For example, OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.
It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. And it could also have detection and review processes for any kind of tweet that could be defaming. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.
Finally, this is the Web 3 era, who knows what mechanism it could find to innovate on that front.
The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others. It also gives very little recourse to people receiving the content to do their own due diligence, or to people who are targeted by the tweets to have a means to provide their counterpoint to the same audience, unless they themselves are just as powerful an actor.
You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically. Twitter wouldn't need to choose the truth, but it gives recourse and mechanisms for the process of truth seeking to take place and for the people being shown the tweet more context and therefore better means to make up their own mind.
Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source.
>OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.
I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
>It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.
So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world.
>The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others.
I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth.
>You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically.
I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.
You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.
> I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
I'm assuming OP feels that not owning the verified account for themselves hurts him in some way and makes it harder for him to defend themselves against the accusations and slandering. The issue I can see in general is that it means other accounts could pretend to be him, and if he tries and respond to some claims, people reading can assume it's not truly him responding.
> So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world
You can still have all these things, but simply increase your bar for them. Basically, if someone says something that could be defamation or slander, they should show due cause, if they don't, then it doesn't meet the quality bar for Twitter and Twitter doesn't have to accept hosting the content and promoting it to others. One can still self-publish if they want.
The bar for due cause doesn't have to be very high either, you could simply say that justification must be provided, and only minimal assessment of the justification needs to take place, basically just check that a logical reason was provided, not that the reason is good or undeniable, but simply relevant.
This person is an Israeli agent
We think this person is an Israeli agent, because they've been spotted talking to Jewish people in New York.
So hopefully I showed how such a process wouldn't impact free speech, nothing gets censored or blocked, but potentially harmful and damaging to other speech is asked to provide a small amount of additional justification for the claims.
> I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth
I'm not asking for censorship, I'm asking for mechanisms to increase the quality of the discussions and benefit the truth seeking process.
I literally spent like 10min thinking about this and already came up with three possible improvements. Imagine being Twitter and having employees that could have access to all their data and spend much more resources brainstorming on this problem, I'm sure they could come up with even more ideas.
1. Provide more transparency on the source of the information.
2. Provide a way for the targets of Tweets to provide their counterpoint.
3. Increase the requirement for tweets that attack a target to provide justification.
He's complaining that he can't keep up replying to them all. Ya he's also complaining they were posted in the first place, but that's to your point, we're not trying to prevent truth from coming out, but for claims made to have more legitimacy, and for targeted individuals and organizations to have more recourse to defend themselves. All things that actually help distinguish a truth from a lie.
This has to happen in a way that avoids the reader trap. That is, most readers won't go out of their way to fairly evaluate the claims and search for counterpoints or research the bias and conflict of interests, etc.
Take me, I see a tweet, if a reply is posted to it a week later, very likely I don't see that reply. The original tweets message is all I saw and now lives in my subconscious as a data point.
It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
If you're saying that Twitter could attach that information to tweets so readers can judge for themselves, then I have no problem with that. I thought you meant that Twitter should use it to decide whether to remove tweets.
It still seems beyond the capabilities of Twitter, though. It's like asking the telephone company to have journalistic duties over everything that's said on the network. And I suppose the cynical point is, why would Twitter implement any of the changes you propose? Would it improve the site? Sure, but would it translate to any advantages for the shareholders? Is Twitter responsible for quality of the tweets in the platform?
>It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
It sounds like an inherent problem, though. If you're up against someone who can tweet 100 times faster than you because they have more resources, I don't think there's anything Twitter can do against that.
You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad? This is a non-sequitur.
> Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.
I would argue that this is ignorant of social psychology. Sunlight isn't the best disinfectant, and people aren't rational non-tribal agents who will all hold hands and sing Kumbaya only if they could have totally unmoderated discourse. Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.
>Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.
The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion. I personally think the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.
That only makes sense if you think that an unmoderated Twitter can't also be used to oppress and propagandize, which is naive.
Revenge porn and harassment has oppressive outcomes. A foreign intelligence agency flooding the zone with misinformation, has the effect of propagandizing.
> the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.
There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.
> The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion.
Of course it's my opinion, what other opinion would I be sharing? I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.
So let me get this straight. The only way that the statement "perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize" can be true is if "zero filtering would prevent Twitter being used to oppress and propagandize". If you could, please explain how that makes sense.
>There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.
OK.
>I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.
I think if Western culture offers such a weak argument that it can't compete with such a backwards ideology in a free marketplace of ideas, that it deserves to be trampled by it and forgotten. The worst thing that could be done for ISIS is to give them a megaphone that's as loud as everyone else's.
"free marketplace of ideas"
No. The Nirvana fallacy would be "since moderating imperfectly doesn't completely eliminate the problem of Twitter being used to oppress or propagandize, no moderation should be applied". Actually I'm saying that a) moderating imperfectly doesn't completely eliminate the problem, and b) no moderation should be applied because inconsistent moderation is worse than no moderation (without this being related to the previous point, but just in general).
