I don't really have much of an opinion on how twitter should approach world leaders.
I'm more interested in the approach of world leaders to twitter. As far as I'm concerned, people receiving salaries from the taxpayer shouldn't be spending their time writing free copy for twitter. They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites, or press conferences covered by multiple media organizations.
If the president feels a need to push out realtime text snippets, it can be done via an RSS feed on whitehouse.gov, and people can consume it via whatever app / client they want. If twitter wanted to scrape that and provide access to it, fine, but they shouldn't be given a free monopoly on that content.
It's not "free copy for twitter" anymore than a press briefing is "free copy for newspapers".
Leaders communicate wherever people are already reading and listening.
Today, Twitter is just as important of a conduit as newspapers or the evening news.
People already read Twitter and find it far more convenient to follow a world leader than to visit individual sites or set up an RSS reader.
Also you might be suffering from a legal misunderstanding -- Twitter doesn't get any kind of monopoly, free or otherwise, on someone's tweet. You keep the rights to your tweet.
There's zero difference between journalists reporting on a press conference and reporting on a tweet, except that tweets are instant while press conferences take time to set up.
And also that tweets are direct to the public, while when you read a journalist's article they might be omitting parts or spinning it.
I live in New York and I get different pieces of information from the government via pretty much every channel -- direct e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, websites, billboards, ads in the subway, post office mailings, newspapers, etc.
Different government agencies and officials at different levels (city, state, national) use all sorts of different communication methods.
Governments have been heavily involved in media campaigns across all channels as long as there's been media.
Press releases are just one communications channel among many. Twitter is just the ~newest in a very long line.
In the ideal case, a politician would do AMA style engagements where they take questions from the public and give detailed replies.
Since that won’t happen for most politicians, I’ll take a televised press conference with some back and forth between reporters and the politician over a tweet any day.
You can't talk about policy (in a meaningful way) with memes. Our discourse is already much too simple. If any group of people needs to be pandered to, then they're clearly not actually interested in politics.
This seems pretty elitist. I think being able to communicate effectively and concisely is important. When Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech it was noteworthy for lasting minutes when normally politicians would go on for hours. Many critics said the same thing about the Gettysburg Address as you are saying about memes. For the time, that was so much shorter than a usual speech, it was effectively a sound bite (and hey, people are still talking about it today, wadda ya know?).
If someone can use memes to communicate effectively, awesome. Most people suck at discourse in general, it's not limited to memes.
It seems pretty odd you have such a disdain for populism, but I'm guessing you believe in democracy. If most people prefer to participate that way and vote as such, are you saying that the people are wrong? Because the whole point of democracy is letting the people decide for themselves what they want.
If you think democracy is fundamentally flawed though, then I guess your point makes more sense.
I genuinely don't want to take this to a negative place. So, please understand, I'm answering your question as best I can, and with positive intent.
I believe populism can be quite bad, which is part of why the founding fathers designed a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy. They were all well schooled in Greek and Roman history, and were afraid of the demagogues of Athens, and of other Greek city states. They believed that the will of the masses could be ignorant and capricious, and should be moderated by wiser more responsible representatives. Of course, they believed that the masses must have some say, (as do I) but that listening to every popular whim may not be the best thing for our country.
Democracy allows for people to be wrong. Its mechanism for fixing wrong votes is to convince people that they should vote a different way, rather than forcing a new direction on them.
Having disdain for populism is well aligned with democracy. Shooting or torturing populists is not
You can and people do it all the time. I mean, I create and consume memes about complicated topics all the time (mostly related to the field of software I am in), so there is no reason that they can augment any discussion regardless of topic.
Twitter is a non-government owned software platform. It makes no sense to use it for exclusive official communications. Because, as we've seen, they can close any account at any time. even the us president
Trump in particular basing his presidency around twitter was super stupid. He could have and still can post anything he wants to trump.com, and it will be widely distributed on social media immediately
I'm always hesitant to base any major endeavor on a software platform that someone else owns. because...they own it. They can do whatever they want with their property
> Twitter is a non-government owned software platform. It makes no sense to use it for exclusive official communications. Because, as we've seen, they can close any account at any time. even the us president
There is nothing that requires official communications on Twitter to be exclusive to that platform.
Ultimately the problem is that Twitter et al is the new de facto public square. Politicians want to go where the people are, not to publish to an RSS feed that some single digit percentage of their audience (which will skew elite) will ever access.
Note also that there are other, broader consequences: Twitter operates the public square restriction from free speech provisions like the US First Amendment—it can regulate access and manipulate the dialogue to suit its own purposes to the detriment of the broader society, which is the whole point of provisions like 1A. Some are content that this isn’t a de jure public square, as though that will prevent us from suffering the de facto consequences.
I think the answer is to start regulating Twitter so it doesn’t have control over so much national and international dialogue. We might say that social media giants must behave according to the first amendment such that it is a “safe” space for politicians to interact. If we’re worried about preserving some sense of moderation, we could require social media giants to implement some common protocol so that they don’t own the dialogue, but only a view (in the SQL sense) into the dialogue.
I think the answer is to start regulating our government. Far more effective to write a law on how the president can use communication platforms than to regulate the current top communication platform.
It depends on what you’re solving for. I want to fix free speech and remove Twitter from the helm of democracy. That it doesn’t need to regulate world leaders is a bonus.
A key issue with politicians’ use of Twitter is that Twitter’s userbase is a very poor reflection of the wider population.
Politicians who are on Twitter, whether they know it or not, start to drift towards the views of Twitter users. Dopamine, like that which you get from from a popular tweet, is a powerful drug, and will alter peoples behaviour.
Aside from that, though, it seems the medium of Twitter has a remarkable ability to bring out people’s most toxic sides... it’s really not healthy.
I don't trust the media enough to honestly and accurately convey information from my elected officials to me.
And while press releases on whitehouse.gov are a step in the right direction, the fact that they are press releases usually makes them anodyne and uninteresting.
The best approach is the one we used to have: a non-partisan (or at least, bipartisan) press corps asking elected tough questions live on television. But that has been lost for some time now.
I'm not. There's a natural scarcity of space for physical cameras and reporters. As far as I understand, the press themselves are largely responsible for figuring out these logistics via the WHCA. (Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
There isn't any practical scarcity for text streams coming from the White House though, so I can't think of a reason why consuming them should be tied to a closed platform like Twitter, other than marginal costs of setting up and operating the infrastructure (perhaps not so marginal once we start talking about government contracts?).
Your point is good but I think the reality is just really mundane: the government could put out its own text streams and multi-publish them to different platforms, but it’s just not there yet. There’s no fire under anyone’s ass to get it done, if it’s even occurred to anyone in a position to do something about it in the past uh... 14 years?
However I would be fully on board with Twitter banning world leaders and IP blocking their capitals including the entire city of Washington. They won’t, that’s a value destroying proposition, but a man can dream.
Well, sort of. Not if they remove it. The fact that they (mostly) haven't exercised this control so far over world leaders' tweets is a matter of internal policy at Twitter.
That's not the sense that I was using, and I don't think it's a relevant point either. What's important IMO is that the platform and the data are not controlled by elected officials.
I can live with it if there's a pool of such channels and a system for sharing access across them, which is more or less the case for white house press conferences.
If the president were to just pick one favorite channel and only ever be interviewed by them and have them as the only invitee for press conferences, then no.
Yes. But I'd go further. All holders of US political office at all levels should be unable to restrict any conference or interview in which they take part to any single interviewer or news agency, so they cannot control who asks the questions or who airs the event.
For several decades, US Presidents have been able to avoid hard questions by cherry picking interviewers or networks in order to "massage their message". That isn't news and it shirks their responsibility to answer hard questions. Tweets are just the next step in the evolution of accountability avoidance.
We did away with royal proclamations long ago for damned good reason: you must answer to the people.
I think it is reasonable as long as there are barriers for consumption and people can be selectively limited in their ability to interact with the broadcasts.
Maybe if Twitter was brought in as a government contractor, including the inability to restrict people from interacting with government tweets and accounts (any non-government entities would fall under the private business side of things and not be included in this restriction) then I think it would be reasonable for the government to use Twitter.
You have it backwards. People aren't born world leaders. In the America at least, they start out as private citizens, and run for office, and while doing so communicate with people in order to spread their message.
What you are asking is for people to shut down their own personal social media accounts when they win an elected position. That doesn't seem like good policy - users will continue to use the same communication channels to their elected representatives.
> They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites
Most everything a government official or board or committee does is on the public record. Saying they cannot use 3rd party tools to organize, document, and communicate their actions would be more expensive and time consuming for them, which ultimately takes them away from the business of actually governing.
