Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X

Real reason: The Guardian can't handle when readers community note them using.. The Guardian.

https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1821189070401249385/p...

This. It's not just The Guardian, though. It's pretty much all moss media. They got too used to an era where they could talk and the public couldn't talk back (or they could but only through letters to the editor which they could conveniently filter to just the voices they wanted to hear).

To be fair, Social Media is just like the "Letters to the Editor" section, except the social media company is the publisher and is the one doing the filtering.

Right, but that's kind of my point: someone else gets to do the filtering and they can't stand it.

Twitter could make itself real interesting if it took "community notes" web-wide. So many attempts at this have tried and failed, but Elon may just have the itch, audience, and disposable money to do it. Would also necessitate forking a special browser, since there would be no way to support web page comments in a first-class way in stock mobile browsers.

Are community notes impartial?

It's difficult to tell because the tweet doesn't link to the original, screenshotting it instead. But the explanation is probably that these are two different meanings of the term "two-tier policing".

It is open source: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

They said that their content can still be shared there.

Also that community note just says they have been consistently saying the same thing for decades which sounds okay to me.

we get lots of direct and unsolicited feedback actually, much more than paper days. a fair amount of it is threats though.

"They got too used to an era where they could talk and the public couldn't talk back"

Maybe--a lot of folks made the same point in the mid 2010s when news outlets began shutting down comment sections on their sites. They usually said it was the "toxic" atmosphere. But I imagine they really didn't like when the top comment was pointing out some obvious error (of fact, logic, grammar etc) in their article. I actually remember pointing out an error of fact on the gaurdian itself back--some review had made some ridiculous point because they were confusing the Aramaic and Amharic languages--and seeing the article later updated and my comment removed.

It's exactly the same meaning but with the sign reversed.

Turns out identity politics is a terrible idea. Now the Guardian et al are finding out exactly why when the people they disagree with are doing it too.

Community notes are not impartial, they are written and approved by the users who sign up to do so (and actually take the time to do this unpaid labor).

Thus, they tend to reflect the biases of the kind of people who most want to (and have time to) write and approve community notes, drawn from the pool of people who use your site.

But uh... isn't it possible that one exists and the other does not?

Exactly: two completely opposing points! I agree that identity politics is a terrible idea.

In theory, it is designed to be resistant to being partial to any one side. And is pretty decent at it. However, being a social system it can be gamed, and sometimes is gamed.

Idk, what Twitter has is much better than this since they are how people find content. Building some special infra and viewer for per-website notes just seems like a downgrade that gets worse and worse the more you try to hash out how exactly it should work.

There is power to slow news. Taking time to consider what to say next and how to reply, especially if you are wrong, is very important. That also applies to when you should stop commenting, even if you are wrong. Eventually every story needs to end because the resources needed to constantly follow up on old stories, and comments on them, need to be balanced with keeping up with new things. Basically, I am saying that comments sections, even if they occasionally point out important things, can be detrimental to keeping a higher level, slower paced and more thoughtful approach to journalism.

I was curious about this. This appears to be the original tweet, but I do not see any notes on it when I view it: https://x.com/guardian/status/1820788959095529653

There are more screenshots of the note in the replies, but none with the complete links to the articles.

A screenshot on X? It must be true! I’m sure those links back up the assertion. No one would just post something misleading on X, right? /s

Maybe the assertion in the tweet is true and maybe it isn’t, but to me, this is the real reason that X should be abandoned. No one on X can be trusted to engage in honest discourse. I don’t believe anything, whether it’s coming from the right or the left if it’s posted on X. You might as well have posted something from 4Chan.

ArsTechnica always handled this well. They promote corrections in comments so they’re extra visible.

I don't think that's true. But if it is, can you blame them? Community notes are not impartial and X has become incredibly biased towards the far right.

Thanks. I think you actually need to be a Community Notes 'moderator' to view them until they're approved—I see them as "proposed Community Notes".

Discoverability of comments/dissenting views is the key factor. I would bet that most readers of any given article on the Guardian site did not get there from Twitter, and therefore could benefit from a browser that displayed community notes. The details of knowing how to show what comments where are definitely challenging, but certainly worth another attempt with the capable AI techniques that could address previously intractable problems.

> But uh... isn't it possible that one exists and the other does not?

Going through the airport between 2001 and 2021 showed that having a Muslim sounding name was going to be a trigger for a random inspection. The Rotherham child rape gangs investigation into the police clearly showed that complaints against South Asians by Whites were ignored for decades to avoid accusations of racism.

The average Guardian reader was only going to be exposed to the first and not the second. So the Guardian went full bore with the basest form of tribalism to explain the things its readers saw.

Now the same people who were gleefully destroying the social fabric in the name of progress are acting shocked at what happens when it unravels completely. I have the worlds smallest violin for them.

