There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?
Twitter has 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily active users. Is that a community? It seems more like an unruly mob. :-)
I agree with the point that all online forums should have moderation, but for me the question is, should something like Twitter even exist? A centralized world discussion forum is not necessarily a good and healthy thing. Can humanity handle having Twitter?
Even if the answer is no, pandora's box is opened. If twitter disappeared, 5 copycat sites/apps would emerge from the ashes overnight.
5 is not necessarily a problem. 1 is a problem. :-)
It's not easy to reach "critical mass" though. Many social networks have tried and failed. Certainly the Twitter alternatives (e.g., App Dot Net) tried and failed. And hopefully we've all learned some lessons from Twitter and won't make the same mistakes again.
Or if we did make the same mistakes again, then humanity is truly doomed, and there's nothing we can do to stop it...
Twitter is absolutely a community, it's just buckling under the weight of its scale. The problem we're facing right now, to me, is that Twitter and Facebook have built communities that they are incapable of moderating effectively because of their scale, but they ask us to give them time to manage this difficult problem and we give it to them, absorbing more damage while they make billions. How much time do they need? They've all been around for over a decade. It's time to start demanding results.
These platforms aren't required to exist. If they can't prevent their services from causing damage to societies across the world, then they should be required to fix that. If they can't fix it, then they should be shut down.
I see many "it's just moderation" takes on what Twitter is doing, but what Twitter and other platforms are now doing goes beyond what most platforms have traditionally enforced in their moderation. Hiding user content that the platform unilaterally perceives to be untruthful is really a new milestone.
Twitter has guidelines rules for things you can and can't say but since the users don't all agree to the same guidelines, and Twitter enforces them very inconsistently, there's no pressure to follow them except to the point you may get suspended or banned from the site.
Rather then evolving along with the needs of their users, Twitter froze it's functionality years ago. Twitter could have added a range of moderation tools, allow users to opt-out from re-tweets, trends and such, allowed people to create groups and communities, foster active cooperation with key users and it's communities,...
Why didn't that happen? Because those hundreds of millions of users aren't paying customers. Investing in all of those things simply isn't worth the investment or pressing enough in terms of optimizing for revenue through advertising and business intelligence.
An audience is a valuable commodity, and so what Twitter doesn't want is risk losing that commodity. Tweaking the functionality of the platform is such a risk.
However, hosting hundreds of millions of people who aren't customers, is also a huge liability. Worst case is having governments representing those poeple imposing hard regulatory frameworks that hurt revenue and profitability.
In a way, it's akin to the lions of the circus. People pay good money to see the lions perfom, but the circus has to accept the risks that come with keeping lions. Which includes getting shut down because the lions escaped and went to town.
So, why does Twitter cater to hundreds of millions of people, and why does the circus keep lions? Because the profits they gain from doing so outmatch the risks they have to accept.
Getting back to your original question, Twitter is basically Humanity's stream of consciousness materialized. It's prohibitively expensive, and rather utopian, to be able to moderate that in a meaningful way which caters to everyone's contentment. By contrast, Twitter's aspiration isn't to provide the best moderation, it's to implement just the bare minimum in order to not lose it's value.
Looking back at the blogpost, you'll find that most of what they propose is tweaks to how they filter content and a small tweak to how you do re-tweeting based on existing functionality. No fundamental changes to the feature set are put into place. On the scale of Twitter's operation, that's mainly targetting low hanging fruit since introducing more substantial changes would be a huge gamble that might end up hurting the business.
I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money. We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist because of the economic incentives to do so.
We don't do this in the US, it's called the 1st amendment.
What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law.
> You have to set some of sort of standard
The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.
> What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law.
So there are still restrictions then and people can't say whatever they want?
> The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.
voat.co is a clone of reddit where the only difference is no restriction on speech. The top posts are usually extremely racist and antisemitic. It is a horrible horrible platform and the only change is no restriction on speech.
The amount of speech that is allowed by US law is so extremely broad that those restrictions may as well not exist.
