Twitter is extremely toxic and divisive, and Dorsey is... the same. People are hoping his removal will allow the platform to mature.

>allow the platform to mature

What does that mean?

The medium is the message and Twitter is curt, prone to exaggeration / outrageous / mean spirited content.... and the people on there EAT IT UP.

What is going to mature?

Censorship and more algo driven content discovery to push ads and approved narratives.

Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.

I don't know what anyone means exactly by censorship anymore.

Like someone regularly posting obvious lies and bs?

I feel like I need an exact example from every person when the topic comes up, and that's not really easy to do.

The specific cases are less important than the overall trend which is social media companies using their control of who sees what to influence public opinion. It’s common to think in terms of users being banned or users being censored, but the real issue is ideas being censored in aggregate. This allows for a more subtle distortion of reality than what traditional media can achieve. Essentially it’s possible to make public opinion look like whatever you want it to on any given issue & control which issues are at the front of people’s minds.

They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.

None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.

>The specific cases are less important

I completely disagree.

Complaining about censorship because someone can't post some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different than someone posting some well thought out ideas and getting them removed.

The complaints around censorship have to do with users posting anything related to certain viewpoints (in fact or in error) no longer being able to post anything at all.

Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming that one is not legally a publisher is not something we should allow in our society.

If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies' or flaming, you're not keeping up.

I really haven't seen what you seem to be alluding to.

That's kinda why I talk about having to ask for exact examples... I still have no clue what exactly you think is being censored.

The propagandists have confused you and many others on this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or published, or is soft-censored by muting its distribution...that is censorship.

One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".

Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e. scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would cause harm to others.

Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.

I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.

I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.

I'm not sure what's complicated about this.

People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.

> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.

You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.

The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.

Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.

I understand the Galileo reference, what is the example today then?

Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS.

For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.

"I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it."

He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo was alive.

What exactly is being censored like Galileo today?

Galileo's book was censored by the church because it insulted the pope.

I'm not certain if that exists much today. Similar censorship would be curtailing mockery of public authority figures.

Everyone who uses Twitter has seen the little ! triangle saying a tweet has "misinformation". Or read about people suspended for discussing

- Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ

- Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud

- Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above]

I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.

It was leaked that twitter has a "Trends Blacklist"

So it's not actually "trending" it's Twitter™ Approved Trending®.

Censoring things they know are trending because of arbitrary reasons is a pretty good example.

What about blocking an article about Hunter Biden's laptop?

What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where opinions are not allowed.

Free speech is important and it's already not including violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and we don't need hate speech restrictions.

>What's bs to you, may not be to someone else.

That doesn't make it not BS.

I think facts are real things.

I applaud this objectivist stance (I think we all agree facts exist) but speech can be about interpretations of facts.

If you want the fact can be "The New Yorker claims these photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack are real".

Despite that, the article was censored on Big Tech's platforms and the NYT called it unsubstantiated. 9 months later they conveniently removed "unsubstantiated" from their article.

But don't worry, all is good, it obviously wasn't election manipulation /s https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1437453951046127629

It's funny to note how Big Tech's didn't censor posts about Russiagate, which actually ended up being unsubstantiated.

Advocates for free speech that support a "public square" model of free speech but who refuse to adapt that to the modern digital communication systems are doing more harm than good in my opinion.

A public square filled with nation state actors influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit free speech than any technological solution owned by a social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free" world where it can be manipulated by those with the right resources (in my opinion).

What we need is for people to get a lot more creative with how to create, support, and sustain free speech online without relying on millennia old concepts which do not map to our current problems quite well.

Twitter is only like that if one consumes that content. Like, if one only ever follows John Carmack and Gwern, that won't be the experience. Saying Twitter is mean-spirited is essentially the same as saying that no matter where one goes one smells shit. Everyone who feels that way should check the bottom of their shoe.

I suggest Matthew 7:5 for them.

It's just too much work pruning / hoping you find folks who are sort a single topic accounts for me.

Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".

I have been append-only to my list and it's been great. Only ever had to take Matt Yglesias off my list and that's because he tweets all the time.

The downside (maybe upside) is that I run out of Twitter content pretty fast.

Fwiw, this isn't my experience. My following list is remarkably stable, and I've only had to prune people "falling of the wagon" once or twice. It's also not much work: you see their tweet, remember that they've done thus more than once recently, and click unfollow.

The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.

I think I reached that point but then the list was like ... 3 stable accounts.

At that point I just didn't find it worth it even visiting. Finding more didn't seem like something I wanted to do.

Yea, that is pretty low. I stabilized at a couple dozen. I run out of tweets on days when I'm being particularly idle, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

I also do get a trickle of new accounts. I recognize a name after appreciating their threads a few times, and then click through to their profile and read a bit to increase my sample size. If it turns out I got a skewed sample, I unfollow them using the same process I described above.

