[HN Gopher] Calling for public input on our approach to world le...
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Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders
Author : uptown
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-03-19 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitter.com)
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Convenient that they did this now, and not say, last November. Or
| even once in the last four years.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Remove the ability to have followers from world leaders, remove
| the ability to be liked from world leaders' tweets.
|
| Keep the ability to retweet world leaders' tweets, but prevent
| retweets to be added more from the retweeters.
| etrautmann wrote:
| What would it mean to not allow followers on Twitter?
| christiansakai wrote:
| 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.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| 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.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Maybe they mean you can follow but the followers count is not
| visible to the public or the account holder.
| strogonoff wrote:
| 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.
| anoncow wrote:
| Are we asking Twitter to stop being Twitter?
| christiansakai wrote:
| Only for world leaders.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| 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
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| 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.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| If anything, for any politicians Twitter account, it should
| hide follower count, and for all their tweets, it shouldn't
| allow likes/retweets/replies.
|
| Essentially their accounts should serve strictly as a broadcast
| of info, and nothing more.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| By "shouldn't allow likes/retweets/replies" do you mean by
| the politician or by the followers of the politician?
| robjan wrote:
| They should hide all metrics. Remove follower count, retweet
| count, like count.
|
| Without metrics there is less incentive to game the system and
| less feedback when attempting to game it.
| mcculley wrote:
| 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.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| "(in the case of Trump, ill-formed)" well at least you're not
| trying to hide your lack of intelligence and critical thinking
| skills
| easton wrote:
| Don't worry, the national archives are working on it:
| https://www.trumplibrary.gov/research/archived-social-media
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| Maybe the first thing twitter should do is follow its own
| rules and apply them everywhere. Trump should have been
| banned years ago.
|
| Twitter and Trump danced this together and now Twitter wants
| to be the good guy?
| breck wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| 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.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| 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.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| 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.
| nostromo wrote:
| 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.
| codingdave wrote:
| > 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.
| jpxw wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| hooande wrote:
| 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
| everdrive wrote:
| >Today, Twitter is just as important of a conduit as
| newspapers or the evening news.
|
| Twitter is a terrible medium for discourse. You wouldn't
| suggest that world leaders communicate via TikTok, simply
| because it's popular.
| mywacaday wrote:
| If it got younger people engaged why would it be a bad
| thing?
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| If elitism is the opposite of populism, then so be it.
|
| I also don't agree that the Gettysburg address is
| equivalent to speaking on Twitter.
| _vertigo wrote:
| "Important" and "terrible for discourse" are orthogonal.
| detritus wrote:
| > Leaders communicate wherever people are already reading and
| listening.
|
| I don't disagree with your post, but do general Government
| communiques not come in the form of press releases to all
| willing outlets?
|
| Perhaps Twitter should at itself to the list, and press
| releases come with an abridged 280 character surmisal that
| they could then use.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Some of them do, but others go out via Tweet,
| advertisements, physical signage, websites, email, and a
| variety of other channels.
|
| The government has to fight the meme wars just like anyone
| else who wants to compete for attention.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| The problem is that all leaders have an inherent conflict of
| interest between the following two goals:
|
| 1. Doing the job
|
| 2. Maintaining power
|
| The problem is, again, two-fold:
|
| 1. The things you need to do to serve the first goal are often
| different from the things you need to do to serve the second,
| and
|
| 2. You must achieve the second goal in order to even attempt to
| achieve the first.
|
| That's the fundamental problem. It has nothing to do with
| Twitter per se. It's an inherent feature of all large-scale
| societal interactions.
| btkramer9 wrote:
| This is a great point and this[1] video gets at the same
| thing with much more detail and examples
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, that is a truly fantastic video. Should be required
| viewing for everyone.
|
| [UPDATE] There's a book too:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-
| Po...
| bun_at_work wrote:
| The stated conflict of interest is only really an issue in
| democracies, or other forms of representative governments.
| Otherwise, spot-on.
| lisper wrote:
| Why only in democracies? Dictators have to work to stay in
| power too. It doesn't just happen automatically.
| moustachesmith wrote:
| A demonhunt ?
|
| 'Just answer me, nor glamorized regent, whose freedom we the
| folk, are going to fight for?'
|
| 'For the freedom of foreigners? ...is this going to be a
| castrated migrationthespian?'
|
| 'Cos meet the Jones isn't radical enough anymore?'
|
| (-;
| williesleg wrote:
| Twitter doesn't care. They're in the business of collecting
| data. Now that so many have left, they want their 'opinion'
| which is really that they thirst for more data.
| ed312 wrote:
| Do you also oppose the US President holding press conferences
| for privately owned broadcast TV channels?
| [deleted]
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| or that CPAN is a non-profit run by the networks to bring you
| full realtime video access into the senate, congress etc?
