this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
580 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
9 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
580
X (formerly Twitter) labeled an unflattering NPR story about Donald Trump as ‘unsafe’ | A spokesperson said the warning was a "false positive." (www.yahoo.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump's recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.

On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.

Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn't explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.

In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a "false positive" and that it had been corrected. The company didn't explain further.

Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.

all 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 181 points 3 months ago (5 children)

And yet if you click that journalist's profile, the ONLY social media link is to that festering shithole. Journalists are complicit and enabling Twitter to do this by treating it as a legitimate platform and the default place for news.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Journalists are complicit and enabling Twitter to do this by treating it as a legitimate platform and the default place for news

100%.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

This

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It’s infuriating and disgraceful, but none of the orgs and their employees seem to feel any shame about it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

It's mind-boggling. How many articles can they write about the latest Twitter clusterfuck, followed up immediately by "follow me on Twitter", before they wonder if they're the baddies?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Wait until you hear about media contagion!

This shit is par for the course.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The problem is, for the past 2 decades twitter WAS the default place for news. I can remember watching somebody live streaming FROM THE BOSTON BOMBING in real time. News outlets would KILL for that kind of up to the minute reporting. Plus, it was able to happen not from just one person, but a multitude of people from different perspectives, live on the scene, all without the news outlet needing to pay for a single dime of labor. It's all just handed to them, from people not assosiated with the station, and therefore not paid, nor given any benefits.

And this went on for almost 2 decades. Now the platform in the past 2 years has shrunk, but it's still millions of users, compared to Mastodon which has something like less than 100k people last time I checked.

So yes. For now it IS the default for news in real time. Even if the slant has dramatically shifted in a very short time. It takes time for people to change habbits. Mastodon needs to grow, and the fediverse needs to grow. Doing so will change the landscape of the internet, since the fediverse is built to be resistant to corporate takeover. Once it becomes the default, things will look very different. The problem is, if you walk out of your house, and walk to the mall, and ask 100 random people what the fediverse is, I'd be shocked if 1 of them knew. That's where we are right now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

But that was BE (before Elon).

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You haven’t been paying much attention to the current state of journalism, have you?

Twitter is a decent portion of their revenue stream, and given that none of us want to pay them for their efforts, what do you suggest they do?

Those clicks are their livelihood & we’re all sitting here reading the article pasted directly to this thread.

WE, INCLUDING YOU, ARE COMPLICIT IN THIS TOO.

E: “I don’t wanna pay for the news, I want journalists to forgo their living & only post their work on sites I’m actually willing to steal their content from”

Keep on downvoting children. Y’all suck as humans.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago

A "false positive," eh? Okay, sure.

How many "false positives" have there been in the other direction, labeling anti-Kamala stories as "unsafe?"

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Weird how many "false positives" they get. Uncanny.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Now the question is was this on purpose? Or was it caused by the huge layoffs they did?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Those are not mutually exclusive.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago

I'm starting to think something is wrong with Twitter

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

weird how it became a false positive only when they got called out

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president

Fucking media. Two years after he gets into power I'd expect headlines like this to be the norm:

Raid on fifth Democratic Congressman calls into question the legitimacy of Trump's new Task Force

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

The original Engadget article which was syndicated here:

(Yahoo! News isn't as bad with link rot as MSN is, but it's still not great)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago

Not news though, is it ?

News is Twitter doing something honest.

But everyone continues to spread rage bait