I'm not a fan of Twitter but it's definitely not just free copy for them; it's like a new communication tech has been invented (i.e. telegram -> phone) but this time it did not have immediate military application (I guess) and government wasn't the one doing the research and unfortunately the tech didn't become as open as the Internet or phone lines. My guess would be that large social media platforms should be part of telecomms now. Calling someone is not as common as it used to, it's now all SM.
On Twitter you can find promoted full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies and government officials. These same governments ban Twitter in their own countries and would never allow similar content on their own platforms. Twitter's solution here is to insert a tiny "State affiliated" footer text below the account name.
Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being allowed to broadcast propaganda ads bought and paid for by the Soviet Union?
> full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies
twitter is available freely on the Internet in any country that doesn't block it. with that in mind it's extremely difficult to remain "neutral" or be expected to be the arbiter of truth.
there are some obvious (easy) ways to implement constraints against state-affiliated propaganda outlets but with the above in mind what is "propaganda" to a European audience might just be news in a FVEY country. facebook has the same problem and I think it's not solvable in a "fair" way.
Say if they really went after anything that is "propaganda" should they also be pointing out that Bellingcat is having very strong ties with Atlantic Council (and collaborates with GCHQ), or should @NatSecGeek be called out for only doxing non-US organizations and individuals? There simply are too many small players that participate in InfoOps and their alignment isn't always as straight forward.
note: I personally think both bellingcat/NatSecGeek do excellent work but none of them are unbiased (or unaffiliated) which means they will at times end up as useful idiots (whether it suits them or not).
You might want to take a look at Voice of America, a Congress-funded network that broadcasts almost exclusively outside the US as US propaganda: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
Sorry, I'm not making the connection to what OP was saying. Can you expand? Does Voice of America pretend to be a domestic news source to the areas it broadcasts?
No it doesn’t. I think the OP was making a what-about counter argument, that the CIA was blasting pro-NATO radio programs into the Eastern Block. Of course the Soviets hated this and constantly tried to jam the signal so I think this example supports the root comment that most governments have a serious interest in curtailing adversarial propaganda.
Protip about wiki links. Posting the mobile link loads the mobile site for both desktop and mobile users however posting the desktop link will load the appropriate version for both desktop and mobile users. Always post the desktop version link.
I always take care to remove m. from a wiki link I'm sharing if I'm using a mobile device.
Even the folks who worked for the VOA and its parent the
United States Information Agency acknowledge that was created as a Cold War propaganda channel[1]. The broadcasts were heavily influenced by the CIA. The agency was reorganized in 1999 and the USIA abolished, but it's still mostly about presenting the State Department's view of international news.
It's possible to be completely accurate and show no obvious bias, but be propaganda by careful choice of what is and is not mentioned and how it is framed. The best propaganda doesn't isn't obviously propagandistic, it simply sets the agenda according to a pre-determined point of view.
Not sure if you have read or watched VOA as of late but there is a lot of "America bad" content in there as well. If it's propaganda, it sure is doing a bad job at it.
"Seriously because the aliens are already here and I have proof!" -- Joking aside sometimes pushing a truth whether it's true or not has an impact on inflaming conspiracy theories... Youtube's covid, election banners for example IMO did more to incite deep state conspiracy then to reduce it... "One often meets their fate on the path they take to avoid it..." - Kung Fu panda
Our lies are probably the most harmful as we have the world's largest military and it's deployed worldwide. Do you not remember the NYT lying to get the Iraq War started? I can't think of a more devastating instance of propaganda.
So once again, along with naming the CCP vs. naming China as the bad actor, we need to instead of naming the US as the bad actor, we have to name the industrial complexes including the duopoly that has been allowed to develop over the last many decades - allowing the duopoly's two core narratives to be the majority of what people get fed through mainstream media conglomerates (the media industrial complex) owned by a handful of individuals.
If we don't correctly, accurately label who is the real target - our anger will be misplaced - and that is something the bad actors want to have happen, and will certainly perpetuate themselves. And we don't learn then. Quick soundbites spread easily but it's not the way.
I was struck by the Chinese embassy that got banned a couple months ago. They said that their fight against radical islam is good for uighur women.. which is propaganda but also the exact same propaganda that western interventionists use all the time. One is ok, the other is not.
Of course, Twitter DID take action against a Western leader who was leading an attempted coup, and they got absolutely creamed by the “freedom of speech” folks for doing so. So Twitter has been willing to draw the line for Western leaders as well.
But that raises a good point: if the media outlets in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion (I won’t even mention the 2001 Afghanistan invasion as there just was not the same level of meaningful opposition) had stood up to Bush’s propaganda even with the limp-wristed[0] way Twitter stood up to Trump’s, perhaps we wouldn’t have been dragged so deep into Middle East interventionism to begin with.
I guess it depends on how you split it, there's not a significant population of Uyghur nationalists of twitter. It's mostly westerners using them as a bludgeon to try and strike the chinese.
I don't think it's comparable - however yes, bad actors and bad actions are decentralized to a degree. The different between China and the US is the CCP is in "permanent" tyrannical control vs. the US et al have democratic elections and at least the society, the people, have the chance to evolve society to elect better people who will steer the ship better towards the ideal global society.
Electoral politics in the US has done nothing to stop the US from invading countries around the world (particularly in the Middle East) for the past half a century+. Who would I vote for if I wanted to stop bombing people? There is no one.
Like I said, the 'good guys' propaganda is good :)
If you track down some of the claims you're making, you'll find that most of them originate with this guy Adrian Zenz who is literally a paid propagandist for his job at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation".
Not that anybody who claims to be 'liberating the muslims' is ever up to any good. But some more objective measures might be things like, what is the body count associated with either nation, or has the population been going up or down in a given region.
Also consider that Chinese narrative of Counter Insurgency / Deradicalization is the majority diplomatic position with plurality of UN support. The opposition to XinJiang block is not only smaller, but the "genocide" position is also currently the absolute minority position. It's a case where Twitter content policy goes out of the way to align with US propaganda.
Why does it matter if propaganda is coming from a foreign state actor or domestic groups, like activist groups that seek to shut down any opposing views?
Agreed. This is so if they’re questioned by Congress at some point they can say “we regret our transgressions, and have reformed by asking the community what we should do better”
I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands.
All that make me think that even tough you're right that the end result will not be democratic, I wouldn't throw them the stone and accuse them of acting in bad faith.
Aren't these glamorous tech companies supposed to be employing from the pool of the highest echelons of intellectualism? How is it that they have such exceedingly large valuations but they can't manage to deploy a rationale by which to manage their user-based content?
That argument proves too much, I think. It seems analogous to the question of "Why would anyone ever want higher taxes? If they think the optimal tax rate is higher, they can just pay more taxes."
If one company takes a more principled approach to moderation, and that more principled approach is harmful to revenue, that company will be outcompeted by companies with whatever moderation policies optimize for engagement / revenue / growth. As a result, in the absence of legislation, you get adverse selection i.e. the dominant platforms will be the ones that optimize for engagement/revenue/growth, rather than the ones with good moderation policies.
If you instead have legislation for what "good moderation" looks like, it applies equally to all companies and mitigates the adverse selection problem.
Of course, it is still entirely possible for bad legislation to introduce worse problems than the adverse selection problem. It depends on the object level of what exactly the legislation is, rather than being a blanket "legislation bad" or "legislation good" sort of thing.
It is virtually impossible to not offend anyone, so they choose from the basket of all potential customers or products which they believe will be most profitable. If the ~~nazis~~ alt-right were making them more money than centrists and leftists, they wouldn't have banned them by citing freedom of speech and expression. However, their analysts probably deemed that losing the rest of the user base through the #cancel culture isn't worth it.
I'm speaking less about the leaders, but more of the mass. Silicon Valley has practically been deified as the brain capitol of the US, if not the world, but they're unable to meaningfully address the question? I think not, they're not addressing it, but with a sleight of hand pretending action to subdue their consumer base with a sense of security and imply a democratic process. An act of vanity, which I hope will be seen through.
I like the comparison to unclaimed land. While other industries are heavily regulated, requiring legal compliance and investment, Internet publishing is still largely open. In my view this is one of the reasons why the online service economy is booming in the US, where others are in decline.
They banned a sitting president of the United States and yet have allowed for years known despots, genocidal regimes, and terrorists groups to operate with impunity. Bad faith is Twitter's modus operandi until they show otherwise.
