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That's not why she should have figured out that it was fake. She could, and should, have noticed that she was talking to a person who did not exist about something he would not cite to a specific location, making excuses when she asked for info about the space it was initially shared. That the worksheet was silly and full of inside jokes added to it, but "this anonymous person sent me this document; therefore, this happened" is bad epistemics.
I'm not certain which of the people in the link 90% agree with me and continue to feel this forum has a bizarrely distorted view of my own politics, but that's a fight I'm pretty worn out on fighting. Regardless, glad I've made a good impression otherwise.
Give me a break.
A normie would think "if that's a hoax, that would require a huge, huge, amount of effort. Nobody would go through that much effort to pull a hoax on a random person". That's why she didn't figure out that it was fake.
You can fool anyone by being a weird person from the Internet, if you spend enough time tricking someone who isn't familiar with weird people on the Internet.
Verification is the difference between journalism and gossip. I think once you play at the former, you should be held to a higher standard than a random stranger. Once her attempt at verification failed, a journalist would have had a duty not to publish. The fact that LoTT did, regardless, is a tidy rebuttal to anyone treating it as hard-hitting investigative journalism.
Proper Credentialed Journalism Outlets have a handy section called "Opinion" that helps launder the difference. I agree, LoTT should not be treated as more than a shitposter. True more generally, too, of course. Most talking heads are shitposters at heart.
Also, it strikes me that LoTT could be used as an example of "the media very rarely lies," if it's accurate that she mostly signal-boosts people doing things she finds inappropriate. I don't know how accurate that is, though.
Right. Like asking “why are you complaining about John Oliver? He’s just a comedian,” except more extreme, because social media is even less anchored to professional reputations. I’m sure it’s deployed at full scale on left-wing Twitter; we just don’t see as much of that shared here.
The latter is probably correct, too. I think she’s on a better epistemic ground than the Alex Jones types.
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LoTT is literally a Twitter shitpost account -- whoever said that she was (is?) doing hardhitting investigative journalism? It's like those people posting "IT'S HAPPENING" on /pol -- way to go dude, you hoaxed a bunch of shitposters.
Look, I’d be happier with an equilibrium where Twitter shitposters aren’t given any more credence than a tabloid.
That's because you try to pretend that the things she documents aren't happening, and want any excuse to dismiss the evidence in front of you.
TW's trick was a godsend for "head in the sand" libs.
Uh…no.
It’s because Twitter journalism is even more decoupled from consequences than regular journalism.
If every single thing she reported was a lie, how would you know?
I always go and check the original source before linking them to people. It helps (somewhat) with instant dismissal as enemy propaganda, but you know how certain types of people manage to ignore and forget any evidence you present to them, so you're forced to prove the same thing over and over again.
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She's reposting stuff. You can check the original source.
Yeah, it would be reasonable for a normal person to check the original sources before believing and broadcasting them.
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"We live in a world where Twitter shitposters provide more information about what's really going on with CW issues than credentialed journalists" does not particularly imply to me that it is sensible to expect the shitposters to live up to the standards expected of credentialed journalists -- if they had wanted to be credential journalists they could have done that!
Shitposting is quite fun however.
Why are credentialed journalists held to a higher standard? It’s not out of respect for the credential.
LoTT has clearly been assigned more resources and more influence than random shitposters. It’s sensible to expect higher standards for the same reasons.
Isn't it mostly that... credentialed journalists are expected to have the resources to do this stuff? I know LoTT has a lot of followers, but I don't believe that this has been monetized to the extent of (say) the NYT, or that she has a newsroom full of fact checkers or suchlike.
When I picture LoTT, it's 'suburban mom sitting in her basement laughing her ass of at all the dumb stuff people are doing' with maybe a side order of 'I hate these people and want them to suffer' -- neither of which I imagine would change much with increased follower counts.
The other thing about journalists is that they like to at least maintain some sort of pretense of 'professional ethics' -- I would expect a credentialed journalist to have taken multiple courses on this, and be aware of pitfalls and procedures. No such course exists for Twitter users at any level, up to and including the owner of the place. Probably it would be good if it did, but that ain't where we're at here.
