their opinion can still have weight.
The Economist, another UK-based periodical with a more right-wing stance, explains why it endorses candidates:
Newspapers don't generally do it, but I've never seen it as a matter of avoiding interference. Rather, it's just that we simply don't have much interest one way or the other in most elections. The newspapers don't spend a lot of time covering them and would not consider themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to make an endorsement.
The American election is special, in that it's the "leader of the free world". What we do here affects everybody, in a way that even the leadership of Germany, France, and England doesn't. Perhaps we'd have an opinion about the leadership in Russia or China, but they don't have free elections.
The government should probably refrain from making an endorsement, but if people can't figure out the distinction between a government and a newspaper, that's their own lookout.
Endorsements for political candidates are done via the editorial boards which are different from the newsrooms. The editorial boards of news organizations have always had opinions and publish them as such. There is nothing problematic with this approach.
> There is nothing problematic with this approach.
A. You assume the editorial board does not have a significant influence over the newsrooms. By endorsing a candidate, they demonstrate which direction the pressure on the newsroom is coming from.
B. This was not why freedom of the press was granted. I was not arguing whether it is a good or bad thing now; merely that this was directly opposed to the role envisioned for them.
> This was not why freedom of the press was granted
Not about this specific point but people making these decisions back in the 1700s and 1800s were at least as flawed as us (arguably much more) and made some extremely horrible/stupid choices in hindsight.
Treating them as effectively infallible religious figures is well.. just that.
Especially if we consider that the interpretation of what freedom of speech (and press) meant was extremely narrow by modern standards well into the late 1800s and beyond.
Can you explain further the mechanism to be used for "checking their authority" without contradicting them or calling out their bad behavior? (Either of which is nowadays apparently considered "political opinion".)
I feel like this is a rose tinted view of media based on Hollywood movies...
News media has always been biased and often had some form of agenda, sometimes even driven by the government.
What you used to be able to do though was acknowledge the bias and read with that lense.
What I think was true is that there was an effort of fairness and truth telling that today is far less true. Many media companies are owned by very few billionaires and they explicitly see them as propaganda.
That said, I'd always marked the Guardian as one of the remaining old schoolers. They have some weird and dangerous views, but their ownership structure gives some confidence there is an effort of fairness overall.
(I am also lost on how a foreign media company could publish a political opinion illegally in that country under US election law??)
The Guardian, note, isn't a social network, it's a newspaper. The idea that social networks and newspapers should be held to different standards is reasonable, because they are different things. It is _legal_ for Carface to use Twitter to promote ol' minihands, but, yeah, I mean, not everyone's going to like it and some people are going to leave due to that (or due to many other problems with Twitter over the last two years).
The Guardian is a newspaper. They broadly have two sections: reporting and editorial. Reporting is basically that. Now you can (correctly) argue that there is bias on the reporting side in how they choose to cover certain stories, how they choose what stories to cover, etc but there are still minimum standards they adhere to, like they won't knowingly print anything objectively false. They'll issue corrections and retractions if necessary.
The editorial side is quite literally opinion. The Guardian, like any publication, can issue their opinion on a given political race. But you know that's opinion. They'll argue why for their position. You can agree or disagree with their reasoning or conclusions. But it's intellectually honest.
Now compare that to Elon and Twitter. It's not even remotely the same. Twitter has an algorithm to decide what to show people. He's used it to push his own posts [1]. His own posts have openly pushed conspiracy theories [2], things that are provably false. This can go as far as pushing literal Nazi conspiracy theories (aka the Great Replacement [3]) and make sure as many people as possible see it.
Musk claims he is trying to be an open and free speech town square. I don’t have an opinion on whether he did this or not but it is certainly the case that if he put his finger on the scales that goes against his claims.
I just created an account on X and the list that pops up to follow: Elon, Terrence Williams, Sebastian Gorka, Dinesh D'Souza, Rand Paul, Dan Bongino, Leo Terrell, Tom Fitton, Mark Levin, Tiffany Smiley, Breitbart News, Matt Gaetz... not a single "left leaning" account other than Joe Biden and maybe Neil Degrasse Tyson, but I chose sports and science as my interests. Open and free speech, right..
The above example was a case of their rules against doxing - publishing JD Vances address and phone number, which is applied pretty evenly to all doxing.