We can only know this for certain looking back. Knowing this looking forward is often cynicism, and it's a trap imho
EDIT: The above are mostly something I try to keep in mind with government public consultations. I acknowledge that cynicism is a little more understandable for private industry, as they are not even in theory rooted in anything but shareholder value-maximization, but gov is at least ostensibly aspiring for public good.
Seriously this is such a BS cover their rear-end from congress move. Now they want to poll the public, get feedback, and move in a democratic fashion? It’s now after the fact they selectively decided which US presidents can be on Twitter and which cannot with zero debate or thoughtfulness of consequences of free speech.
That's where it gets interesting, though. Assuming you have a democratically elected official with progressive views in any direction, and they're telling people to act for their self-interest, but the current zeitgeist overall is the given idea is immoral or otherwise objectionable, then what process do you use to make the judgement other than an arbitrary one that supplants the "rule of law"?
Consider if Biden dropped a tweet saying "don't observe DST."
That could be dangerous, right? You've got two distinct groups of people that for some reason or another fail to coalesce, all "hell" breaks loose because some people are showing up to work at different times, logistical break down... Do you squelch him? And how does that compare to a non-violent break-in at the capitol to show congress that their representation of the general public is failing a given demographic?
Personally I think that the channel should be wide open to anything but the most unbearable aspects of communication, like child exploitation. You've got no chance of convincing a white supremacist that his worldview is askew without engaging in a conversation and logically defeating his assertions, not to mention the fact that publicly shaming the ideology (while jointly defeating it) in a widely available forum is certainly the best prophylactic. Instead the "acceptable" rhetoric is one-sided which alienates anybody that has the audacity to even ask the questions proposed, while destroying their ability to come about a rational conclusion through empirical observation. That channel should be equivalently wide for politicians which the people have elected to represent them up to the extent of tangible action to break the law up to the barrier of reason, e.g. meaningfully inciting violent actions against individuals or groups.
And this is all precipitated by the fact that Twitter and the like are commodifying speech, which is a genuine hazard as it creates a serious hurdle at the intersection of liberty and commercial interest. Commercial interests want inoffensive discussion which appeals to the widest possible band of individuals, meaning that the content and discussions are only allowed to span a narrow width, generally. It is not in any meaningful way acting in the public interest at that point, and only seeks to, through largely automatic processes, extend and crystallize the status quo which is genuinely harmful as we're doing little more than discussing how to spin in place at that point. This is driven even further through deplatforming (active or passive) extremist viewpoints, and exposing them disproportionately with algorithmic processes.
I think the streamer you're referring to was just the focal point and scapegoat for a lot of the outrage over the very unequal and sometimes disturbing way Twitch moderates content.
I agree people were already mad but you would have to go pretty far out of your way to find someone with worse optics, she definetely brought a lot of heat to it herself.
World leaders should not have a forum on Twitter. We have official government channels for that, where other stakeholders in the system provide their input before the message becomes public.
If an individual moves into the position of a world leader or equivalent, their account should be frozen until such time that the position ends. This is the only sane policy. Anything else is too dangerous for humanity. Twitter and similar forums have the potential to destabilize global peace in the long run.
Ex: A world leader should not be allowed to say "We are going to war" on Twitter, only to have the military turn around and say "We're doing what?!". Most governments have an official process for declaring war for this very reason, otherwise we are regressing back to medieval times.
Whether a world leader can announce a war without consulting with the military first has nothing to do with Twitter. In the past (and present), they can still do that just as easily over live radio, live TV, or announced to journalists as breaking news.
It's up to a country to determine the official processes by which a leader can speak to any media outlet.
For most leaders, they use Twitter responsibly and blandly, not very different from other channels, and honestly their staffers manage it for them. If a leader is irresponsible, then it's up to the legislature to take action.
It sounds like you're proposing something where some politicians can participate in discourse on Twitter but not their slightly more successful rivals?
A line needs to be drawn somewhere, but it could become a prestige thing to be too big for Twitter. (Also, in practice, their press secretary would be on Twitter and say things for them.)
I think I disagree there. Though there are negative effects, one positive effect is that Twitter creates an opportunity for direct public feedback being seen by world leaders vs official channels that insulate from that feedback to a much higher degree. Though I do say "opportunity" because obviously leaders can create organizational insulators to Twitter accounts just as with any other channel.
Not all opportunities are exercised - but especially on HN I would think we should realize that it's significant that they exist.
But your comment also brings up a possible secondary benefit: the benefit of the people to see and possibly get in contact with other real people (real for the most part hopefully), as they criticize world figures. This is something that doesn't exist in other media outlets or exists only for people who can afford to take time out to go to a protest or in person official function.
No idea what that first paragraph is trying to say.
And people can contact other people and criticize world leaders whether or not those leaders spend countless hours a day tweeting.
Twitter is quite possibly one of the worst places for that anyways for multiple reasons (established fake account infrastructure distorting conversations, poor layout for async discussion between many people, etc)
I was trying to say that just because one individual leader did not avail himself of the opportunity, doesn't mean that having that opportunity exist isn't valuable overall.
People can contact each other but having the leader somewhere available provides a focal point that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Twitter has problems - but it's not clear to me how a lot of the problem unique problems of twitter vs common problems of meeting and filtering out any anonymous mass of people at a party or conference.
> I was trying to say that just because one individual leader did not avail himself of the opportunity, doesn't mean that having that opportunity exist isn't valuable overall.
Then say that? Because this:
> Not all opportunities are exercised - but especially on HN I would think we should realize that it's significant that they exist.
Sure doesn't mean that.
> People can contact each other but having the leader somewhere available provides a focal point that otherwise wouldn't exist.
What? No. The focal point is the person and their actions.
Donald Trump was also one of the most contentious topics on every other form of social media that doesn't have him posting. Just look at Reddit.
> Twitter has problems - but it's not clear to me how a lot of the problem unique problems of twitter vs common problems of meeting and filtering out any anonymous mass of people at a party or conference.
Then read my comment again.
All platforms have problems, Twitter is just even worse than par, and the format is especially bad.
I can't believe we're actually going to pretend the platform that started by limiting people to discourse based on 140 characters supposed to be some sort of rallying point against bad leaders rather than an echo chamber where everyone talks past everyone except those who agree with their views.
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Leaders should use their official platforms that aren't subject to the whims of a private company. If news companies or individuals or even the platforms themselves want to drop those official statements into their ecosystem that's on them.
It's one thing if a country just can't put together that infrastructure but the spark for this is literally the only country in the world with a tld for their government (.gov) there is no reason it should have ever come to this.
So given the problem of a megaomaniac world leader who wants to unilaterally start a global thermonuclear war... the solution is to have Twitter freeze their accounts? And we're all good to go, no other issues? That's the actual solution that you came up with and think "yep, solved it!"?
The BBC, with its explicit "public interest" mandate, funded by public money, is constantly criticised for being simultaneously too deferential, opinionated, conservative, and liberal - and that's only in the UK.
How on earth is Twitter going to make a policy that pleases worldwide shareholders, governments (and their oppositions), and the general public?
Maybe I lack imagination, but it feels like Twitter is constantly trying to kick its inevitable fragmentation down the road.
Facebook, when I used to use it, felt like a reasonably structured glut of content. Twitter on the other hand feels like a poorly structured glut of opinions. I sometimes can't even differentiate between the original tweet, the reply, and I find it hard to know how many replies there are. It feels like trying to have a coherent conversation in the middle of an old fashioned stock exchange - virtually impossible - I think twitter's UI is at least partly to blame for this.
I think Twitter's problem is that there isn't enough feel good content. Facebook shows you the dark pattern engagement content, but they also have pictures of your family, kids selling girl scout cookies, 10 minute videos about how to turn ramen noodles into a combine harvester, etc.
Twitter only has the dark pattern engagement content and it makes people sick after too long. Maybe they should buy a Flicker type platform just to try and tone down the outrage a bit.
Any time I see people make sweeping claims about what the content on some social media site/app "is", I feel compelled to point out that your Twitter and my Twitter are likely much more different than you realize. Because the UI looks the same, people naturally assume the content is similar, but your experience is highly dependent on who you follow.
My Twitter feed is 50% pixel artists sharing beautiful content, 30% programming language people having interesting discussions on language nerd stuff, 10% authors talking about fiction, and 10% politics and other stuff. I get a lot of feel good content.
But that's because I chose to make my Twitter feed be that by who I follow. Reddit and YouTube are likewise highly nourishing to me. I do wish social media sites made it easier to curate like this, but I disagree with the notion that there is any singular view of what content on these sites is like.