IE, lets say someone were to argue "I think it is totally OK for the government to arrest and execute people who disagree with the government in any way!", and then backed up this belief by saying "Well, you support restrictions on free speech as well! You don't think that people should be able to send mass death threats to everyone, 100 times a day! Therefore, since you support restrictions on free speech, it is totally OK to arrest anyone who disagrees with the government in any way!"
This is the argument that you are making. And it is a bad one.
The reason why it is bad, is because the restrictions on speech, in the US are almost non-existent, and that is not a good justification to do other things that are much more restrictive, such as in my extreme example of arresting anyone who disagrees with the government.
But the point is that the fact that they are so extremely small and minimal restrictions on speech in the US, is not a good excuse to justify much larger restrictions.
If the existing restrictions of US law are so minimal, it makes no sense to bring it up, as any sort of justification for much larger restrictions.
It is just not relevant to anything, to mention that, because those restrictions are small, and are therefore not related to much larger restrictions.
That would result in 90% of user generated content being spam. There's no law against me sending you 10 spam DMs a day on Twitter. Is that really what you want?
Giving people the choice of whether they want to accept moderation or not, seems reasonable.
For example, if twitter allowed everything that is allowed by law, but also gave people control over content that they see, then that seems fine.
There is a fundamantal difference between disallowing something, and giving a user the option of not seeing certain content.
IE, I do not believe that the block feature is censorship, for example.
> Is that really what you want?
I'd want to have the option to control the content that I see, as opposed to twitter forcing its own decision. I don't see a problem with someone choosing to allow spam to themselves, if they are OK with that.
Twitter does. On Twitter. That's practically a tautology.
Is your point that you didn't know the answer, or that we should descend into anarchy because attempting to answer difficult questions is tricky?
Both sides think Twitter is biased against them. The only reason you think it's biased is because of the same tribalism that you're baselessly accusing them of.
It's blatantly obvious that Twitter can never stray far from the middle because it would lose them one half or the other of their audience and business.
You believe that and I respect your beliefs. I don't use Twitter, so I'm not really in a position to agree or disagree with you.
That said, so what? The shareholders of Twitter own the company. If the company is doing what the shareholders want (within the strictures of the law), then so be it.
Free speech cuts both ways. I can say just about anything I want. But Twitter or Facebook or HN, for that matter, is under no obligation to host my speech.
The only entities that are forbidden from censoring by the First Amendment are the Federal government,(and through the 14th Amendment) as well as state and local governments.
So if Twitter censors (or doesn't censor) content that you think shouldn't (or should) be censored, you are free to argue for your point of view and encourage others to do the same.
And Twitter can do the same.
Even if (and I take no position one way or another) Twitter is biased and acts upon those biases, so what? That's their right under the First Amendment.
It's messy, and it pisses people off, but there's no provision in the First Amendment that speech must be orderly or inoffensive.
They understand that "free speech" is one of many principles we value, that these principles can clash, and we inevitably have to choose between them in cases. Even if those choices make some people uncomfortable. Before today, speech was neither offline nor online so free as to permit fraud. It's a terrible civic abdication to write off criminal behavior because it's so easy to get away with online and because it looks so much on the surface level like "free speech."
Or because we live with too much fear and paranoia to accept even a discussion of establishing standards. Twitter making any judgment that some content is fraudulent is not the same as becoming the editorial boogeyman from the extremist side of whatever political party is opposite to yours. That's fear. That's an appeal to the slippery slope fallacy.
My trip to the store is better off for knowing that if someone was shouting about about Jesus or conspiracies, they'd be asked to leave. We don't question that limit on speech. There's a reason you see people doing that on street corners. If there was never any deplatforming, all platforms would inevitably suck.
Is it ideal that Twitter and Facebook have so much power? Maybe not, but that's just the reality we're in. We can't be paralyzed into inaction. There's no perfect body that everyone would trust to do the job and someone has to keep Twitter and Facebook from sucking too hard. Don't let your paranoia make you overlook that they'd lose half their audience/business if they ever strayed too far from the middle.
"People on Twitter, including candidates for office, may not claim an election win before it is authoritatively called"
If people can't see through the BS, then we get what we deserve. Every change like this is going to have unconscious bias and will likely be taken as proof of manipulation by people who don't share that bias. The only winning move is not to play.
