5 replies to this topic

[nivoglibina]

I have seen a lot of sensible journalists, companies and websites making an effort to get rid of Twitter/X.

 

In light of what's been been revealed about the character of the owner of that company, I hope that autosport will also make an effort to not support a company that condones nazi's and who helps the Russians in ther war effort against the Ukraine.

Can we ban linking to "X" posts on the forum?

 

[Risil]

We've discussed this among the mod team. The most important thing to note is that we're not aware of any capability in the forum software to ban links to certain websites. Even if there were, it would probably be trivially easy to bypass.

More broadly, we encourage members to use their own discretion. The content of tweets is not intrinsically objectionable and we don't want to get in the way of any useful information found therein. If you disagree with the politics of X's owner, then by all means don't post or click on any links, or ask for an alternative on Bluesky or Mastodon etc.

[Rigoletto]

This feature request is stuffed with reasoning errors:

 

I have seen a lot of sensible journalists, companies and websites making an effort to get rid of Twitter/X.

A subjective appraisal of those journalists, based on them sharing your personal opinion about Twitter.

 

 

In light of what's been been revealed about the character of the owner of that company

Immediately a red flag that your request will be based on disapproval of a man that many others of equal morality, have no problem with.

 

 

I hope that autosport will also make an effort to not support a company that condones nazi's and who helps the Russians in ther war effort against the Ukraine.

And here is the key trick used in this age. It would look too crude to say "I want xxx banned because I hold different opinions", so protagonists use an adjacent, often inaccurate reason, to tick a rule box to justify their desire for a ban. In this case, going straight to Godwin's law itself and calling him a Nazi supporter. Or as is flavour of the month, an active collaborator in a foreign war. There is of course, also the pre-supposition that his political views are wrong - a pre-supposition disputed in open, intellectual debate.

 

 

Can we ban linking to "X" posts on the forum?

To admins' credit, no. Any tweets will be about F1. Can't get that bad, can it?

[JimmyClark]

Banning a useful news source, with plenty of informed and helpful journalists/sources still using it, is very much a 'cut off your nose to spite your face' moment. 

 

You don't need to click an X link if you see it, and banning it as a source just isn't helpful, especially as many stories do need to be backed up by a source and seeing who wrote it on X (as most breaking news snippets or rumours are still put on there by those in the paddock) is helpful in determinining if its reliable or not. 

[Risil]

Banning a useful news source, with plenty of informed and helpful journalists/sources still using it, is very much a 'cut off your nose to spite your face' moment. 

 

You don't need to click an X link if you see it, and banning it as a source just isn't helpful, especially as many stories do need to be backed up by a source and seeing who wrote it on X (as most breaking news snippets or rumours are still put on there by those in the paddock) is helpful in determinining if its reliable or not. 

 

This is actually a really good point, that in certain contexts (like the F1 paddock) a tweet may actually be a primary source. (It's problematic from a record-keeping point of view that this should be so, but that's what we've been dealing with one way or the other since the invention of the web. It's highly uncertain what "the historical record" will look like 50 years from now, and to what extent it'll reflect the surfeit of information we are currently surrounded with. It can be hard enough to locate the content of a web page that you looked at even 10 years ago.)

[JimmyClark]

T It's highly uncertain what "the historical record" will look like 50 years from now, and to what extent it'll reflect the surfeit of information we are currently surrounded with. It can be hard enough to locate the content of a web page that you looked at even 10 years ago.)

 

Although digressing from the main point of this thread, I really agree with this. With the demise of Autosport as a weekly publication and probably no traditional paper magazines now covering in-depth news about motorsport on a weekly basis, you do wonder if this will be seen as a bit of a 'dark ages' of recordkeeping far in the future. Though this isn't exclusive to motorsport, of course.