>You think you can just shine a light on bad ideas and they'll go away
Actually I'm disputing the idea of "good and bad ideas" in this context. Neither Islamism nor any of the examples you gave are good or bad in an objective sense. The most we can say is that they're more or less successful in perpetuating themselves in time, or that they cause more or less of some specific phenomenon. I described Islamism as backwards and stupid but that's my opinion, not an objective measure. If when given sufficient exposure it would win ideologically then I think it should be allowed to win. I see no reason to prevent this.
>If you want to form a worldview based on social psychology
When did I say that?
"no moderation should be applied because inconsistent moderation is worse than no moderation"
The consistency of moderation is a spectrum, from very poor to average to excellent.
You're insisting on drawing a rigid binary of "inconsistent" versus "perfectly consistent", and saying that since "perfectly consistent" is impossible, the only alternative is "inconsistent" which is categorically worse than than no moderation by sheer virtue of the binary category that it's assigned to. This is the perfect solution fallacy.
"Actually I'm disputing the idea of "good and bad ideas" in this context"
It is a binary distinction. Something that's almost completely consistent is not completely consistent, therefore it's inconsistent. I'm not saying it's equally as inconsistent as something that's totally inconsistent, but it is inconsistent. Maybe you're interested in measuring the degree to which things are consistent, but I only care about whether they're consistent.
>the only alternative is "inconsistent" which is categorically worse than than no moderation by sheer virtue of the binary category that it's assigned to. This is the perfect solution fallacy.
It's not, and I will tell you why: in my opinion, an okayish criterion that's applied consistently is better than a good criterion that's applied inconsistently. The best compromise is the one where all the parties are left equally dissatisfied. And why is that? It's because it's easier to convince everyone that one is being fair than that one is taking the optimal course of action.
>Right, so if literal authoritarian Islamists became the dominant paradigm and Sharia was imposed on you by force you have no problem with it simply because that's what won in the marketplace of ideas.
That depends on what you mean by "have no problem". Would I think everyone is completely stupid and possibly seek to move to some place else? Yes. Would I take any steps at all to prevent that, beyond possibly arguing against such ideas? No.
>this is nihilistic moral relativism
I'm a moral nihilist, yes. That is to say, I reject that idea that morality exists, at least by some interpretations of the word.
>I know you conservative types don't really believe in moral relativism, it's probably just disingenuous posturing because you know right-leaning opinions tend to be banned more often in social media in the current moment, so it's helpful to adopt a stance on censorship that seems more principled and logically consistent. The left did this in the 1960s. If it was just ISIS propaganda being banned and nothing else I know I wouldn't be hearing any of these nihilistic relativistic arguments.
1. I have no idea where you got that I'm conservative, but of all the labels I would apply to myself, that's not one of them.
2. There's no point in continuing if you're going to unilaterally ascribe beliefs to me and assume ulterior motives. You can just imagine how it's going to go and pretend that you're correct.
A corollary of this opinion is that a good criterion that's applied with 99.99999999% accuracy is worse than a mediocre criterion that's applied with 100% accuracy. That is an absurdity which comes from forcing the real world to fit into rigid binary categories.
> It's because it's easier to convince everyone that one is being fair than that one is taking the optimal course of action.
Perceptions of fairness isn't my primary objective. My primary objective is to make life better for myself and the people I care about. Yes, that's not an objective ideal, morality isn't objective, we agree on that.
> Would I take any steps at all to prevent that, beyond possibly arguing against such ideas? No.
> I'm a moral nihilist, yes.
> [don't] unilaterally ascribe beliefs to me
I withdraw the moral nihilist comment, because I've realized you can't be that, given that you're prescriptively arguing for no moderation as being superior to moderation. That means there is some moral system there that you're not disclosing, since without some moral assumptions you would not be able to argue for one possibility being superior to another. Regarding your political beliefs, I was presuming more than assuming them. If you're not arguing from some tribal culture war motivation, then I find your opinions to be bizarre and can't understand the system of principles or axioms that they come from.
That's not an absurdity. There's no contradiction in those statements. You simply disagree because you have different priorities from me.
>I withdraw the moral nihilist comment, because I've realized you can't be that, given that you're prescriptively arguing for no moderation as being superior to moderation. That means there is some moral system there that you're not disclosing
Like I said, it depends on the interpretation of the word. If you're using the word "morals" to refer to a system of values (i.e. a set of relative importances that are assigned to things) that inform people's decisions, then yes, I believe in those, obviously.
>If you're not arguing from some tribal culture war motivation, then I find your opinions to be bizarre and can't understand the system of principles or axioms that they come from.
What do you find bizarre about the following?