Is it possible that "two-tier policing" exists, while "two-tier policing" does not? In a word, no. I know this a priori.

Come on, it's clear they were referring to either my reference to "two different meanings of the term" or the reply's reference to "the same meaning but with the sign reversed"—those are two different meanings.

The community note is saying that they have not been consistent. In the past they seemed to be saying it is real and in the post they are calling it a myth.

Comments are user generated content that you host. They require a certain level of moderation just to avoid spam and illegal or deeply unpleasant comments.

X is pretty moderate to be honest. At least the popular opinions are the same moderates held in the 00s.

“Journalism” isn’t failing to report a story because of who it might offend. If it happened, it’s valid. Even worse, journalism isn’t telling the opposite story because the real story might offend.

That’s the problem with the Guardian. They spend a lot of this time writing defensive stories, while missing the real ones.

Didn’t Guardian write a single story about how Kamala Harris got her political start under the patronage of Willie Brown? I don’t recall a single Guardian story critical of anything Kamala Harris did once she became the candidate.

Now do democracy and voting. Or how about serving on a jury. Or serving on a school board.

By your definition those also must not be impartial and maybe that is a fair definition but what does it imply?

Do you similarly distrust democratic outcomes, jury decisions, etc.?

Most mainstream newspapers and magazines publish letters to the editor and guest editorials or opinion pieces from those who disagree with the publication's reporting or editorial opinions.

What they filter out is the utter crap that invariably comes to completely dominate any unfiltered comment section that is open to the general public and takes effectively anonymous submissions via the internet.

IME the comments almost universally had no value, and were very often toxic. I wouldn't want that on my website - why? What value do they add for anyone?

Nobody allows that on their website now - that was before many lessons were learned. HN doesn't allow anything like it (and never has, afaik).

And Wikipedia.

Some but certainly not as much criticism as was written about Trump. Mentioned negatives include her support for Israel, lackluster interview performance, poor performance in 2020 primaries, and previous stances as a prosecutor.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/rashida-tlai...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/kama...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/24/kama...

Edited to be less opinionated / more factual

Wikipedia isn’t the cesspool that X is, but yeah, it’s not as reliable as many people think it is.

Trust, reliability, bias are things that have a scale.

I'm always skeptical of things I read, the advantage Wikipedia has is that it's easy enough to see what references are used and how active community edits and debate on an article is.

Nuggets of "information" posted to X, Faceook, and the like are often much harder to dig into and peer behind the curtain of.

My recollection is that Gab made a plugin for browsers called Dissenter that did something like this, but they were banned from the Mozilla and Chrome stores under their moderation/censorship policies. I’ve never used it but I think it created a discussion on top of any URL. They ended up making a browser fork of Chrome but it probably went nowhere.

Ah okay. So I searched for the article which is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/06/engl...

The myth it is referring to is that there is a two-tiered system targeting white people. That's obviously a myth -- the notes are probably referring to instances where the Guardian has claimed that police treat racial minorities differently which is quite probably the case (happens everywhere else in the old British Empire so not sure why Britain would be any different).

I found the post on ex-Twitter:

https://x.com/guardian/status/1820788959095529653

But that's from 6 August, not 8 August as per the screenshot and there is no community note on it. I can't find a post by the Guardian about this on 8 August, maybe they deleted it? Does seem weird that they would delete one and not the other. It also seems that one would get community noted and not the other (especially since the 6 August post has 1.6m views and the 8 August post screenshotted has 60k views).

I tried to find the articles shown in the community note in the screenshot, and I can find some about two-tier policing that don't really seem directly related to this.

Maybe I can't find the one that's screenshotted because I don't have an account, maybe they deleted that one but not the 6 August one, maybe the screenshot is fabricated.

Either way, I'm quite sure that this "two-tier policing" claim is of the same ilk that equates rejecting racism with being racist; ie. the "leftist bullies" idea. That violent right-wing protests are being "treated differently" because they're white, rather than treated differently because they're a bunch of psychos being whipped into a frenzy by lies spread on ex-Twitter by influencers, including Elon Musk.

I wouldn't say that's the same as claims that, for example, black people are more likely to be subject to police brutality. But right-wingers love to make claims about "reverse racism".

> What value do they add for anyone?

Counterpoints are useful to help negate echo chambers where we end up clicking on the articles which validate our world view.

In addition the most upvoted comments (at least on the Financial Times website) are sometimes more informed and nuanced than the articles themselves. The article often gets the debate rolling - come for the articles, stay for the comments (so to speak).

Quantity vs quality. Journalism faces the question of 'how to present in an unbiased way' and the answer often comes out as 'equal coverage' which is, as answers go, terrible. Most of the time one 'side' isn't equal to the other when comparing statistics and doesn't deserved to be covered 'equally'.

Would you prefer a trial by community notes or by jury.

Jurors do not self-select into jury duty, though some try harder than others to get out of it. So the effect is less.

