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From a fine publication, The Modern Farmer, an intriguing exposé!
Twitter, specifically, has been a source of contention. It all started when the official National Park Service account was asked to stop tweeting after it shared photos that compared the crowd size of Trump's inauguration to the crowd size of Obama's inauguration in 2009. Then the official Badlands National Park Twitter went rogue and started tweeting facts about climate change. The tweets were later removed and blamed on "a former employee who was not authorized to use the park's account."
Since those tweets were removed, over 40 "alt" or "rogue" Twitter accounts have sprouted up to fill in for many agencies and National Parks. Some of them already have a pretty big following—currently, AltUSNatParkService has more than 1.27 million followers. So far we're seeing climate facts, inspirational quotes about the environment, cute photos of animals, and a lot of snark (this is Twitter, after all).
TFA includes the a few of the more interesting ones, including:
- AltEPA: He can take our official Twitter but he'll never take our FREEDOM. Unofficial EPA #resistance. #factsmatter. If loving science is wrong, we don't wanna be right. #factsmatter
- AltUSForestService: The unofficial, and unsanctioned, #Resistance team for the U.S. Forest Service. Not an official Forest Service account, not publicly funded, citizen run. Read it while you can! https://t.co/rTbMl0n3Zc
- AltUSDA: Resisting the censorship of facts and science. Truth wins in the end. Read the USDA Climate Change Solutions page while you still can: https://t.co/99G1M2zuYG #resist #science #climatechange.
- AltFDA: Uncensored FDA
- AltUSFWS: The Alt U.S. Fish Wildlife Service (AltUSFWS) is dedicated to the conservation, protection and enhancement of fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats
Being Twitter, some of these seem to have difficulty staying on-topic and seem to think that anything is fair game.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday February 03 2018, @06:24PM
Being Twitter, the whole thing, even if puffed up to the size of a tempest, would not fill a teakettle.
It's not the "character limit" that's the problem, but the "relevance of the typical message on that medium" that is statistically zero.
There have been moments of brightness, but they are incapable of bringing up the average value above zero unless you work with more digits of precision than make any sense.
If you acknowledge that "Twitter (& Twit Tweet Twatter Twoot Twitler)" etc. is not the basis of the story (something that should be done for the vast majority of "Twitter" stories), it becomes something along the lines of this:
"The public statements of many science-oriented or science-following government agencies have been censored on political, not scientific, grounds by the current presidential administration, which is acknowledged by all sides to firmly believe that if they think something strongly enough, it doesn't matter if it happens to not be remotely true. A loose association of individuals within these affected agencies, along with random people not connected in any way to any government agency, have taken to issuing statements on the agencies' behalf, mostly by means of anonymous online posting. You can read some of those at the locations listed below." (Insert list from article.) "As always, please remember that just because someone says something really confidently, that does not make the something in question true, relevant, or useful."
The story isn't about Twitter, though Twitter figures into it in a minor way. That is true of nearly every story written in such a way as to indicate that it's about "Twitter."
Pretending these stories are about Twitter, so frequently done, is sort of akin to saying that a story is about "AT&T" because someone said something stupid to someone else over a telephone connection carried by that carrier's network.