if they are gonna to have all that, which i think they need to survive as a business, then the next best thing would be to empower users to have more control over the content they see ala email filtering
I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about what Twitter does on their website. If it vanished tomorrow, I’d be fine. Most of us knew what was going in the 90’s just fine.
By the way, all the newspapers and mainstream media that were displaced by social media are almost all ad-based, for-profit enterprises too.
The fact that people use these poorly vetted sites as their primary source of news is unsettling. There is a lot of quality content, but it’s surrounded by a lot of garbage (from both the left and the right).
The NYT and WSJ both operate by much higher standards than I’ve ever seen on FB or Twitter. The newspapers are far from perfect, but they do abide by ethical standards. And most importantly, they are liable for their content.
You are chasing after a distinction without a difference.
Newspapers and TV media also have always received a lot of government pressure trying to spin their coverage or convince them to downplay (or emphasize) certain stories. I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.
It's obviously bad in both cases, and it's clear that this kind of behavior has actually increased the attraction of misinformation and decreased trust in mainstream media -- which is the opposite of the intended result.
I’d say it’s just a reflection of us, not our compass.
Sometimes it seemed like most of the news coverage of Trump consisted of news anchors reading his tweets on air. His tweets got a lot of the people into DC on the 6th to hear his speech in the first place.
Twitter is not just a distraction, sometimes it is the news.
Either way from a moral perspective doesn't change the fact that a platform censoring viewpoints is a violation of the principal of free speech, and morally reprehensible in a free democratic society. Twitter tried to be the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, and I'm glad that Twitter's new management recognizes the error of their former ways and is committed to not repeating the same Orwellian mistakes.
Is maximizing profit the only thing that social networks should care about? Or are there other obligations also?
There is a place for social media in our world, I just don’t want to hold it up to such lofty aspirations that it will never achieve.
There should not be a single, privately owned town square. There should be thousands of town squares where people can go and engage. Some should be public and some should be private. Placing all our free speech eggs in the Twitter basket will not end up well.
Just because the ticket has finally come in for censorship that offends your own sensibilities, does not change the fact that this dynamic has existed for the past two decades. The pot has been slowly boiling, and you are now realizing it. Good - jump out!
The only way out of this is decentralized platforms running on Free software, period.
We really would be better off with no censorship. Even allowing obvious conspiracy theories and fake news is better than trying to police the truth and getting it wrong. When moderators get it wrong even one time they lose trust forever and give the conspiracy theorists even more ammo — in some cases by making the conspiracy theories about censorship become true!
Besides, even if you wanted corporations to police speech and decide what is true, would Twitter and Facebook really be the ones you would want to do it?
It’s been very sad to see Westerners, especially Americans, and especially American liberals be so fearful and weak that they discarded the single most important principle of freedom, liberty, and human rights: freedom of speech.
That sacrifice got us nothing. Misinformation still spreads and it is more attractive than ever to the conspiracy-minded precisely because they can see the attempts to suppress it! Forbidden knowledge is always more attractive. It wasn’t worth it!
The only way out of this is to stop asking corporations and governments to censor things. Just stop.