This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's been a few stories like that hitting /r/politics the past couple week. By "like that", I mean, some reiteration of some vague bad-mouthing of Trump over something that's not actually very important and was reported on years ago. As someone who is no fan of Trump, I also am unhappy with this news coverage, albeit for different reasons: there's actual bad things to say about Trump; no need to report on irrelevant gossip. Actually talk about his policies and fallout from what he did during his term. But news organizations don't want to do that because it involves talking about regulating business (e.g., the FDA regulating food production) in a positive light and their owners don't want that.
That’s been 9 years of that now
It’s insane
Even for paid shit
Oh, yeah, /r/politics has always had a lot of nonsense bad-mouthing of Trump. The difference I'm calling out is that the past few weeks, there's been a lot of re-runs of such stories from years ago.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
News organizations absolutely want to regulate business which is one of the reasons they are in the bag for Harris. Regulatory capture is a godsend to corrupt, dying companies.
Legacy media's dream is to get X banned before it completely replaces them. Ideally, journalists would even receive state funding to spread regime propaganda more directly, removing the need for subscribers at all. Don't laugh, it's already happening in other countries.
They want more regulation and government interference, not less.
News organizations are uncomfortable with Harris, though. I’m guessing it’s because she’s economically illiterate to the point of insanity; Trump prefers a different set of trade offs than the upper middle class but seems to understand not smashing the whole thing.
More options
Context Copy link
It’s amazing how integrated media and corporations are as well, with their strategy to stop advertising on X as a way of crushing it. They use the excuse of “hate speech” while completely ignoring that there is the same level of heinous shit on ALL the social media apps - have they seen Tik Tok? Have they seen instagram rwcently?
Serious journalists depend on Twitter both for material and self promotion. Instagram and TikTok are for tabloid tier infotainment meaning there's very little chance of the content from those platforms polluting the memespace of serious discussions and they can be safely ignored/excluded.
I suspect this is largely because Twitter trades primarily in text and links rather than photos and video. Writing on Twitter typically has a much higher velocity, range, spread and linguistic precision than a set of photos or a linear video (hence why Insta and TikTok posts often include captions for added clarity).
I don't know if the other apps have any similar mechanisms to the retweet function. Seems like mostly all you can do is view, follow, leave a comment and smashthatlikebutton.
You’d be surprised how many people exclusively use TikTok instead of any other social media. There’s plenty of channels on there that offer news coverage as well. I think it plays a huge negative role in influencing the current zeitgeist and how young people especially view things, which is probably why America is banning it soon
TikTok has lots of highly engaged users but I assume they're not accomplished politicians, broadcasters, academics, and other leading figures of major social institutions. They might run a brief campaign on TikTok if their social media coordinators recommend it and then duck out again when the moment passes, they don't stay there and engage with other users as peers like they do on Twitter.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Xwitter claim does not check out for me. Journalists continue being utterly addicted to it, and I also recall them being unconditionally defensive up until the point of the Musk takeover (which they resisted and continue to resist). If they wanted it destroyed, surely they should have supported it at the time, as it was foreseeable that it would make it less influential and make a future ban easier.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not laughing, because it's happening here in Canada.
The federal government banned free news posts on large websites (literally just Facebook and Google). Facebook decided it didn't want to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to host paid links, so it chose to not be a Digital News Intermediary under the new regime and was therefore required to block all news links. Google negotiated an exemption for itself in exchange for $100M/yr paid to the Canadian Journalism Collective, so there are literally zero companies covered by the Online News Act.
The end result? News as a whole is worse in Canada, with smaller outlets (particularly ones that won't get funding from the CJC) hit the hardest.
They had the gall to complain about Facebook harming Canadian journalism by "not paying their fair share" and "unfairly profiting". Now that Facebook is drawing zero profit and their fair share is consequently zero, the journalists are still complaining about how harmful the ban has been. Of course, they blame Facebook for following the regulations rather than the Federal government for creating them.
Yup: "(8)...the groups wants 70% of news costs paid for government or through government regulation." If that had actually occurred, then Canadian journalists would barely have had to provide anything, nevermind anything of real value.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link