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| 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.
| cle wrote:
| 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?).
| SllX wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Twitter isn't "a closed platform" in the sense that is
| relevant here. If I want to read the President's tweets
| without a Twitter account, I can.
| cle wrote:
| 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.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Given that the list of organisations [0] consists of public
| and private ones, your statement reads somewhat disingenuous
| to me.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_press_corps
| dehrmann wrote:
| PBS, NPR, the BBC, and Al Jazeera all have seats in the White
| House press room.
| randcraw wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| SkyBelow wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| 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.
|
| Other countries are aware of these issues, and the risk that
| Twitter and other big tech companies bring to their societies.
| We've seen leaders like Angela Merkel
| (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/germanys-merkel-hits-out-at-...)
| and Emmanuel Macron (https://www.axios.com/macron-social-media-
| bans-trump-twitter...) point out the obvious issues with Twitter
| banning Trump, and it was a wake up call to those leaders. With
| leftist activists now calling for other countries' leaders to be
| banned (https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-trump-banned-
| bolsona...), I would say those nations have every right to be
| alarmed.
|
| 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.
| Tossitto wrote:
| 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.
|
| I don't know, it's hard to say.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Marketing tip: Always ask the public for input and consult with
| "experts" before doing what you intended to all along.
| patcon wrote:
| 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.
| spacephysics wrote:
| 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"
|
| Almost like act first, ask permission later.
| nodesocket wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| Twitch did this with some sort of committee late last year and
| it blew up in their faces.
| DC1350 wrote:
| The deer incident?
| debacle wrote:
| 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.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| I think that was Twitch's intent. Why promote a basically
| no name streamer to a group made up mostly of very
| prominent people on the platform?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| You think twitch purposefully nuked their own program?
| Wouldn't that just make both sides of the isle mad at
| them?
| joshgel wrote:
| Also, if you phrase the question "should everyone follow the
| same rules?" in the right way, everyone is going to say "of
| course!"
| Tossitto wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| HR too. Makes your staff feel "valued" and listened to.
| ike77 wrote:
| That's a point of view, and a pretty cynical one.
|
| 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.
| Tossitto wrote:
| 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?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| 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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| 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.
| mtc010170 wrote:
| I'm curious because I didn't realize this was a trend. Can
| anyone share some more info/sources on the decline outside
| the US?
| aww_dang wrote:
| Please read it as the decline of other heavily
| regulated/unionized industries relative to the booming
| online service sector within the US.
| mtc010170 wrote:
| Oh I follow now.. thanks for clarifying!
| khawkins wrote:
| 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.
| statstutor wrote:
| > That's a point of view, and a pretty cynical one.
|
| Twitter can and do ask for user feedback all the time,
| without making a press release about it.
|
| I don't find it cynical to ask why they are doing this in
| public - it seems likely that the parent has hit upon a good
| part of the reason.
| blowski wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| Twitter's problem is engagement. Facebook is a doomscroller's
| paradise. How can Twitter replicate that?
| osrec wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> that there isn 't enough feel good content._
|
| 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.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 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!
| osrec wrote:
| It makes your tweets nicer, but also an echo chamber,
| which will unfortunately be exploited by those you follow
| at some point.
| mdpopescu wrote:
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| 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.
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| Stupulous wrote:
| 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.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Why not just use the mute keywords feature which already
| does this ?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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.
| excalibur wrote:
| 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.
| abbaselmas wrote:
| "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!
| system16 wrote:
| 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?
| refenestrator wrote:
| Plenty of it by our own government and allies as well.
|
| Maybe we can be a little more principled than "good guy
| nations" and "bad guy nations" if the goal is truth?
| loceng wrote:
| Who's truth is more truthful, who's lies are more
| harmful/helpful?
| taf2 wrote:
| "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
| loceng wrote:
| YouTube's blanket ban was a problem absolutely - it was
| lazy and as hands-off as possible missing all nuance.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Classic Google, when nuance and reason are required they
| instead program a dumb bot to handle it.
| refenestrator wrote:
| 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.
| loceng wrote:
| 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.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| 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.
| pudhbithyftdti wrote:
| Well, there was, but a lot of people really went out of
| their way to remove him from power.
| loceng wrote:
| Then run for political leadership.
| dirtyid wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]It really was.
| refenestrator wrote:
| That's american-on-american, I was talking about
| geopolitical interests.
|
| I saw reports of posts from air force bases supporting
| our attempted coup in Bolivia, for example.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Well it probably helps only one of those is sterilizing
| muslim women while keeping them in detention camps?
|
| Fighting a multi-national ground war against ISIS is a
| bit different then genocide against your own citizens.
| refenestrator wrote:
| 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.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| 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.
| loceng wrote:
| 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.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| It is allowed because the gatekeepers today are much more
| financially involved with hostile states. The same situation
| didn't exist with the Soviets.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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
| president wrote:
| 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.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| 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?
