Twitter: How Important is it to Ones Media Diet?

[_Res Ipsa]

I have a Twitter account, but never used it much until COVID-19. I follow 10-20 epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease specialists, public health specialists, modelers, and ER and ICU docs who treat COVID. I read once or twice a day to get information on new preprints and information on the spread and effect of the virus.

I have a smattering of assorted people I follow for idiosyncratic reasons. But the only reason I spend time reading is COVID-19.

[_I have a question]

In diet terms Twitter is completely empty calories.

[_honorentheos]

Thanks, all. I appreciate the insight into how widely and diversely the community uses Twitter as an information source...or not.

I became curious about this while reading the thread discussing Elon Musk's recent Twitter activity. Seeing the various reactions to the tweet led me to wonder how the diverging views overlaid with how one otherwise engaged with Twitter as a platform. Not that it means anything concrete, it did raise the question of how much that particular media informed the message...or at least how it was received.

EA - the point that it serves as a window into the discussions between journalists is interesting. I'm curious how many you actively follow on Twitter and if this observation comes from following certain journalists? Or you happened on it through other means?

[_EAllusion]

I follow 30ish journalists directly and there's a network of journalists that you end up checking in on because of various stories that touch them or because they interface with what you are reading directly. Some journalists are really sharp people; others are as dumb as a box of rocks. Some have solid domain expertise, others are solid generalists, others seem to have no real expertise at all. And there's a lot of variety in-between. It's often what you'd expect: Andrew Kaczynski is sharp on a variety of subjects and supports himself well; Chris Cilliza is a moron. But sometimes you're surprised.

People are more obvious about their biases and weak spots, and their interactions tell you how they understand and treat criticism. All of this provides context from the news that, if nothing else, helps explain why it gets written the way it does, and can provide insight into why it is so good in some areas and so bad in others. In this regard, Twitter is a giant message board, and it turns out all the people writing the news are posters.

Most of my Twitter news consumption is from following specific publications or experts on a specific subject I might be interested in. For that, Twitter is basically just a search engine that's good at that particular task but can be replicated elsewhere. But there's no real replacement for this other part. Twitter is basically the more modern version of the blogosphere that faded away.

[_EAllusion]

I haven't written about it here, but Nate Silver has been absolutely embarrassing himself by acting as though he is lay-expert on epidemiology on Twitter. It's made for some cringey reading at times. It's not all bad, but man is he so obviously out of his depth.

I'm not an expert in the subject, but I know enough to spot egregious errors in his commentary. He's just interacting with popular material rather than trying to build up a foundation of knowledge to contextualize it. He isn't doing his homework to understand the field. There's now a wave of people complaining about Silver's fake expertise on this subject on Twitter where many of those people are saying he should stick to politics and sports. Aside from poll-based political forecasting and statistical analysis, his political punditry has always felt like smarter Chris Cillizza to me, where he postures in depth study but doesn't seem to show the real signs of it, and I'm coming to the idea that this is just who he is in general.

Thanks to this, I think I'll have more of a raised eyebrow when Silver writes articles on data analysis on subjects I understand not as clearly. Watching him so clearly mistake naïve data analysis for genuine understanding of a subject makes it easier to see how he might do that elsewhere.