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+--- Thread: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ (/showthread.php?tid=281641)
“ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - btfc - 10-28-2023
‘ A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.”
The new work adds data to a swell of recent anecdotal accounts from researchers, academics and journalists who have noted a change for the worse in the way news and information moves and is incentivized on Twitter over the last year, especially since the start of the Israel-Hamas crisis. A separate analysis published Thursday by NewsGuard, a nonpartisan company that tracks false narratives online, found verified accounts were responsible for nearly three-fourths of the most viral misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Twitter.
“That shift is real,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new report.
“At its core what we’re looking at here is a different vision of what news is,” Caulfield said. “It’s fast, it’s unvetted, and it’s very often unsourced. And there’s every indication that the shift is not accidental and that it’s part of a vision of what news is going to be on X.”
“The people who are engaged, they probably buy into this vision, but we have doubts that it serves the public well,” he added.
The researchers branded seven high-performing accounts on X as “new elites,” because they have exercised “disproportionate power and influence” over Israel and Hamas news. The “new elites” include: Visegrád 24, a news aggregator run by a right-wing Polish social media marketing agency; Mario Nawfal, a Twitter celebrity known for hosting live audio chats focused on cryptocurrency who was the focus of an NBC News investigation; @spectatorindex, an account self-described as “News, media and data from around the globe,” reportedly operated by an Australian-Muslim medical doctor; @CollinRugg, a co-founder of the conservative site Trending Politics; and @CensoredMen, a 10-month-old account that before pivoting to the Israel-Hamas war primarily posted in support of the misogynist internet influencer Andrew Tate.
Tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from these accounts outperformed popular news accounts belonging to CNN, The New York Times, the BBC and Reuters, despite having far fewer followers, according to the research (NBC News was not included). Across the research period, tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from well-followed traditional news sources garnered 112 million views over 298 tweets, while tweets from the seven newly influential accounts drew 1.6 billion views across 1,834 tweets.
The researchers said that changes made by Musk to X had pushed the platform in a new direction.
“This occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the ‘credibility signals’ that served to ground users in the past — checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter/X-based labeling of deceptive content,” the researchers wrote. “Even fundamental affordances of the web — such as simple sourcing through links — have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users’ attention.” ‘
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/7-accounts-warp-israel-hamas-war-news-x-musk-rcna121465
Re: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - sekker - 10-29-2023
People will fill any leadership vacuum.
A lot of news agencies left Twitter and did not return to X.
X has still a lot of users.
And MSM have shot themselves in the foot over recent issues like the poor reporting around the terrible loss of deaths at a hospital in Gaza.
Re: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - Speedy - 10-29-2023
The NYT had its blue check mark removed just the other day. The best we can hope for is that Elon tires of playing with his new toy and shuts it down. The worst thing is more likely.
Re: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - Carnos Jax - 10-29-2023
Speedy wrote: The worst thing is more likely.
Yes, I'm afraid so.
We sold another third of our Tesla shares over the last several months (and put it into crypto) because Musk seems to be negligent in his management of the company (because of his new toy).
Re: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - sekker - 10-29-2023
Carnos Jax wrote:
[quote=Speedy]The worst thing is more likely.
Yes, I'm afraid so.
We sold another third of our Tesla shares over the last several months (and put it into crypto) because Musk seems to be negligent in his management of the company (because of his new toy).
Whoa - you think crypto is more secure than Tesla?! Wow.
Re: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - sekker - 10-29-2023
Speedy wrote:
The NYT had its blue check mark removed just the other day. The best we can hope for is that Elon tires of playing with his new toy and shuts it down. The worst thing is more likely.
The problem is that MSM is NOT a 'good' business. It's actually expensive to do investigative journalism. And a few clicks online does not cover it.
Far more lucrative to make short cat videos.
And so, MSM quality can be shown to be eroding. And ANY mistake gets 1000x amplified online, etc.
Reduced MSM accuracy reporting with mistakes amplified plus folk in their bubble and far fewer reading MSMS gets us at this place in our culture.
Frankly, I doubt Musk is going to tire. I suspect he's going to double-down.
Re: “ 7 influential accounts are warping Israel-Hamas news on X, researchers find “ - Carnos Jax - 10-29-2023
sekker wrote:
[quote=Carnos Jax]
[quote=Speedy]The worst thing is more likely.
Yes, I'm afraid so.
We sold another third of our Tesla shares over the last several months (and put it into crypto) because Musk seems to be negligent in his management of the company (because of his new toy).
Whoa - you think crypto is more secure than Tesla?! Wow.
It wasn't an easy decision, but yes. Keep in mind though we are still in Tesla. Our current portfolio as a result is 50% TSLA, 25% GBTC & 25% ETHE (the latter being Grayscale's soon to be ETF products for Bitcoin and Ethereum). Admittedly I don't understand crypto nearly as well as Tesla, but my brother does. And it's upon his recommendation we're doing so. He's the one that got us into Tesla back in 2017. And he says he's nearly as confident in crypto as he was in Tesla, so I trust him.