It pains me but I’m leaning in this direction too. I found the idea of a digital town square with a commitment to maximum truth appealing, but seeing what Twitter has become it’s hard to not feel this was naive of me.
To me the big blow was seeing the response to what’s happening in Gaza and what narratives people and algorithms in combination end up promoting. The thoughtful, balanced, humanistic view gets approximately zero traction, while completely untruthful propaganda (on both sides) has enormous reach.
Maybe it’s an insurmountable problem. Human defense mechanisms in combination with algorithms will always push people to tribalism and cheering for atrocities. I hope not, but seems like it.
I guess you could take the OPs approach of filtering out all the propaganda and keep contributing. But then you are effectively working for a propaganda machine free of charge, helping create value that will draw others in to be subjected to the propaganda.
It’s often not too hard to determine if you put in the effort. For example you have big accounts like John Spencer spreading claims that Gaza’s population growth is completely unaffected by the “war”, with thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of views [1].
If you need an example on the other side you can take this popular post that claims the German foreign minister has said Israel has a right to target civilians [2], when in fact she says Israel has a right to target civilian infrastructure, if it is being used for military purposes.
Community notes do not appear because the algorithms require people who typically disagree to agree, which I doubt will ever happen in a military conflict.
To me the big blow was seeing the response to what’s happening in Gaza and what narratives people and algorithms in combination end up promoting. The thoughtful, balanced, humanistic view gets approximately zero traction, while completely untruthful propaganda (on both sides) has enormous reach.
Maybe it’s an insurmountable problem. Human defense mechanisms in combination with algorithms will always push people to tribalism and cheering for atrocities. I hope not, but seems like it.
I guess you could take the OPs approach of filtering out all the propaganda and keep contributing. But then you are effectively working for a propaganda machine free of charge, helping create value that will draw others in to be subjected to the propaganda.