For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms.
I don’t do “Twitter style” social media much but when I did use my Mastodon account I found significant engagement. On Twitter my posts were invisible, but on Mastodon people found, liked, and commented on them. Conversation were good as well.
I was a beta tester for BlueSky and I found the same “invisibility” problem there. Same posts on Mastodon, Twitter, and Blue Sky and only the Mastodon ones generated responses or any acknowledgement for that matter.
I disagree, I'm able to get world events while they are happening realtime, from both reporters and lay people, and see which way the event is being colored and manipulated by comparing the two. It's invaluable.
Hard to know what to say to these stories anymore. But one idea is:
One thing you can do is write to your MP or representative.
Here is a letter template to write to your MP if you are in the uk - you could also use the template in the US or elsewhere in the world : https://www.theclimatecoalition.org/write-to-your-mp
An explanation of how this works from the article:
JWST is able to analyse the light that passes through the faraway planet's atmosphere. That light contains the chemical signature of molecules in its atmosphere. The details can be deciphered by splitting the light into its constituent frequencies - rather like a prism creating a rainbow spectrum. If parts of the resulting spectrum are missing, it has been absorbed by chemicals in the planet's atmosphere, enabling researchers to discover its composition.
Note that they say the identification is ‘tentative’ and not robust yet.
My comments was really made in jest…love the follow-up from everyone though! I also lov ehow science will always defer to “possible” instead of “definitively” no matter how much evidence there may be.
That's because that's how science works. Discoveries are not considered to be statistically significant until they reach what's called 5 sigma certainty which is approximately equivalent to saying that the chance that the discovery is wrong is 1 in 3.5 million.
A lot of scientists would consider it unethical to claim a discover until you had provided enough data to reach 5 sigma certainty. When papers are published, it takes a lot of peer review before the hypothesis of that paper event approaches 5 sigma certainty, but that doesn't mean that reporters aren't happy to pick up the story.
It's just bad and/or unethical science journalism that are picking up on unproven papers because of the sensational title.
bbc.co.uk
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