Friday, December 01, 2023

What the hell?

There has been an increasing trend over the last few months on Twitter X (or at least, in my experience of it) for the "For You" time line to be including a lot of sensationalist video clips which could perhaps be called "clickbait-y" in other contexts, except they aren't selling anything, but presumably just trying to get some sort of engagement numbers.   

These videos in the last few days are, I reckon, suddenly including some high violence content, enticing viewers to watch to see incidents in which people either died or were injured.   You might not always see the injury - for example, you might see an explosion and be told that 20 people died, for example.   But they are pushing it beyond the boundaries that, say, mainstream TV would allow, and this content is not something I am wanting to see anyway, but videos usually start playing automatically and so it feels like violence porn is being forced upon me.

Just now, someone has put up a video of a black guy being literally shot in the side of the head (by accident, by a friend sitting in the car), and its gross and shows a huge amount of bleeding.   (It is made immediately clear by subsequent posts that the guy, somehow, actually survived this, with disability though.)

But in all the comments I have seen so far, no one is saying "wtf, why is a hyperviolent accident allowed on here at all and appearing in my time line??"

If Twitter and Musk really are in a death spiral, the end needs to come sooner rather than later, so we get to a substitute that has a sense of decorum again... 

Update:   It just keeps getting worse.  Today I had to block "CCTV shootings"  and "Crazy clips" and something else, all because they were showing clips of someone shot, or doing something which resulted in death of injury.

It's like a Chan4-trashification of the app is unfolding rapidly.

I see on Reddit that people have been complaining about this for many months - I don't know why it has just hit my account in such a wave.


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