Heck, an individual's Twitter experience can be radically changed just by making some changes. A few years ago, I had pretty much abandoned Twitter. Like the GP says, it was a cesspool of negativity. And then I heard someone talk about the "cocktail party" strategy: "If you were at a cocktail party and ended up next to this person, would you hang out and chat? Or would you excuse yourself and go somewhere else?"
I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
Huh. While I was using Twitter I was mostly exclusively following people I agreed with. I was still angry all the time, because those people were posting stuff like "another cop kills another civilian" or "the US military defended freedumbz by bombing more brown people, yay!".
Following only people you want to chat with doesn't necessarily mean talking about nice things.
People you agree with politically are not always the people you would want to talk to at a party. I know many people who I would agree with ideologically but bring it up so often that it is difficult to actually have a conversation with them about anything else. I know people I don’t agree with in some topics but agree with in others, and I know some people I talk to specifically because I disagree with them but would like to hear what they have to say. This isn’t to say that you should immediately go out and surround yourself with people who don’t agree with you, but I’ve found that exclusively selecting for people you agree with is pretty bland. Try to mix it up a little and you’ll probably appreciate it.
Maybe, although I'm quite curious to see how people who mostly talk about old computers and crazy debugging stories are going to do that.
Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.
I think they should bring out personalized, customizable and curatable blocking/block-lists for both accounts and topics, and perhaps content sentiment as well.
E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow.
Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
I believe that you are asking for a more isolated filter bubble here. This is nice when it’s all positive but never engaging with opposing viewpoints is a serious problem. Polarization and atomization make it hard to cooperate as a society.
If you have a "no liberals" filter, you'll get a worse bubble. But if you implement it as a "no politics" filter, you can get all the benefits without directly affecting bubbles.
"No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
>> a policy that pleases worldwide shareholders, governments (and their oppositions), and the general public?
They won't. The final policy will please twitter shareholders. That means they will not do anything that might give rise to a competitor service. They aren't going to kick out the alt-right. They aren't going to kick out Trump 2.0. If Putin wants a Twitter account he is going to get it. If Trump wins office again he too will get one too. Twitter is not in the business of angering people in power, people who could put barriers between twitter and profits.
It's already fragmenting. The far-right has essentially left the platform at this point, the mainstream-right is feeling a strong pull in that direction I think.
A good article by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, on "credible neutrality" as a guiding principle for the protocol:
https://nakamoto.com/credible-neutrality/
Twitter has long lost credible neutrality as a platform which is why it's ultimately going to die.
I understand "credibly neutral" here to mean the idea that you appear neutral, whether or not you are actually neutral. Compare with: plausible deniability.
The goal of credible neutrality is to convince people that you have acted fairly and gain political acceptance [Vitalik does this by appealing to the standards for property ownership under capitalism]; the goal is not to act fairly [as Vitalik softly admits, the true goal is to do whatever is necessary to support (his) wealth accumulation].
I would much rather credible neutrality did not exist as a justification for particular actions, and that it faced automatic criticism.
Give Bob 1000 coins and admit that you did so, rather than set up a system of rules which is designed for Bob to receive 1000 coins. The use of passive voice is an indicator that someone has disguised their responsibility.
I have quite literally no idea what the correct answer is, and I reckon anyone who claims to have an easy answer is lying, because the landscape is fundamentally different to anything we've seen before.
Twitter is both a public forum and a private enterprise. The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation. Is it the responsibility of the platform to prevent its abuse to that end? Or is it essential for it to remain entirely neutral? How does that work across different legal, social, and political environments? How does that apply differently to democratically-elected leaders? What constitutes harassment or targeted abuse? What counts as impersonation or parody?
It feels like it's going to be a fairly unpleasant period while we figure that all out.
>The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation.
If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing?
I find the premise troubling. People can disagree and interpret events differently. Without that, there's very little to discuss.
> If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing?
We're realizing that it's no longer as simple as "people should just know better", because the forces they're up against are armed with all the latest psychological tricks to induce belief even in people who /do/ know better.
People have been lying to and manipulating others since the beginning of recorded history. Even mythological figures exhibited deceptive behavior. The Pulitzer prize is named for the creator of "yellow journalism". There's nothing new here.
This reads as "this time is different", an appeal to special circumstances without addressing the crux of the issue, subjectivity & diversity of opinion.
In practical terms this requires "fact checkers" supposedly impartial arbiters of objective truth. We can disagree on philosophy and the nature of man, but this premise is a non-starter for me.
In addition to the bad actors (these are the same throughout time) themselves, they now have capabilities that _are_ different:
- They can be heard at will be heard by millions to billions of people
- They can track in real time whether their messaging is working, and adjust it for maximum effect using everything we've learned about human psychology in the last century
- They can target their messaging at scale, varying it to match what will work best for a given narrowly-defined demographic
- They can do all of this with an iteration cycle of hours, instead of days or weeks
Where is the historical parallel that invalidates the premise?
Advances in technology do not address the underlying philosophical or moral premises. The pushback against the Gutenberg press was argued along similar lines. Technocrats appear to be the new priestly class.
Narrowly focusing on technological minutiae deliberately misses the point.
I remember when the rallying cry of opensrc and hacker culture was: "information wants to be free". Shameless political FUD is the same parlor trick played again and again. Disappointing to see it getting so much play here.
If you're opening the door for invites to prove a negative, then perhaps you can prove that your rationale isn't misinformation? In terms of real politik, it buttresses authoritarian "fact check" narratives.
We disagree and that's not only healthy and normal, but the entire point. We should be able to disagree without characterizing arguments or subjective observations as misinformation deviating from an authority's concept of "objective truth".
Much like the global economy made morality an infinitely complex problem (thanks The Good Place), the global Internet made digesting information equally as complex.
We don't equip people to do it through our education systems in America. What we're doing is sending millions of people out into the world, wholly unprepared to navigate it successfully, which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
I don't personally blame Twitter. This is such a gigantic problem, that pinning it to a single source is just understating what's happening. If America wants to survive another 100 years, it will have to find a way to fix its "lack of critical thinking skills" problem in a way that flips the statistics, which is more or less impossible, without swift and decisive action to make large changes to how we educate our children.
Yes, the state has an incentive to create critical thinkers, the incentive is just obfuscated substantially from the average decision maker in "the state".
I don't believe so. The state by its nature wants to find equilibrium like practically every other system. One of the paths of least resistance is the manipulation of the public into an unthinking, docile, and generally inert individual. This makes everything much more predictable and controllable, which brings it closer to equilibrium.
You could intuit this sort of outcome, perhaps, from a reading of "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Humans don't really do well with probability, we want definitive binary outcomes that aren't reliant on probability. We want a quiet, well defined day to day. Politicians want the same thing (alongside a disproportionately large allotment of control and wealth in return). Want though, is the difficulty, because the reality is that the underpinnings of practically all human functions and the world in itself are fairly chaotic.
I think you're under the impression it's a noble goal in the name of progress, but [genuine] progress is disruptive in every field. That disruption breaks the equilibrium, and makes the quiet day a rather loud lifetime.
The state is people. There is no difference between "the state" and "its people". If its people are manipulated, the state is manipulated itself.
The state wants compliance as much as the people want compliance, which is certainly one incentive, but it exists in parallel with other, competing incentives.
"The state" doesn't exist as an independent thinking body. I don't think it's healthy to treat it like it does.
I do agree though, the incentives are hidden, non-obvious. Progress is incentivized because it helps the state, and it helps the state because it helps the people.
I disagree with your premise. There has been a stratification of interests since the 70's which has isolated the state and has homogenized the state's interest with that of the elite echelon, they've intermingled to the point where they should be more accurately called the ruling class. Of course the body of the state as a whole is a different discussion, but the mind is what drives it forwards and is certainly interested, singularly, in maintaining current momentum and directionality over utilitarian or technological developments.
I actually wanted to suggest the opposite. Make everyone play by the same rules. Remove blue checkmarks. Anything you read could be a lie or someone pretending to be someone else, when taking things at face value is unsustainable one has to learn to think critically.
Of course, this would be against Twitter's interests. They’d rather fit authorities’ stereotypes as to how a public communication channel should behave, and be normalized that way. Safer, more shareholder value.
I was thinking for world leaders' tweets, it should strictly be news, not popularity contests, not hype machine, not rage-inducing machine. I'm thinking of making it strictly news.
In terms of how people can get the world leader's news (tweets). Maybe something like news feed on their twitter feed, like Youtube has some local news on my feed even though I don't subscribe to anything.
No one would be able to see the world leader's tweets in their home feed. They would have to go to the specific world leader's page (or use a 3rd party app too once again see Tweets from the world leaders in the home feed).
The practical effect would be that only people who are very interested in a world leader (and bots) would retweet them. This would make the Twitter experience even more insular.