Voters are partial to the candidates they vote for; that's why they vote for them.

> Counterpoints

In the comments section of news websites, it wasn't counterpoints. It was just aggression, lies, toxicity, etc.

The Financial Times is pretty rarefied air. Everyone must be subscribed, so no anonymity (I would guesss). How much does a subscription cost? $300+ per year?

I was able to get out of jury duty by saying I tended to agree with police. This was advice given to me by a friend in law enforcement.:.

i think about $600 a year and the comments are much higher quality.

Lower periodicity does not mean taking more time to say things.

It means more rigid deadlines - more stories that are half-told to meet the deadlines and longer times to corrections.

They aren't as good as here though.

This is incorrect. The example you give is perfect. Twitters community notes reflect the received wisdom of a mob. Not the truth. They stand when the Twitter user base thinks they should.

As a right wing hub they oppose realities which don’t fit their world view.

Using the example you linked there is a long documented history of minorities in the Uk, including the Irish, being treated much more harshly by British police. Stop and search laws and multiple incidents of innocent people being framed for crimes.

The rights which to pretend this is targeted at the white majority, simply because multiply convicted criminals like Tommy Robinson are being jailed, is a myth.

No British policeman can stop you on the street by psychically intuiting your political views. They can stop you if you are breaking windows, chanting slogans, or have a different skin color.

The Guardian publishing real journalism (the paper has broken more significant news stories in recent decades than any other British outlet) into a toilet of right wing opinion doesn’t make sense.

As there is no way to rebut a community note the last word is always with the mob.

> Twitters community notes reflect the received wisdom of a mob. Not the truth.

Do you have an example of such flawed community notes? The ones I encountered were pretty sane and middle of the road, often correcting Elon himself.

Were they? They [Guardian] are now claiming that both groups are being treated the same when they were clearly claiming that that wasn’t the case earlier?

Which exact groups they are talking about doesn’t really matter for this specific argument.

', or have a different skin color.'.

Really?

> there is a two-tiered system targeting white people. That's obviously a myth

Except… That’s obviously not what Farage et al are saying.

The claim is that white nationalists (verging on fringe(?) neo-nazi) protestors and rioters were treated more harshly than protestors and rioters belonging to other races or subscribing to other (also violent and radical) political (or religious) ideologies.

It does not seem obvious at all to me that this is clearly a myth.

It seems clear that the current crop of "white nationalists (verging on fringe(?) neo-nazi) protestors and rioters" were treated with kid gloves in comparison to the treatment of "other race" protestors in the Brixton riots.

The current claim that current "other race" UK protestors are (oranges to oranges in same circumstances) better treated than white protestors is subjective, it's not suprise that such a claim is being made by Farage and Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon .. it's very much their schtick.

> What value do they add for anyone?

What about the example at the head of this comment chain?

I think news sites did lose something without feedback. I can accept a chess pool with a single good comment to make up for it. So it does provide value for me and I disagree with the "lessons learned". Also, the legal risks of showing user content should be scraped for anything that is not explicitly illegal.

We have information bubbles now that are way worse than the occasional comment in bad taste.

> Brixton riots.

That was more than 40 years ago. I was wondering whether bringing up 2011 might make sense (since it was over 10 years ago, the riots weren’t as politically motivated etc.) but this is just something else..

You get some worthwhile commentary even on trashy sites (eg. Daily Mail, X) You just have to filter a bit.

I'm find it kind of annoying when you can't comment on an article with obvious things wrong.

Yeah that confused me. I'm a 'moderator' (community note contributor in X lingo) and can see the proposed ones. Top 3:

>The Guardian have reported on two-tier policing, specifically about on race and sexuality, for decades https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/metropolitan...

There has been widespread use of force by the police against working class (white) protestors. Including random unprovoked attacks on women and the elderly: https://x.com/ashleasimonbf/status/1820088461182812308

>The concept of 'two-tier' policing is contested, it is neither proven nor disproven, therefore it is equally as inaccurate to call it a myth as it would be to say it is fact. The Guardian view is not accepted by all media commentators as fact: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/05/met-chief-grabs-... https://thecritic.co.uk/two-tier-policing/

They all say: Needs more ratings, Not shown on X

I didn't feel inclined to upvote any. The system is there to point out factual errors. Differences of opinion can be posted in the comments (Xed?) as usual. "Two tier myth" seems to be opinion to me. There may have been a public note which disappeared - it's an upvote/downvote type system.

I don't think the Guardian article does claim that if you read it.

>The average Guardian reader was only going to be exposed to the first and not the second

Brief googling showed >30 articles in the Guardian on the second.

Yes, it's not difficult to get out of. You could also get out by saying that you don't trust the police, or any number of things that might affect your ability to be impartial in the case before you.