I don't even know why they bother with that kind of research. It's obvious that Trump can just lie and all his supporters believe it because they have a propaganda arm that's perceived as "news". The Trump believers all think that "MSM" is lying to them but for some reason they think that Fox and NewsMax and Alex Jones aren't (when the exact opposite is true).
It's like the whole hush money thing. Turns out it just doesn't matter, they should have let Stormy Daniels say whatever she wants because Trump just has to go on stage and make stuff up and then Hannity will repeat it and it becomes right-wing canon.
Did X suppress support of the other side? The Hunter Biden laptop story is a prime example of the difference between X and Twitter. The suppression of Covid debate is another example.
On old Twitter you could call someone a Nazi and accuse them (falsely) of genocide. But if you “dead name” a celebrity, you’d get banned.
I'm not sure about the veracity of your claims of bias pre-Musk (I have heard of the NY Post story issue, as far as I'm aware they suppressed it on advice from law enforcement that it was foreign propaganda, which was later withdrawn and the block removed).
However in answer to this question:
> Did X suppress support of the other side?
If you have 2 options and you promote one artificially then that is the same as suppressing the other option, in either case you're making sure more people see one option than the other.
I mean, new!Twitter went through a phase of banning people for merely uttering the dread word 'mastodon'. They also, briefly, hilariously, memory-holed the word 'Twitter' (any occurrence of the string 'twitter' on the mobile app would be replaced with 'X', leading to a rare 2020s outbreak the Medireview Problem: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview). And various other deranged petty nonsense.
> If they think the site is unbalanced, then they’ve just made it worse.
Great point, and I think that's totally true. However, an organisation has to make the judgement call between staying on a failing (as they see it) platform in an attempt to rescue it, and leaving for an alternative that is less flawed. Clearly the Guardian thinks they stand little chance in affecting X in any meaningful way.
It's not even amplified just from his account but the site itself. Create a new account and follow something like sports or entertainment.. then see what floods your feed. I logged in first time today, and it's quite shocking actually. Not a single left leaning account, just all maga that outnumbers the sports or whatever you clicked as interests.
At least it provides some entertainment in seeing conspiracy theories I'd never heard of. Just now Twitter showed me a tweet about how offshore wind energy projects will lead to the rapid extinction of Right whales.
Apparently this is going to be the Trump administration's justification for trying to kill offshore wind power.
Of course as is par for the course the people who actually study and work with Right whales say that theory is wrong and there is little evidence of serious harm to the whales from such projects.
Looking past the childish antics, don’t you think it’s kind of rich that;
1) The party which has been kvetching the most about being deplatformed and canceled by mainstream media and colleges etc. is now in power and in the name of promoting free speech promises to go after institutions in academia etc. that are full of their political opponents (who lean left) for “claming down on free speech and calling it disinformation”
2) One man bought Twitter and controls everything about the platform, some things definitely increase freedom of speech (eg proliferation of neo nazi and openly antisemitic viewpoints) and some of his own decisions clamp down on it (eg overnight declaring that “cis”, the opposite if “trans”, is a slur and cannot be said on Twitter anymore)
3) The same man will now be heading up D.O.G.E., the bureau of government efficiency, together with another private sectir billionaire (who got public sector money) to defund many public sector things, or at least make them more efficient
To sum up, we’ll be in the strange situation where the party in power is concerned about increasing freedom of speech (usually the counterculture wants this freedom while the ones in power want to repress dissent). We will have the world’s “most free social network” actually OWNED AND CONTROLLED by one guy, who happens to also work for the government, in fact head up a new government agency tasked with defunding others, and is a super-Fed.
People on the left will start to question the optics and unusualness of all this. Will the MAGA party (the acronym GOP seems very outdated) in good faith encourage speech against themselves, and will the owner of X, while heading up a major new agency in the federal government, also encourage loud criticism of their own activities?
Or will their algorithms — which one man will continue to ultimately control — silently (and maybe only as an emergent behavior) prioritize what they want and suppress what they don’t?
As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”), and a few on the top control Google, YouTube, TikTok etc. I do not see true power for the people. “Freedom of speech” is just another expression the owners and corporations co-opted and hijacked to mean “controlling a platform” and “owning an audience”.
Why do we simply donate our audience and content to these platforms? Because they have the backend software infrastructure and we don’t.