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Prensa_(Managua)
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I think it's great that, despite censorship, we work hard at
| providing a reliable source of information throughout the
| world.
| nostromo wrote:
| Right. VOA is pretty much a mini American BBC nowadays.
|
| I think people that call it propaganda are judging it based
| on the Cold War era VOA.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The kinds of people who really have a hateboner for VOA
| tend to be the kinds of people more at home in the cold
| war anyway.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/warriorsofdisinf0000alvi
| enkid wrote:
| "Propaganda" is a loaded term. VOA is historically a very
| accurate and unbiased (as far as that is possible) source
| of news. [1] [2]
|
| [1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/voice-america-bias-and-
| reliabi... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-
| america/
| [deleted]
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > 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).
| ulucs wrote:
| Yes, only US should be able to spread their propaganda
| nbardy wrote:
| You'll have better conversations of you engage with the
| argument rather than misrepresent it.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| 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?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Your comment has some unintended irony if taken as a call for
| action.
| [deleted]
| etxm wrote:
| I got an idea, don't let world leaders use it at all.
|
| They have official means of communicating with the public. Leave
| Twitter for people without a voice, posting memes, and general
| bullshitting.
|
| World leaders don't need to get caught up in quippy bickering.
| mberning wrote:
| 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.
| Shivetya wrote:
| 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
| spacephysics wrote:
| Ideally that would be quite a feature, but in practice nothing
| on the internet is assuredly temporary.
|
| Logistically it's infeasible. Someone will create a database of
| archived tweets, or screenshots will circle the web. Etc.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| They might want to address issues like this as well:
| https://gizmodo.com/twitter-stands-by-lets-oann-link-to-repo...
| kyrra wrote:
| Btw, a nytimes reporter did the something similar, but not as
| gross.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-nikole-hannah-j...
| shrubble wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| dreen wrote:
| 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)
| benlumen wrote:
| Interested in a dialogue now they helped put their guy in office.
| The power of this company is chilling.
| hristov wrote:
| 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.
| Tossitto wrote:
| Your error is in assuming the public has any meaningful say in
| government outcomes.
| seany wrote:
| Seems like not censoring anyone regardless of who they are is the
| best option.
| sneak wrote:
| 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. :(
| binarymax wrote:
| How about: the same rules apply to everyone no matter who you
| are?
| glitchc wrote:
| 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.
| hesk wrote:
| "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've
| signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin
| bombing in five minutes."
|
| Who needs Twitter when you have TV?
| drstewart wrote:
| 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!"?
| jefftk wrote:
| It sounds like you're proposing something where some
| politicians can participate in discourse on Twitter but not
| their slightly more successful rivals?
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| That should be up to countries, not Twitter.
|
| 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.
| dv_dt wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| What feedback?
|
| Does anyone think Donald Trump ever actually read those one-
| line zingers random celebs would reply to his tweets with?
|
| Do people think some dictator is going to ignore the people
| they're oppressing but listen to @xx69destroyerman calling
| them out?
| dv_dt wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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)
| dv_dt wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > 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.
|
| -
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| canoebuilder wrote:
| 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.
| timdaub wrote:
| While on first sight, I find it applaudable that Twitter cares
| and wants to learn, I think it's not in their responsibility
| anymore to moderate.
|
| They've proven to be incapable and overwhelmed about making
| legitimate decisions.
|
| They should get regulated and they should stop regulating.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Optimistically I'd agree, but given corporate politics my gut
| instinct leads to deep pessimism.
|
| I think this is just a PR stunt, nothing will change that isn't
| already planned before this public input session. Move along,
| status quo.
| undefined1 wrote:
| how about a simple rule?
|
| No politicians on Twitter.
| jonnypotty wrote:
| Oh sod off twitter, don't pretend you care what the public think.
| jimmytucson wrote:
| 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?
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I aggree with this.
|
| 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| Be a free speech platform, how about that?