Making a business model like that illegal would force these services to go the paid route, or have less a subversive, and alas, less effective, advertising.
I think a more nuanced and useful way to look at things is to think of Twitter as an amplification machine rather than a speech machine. I can say what I want out loud, I can write whatever letters I want, I can make my own website if I want, etc., but putting it on Twitter causes Twitter to amplify it. Many of these announced changes pertain to what Twitter chooses to amplify - and how - rather than what it permits people to say. (As far as I can tell, the only tweets they are actually removing are those that call for violence, a standard for censorship that seems quite reasonable.)
If we think in terms of how and when to amplify speech, rather than trying to figure out what kind of speech to censor, we can hit upon more workable improvements. Twitter's proposals here, under that framing, are a mixed bag.
Twitter provides several ways to amplify posts - some of which are intentional on the part of users, some not. For example, if I follow a person, I'm telling Twitter to show all that person's posts in my feed. If I reply to a tweet, I'm telling Twitter to show my post to that person in their notifications, and also show it to other people who engage with it. If I quote-rt a tweet, I'm telling Twitter to show it to everyone who follows me, alongside my commentary. Etc.
On the other hand, if I like a post, or engage with it in any way, I'm not telling Twitter to show it to anyone - but my Like may cause it to recommend the post to others, sort it upward in the algorithmic timeline, etc. This unintentional amplification can have unintended consequences, because the system cannot tell when engagement metrics are due to positive or negative characteristics of the post.
Quote-retweets are also rife with unintended consequences. If someone "dunks" on a post by quote-retweeting it with criticism or mockery, they're betting that their comment is going to lower the status of the person they are quoting or persuade people the post is false. But the folks reading their post may not agree - and the original post might have been an bad faith attempt at distraction, which a dunk then amplifies. Alternatively, if a popular account dunks on a much less popular account, it can (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) trigger a wave of hostility and harassment.
So I like parts of Twitter's changes here - they have the right to try and amplify true information more than false information, and removing flagged posts from recommendations will do that. Additionally, removing recommended content from non-followed accounts from the algorithmic timeline is positive as well - it reduces unintentional amplification and puts more control in the hands of users. But their encouragement of the quote-retweet is concerning. They don't seem to realize how effective a weapon it can be.
I would argue that any automated recommendation of user-generated content needs to be carefully controlled, if not abolished altogether. Recommendation systems cannot distinguish between content with high engagement due to quality, and high engagement due to emotionally manipulative dishonesty or other negative factors. And specially interested (or bigoted) political actors, who are simply interested in "the most effective way to attack / promote X" rather than arriving at the most truthful position, can test and manipulate those recommendation systems far more effectively than folks trying to engage with nuance and good faith.
This "situation where lies so easily go viral" seems to me to have intensified starting in around 2014 to 2015 - when Twitter introduced the quote-retweet, and Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. I don't think "free speech" is the right framing for thinking about it. The recent phenomenon is not the existence of extremist political movements or medical misinformation, but rather, their amplification.
b) When people spread false information at scale, it risks the very foundations of civilization.
Anyone with an actively managed platform has to try to ensure some kind of intelligent fealty - the trick is to do it without bias or and kind of ideological orientation.
They are obviously referring to the principle in this case. But maybe you don't understand what that means.
The tech companies have a clear liberal bias, despite what the media wants you to believe. Tech savvy people tend to be more liberal, and tend to spend more time on social media, so you have a bubble of opinions that drown out the other noise (which already gets downvoted to the bottom, shadowbanned, or censored anyway), resulting in the faux appearance of a consensus that there isn't a real problem here. Anyone with enough influence to have this opinion really noticed in the mainstream media, will be discounted as a "conspiracy theorist".
On one hand, I agree that businesses should be free to operate as they like & you can vote with your feet if you don't like the rules. However, we also have to be realistic about the fact that the largest tech corporations are now more powerful than most countries. Opting out isn't a very practical solution.