I believe that we need open source alternatives that anyone can host, that no one can own the entire network. Not even Durov. Mastodon and Matric and Bluesky are a good start. I’m working on my own too:
And yes, it is possible for the entire ecosystem to make money serving the people with open source infrastructure, just like Wordpress, Drupal etc. Here is how it could work:
As long as Zuck controls Facebook (sorry, “Meta”), Elon controls Twitter (sorry, “X”),
off topic, but one thing I always wonder is why the press goes along with company re-branding? If everyone knows it as Twitter or Meta, wouldn't the easiest thing be to just keep referring to it that way in your articles etc and not help the company in its massive undertaking of changing everyone's name for the product?
Yeah the Google -> Alphabet, Facebook -> Meta, Twitter -> X happened all pretty close to one another.
I mean hey, I can understand why someone like Blackwater renamed themselves to the more innocuous-sounding “Academi” LOL. But why does the media go along with it?
For the same reason they go along with other things, like covering Trump 24/7 in 2015-2016 even though they hated him. The incentives push them that way. A lot of things just go on autopilot. “This is what everyone is doing so we must too. This is the controversy so we must cover it before others do”.
I had a conversation about Capitalism and Freedom of Speech with Noam Chomsky twice on my show:
Dunno - X/Twitter, at least at the leadership level, has switched from neutral to MAGA. I find it quite reasonable for him to want to move somewhere more neutral.
Animals could well use an autoregressive model to predict the outcomes of their actions on their perceptions. It's not like we run math in out everyday actions (it would take too long).
Perhaps thats why we can easily communicate those predictions as words
Illegal models! I'm sure there will be more regulation to come but the law has already struggled a lot with the internet and the transactions through it. I wonder how much trial and error this wave will cause.
I wish the people who are frustrated would actually come to europe for once. We do need a dose of american optimism and dynamism , but alas you never come guys. What s wrong
I'm not of that opinion. At all. They should stay and clean up their own house. And I don't know what optimism you speak about: the people who I assume are frustrated right now, are not whose optimism I miss.
If you work in knowledge fields, I'd imagine it's not too difficult to immigrate to certain countries. But also those fields pay far more in the United States than any other country in the world, so it's a tough thing to commit to.
Thank you for saying so! I'm American, but I lived in the Netherlands for 7 years, and absolutely loved it there.
I think the biggest barrier for young Americans is getting through the paperwork. The EU doesn't make it easy to immigrate (legally). You generally need an offer of employment in hand.
I was in Europe for a while recently (Switzerland). Thought about staying but when I realized that even if I naturalized, I could never really be Swiss, and furthermore future children would not really be Swiss (even if they too naturalized), and at best perhaps my grandchildren could be considered somewhat provisionally Swiss... not appealing. Too much old, too much history, if you aren't embedded in it you are permanent outsider.
I remember a fair few moved after the last go around (2016) to Berlin and the ones I met found German bureaucracy incredibly stifling in terms of business, which was a major fumble of the ball.
Same with Brits moving post Brexit vote, finding the German environment difficult to do business in.
Really, Europe needs to be able to capitalise on whatever amount of talent flight from the US happens, instead of … whatever the fuck they are doing currently.
While I appreciate the compliment, I think the issue is mostly that European employers aren't used to paying competitive with the United States for one which helps lead to the flow mostly occurring in the opposite direction. I understand there are also complex reasons behind it making it less viable, like not having as much in terms of private investors willing to fund start-ups and such.
I've considered it many times and I cant afford to make so much less money when I have a family. Presumably we'd end up back in the US at some point basically broke.
Estonia. Tech country, advanced, lots of startups, in the capital and in tech companies most people speak English, easily understandable tax system, stable political climate, and a good standard of living including public healthcare.
I live there, happy to discuss if there's interest!
Originally, chance. Over a decade ago I was traveling country to country a year at a time, and had never lived somewhere so far north. I booked a ticket and landed with a suitcase knowing nothing about it (no exaggeration, I had no idea.)
Once there I realised it's an amazing place. Lovely people. Peaceful and quiet. Good rule of law and stability combined with kindness (you can trust the police here.) High tech. Beautiful nature. Very clean air. Lots of forest. Big enough to have a big city; small-town living if you want.
It's very business-friendly and I started a company here. Then, married an Estonian, so I guess I'm staying here now :)
I can guarantee that there is at least one country in [geographic] Europe where you do speak the language, and you are likely to find employment. Whether you would want to accept the change in lifestyle and living standards is another question.
This will be an unexpected boost to their ad revenue
reply