That's discrimination, unpopular as this may be, world leaders are also people. To fairly implement what you suggest, twitter must make a rule that political personalities must post political content while in office on a dedicated "world leader" handle
>To fairly implement what you suggest, twitter must make a rule that political personalities must post political content while in office on a dedicated "world leader" handle
I struggle to see a problem with this. A political personality making political statements should do so from an account representing the office, for instance, @POTUS. That account should belong to the office, not the individual. Maybe state and corporate accounts should be treated differently than personal accounts.
Yes. That is what i am saying. I think that's fair and good in theory, even if i personally don't think twitter should take that direction. For one thing, it will be hard to moderate and set clear boundaries.
World leaders should not be afforded any form of preferential treatment. Everyone is equal under the law; all users equal under a platform. That's it. The moment you treat a subset of the population differently from another (such as giving them a blue checkmark), you begin to break from this ideal. Of course, any platform is free to do as they please. But congrats, in doing so, you have devolved into a world of kings and queens.
Isn't the checkmark just a verification? Pretty sure that's there so users can differentiate between real and spoof accounts. That way users know that @realDonaldTrump is really him, instead of the (probably) co-opted account @DonaldTrump.
It's a pretty far cry from having any sort of additional power.
Furthermore, acknowledging status where it exists is not the same as creating a distinct group of people with special status. What about "Dr." for people with doctorate degrees? Doctors don't have any more rights than anyone else, and having the title exist certainly doesn't create some part of society that is inaccessible to others.
Holding political leaders to a different standard on social media doesn't mean they are royalty, it's just an acknowledgement that they do hold power, elected, inherited, or otherwise. Furthermore, if Twitter's history is a sign of what any new policy would look like, world leaders would be held to a more restrictive standard than others, on Twitter.
I'm pretty sure that not just anyone can get a checkmark. If it were the case that anyone could get the checkmark, then sure, I agree it would just be just a form of verification. This would be perfectly fine :)
You're right that acknowledging status exists is not the same as creating it. But does one not go hand in hand with the other in this case, where you are selectively picking who to acknowledge?
Now, I don't know the specifics, but from what I understand, there is an overwhelming disparity between journalists/politicians getting blue checkmarks compared to others who may have more followers. Of course, that would also be fine, assuming there was a rigorous definition of what a "journalist" was. Keep in mind, this is not evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni8CpIJpmqw
I want to be clear, I was not implying political leaders royalty. But when you hold some group to a different standard than others or have rules for them that differ (whether more restrictive or lax), you have basically reinvented legal inequality.
> we want our policies to remain relevant to the ever-changing nature of political discourse on Twitter and protect the health of the public conversation
What the fuck? In what universe are the political hot takes, memes, and sniping on Twitter considered "discourse"? And in what universe is this considered healthy public conversation? Do people actually think Twitter is in any way a good medium for this?
World leaders can tweet, they shouldn't be able to untweet. It's public record.
They shouldn't be able to block users - If the feedback is so bad, then twitter should be banning those users under regular T&C's
The T&C's that apply to me should apply to them. If they cross they line they should be handled like I would etc.
How about we all admit that this is a simplistic position that flies in the face of centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?
> > centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?
> platform that removes illegal speech
What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not.
EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence?
This false dichotomy of authoritarian governance or 'cesspool' keeps coming up.
There exist other options.
Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement.
Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it.
Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient.
These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.
How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.
Are you suggesting that these international platforms should keep track of location (and nationality?) of everyone who is on them and apply different standards based on that?
Or just on the basis of the one or more places the company itself is are incorporated? Will they shop around for communication laws the same way they do for taxes?
Your response was less constructive then the one you replied to, not only did you fail to adequately explain what is wrong with asking a platform to be a place for free speech, but you failed while using truly reductive decisive rhetoric that just serves to make someone dig into their position instead of being open to hearing why they’re wrong.
"Be a free speech platform" means nothing by itself. It's a sentence without meaning. It communicates no ideas – because we all already like the idea of free speech, and the challenge is to understand what that means in a modern context.
(Of course, underneath all that, it's a dogwhistle. We all know what "free speech platform" means, because it's what Parler called itself. I'm doing the parent the justice of assuming they weren't deliberately using a tired dogwhistle phrase.)
You've stated what you think freedom of speech isn't, but can you actually define what you think freedom of speech is?
It's funny how this mantra of "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences of speech" seemingly originated at precisely the same time that big tech corporations and social media mobs began punishing people en masse for lawful (but politically incorrect) speech.
It seems like doublespeak really. I.e.: "Welcome, no tresspassing"
I'm on mobile so I can't provide sources too well, but it's fairly clear if you study the American Founding.
Source: political science undergraduate
Of course you are welcome to form your own interpretation, but I feel it is a fairly clear distinction. Happy to further this discussion when I'm at a computer with more access to info.
Indeed I have read through Farrand's records of the constitutional convention, I've read many of the founders personal writings (both federalists and anti federalists), I've read many works of prominent Enlightenment thinkers, and I've studied much of the history of the oppression and censorship of the Church which helped inspire the ideal of freedom of speech.
Nowhere have I seen anything resembling "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences", except from the Church.
After all, heretics and blasphemers were indeed free to say what they wanted to say (they had larynxes, after all), but they were not free from the consequences of their speech.
Please do tell me what you think freedom of speech is, in your own words, when you are at a keyboard.
In my own words, freedom of speech is an ideal, like the ideal "that all men are created equal". This ideal seeks to liberate human kind from being systematically punished for expressing offensive ideas, because ever so many of the greatest human revelations were profoundly offensive to society at large at their inception.
"I cannot contemplate human affairs, without laughing or crying. I choose to laugh. When People talk of the Freedom of Writing Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist, But it must be hundreds of years after you and I Shall write and Speak no more."
I think we may actually be on the same side, then - my implication was that America is "freedom from persecution," _not_ freedom from criticism and/or private consequence. When I say _private_ consequence, I primarily mean if you say something that the owner of a restaraunt you dine in does not like, you can get kicked out from that private enterprise, but the government cannot stifle your ability to say the words that got you kicked out nor can you go to jail for face legal action.
TL;DR I believe we may be thinking of different ideas of "consequence" :)
Defenders of slavery used that same "private enterprise" line to assert their rights over people; as did restaurant owners 100 years after slavery was abolished to justify kicking out people with offensive skin color.
It was not an existing law, but the ideal "that all men are created equal" which abolishonists and civil rights leaders pointed to in their quest for equality.
Likewise it is the ideal of freedom of expression which we are pointing to now that should protect humans from being banned from the digital town square for expressing offensive ideas.
Oddly, until recently they were. It only became different recently and obv xkcd popularized the idea, but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech.
Everyone in the world has the right to free speech because they can literally talk and say whatever they want, but if the society that speech is spoken in doesn’t agree to allow that speech to be spoken freely (as in beer) it’s not a truly progressive society. Apparently the brits have been struggling with this for years[0]
>but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech.
Given that every government in history which has recognized the concept of "free speech", including the United States, has regulated and even outlawed some forms of speech, and given that "consequence" is a natural, emergent property of societies and the fact that humans are social, emotional animals who don't process speech as mere passive data, one must come to the conclusion that free speech has never existed at any point in space or time.
That being the case, one wonders why everyone is so concerned now about something that, clearly, humanity has never needed up until this point?
When did I claim to be okay with every loss of speech?
Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. Despite common arguments, sites like Twitter are not the public commons, nor do they hold a monopoly on human communication, nor do they control public discourse.
Even Benjamin Franklin sometimes turned away people who wanted to publish slanderous material in his newspaper. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate all platforms to carry your speech - it never has. Twitter being able to moderate content and ban accounts - even the personal accounts of Presidents of the United States - does not violate freedom of speech.
> Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not.
This is false. As you said in your previous comment the government has always had a very heavy hand in regulating what people could and couldn't do, it's very much regulated who you can do business with and what you can stock and sell and to whom. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a society that protects the rights of both the buyer and seller as much as possible.
Your two comments contradict each other in such a stark way it quite frankly makes my head spin.
None of that really follows, the idea that because something hasn't existed until now proves it isn't necessary is again a reductive argument that simply doesn't make sense.
There are many things that didn't exist and thus, were unnecessary for "modern" living and yet once they were invented and adopted it would be hard to go without them.
Simple answer to this entire issue: If it’s not illegal, don’t censor or moderate it in any way.
Social media companies like Twitter realize that this is the most reasonable approach, but it effectively removes their ability to manipulate... so of course they continue to censor and moderate in a biased fashion.
