I recently read a comment to the effect that “platforms aren’t untrustworthy, people are” and that you need to evaluate information sources independent of platform.
The context being a partial defence of getting news and information from Twitter, in spite of prominent examples of fake information spreading over that platform. This is from someone pretty respectable (originally, I had a screenshot, but it adds nothing but their name, which is irrelevant) and I’m going to disagree with them on this bit. Partially. Maybe wholly.
First off, at face value, that is true. A rando on Facebook and a rando on Twitter have the same credibility. This is independent of the platform. We should learn to evaluate sources and interrogate them thoroughly.
BUT: some platforms structurally invite misuse and, either through ineptitude or disinterest of their owners, are more able to propagate misinformation and disinformation. Twitter is absolutely one of these. In my view it always has been: It’s structured around short posts, atomised from any context, and these posts are trivially boosted, with their surrounding context hidden from the home timeline. Information travels fast when it’s bitesize by design, and showing something to your followers as part of Twitter’s public performance is a single button click.
We don’t have such concerns about WordPress blogs, for instance, even though it is also a platform. It’s barriers to sharing on the platform are slightly higher, and the barrier to generating content a little higher. Misinformation may exist, but its propagation is slowed. The content is far more difficult to separate from its long form context.
A blog is, I’d argue, the structural antithesis of Twitter.
And that’s just pre-Musk Twitter. In it’s current incarnation, it’s very notable for putting in huge barriers to determining legitimacy of information. Most notably in having completely dismantled its verification programme, and allowing anyone to effectively impersonate a person or organisation, up to and including that blue-tick verified shorthand.
These aspects aren’t wholly unique to Twitter, but I think it’s a place where you can easily find all of them embedded into the system and its culture.
But, I think, an underappreciated problem is that it’s simply impractical to assess the source of each individual nugget of information. It’s far more effective, and almost as reliable, to pre-filter information broadly by its source. Your hit rate on identifying disinformation is just as good if you simply dismiss anything from, say, the Daily Express and wait for BBC News to report on it instead. So I’d argue it’s safe to be far more skeptical of something someone just twet. Especially if it’s a screenshot, where the contextual clues of whether that verified sign is “real” or paid for are hidden away.
That’s before getting into the fact that we should never have got to the point where you got news from a social media post, and not a verified platform or website, or from a vetted, professional source. A reasonable heuristic for that being a source that faces meaningful consequences if they deliberately publish misinformation. That’s still, mostly, the case for professional journalists writing articles, but not for Twitter accounts. Even Twitter accounts of known people. You can lie and mislead with no hit to your income generated by having a following on Twitter.
And, of course, we could also talk, at equal length, about how Truth on social media is determined by follower count. Not only does that determine the reach of “facts”, but the account with more followers can easily control the narrative of dissent entirely by force of volume. You can be contradicted in the comments, but if you have the weight of 100k followers to back you up, you can ruin someone’s day by clapping back — whether you’re right or wrong. The “Quote Tweet” feature of Twitter being a key weapon in this, because that pushes your reply directly to your followers. I raise this mostly to underline how Twitter is structurally ripe for abuse and disinformation in a way that many other platforms are not. It’s a platform where you need to threat-model responses to your posts — even absolutely insane responses that have misunderstood you intentionally.
So, yes, platform absolutely matters and we should take that into account when evaluating information. And, going forward into this post-Musk world of X and its Xcretions, outright dismissing tweets (and screenshots of tweets) as evidence of literally anything is going to become the simplest act of due diligence we can do.
Spherical Bullshit 