Five minutes with internet and social media versus five minutes with the mainstream media - accuracy and speed of signal

An interesting observation.  From a couple of weeks ago when Hamas invaded Israel.

Twitter has become terrible.

But the depressing truth of it is that anyone who spends five minutes of here gets a basic sense of the barbarity of what just happened in Israel.

Anyone who spends five minutes browsing the headlines of NYT, WaPo, WSJ and Guardian has no idea.

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 7, 2023

Interesting, in part, because it is true.

Twitter specifically, and the internet generally, are faster at reporting anything.  But the signal strength and quality are highly variable.  You have to know how to tune the signal and refine it.  In the early days of telegraph, an antecedent of the internet, telegraph operators could famously recognize the hand of some someone sending the Morse code.  Yes, it was all dots and dashes, but the speed and cadence of an individual was recognizable.

So with Twitter and the internet (blogs and substack and specialty platforms), you know to elevate or discount some signal generators over others; you know to elevate or discount some of their individual signals based on their history, orientation and context.

You have to work harder to read the signal but ultimately you get a better signal faster from the new sources over the old mainstream media.