I think the election fraud nonsense suggests it might not be that simple. Bad actors in positions of power are abusing these services to the point where we have real conflict occurring.
If it's not illegal, don't censor or moderate it in any way. More speech is better than less speech; Uncensored speech is in fact the antidote to the supposed problems that Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. disengenuously claim to be solving.
Sounds like we agree on this. I want to push you here though.
Did twitter contribute to the events on the 6th? Do they have any role to play?
Do you have to use the words "go and kill them" in order for it to be violence?
I'm trying to be genuine here, because I don't know. I will say it certainly feels like we saw the violence being induced for months ahead of time on twitter without explicit calls for violence.
Should we just allow this?
It's happening still. We have members of congress calling the election stolen. This is how more violence happens. It's a slow burn, but it's a burn.
If the speech is legal it should not be censored or moderated in any way. Any deviation from that results in the technocrats interfering with the flow of legal information and manipulation of social, economic, and political processes - which is in large part how we ended up with the events of recent months in my opinion.
Twitter/HN is not an apples/apples comparison... but sure, Twitter is completely within their _current_ lawful rights to moderate and censor whatever content they want. But I would posit that they are actually causing more harm than good through these efforts, and they've now firmly placed themselves in a total quagmire in doing so.
Not if it's non-specific. What if someone says "Death to all [group of people]", should they be banned? It's calling for violence but is not illegal in the US.
> Politicians and government officials are constantly evolving how they use our service
I find corporate-speak as dreadful, artificial and insincere as the next guy, but this bit was unintentionally funny. At least I wonder now how a constantly evolving government official would look.
I think Twitter fails to realize that cyber space will ultimately supersede real world in its importance as a common space to interact, transact, communicate and live. We’re already close to that point.
This: “Generally, we want to hear from the public on whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter. And, should a world leader violate a rule, what type of enforcement action is appropriate.” is interesting.
The trouble is that, from Twitters perspective, they are the arbiter of how these interactions happen. Same for other major platforms.
It fails to address the question of whether private for profit corporations should be sole arbiters of the very substrate upon which we live and its rules.
Once the public and world governments think this through and fully game it out, I don’t think they’ll settle for the current status quo.
We’re already seeing internet shutdowns during elections in certain countries as a course and crude enforcement or regulatory action. I’d expect this to become more granular over time and to expand.
>Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.
marjorie taylor green requires more detail than simply “a republican congresswoman” - she’s blamed forest fires on jewish space lasers, among other racist, homophobic, and transphobic conspiracy theories
And some of the "more detail" might also include that her account was re-instated after that, but that today's suspension comes at a timing that some might consider interesting, as a movement is attempting to oust her from government. Yes, more detail could be invoked.
She is still an elected member of congress, and from what I hear - a rather popular one, regardless of her "tinfoil hatery".
Opposition parties should _never_ have the power to just expel people they don't like from the opposing side.
I'm sure it's purely coincidence she is locked from her twitter account on the same day that congress will be voting on a resolution on whether or not to expel her.
> Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution addresses the question of what is required to expel a person from Congress. It states: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”
If it’s in the constitution, especially if the founding fathers put it in, it can become popular with Americans.
Free speech is not concerned with a person's ability to spew and regurgitate bs in private platforms and I see no reason to give her preferential treatment over anyone else.
They can go in a public place to do, e.g. press conferences and so on.
Any person has the right to dictate a mode of conduct on their platform and penalize individuals who do not follow said code. Why should I be paying for bandwidth and host the content of any individual who does not follow my rules in my platform? I provide a service and I have the right to dictate who gets to use it.
The senator can go spew her homophobia, conspiracy theories and racism in a public space, nobody prevents her, but I certainly wouldn't provide a platform for her and her ilk.
She was only only suspended for 12 hours, and Twitter is doing damage control saying it was their automated system that messed up. I don't believe them.
> I'm sure it's purely coincidence she is locked from her twitter account on the same day that congress will be voting on a resolution on whether or not to expel her.
Surely you could see that correlation as a pattern of questionable behavior finally biting her and not some conspiracy between the liberal elite and Twitter.
Is there like a guide somewhere telling people to bring up some specific incident every time a particular UnPerson's name is brought up? I swear there's a few dozen people for which, as soon as their name is mentioned, a dozen green accounts will suddenly post what somebody has determined is "critical context" under which we are supposed to see them.
Okay she made one silly facebook post that doesn't really quite say that. If we're gonna popularize the absurd things said by every freshman congressperson on social media, well we've got a long book to write.
What? There’s a difference between “one silly post” and the perpetual spiel of QAnon conspiracy theories and beliefs. Your comment makes it seems as if she said that one edgy thing we all say as teenagers in a one off. I don’t agree with muting her until after her expulsion, but this comment is disingenuous.
I guess I will break all of this down for you, since you did ask.
1) Twitter calls for public input on their approach to their handling of accounts of government officials. This individual is a government official and this is an instance of handling their account.
2) Well-timed. They called for this input on March 18th. This instance of account handling is from March 19th, approximately one day later. This makes it "more relevant," given that it was not, say, six years ago.
So, I offered this data because it was topical and timely to the discussion at hand. Rather than a hypothetical, it exists as a real instance of how Twitter as a corporation handles the Twitter accounts of government leaders. If I were to discuss the price of tea in China back in 1887, that would not be topical or timely.
This may be all be true[1], but none of it explains your "nothing to see here" trailing remark.
[1] Though there's activity on her account from 15 hours ago. In addition if someone is banned from Twitter, doesn't Twitter take their tweets offline/hide them?
Oh, the trailing remark is because Twitter has long had the habit of "whoops the algorithm did it!" happening as the most convenience of excuses when the timing is suspicious.
I don't know what Twitter does with people's tweets. Frankly, I find the platform almost too chaotic to look at for more than a few seconds. It feels like a roomful of ping-pong balls with text on them, whizzing at your head, only loosely clustered.
I’m much more interested in world leaders’ approach to Twitter. I expect we’ll be seeing some object lessons in the difference between power and influence.
The way Twitter is framing this is really interesting, they're evidently operating under the assumption that they are in the position of power.
The only reasonable policy is to ban all world leaders from Twitter. As world leaders, they can speak elsewhere.
If someone is accused of being a world leader, and you have adequate identification, it's fairly easy to confirm or deny. In the case of a disputed election, maybe both candidates could be considered leaders until the dispute is resolved.
They need those exciting leaders if their sole goal is to maximize their profits. If they also want to have a world to spend their profits in, it's worth considering that some tactics may be different.
This is unusual territory, since it's not all that common for one company to be so closely involved with what could literally have been violent insurrection, even leading to outright war. It didn't, but it came far closer than the leadership of Twitter liked. They want to be ubiquitous, but not so pervasive as to be existential.
Twitter was the primary medium connecting the President with the people who believed that thy were doing "the capitol hill thing" at his behest. Whether that was his intention or not, Twitter carried messages directly from the President to people who acted on them.
Twitter was without a doubt important. It wasn't the sole player, to be sure, but they were a direct intermediary between a prominent leader and his followers, bypassing all other gatekeepers.
Perhaps he'd have switched to an email newsletter or Facebook or another social medium, but in the days leading up to January 6, it was very much about Twitter.
Purely from an opsec perspective I doubt we'll ever have world leaders as online and accessible on private platforms like Twitter as we did in the last years. It's just too much of a national security risk and every major state has to assume the CIA/Mossad/KGB/etc. is actively trying to intercept and undermine world leader's online presence. It is stupidly easy for a determined state actor to over time infiltrate and get an in with a private American company. The risks are just too great to have a world leader using Twitter or similar platforms for anything more than reshashed press releases and announcements. Smart nations will probably get ahead of potential hacking or other incidents by just having a blanket and clear policy that no official business will be communicated or done on Twitter or similar platforms.
If you know who the first Lord Beaverbrook was, or have read The Fountainhead and remember the character of Gail Wynand, you can understand and almost predict the next moves of Dorsey/Twitter.
Its the same reason for Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post.... having a media outlet gives you political power.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't think world leaders like the US president should use Twitter.
- Unlike traditional media where you have several competing outlets to disseminate your message, everything you put out on that platform is subject to the censorship whims of a single corporation.
- It doesn't feel very presidential. 140 or 280 or whatever characters seems like an artificial cap on what is presumably very important messaging for the country. (You may argue people don't have an appetite for more - I guarantee when politics comes up in conversation over a backyard BBQ most people have a lot more to say than that).
Same rules, no special treatment, no special indicators or "official" tags. Don't involve yourself in the politics. You do not want to be caught in wether taiwan is a country or not, or who the leader of palestine is, etc.