I think this is fundamentally the problem, and not free speech. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are of unprecedented historical size. Nobody really worried about whether some little discussion forum allows free speech or censors itself. But Twitter and Facebook want to become "the world's discussion forum", and I'm not sure that's even a thing that should exist. You can't really have free speech if there's only a small number of platforms for speech.
What about it? People get banned from Twitter all the time - literally every hosted platform and service moderates and bans content as they see fit. The terms of service you agreed to when using that platform likely includes phrases like "for any reason" and "in perpetuity throughout the universe."
So I guess I make another account? Or go somewhere else? That's not exactly the boot of fascism stomping on your face forever.
>However, we also have to be realistic about the fact that the largest tech corporations are now more powerful than most countries.
No they aren't. Countries have armies and the monopoly on violence. Countries can arrest you, torture you, confiscate your possessions, make your beliefs illegal, and murder you. The only thing Twitter can possibly do to me is delete my account or ban me. They only control their one platform, they don't control the internet or the entirety of media. They're not going to send me to the gulag or throw me into the ovens. They're not going to erase me like Stalin.
To say that any social media platform is more powerful than most countries is ridiculous.
Alright. Let's say that all of the major social media platforms ban any discussion of raising their taxes, or enacting more regulation on them, or let's say they straight up ban major politicians from the platform.
Oh, and also there is no other significant competitor that matters, and it is unlikely that any competitors will pop up anytime soon.
Are you just OK with that? You are just going to say "well, I guess it is their platform, and they can do what they want, and it doesn't matter that no competitor has any significant chance of being successful".
> They only control their one platform, they don't control the internet
Ok, now what is almost all of the major platforms do it, and there are no serious competitors?
Let's expand this out even further. What if Walmart did the same thing? Along with multiple other grocery stores.
You want to raise their taxes, well sorry, you probably aren't going to be able to buy food from any major grocery store.
Or how about if common carrier laws were removed and your power company did it? Or the water company, now that this is legal?
Your passive acceptance of this type of being can be extrapolated out to horrifying results.
Unless we're talking about a situation where a government controls the internet and makes it illegal for anyone but those social media sites to set up a server or host content, then that might create an immediate market demand for alternatives and those alternatives would appear, although alternatives would very likely already exist.
>Oh, and also there is no other significant competitor that matters, and it is unlikely that any competitors will pop up anytime soon.
You keep piling on qualifiers like "significant" and "serious" yet before social media silos it was entirely possible to reach millions of people and go viral with hosted forums and personal webpages. Hacker News alone gets a ton of traffic and it's hardly mainstream. What will happen is that the web will adapt as it always has.
It's not as big a problem as you make it out to be. Don't confuse the size of these sites' userbases with proportional degree of control over anything outside of their domain.
>Ok, now what is almost all of the major platforms do it, and there are no serious competitors?
>Let's expand this out even further. What if Walmart did the same thing? Along with multiple other grocery stores.
>You want to raise their taxes, well sorry, you probably aren't going to be able to buy food from any major grocery store.
(...)
>Your passive acceptance of this type of being can be extrapolated out to horrifying results.
Everything can be extrapolated out to horrifying results if you try hard enough and care little enough about reality. But your scenario in which every social media site (including those hosted in other countries,) and every businesses and government utilities and services conspire to control all forms of communication and deprive people of basic services as a means of oppression is so far removed from any conceivable reality that I have to question whether you're commenting in good faith. Otherwise, you're doing a good job of making my point for me.
They don't even have to all conspire together. Instead, merely one of these companies doing it, alone, could have a huge effect.
For example, a power company, or water company doing this, all on its own, not conspiring with anyone at all, would be very bad for society, if it were legal (fortunately, it is not legal for a power company to do that).
This is because it would be extremely expensive, and difficult to get another power line, or water pipe, to your house. There are huge barriers to entry.
If only a singular power company did this (after the law was changed), if would be very difficult for any of their customers to resist such changes. They'd have to take extreme actions, such as moving, or paying for whole new pipes to be dug in the ground to their house.
It works for me.
I don't use Twitter (or Facebook for that matter) and I don't lose anything by not doing so.
and so, why do you believe that? I'm not being combative or snarky here. I honestly don't understand why not using Twitter isn't "practical."