* In any system involving multiple people, fairness is of utmost importance to maintain stability and cohesion. Unfair treatment causes conflict and divisions.
* No idea should be silenced. The acceptance that some ideas should be silenced and others not inevitably leads to conflict regarding the rationale itself and whether it's applied fairly, and may lead to a slippery slope. On the other hand, if absolute free speech is in effect no one can legitimately complain that they're being treated unfairly.
There are also more practical reasons to oppose censorship in all its forms, such as the Streisand effect.
Take any crime, such as murder. It is impossible to ban and punish murder perfectly fairly. Some inconsistencies and unfairness is guaranteed. That doesn't mean we should stop enforcing all criminal sentencing just because it's not perfectly fair.
You bring up the social consequences of perceived unfairness and the Streisand effect. These are social psychology arguments which you've previously said you're not looking at. Well it's good that you're taking social psychology seriously because that's the focal point of this, and I refer back to the previous things I've said on that.
It's not. What's impossible is to determine with 100% certainty who committed a murder. But if you start from the assumption that you correctly know who committed a murder, you can administer a fair sentence quite easily. For example, you could punish all murders equally regardless of circumstances, but it's possible even if different sentences may be applied.
Censorship is completely different.
First, it's not completely obvious that the mere utterance of an idea is something that should be prevented or punished.
Second, the unfairness of censorship comes from the fact that the utterance of only some ideas is prohibited. Well, why those and not others? That is to say, given that ideas don't arise in a vacuum, but are the products of minds, why are some people being punished by being prevented from expressing themselves just for their ideas while others aren't? It's not like (extrajudicially) murdering some people is legal and murdering others isn't.
Third, murder (and, to a lesser extent, crime in general) is an exceptional occurrence. It's not something that's happening trillions of time per day. For something that happens so frequently, it's inevitable that policing will be inconsistent to the point that one violation will be punished and another not, even though they're exactly equivalent.
>These are social psychology arguments
These are common sense arguments. The idea that fairness is important is as old as trying to decide what to have for lunch.
This is again you trying to fit reality into neat, hard, rigid categories. You think murder sentencing can be "fair" and "consistent", but censorship can only be "unfair" and "inconsistent". Binaries that only exist in your imagination and don't exist in the real world. Categorical thinking is bad, and I suggest you read my post on this kind of thinking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674580
Murders, just like any other crime or just like spoken words, aren't homogeneous. Premeditated murder and torture is different to a spontaneous unplanned murder. Judges and juries are subjective, and will come to different sentences for the same crime. Juries are imperfect, and will convict some innocent people or let some guilty people off by sheer accident. There is lots of unfairness here. And it's necessary unfairness, because we accept that systems can be desirable even if they aren't perfectly fair.
> First, it's not completely obvious that the mere utterance of an idea is something that should be prevented or punished.
> Well, why those and not others?
We've already been over this. I am not a moral relativist or moral nihilist. I will advocate to ban strings of words that have a non-trivial probability of causing stochastic terrorism or genocide, by the same logic that we choose to ban direct calls to violence. You are not a moral nihilist either, because you presumably are happy that theft is illegal, despite the fact that your opinion on that is purely subjective, as are all political and moral opinions.
> Third, murder (and, to a lesser extent, crime in general) is an exceptional occurrence. It's not something that's happening trillions of time per day.
This isn't relevant. Drink driving and petty theft happens many times a day but it's a crime for a good reason. And if it weren't a crime, it may happen much more often.
I think that murder sentencing can be fair. It's not, but murder is not something that should go unpunished either way.
I think censorship is not and has never been fair. Not only that, historically the point has been the opposite: to oppress. I think "well-intentioned censorship" like you propose is so easy to pervert that it's worse than nothing.
>We've already been over this.
And we're going over it again because the first time around you apparently found my viewpoint incomprehensible.
>I am not a moral relativist or moral nihilist. I will advocate to ban strings of words that have a non-trivial probability of causing stochastic terrorism or genocide
But you're not alone in the world. While you're happy to have those strings banned and none others, other people will want to use the same systems that were put in place in order to ban strings, to ban some strings that you may not care about one way or another, and others that you think should not be banned.
>by the same logic that we choose to ban direct calls to violence
I don't think calls to commit crime need to be banned. I don't think shouting fire in a crowded theater need to be banned. It's one each person to act accordingly in each situation, and not be moved to action by the first idiot who says something stupid. If the justification for censorship of ideas is censorship of calls to violence, I'm fine with having none.
But see what I mean? If I tell you "I'm not opposed to banning calls to violence" I'm opening the door for you to come back with "well, then what about these other strings that have similar effects?" Do you not see how the same can be done to you?
>This isn't relevant.
It is relevant. Unlike crime, which most people at most rarely feel like committing, almost everyone has an opinion that someone else would find objectionable and would rather they didn't voice.
Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.