The Guardian in another article explains that they are annoyed because Musk used twitter to promote his preferred candidate.
The Guardian itself used their own platform to publicly endorse Harris.
This deja-vu of childish antics is just comical in 2024
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
Musk can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And he can run Twitter accordingly.
The Guardian can have a preferred candidate and political stance. And they can choose the platforms they use accordingly.
It all seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I would like to know which newspaper or journal is not biased.
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?
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.
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.
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??)
On the other hand, that's the express goal of the owner of X.
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:
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/10/31/...
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.
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:
https://community.qbix.com/t/growing-your-community/305
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:
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 Guardian is being direct as far as I can tell about what they do not like and why they are leaving.
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
https://www.fastcompany.com/91198871/why-x-suspended-journal...
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.
It is utterly disingenuous to conflate the two.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/20/23730607/elon-musk-...
[3]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
There’s a bit of difference between encouraging votes for the good of the people and encouraging votes to help you personally.
But if I’m mistaken and Harris promised the Guardian a govt position they could use to pass laws to help them personally, do tell.
(edited to add last part about journalistic integrity)
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?
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.
That is commitment to maintaining your echo chamber.
If you lean in to your biases you stop being news and start being entertainment.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_JtMSpMrOw
(Earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo)
It’s an emergent behavior of the system. Here is George Carlin with a darker take than me:
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
Details matter in these things.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41662702
Fun times
Saying a leftwing site is just the same as a site that's ended up as Elon's (and numerous rightwing users) soapbox...
Ftfy
https://www.dictionary.com/e/subjective-vs-objective/
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-modifies-twitter-cod...
Except he'll be going up against Musk 2022 and his tweet below:
>For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally
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.
https://x.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1839463404286746770
To be fair they could censor a million differing opinions and still be the free speech platform among competitors.
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.