And no special moderation either. If it violates what Bay Area Americans consider ok, ban the account.
After all, these foreign world leaders have decided to use a private American company as a platform. If they don't like it they should simply build their own.
Basically, we know that governments and leaders are going to punish us for taking sides in political fights. So we are going to pretend that the side we took is supported by the "public"
Politicians like everyone else are entitled to their own opinions, but they aren't entitled to their own facts. We should hold all of our politicians accountable to provide factual information.
It's one thing to say "I believe the election was rigged based on facts X,Y,Z" and quite another thing to say (real tweet): " “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
Maybe world leaders need two accounts/streams, one for 'official' government business and one for political rhetoric which has some sort of limitations (can't be RT'd, etc.)
Isn’t spreading political disinformation, hate speech, etc. not allowed on Twitter? I think that’s generally a good policy; and they should just treat this kind of speech from political leaders, the rich and powerful, etc. the same way they’d treat it coming from a nobody.
The most visible accounts should be the ones subject to the highest level of scrutiny and moderation. Doing it the other way round is bizarre, IMO.
We’re living in a time where most people on Earth have an unprecedented ability to broadcast their opinions to the world, effectively free of editorial oversight, and I think a lot of people forget that. Especially given how quickly this change has happened, it’s kind of nuts to see so much hand-wringing over media platforms exercising a bare minimum editorial oversight to prevent incoherent toxic bullshit from dominating the information landscape they host.
It's the best option for the world, but not the best option for Twitter Inc, sadly.
They aren't the same thing. Twitter is a for-profit company and has a legal obligation to not build in revenue footguns, even if it would be better for society and the world for them to stop censoring people. :(
I can't seem to find the case for treating some users one way, and some users another. Also can't determine how a 'leader' will be concisely defined and vetted.
They should, firstly, be held to at least the same standards as other users. If it's not ok for one user to threaten another, why is it ok for a world leader to use your forum to threaten war, especially when world leaders are given a mandate and monopoly on violence?
Similarly, if you would ban someone for repeatedly spreading misinformation, you should ban world leaders. They should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. Stop creating platforms for despots.
I think Twitter should allow trusted/editorial account that shows prominently (even part of the tweet itself) on world leaders tweets.
This will be NYTs, Washington Post, etc... of the world.
The big plus here is we return the editorial part of these institutions. Imo, these used to be net positive on the society (see Watergate during Nixon)
Twitter will pick the list of editors (kind of what they currently do with the verified account) The bar to be an editor needs to be high and a trusted source of news.
Who defines what is “trusted” in this scenario? I think your entire assertion here is problematic... the “trusted” sources that you mention have for years shown an inability to report without injecting their biases and agendas.
We need a public place where anyone can get verified and only verified people are allowed to interact (in addition to more traditional as well as anonymous spaces)
This is laughable. Twitter banned the president of the United States of America. They are not a neutral platform and should be stripped of their section 230 exemptions. They are the last group that should be trying to be the "arbiter or truth". Twitter's culture and actions are so politically slanted in one direction that as an organization it would not know what truth was if it had teeth and bit them.
If the Tweet violates guidelines then remove it from any kind of public listing of Tweets, but leave it for people who specifically follow that person.
Perhaps mark it with a special "click here to open" kind of thing.
But don't ban/block anyone for something that is not illegal. It's as simple as that: follow local law, and block only what's actually illegal.
I think twitter should give foreign leaders pretty wide latitude to tweet, as long as they do not call for violence, use their tweets to command foreign agents, etc. Of course twitter can put notices on their tweets that these are foreign leaders that may not have the best interests of Americans at heart.
It is rather pathetic that the citizens of the US, which is supposed to be a democracy run by its citizens are too scared to communicate directly with foreign leaders but are begging the government to create a smoke screen of propaganda so that their fragile minds can be protected from direct statements of foreign leaders.
We are supposed to be adults and we are supposed to be making the major decisions for our the direction of our nation and forcing our politicians to execute our will. We are not supposed to be scared children begging an expensive army of government officials, journalists, and shady "analysts" to protect us from the reality of the world.
If you let someone else shape your world view for you, they will do it to their advantage, and in the US this usually means more war, more tax payer dollars spend on the military, more death. Most of the more recent wars the US got into have been aided by carefully manufacturing powerful supervillian images of foreign leaders who were usually just garden variety low level a-holes that were completely harmless to the US.
So man up, or woman up, read what the other people have to say directly from the source and try to make the best decision for the nation and yourself.
World leaders are ultimately going to decide if ceding messaging influence powers to Twitter values / US influence is wise, not public input. Most countries are going to want sovereign control over online speech / content moderation eventually.
This survey is just messed up... when you press Back and Continue you see the questions change entirely while keeping your answers!! It's not even clear to me that they're recording the answers properly!
1. Are you an infrastructure? In that case you censor nothing but probably give users tools to manage their own censorship (like "remove suspected bot content" "remove tagged hate speech" options)
2. Are you a media? And in that case you have an editorial line, that you apply TO EVERYBODY. Or you state that world leader (or which world leaders) get a free pass. You make it explicit.
You can't be the first one for leaders and the second one for random individuals. Be coherent.
Let's be real, we are mostly talking about Trump here. To this day, I am not sure if it was just simple selfish greed or higher twitter instances aligning with his opinions, but there was an anomaly, an incoherence in your stance.
If you want to fix the cynical image you are trying to get, choose a coherent stance and stick to it, EVEN IF THAT MAKES YOU LOSE MONEY. Or accept that you are a cynical entity.
Differentiate between official and unofficial announcements... most are unofficial unless scheduled ahead of time etc. Such as a government public announcement. Similar to TV
If Twitter maintains its place in public discourse and communication, then sooner or later the “approach to world leaders” or politicians on any level becomes a moot point, because if anyone's views diverge to a sufficient degree from Twitter staff they will be banned long before attaining political office.
Twitter should not be filtering and censoring public discourse, debate, and information, acting as the arbiter of what ideas and information can influence politics.
Communications platforms in the United States should adhere to the United States constitution.
World leaders in developed countries should not be depending on Twitter or private media companies at all.
There is no good reason why the President of the United States cannot publish his (in the case of Trump, ill-formed) thoughts directly to whitehouse.gov.
We should demand and expect that governments publish directly to the web in an immutable way that is archived to satisfy our duty to history.
Twitter made things worse by hiding Trump’s previous tweets. Every voter should be required to read every damn one of them.
Twitter really was horrible, it enabled Trump's keyboard warrior persona. He was too chickenshit (or lazy) to actually say things with a camera and press in front of him, but with Twitter he can just shit post with no consequence.
My one input: please consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan a world leader, since she is leading the majority of the world (90%) in terms of providing everyone access to the world's scientific information.
"questionnaire will be available in the coming days in 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Urdu."
not in Turkish! Great!
I hope every country they have users in demand they keep the data for local users local and they conform to the laws of the jurisdiction like local media has to.
I must say Twitter is handling this masterfully. They already censored the president of the United States, oft-called the most powerful person in the world. The die is cast. Soliciting opinions now adds a layer of plausible deniability without changing things.
What could be the outcome? Will a cohort of COVID-deniers convince Twitter that everyone is entitled to an opinion, leading to the great unbanning of Donald Trump?
This came up when Trump was threatening social media with restraints. I wrote this at the time and haven't changed my view:
For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.
In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
So absent power dynamics, speech shouldn't be free? I rather think of it as a fundamental human faculty which one has the right to exercise. Not everything is about your hierarchies.
What is free speech? I argue it is not even a concept. Concepts divide people. There is no person against free speech. Please don't bring up Russia and China. I've been to these countries and people they cherish free speech;they just have freely spoken to have an explicit authoritarian ruler. Free speech is conversation to have out of laziness.
You might want to aim your comment bot more accurately next time. I offered a definition which your copypasta conspicuously fails to address, and your geopolitical tangent has no relevance.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other tech companies are too big and powerful and influential to be allowed to act on their own. They should either be split up or regulated heavily so that they are held to behaving like a public agency. It's not just not acceptable to have a company with a user base larger than most countries to operate with the power to shape societal speech - they need to just enforce the bare minimum legal requirement and nothing more.
Personally I have no trust that Twitter is doing any of this in good faith. For example take this bit from their blog post:
> We’re also in the process of consulting with a range of human rights experts, civil society organizations, and academics worldwide whose feedback will be reflected in forthcoming revisions to the policy framework.