Yeah. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42131043

It works quite well in practice. The unapproved notes are a bit all over the place in terms of bias and or being wrong but the ones that get enough votes to be shown are mostly fairly factually correct.

I don't think this is true, popular tweeters, including Elon, often spread misinformation that functions as right-wing propaganda. Typically they just quote tweet someone else, add on nothing like "interesting..." or "wow..." and then post it. Of course, they're quote tweeting actual far-right pundits or sometimes neo-nazis. There're some arguments about plausible deniability - I don't know if someone like Elon is aware that some of the people he's quote tweeted are neo-nazis.

Most give you an option to contact the author. I've corresponded with a few - most of what they get is death threats, etc.

> I can accept a chess pool with a single good comment to make up for it.

Have fun with that.

> the occasional comment in bad taste.

That's a lot different than most social media.

Let's flip your script: The Guardian broke the Edward Snowden story. The Guardian supported Assange before it was hip with the "new right" to do so. The Guardian has more rights to the label "populist" than the recent wave of astroturf turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

All i have ever seen on Twitter was posturing and sniping. The fact that many folks consider social media propagation of one-sided polemics posing as news does not persuade me of the value of this sewage flow of emotion and bile.

Elon Musk uses his cudgel to attempt to topple the governments of nations. The vast power he wields is due to a purchase: $70 billion or ao, including $13 billion in investments from an opaque fund we now know includes sanctioned oligarchs and Saudi royalty.

Using the weaknesses of democracy to destroy the democratic world, and funded by repressive types who want us to worship the raw power of money like royalty, no really; those seeking to return humanity to feudalism!

I do not see any positive side to Twitter or Facebook circa 2024.

I find it disturbing that those who seek to destroy our society is running it. This is not populism, but merely zombie pawn-ism.

Why on earth would you stand up for a spineless man that would never stand up for you?

... so... your answer to my question is "no"?

I thought so. I use Twitter daily and, for all its flaws, I think the "community notes" feature is pretty awesome. In fact, I like it so much I would enjoy having in on pretty much any information stream I receive.

Maybe I could even start following and possibly trusting legacy media again - if they would bother adding it.

that is a screenshot that I can't click on to verify if those community notes at all support what they claim to. this is nonsense.

So that screenshot is fucking bullshit then. Classic.

That's because they're nazis not because they're white

The headline claims it, isn't that more important than the article claiming it?

> Have fun with that.

I do, that is the argument.

It would also leave me better informed since the example clearly shows that the statements could benefit from a wider context. And this wouldn't be the only case.

If comments don't provide value for you, you can ignore them. No reason to remove them for everybody else too.

I stopped reading the Guardian a few years ago. It once had really good content. That changed significantly in my opinion.

>All i have ever seen on Twitter was posturing and sniping. The fact that many folks consider social media propagation of one-sided polemics posing as news does not persuade me of the value of this sewage flow of emotion and bile.

Then you've been looking very selectively. Also, do you include left-leaning and often hysterically hateful rants by left progressives and the hardcore woke in your idea that Twitter is mostly full of posturing, sniping and one-sided polemics?

Twitter, or now X, certainly has plenty of people doing the above from the right of the so-called spectrum, but it also has many doing the same from the left, and it used to have even more of them (people already seem to forget what kind of identity politics Twitter used to be famous for before being owned by Musk.)

Or does your specific worldview not recognize that such emotional, hysterically ideological attitudes also exist from the left?

>Using the weaknesses of democracy to destroy the democratic world

Another classic from many opponents of Trump (aside from whether one favors him or not, because many who aren't of the left also dislike him) The idea that those who do favor him are automatically "destroying" the democratic world".

Implicit behind this is the notion that democratic processes should only be allowed to count if they give majority votes to people and ideas you happen to favor, and if they don't, then well, democracy is suddenly a danger and those who used it for a certain voter mandate are dangerous ignorants who need their betters to tell them how to think.

>I do not see any positive side to Twitter or Facebook circa 2024.

Really? Nothing? So I suppose the many supporters of the progressive left and their pages/accounts on Facebook and Twitter are also negative?

>I find it disturbing that those who seek to destroy our society is running it.

Have you even paid the least attention to the specific things that many people support from candidates like Trump? For many of them, a rejection of obsessive identity politics and mistrusting claims about immigration or the economy that don't ring true are staples, and far from being unreasonable ideas that mean the end of society.

It's absurd how many people share your apparently, blindly one-side views, while attributing all evils to the supposedly monstrous other side, and then complain about how one-sidedness has taken over politics. Funny too.

The headline is being construed to claim what it does not.

> It would also leave me better informed

You do you, but my argument is that it leaves you worse informed:

1) There is a lot of false information, which will mislead you inevitably (you're not that smart; nobody is)

2) There is a lot of noise for the signal, a lot of waste. You are worse informed because you could have spent the time learning from higher quality information.