- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
It wasn’t the source of the news, but where people would consume news. Most of what the site was actually good for was making a notice with a link to a real article. Like an RSS feed with extra steps.
That’s why I never got into it. The main way it was actually useful was still totally unnecessary.
Kind of like Tiktok. Tiktok is a great place to find breaking news, but it’s not a great news source.
Oh yeah, you’ll HEAR about it.
Tiltok says in a menacing tone about any major incident or minor story.
What are you talking about? It was the go-to app for journalists for a decade. They could live report from events in a simple, chronological thread, or collect eye witness reports by quote tweeting personal accounts. I followed the Charlottesville and January 6th riots in real time by reading journalists threads. There was a lot of trival or even harmful bullshit on Twitter, but the way journalists used it was a huge positive.
I’m not sure if the Arab spring could have happened without Twitter.
The thing that happened 13 years ago and did nothing but overthrow Gaddafi, a man who, even if all criticism of his regime is valid, was replaced with something much worse because NATO doesn’t actually care about democracy for brown people?