This sounds like they will solicit opinions that agree with their planned policy updates, and will increase the amount of censorship they perform, informed by their progressive politics. This blog post just seems like a notice that this is coming, rather than an honest attempt to collect user input. They're also not clear what organizations they are consulting but I am guessing it does not include any moderate or conservative voices. The blog post does not mention "speech", "free speech", "censorship", "neutral", etc. It does however mention things like "fundamental human rights" and frustratingly vague wording like "health of the public conversation". This blog post is a fluffy PR piece that is starting the work of previewing and justifying whatever they're about to do to double down on their current heavy handed control of speech.
Another curious part of this post:
> This is to ensure a global perspective is reflected in the feedback
It's interesting that the blog post mentions seeking a "global perspective", so maybe this is PR for other nations more so than a US audience. Twitter doesn't do a good job of reflecting varying perspectives even domestically in the US., since they regularly disallow centrist or conservative posts on a variety of controversial topics. When they take this mode of operation internationally, it is even more unacceptable since Twitter (and Facebook) are essentially propagandizing other nations and engaging in a slow-moving cultural shaping mission when they censor speech from those nations according to their own political or cultural opinions. I am expecting that the "global perspective" they seek is one that agrees with their way of doing things, not an honest readiness to accept ideological/cultural diversity. If they at all cared about this, they would first start by correcting their mistakes within the US.
It's ironic that we place such a focus on foreign actors influencing our society in America. We often hear about Russian interference or other such scary activity, but the same scrutiny is never given to domestic actors who are waging an all out war on diversity of thought. Twitter is one of those bad actors, and cannot be trusted to uphold free speech principles. We need alternatives to them, and the other companies complicit in propagandizing our society - regular censors/deplatformers like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.
This is a brilliant post, thank you for your contribution.
I just wonder what kind of alternatives we have that could be effective. Something government sponsored but administered by a third party with a strict constitution regarding moderating only the extremest content? A system of self-moderation in place that isn't destructive, but rather hides content to prevent congestion? I feel like voluntary identification is also a must.
There is no moral equivalence. Public consensus means nothing. Laws still restrain people no matter how many people agree. The purpose of laws, in regards to humans? Limit the violence, not create it.
Here's an idea. How about not betraying the people paying for your bailouts. You could at least hire more people.
Isn't Karl Marx the one European who has enslaved more people than anyone? Wealth doesn't accumulate. What once was novel, like electricity, becomes ubiquitous. And you can't "rich" yourself out of society. If you are moral and behave, you accumulate wealth, and often give it away before your lazy spoiled children ruin you.
And the dialectical materialism, didn't Marx misread Hegel? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegel never said that. What Hegel said is if you choose an "-ism", the very real world proves it wrong, and that's how you get ideals.
The communist plague the world. OK. We'll just advance medicine. The communist bribe and loan our leaders? OK. We'll just take the money from them, and throw them in the ocean when the loan comes due.
So let me understand this, Twitter, which banned it's own United States President, is now removing itself from responsibility of banning other nation's presidents many of whom call for genocide and violence and are stated enemies of Twitters parent country?
I think you're misreading the history. For years, Twitter refused to ban basically any world leader, including the US president, despite many calls for them to do so and many tweets that would've gotten you or I banned. But events 2 months ago rendered that stance untenable. So now they've gotta come up with a new one, since they don't want the rule to be "special privileges, but only for leaders who Twitter, Inc. happens to like".
It's very likely that whatever new policy comes out of this will involve restrictions on other nation's presidents.
> But events 2 months ago rendered that stance untenable.
Now that's just not true. What trump did was a relatively minor infraction compared to what is happening in some countries around the world. Like it just doesn't come close on any scale.
The realization here is that people at twitter have an opinion on US politics, and are generally oblivious to the rest of the world.
The waters they're in would've been way less hot if they just did nothing and claimed neutrality. In that light shedding their neutrality was a very conscious decision by Twitter.
It was relatively minor, but it was a lot more relevant to Twitter because it happened in the country where most of their employees and servers are located. What they realized, I think, is that their prior stance of "we'll never ban a world leader" was naive; they hadn't fully thought through the potential negative effects, because the full spectrum of consequences that a government leader's speech can have was outside the personal experience of the policy setters.
Who thinks it's not political? That's why they had a hands-off policy for so long - they knew that any real sanction of a world leader is inherently political, no matter how good your reasons are.
This is pretty extraordinary. Close to 6 years of Donald Trump brazenly breaking twitter rules as candidate and president. Repeated violations, culminating in a riot at the capitol. March of 2021 and Jack Dorsey rocks up "Hey guys, I think we should think about our policies with regard to politicians".
Suppose you run a message broadcasting service hosting three hypothetical world leaders. One posts propaganda about an ongoing genocide in his country, namely that the genocide is highly beneficial to those being genocided. The second posts racist messages threatening another country with annihilation. The third posts that his recent election loss was "stolen," and subsequent to these posts a few of his supporters stage a riot in the capital (without coordination from the leader).
Which messages do you allow? Which do you censor? And which world leaders do you ban?
World leaders should not "be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter", they should be held to a higher standard; if some random loser writes a Tweet justifying genocide, reasonable people can disagree on whether that loser should be banned. But when it's people who are backed by a military which can actually carry out a genocide (and, e.g. in the case of Netanyahu and his ministers, the Assad regime, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Burmese military junta, has already been carrying one out for years), they must be banned, full stop.
I'd like to see the tweet and read their genocidal rhetoric directly. If the alternative is a news outlet digesting and editorializing their words, I'd rather hear it directly from the source.
Sometimes the genocidal rhetoric is not subtle, but sometimes they market it as "protecting minorities" (Assad, who is decimating the Sunni Muslim majority), or "liberating women from being baby factories" (Chinese Communist Party, on forced sterilization of Uighur women).
Hitler and Mussolini were not debated, they were defeated. Dissent is good if it's your only option, but we're talking about external parties not under the control of these "leaders".
Or they will have justification for removing "problematic" politicians because their userbase said so. You know, democracy. A userbase that already leans one way...
Mighty fine of them to start caring about this months after the US election. They are run by transparent political operatives but the media constantly runs air cover for them. 50 years ago the media would be investigating the inner workings of Twitter with a microscope.
Twitter is incapable of doing any judgements where the leaders / office holders of any country are concerned. If people want to follow a leader, let them. If they are incapable of handling what they see then that's on them. They are leaders of countries, not some Instagram star.
> Twitter is incapable of doing any judgements where the leaders / office holders of any country are concerned.
What do you mean by this? Surely Twitter is capable of making judgments and enforcing its rules accordingly, just like Burger King can require the president to pay for his meals. Are you saying Twitter should decline to enforce any rules against world leaders?
They allow anti-semantic comments from some leaders and censor others over opinions that they don't support but haven't violated any actual reading of the rules. They have demonstrated that they cannot figure this problem out. So, since they cannot do it in an objective or fair way, they should not do it at all. People can follow or not follow. Elected leaders have always been a special case.
I would suggest that besides concentrating on the world leader issue that Twitter consider some sort of expiration, short at that, for all tweets so as to put down this revenge/vengeance oriented the woke have created.
people complain about fake news and rightly so but the cycle of hatred that results from these purity tests applied to anyone because of past tweets is worse
I've been thinking about these things and twitter for the past few months, and I wonder..
Is snoop dogg on twitter?
If yes, then your policy is already transparent to me, why can't twitter see it for themselves?
If indeed snoop has been banned for promoting violence, then okay - go all the way - anyone who has ever talked about violent things block them.
I myself might enjoy a portal that has no death, killing, boxing, hockey, fighting... all those things.
Just as I got excited when I saw that fbook was deranking all politics and then in Australia blocked all news - I was like - wow, what a utopia social network - friends and family can see and be seen without all that other stuff!
I have chuckled many times over the years watching twitter dodge and weave as policies shift this way and that - some things that I've already dealt with with open public forums.
I'd say I'm very interested in this one - but the whole phone number for your account thing has basically censored my use of it so I already go elsewhere.
I wonder if any downvoters could tell me if they have seen the videos and the plethora of songs from snoop that advocate serious violence, including the fairly recent one with putting a gun to the pres and pulling the trigger?
fine to disagree, just not sure if others know enough about the comment to not disagree ignorantly.
I'm more interested in the approach of world leaders to twitter. As far as I'm concerned, people receiving salaries from the taxpayer shouldn't be spending their time writing free copy for twitter. They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites, or press conferences covered by multiple media organizations.
If the president feels a need to push out realtime text snippets, it can be done via an RSS feed on whitehouse.gov, and people can consume it via whatever app / client they want. If twitter wanted to scrape that and provide access to it, fine, but they shouldn't be given a free monopoly on that content.