I don't know where you're drawing the line.
Her Twitter bio proudly claims to be a "Media/News Company," and the testimonials on her About page includes a glowing review of her journalism by Matt Walsh. Wait, does he count as a journalist?
There are talk show appearances and shout outs from the former President. Chats with other culture war luminaries. Honorary school board appointments (?!). Those aren't normal suburban-mom activities. She is clearly running a brand.
But that's kind of beside the point. I can't believe that one needs credentials or courses to ask "is what I'm about to say true?" I also don't believe for a moment that's the main motive for TW critics. He certainly doesn't get to deploy a similar defense!
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It's out of respect for the function they are holding. Even if I don't hold a lot of respect for the credential of a doctor, if you present yourself as one, I will be expecting that your health advice is based on a higher standard than that of a random's youtuber, and that you will be taking some amount of responsibility for it.
Shitposters can get quite popular, and that will mean influence and resources. That doesn't mean they're presenting themselves as rigorous truth-seekers.
But the best part of the whole affair is that she actually did do more due diligence than a lot of mainstream journalists, it's just that Tracing put a lot of effort into faking the evidence.
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I hear tell that that's the secret to magic tricks.
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Wasn't this person already renowned for having some gorillion followers and profiled on major news media by the time Trace's hoax happened? If you don't have the capability to assess the accuracy of what you put before hundreds of thousands of people, then maybe you should recuse yourself from putting things before hundreds of thousands of people. Do you seriously think, hand on heart, that you would have accepted an "I am just a poor normie, you can't expect me to fact check" defense for a sneer celebrity with this much of a platform from the other camp?
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The claim is that... LoTT is not familiar with weird people on the internet?
There are different kinds of weirdness. There is sincere weirdness. For example, some-one might believe that women punch just as hard as men, put their opinion on the internet, and be upset when other people reply with insults. There is trickster weirdness. For example, some-one (call them Tricky) might create a fake account that posts the claim that women punch just as hard as men. Later, when some-one else (call them Gully) thinks that the fake account is real, Tricky will enjoy using his real account to call out Gully for being gullible for thinking the fake account was real.
One might discover sincere weirdness on the internet and spend a merry year or two shining a light on it. Only later does one discover that trickster weirdness exists, and realize that one was in fact Gully from the paragraph above, and had blundered into being Tricky's lolcow.
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We've already established that LoTT didn't recognize the in-jokes, so I'd answer "obviously not familiar enough".
That doesn't answer the question of whether she should have, though. It seems pretty clear to me that it was simply too good to check.
In any case, it's a little strange to say that a culture warrior with 3M followers is a "normie" or "random person".
What do you mean 'didn't check'? TW, by his own admission, claimed that he believed the 'jig was up' when LoTT kept asking for, gasp, more evidence of their claim!
Leading to them faking copies of the handouts.
Stop trying to play this off as LoTT just blindly accepting whatever was sent to her. She never did.
I don't know if it's actually better that she apparently did all this due diligence and still fell for it.
Can you explicitly make the argument for how it's anything other than obviously better? Is the idea that the hoax claim was so obviously wrong, any fabricated evidence should be automatically dismissed? Because if so, that's absurd. We have enough documented cases of insane things happening in schools, that this one would barely move the needle. The whole hoax is about on the same level as "joke's on them I was merely pretending to be retarded".
Sure. If you're just publishing everything you get, and you publish some nonsense, that's one thing - you're publishing everything, you're not trying or pretending to actually evaluate it.
If you actually do due diligence, and you end up eating the onion, that's worse. You can't even (as people in this thread claim) act like a helpless normie, because helpless normies don't give a shit about due diligence. Instead, you do due diligence if you have a sense that you have a platform and a reputation you need to guard.
So perhaps I can see the argument for "she's a savvy operator and we should blame her for fucking this up" or "she's a rube, of course she ate the bait" but going for "she's savvy and it's not her fault" is incoherent.
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