This process really feels like almost no work, and I've gotten enormous benefits from it. Most concretely, it's been trivial to frontrun traditional media and public health recommendations by several months during the entirety of the pandemic. I can pretty much credit my Twitter feed with myself and my extended family getting through the pandemic much more safely and healthily (incl mental health) than we likely would otherwise have.

Sorry but cynically toxic and divisive algos drives more attention thus more ad revenue (see FB), it's not going to get better with a more investor friendly CEO

Yeah not really sure how people think trying to squeeze more money out of the platform will somehow improve the experience.

Twitter has not as aggressively monetized with advertising as FB has, I wonder if we will see the same soon.

I personally think this move, and to a larger extent the current trends we're seeing in our industry has much more to do with revenue, profits and share price than it does with the product or any social consequences.

like big tobacco selecting tobacco plant strains with more nicotine to ensure addiction

I think twitter moderation has been so overtly one sided that there is plenty of profit to be made by warming up to the other side.

I'll take Things That Will Never Happen for $400, Alex.

Do you have examples to share? From what I've seen of posts taken down and/or accounts banned it seems to be people spewing severe vitriol - and that's on both sides.

And what is the cost of that to society? These companies always maximize their own profits. Nobody cares about society or greater good anymore.

I wonder if that is the reason why we are living in the age of misinformation.

Twitter is THE social media I am not able to use without letting it affect my mental health. Anytime I logged into Twitter, I came out more angry, bitter and outraged. It's like the whole platform is built around hot takes, dunking, bullying, and outrage. It always baffles me how mainstream media never utters a word how toxic Twitter is.

Completely agree. On top of that, even if you avoid the politically charged stuff, there is just a staggering amount of bullshit. “Thought leaders” with tens of thousands of followers all tweeting the same broad ideas as if they’re original thoughts.

Oh god. The thought leaders. The truly despicable aspect of Twitter. These people pop up on my feed and it’s just extremely cringeworthy. No need to explain in depth what their thoughts are. Just 140 characters and off you go.

The mainstream media are trying to recapture the attention-monopoly they had in the 60s-70s, and are largely succeeding. They don't want to compete with Twitter; they want to buy it.

Any particular reason you excluded the 80s (or even the 90s) from the attention-monopoly time period?

Only that I think the 80s were a little past the sweet-spot of network television; cable was starting to become widespread.

Mainstream media has no problem with Twitter because it's not eating their lunch.

Makes me think of how many traditional media outlets had a lot to say about YouTube being "rabbit holes" and whatnot around election times, but have a lot less to say about them now that Google picked up the pace on censoring content and pruning platform capabilities (removing dislikes being a big one).

> It always baffles me how mainstream media never utters a word how toxic Twitter is

Because they are the toxicity.

They love embedding tweets to make news articles

That won't happen, the community is there to stay and it won't be less toxic just because the CEO resigned.

It's like when Kyle Vogt was forcibly removed from the CEO position at Cruise and replaced by Dan Ammann.

You need someone with brains and decency (not just luck) to run the company.

Are you trying to say this is Twitter's version of Uber's Travis Kalanick getting pushed to the exit moment?

> stock popped 10%

stock is back to where it was a week ago, and is still lower than most of the year. These headlines are meaningless.

I think people are excited for _any_ change at Twitter right now.

They've been making progress in the last year or two but I suspect most people think they could be doing more...

The stock is down for the day at the moment. I wonder if all comments rationalizing the (very) brief 10% up will rethink their arguments.

Interesting - it could be that the reality is harder than the headline.

They saw Dorsey's plan, and liked another plan better. Simple.

Was it plan or execution? I understand he had some very aggressive performance targets to hit too.

I think parent comment is making a joke in reference to HBO’s Succession: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5xBrFbNHhYk

The line is a bullshit TV talking point to rationalize (to the markets) an abrupt 180 by one of the characters.

Is it bullshit? The plan the buyers like has a chance of making just a few more dollars for their limited partners than Jack Dorsey's plan and thats why they bought more shares. Simple.

Thanks for the cultural context!

Dorsey seemed willing to stick to Twitter's core vision. It would not surprise me at all if investors like Paul Singer decided to try and convert it into a second facebook.

Vote of no confidence surely

Did the news leak before market open? His tweet was at 10:48 EST, and the email screenshot has 9:45 AM, which presumably is EST (it's certainly not PST).

Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess it originally linked to somewhere else.

The HN submission was originally a link to an article with a headline something like "Jack Dorsey expected to step down as Twitter CEO."

There is an history of tech Startups doing very well financially when their founders leave. See Google, Microsoft, Apple

Stock is red now. Pump and dump.

The past few years the stock market has been so divorced from reality that I wouldn't read too much into it.