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Not going to disagree with you on Twitter’s issues with accurate information. But the question why does it matter if our professional institutions are failing as well?

There have been numerous articles from media critics – Oliver Darcy, Poynter, CJR, mainstream media, etc,….on the failures of amateur, democratic media like Twitter and Meta this week. And barely any notice about the failures from mainstream media on the Gaza hospital incident. It is bizarro world where we are applying professional standards of journalism to amateur media and applying amateur standards to professional media.

In a free society, the only effective way to diminish the impacts of bad information is to have our professional institutions be trustworthy and credible. And the only way to do that, is to have strong mechanisms of accountability and checks/balances on these professional institutions. And I don’t see that happening. Everybody is obsessed with Elon and Twitter. If people have trusted sources to turn to, we have less inclination to buy into the bad information on Twitter.

And yet, on Twitter, I actually do see more accountability and checks/balances on mainstream media, much more than I do in the normal media ecosystem. That’s silly and harmful.

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