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Except maybe it's a bit more complex than your ridiculously
| simplified pithy one-liner.
|
| Seriously, what the fuck is that even supposed to mean? It's
| literally duckspeak - a reflexive slogan uttered without any
| thought. It elides all of the complexity of understanding what
| free speech is, or what a platform is.
| weakfish wrote:
| People tend to conflate freedom from persecution due to
| speech with freedom to say whatever, wherever. They are not
| the same.
| vxNsr wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-
| speech/in...
| krapp wrote:
| >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?
| vxNsr wrote:
| 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.
| T-hawk wrote:
| If you continue being okay with every loss of speech,
| then the only endpoint will be to have no speech at all.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _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.
| vxNsr wrote:
| 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.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Nah, fuck that.
|
| "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.)
| danaliv wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| kbelder wrote:
| Simple doesn't mean simplistic.
|
| I'd like a platform that removes illegal speech, nothing
| else. Such a platform should be legal.
| sneak wrote:
| The boundaries of legal speech are pretty well sorted out.
|
| Web and email hosting companies don't have an issue figuring
| it out. Twitter shouldn't either.
| nonotreally wrote:
| Can I call for the death of someone on this platform?
| canoebuilder wrote:
| Can you do that on the television, telephone, radio or in a
| newspaper in America?
| nonotreally wrote:
| I'm trying to find the limits of Freedom of Speech.
|
| Are we agreeing that there are in fact limits on Freedom of
| Speech?
| canoebuilder wrote:
| Yeah, this has actually been thought of before.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat
| nonotreally wrote:
| I'm not suggesting that I've stumbled into some new idea.
|
| I'm trying to understand what people mean when they say
| "free speech platform".
|
| It seems to be a get out of jail free card of sorts.
|
| "Free speech" without any limits obviously doesn't work.
| Where are the limits of the parent comment? The devil is
| in the details.
| canoebuilder wrote:
| Twitter, Facebook etc. are communication platforms in the
| same way the postal service, telephone system, etc are
| communications platforms.
|
| Communication platforms in the US should adhere to the US
| constitution.
| sneak wrote:
| The US constitution effectively says that you have
| complete editorial control over the content of your own
| website.
|
| Facebook and Twitter run websites.
| nonotreally wrote:
| It can't be that simple. This is a private company.
|
| Isn't this where the entire problem is coming from? If
| this were a state run service, we know the answer and can
| apply it easily.
|
| The confusion is coming entirely from it being something
| other than the state.
| ska wrote:
| 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?
| ookdatnog wrote:
| These platforms exist and aren't hard to find. They also tend
| to be cesspools.
|
| Part of the value proposition of their competitors is that they
| do moderate their content, to some extent.
|
| I don't see why we should force all platforms to operate
| essentially without moderation.
| alexashka wrote:
| 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.
| campl3r wrote:
| Free as in everything that's legal?
|
| Sounds conceptually great to me.
|
| 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.
| jmeister wrote:
| Was this motivated by the hostile meeting with China on Friday,
| and an expectation of worsening US-China relationships?
| gonzo41 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Pretty simple IMO.
| BaseS4 wrote:
| > let radicalized employees ban anyone they want
|
| > never release details of how the censorship algos work
|
| > spend lots on PR firms and lobbyists in the hope to get your
| product nationalized as a utility
|
| > ban a United States President
|
| > already possess a bajillion recommendations in your tweet
| database about what to do
|
| > ask anyways to create the illusion of group participation and
| community building
|
| ok twitter
| kjrose wrote:
| 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"
|
| Please don't nationalize/regulate us.
| whitebread wrote:
| At this point it feels like the best option is to shut twitter
| down completely. What good comes solely from twitter?
| ralmidani wrote:
| 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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| 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.
| ralmidani wrote:
| 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).
| aww_dang wrote:
| Dissent is valuable. Twitter should allow replies on these
| posts. There should be more transparency on how the replies
| are ranked or hidden.
| ralmidani wrote:
| 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".
| steve76 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Anything else?
| macspoofing wrote:
| Oh man .. Twitter ... what an effin mess they are. What do they
| think they will get from a questionnaire?
| gedy wrote:
| I think the nuance is interpreting "the rules" instead of just:
|
| > "whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to
| the same rules as others on Twitter".
|
| E.g. Twitter in 2020 was rife with "inciting violence" but
| largely depending on your point of view/politics, and if it was
| "justified". Etc.
| dnndev wrote:
| Differentiate between official and unofficial announcements...
| most are unofficial unless scheduled ahead of time etc. Such as a
| government public announcement. Similar to TV
| at_a_remove wrote:
| A Republican Congresswoman was just locked out of her Twitter
| account prior to some kind of Dem resolution, at least if you
| believe https://www.mrctv.org/blog/marjorie-taylor-green-
| reportedly-... as a source of truth.
|
| Nothing to see here, move along.
| nonotreally wrote:
| I'm not seeing your point here.
|
| Do you like this? Not like it? Why?
|
| I feel like this is exactly the type of feedback they're asking
| for.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I offer data, not a conclusion. And it's data that is well-
| timed, given the statement.
|
| What do _you_ think?
| nonotreally wrote:
| I didn't raise the point. I haven't formed an opinion on
| this particular issue.
|
| Why did you offer _this_ data?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| 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?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| andyxor wrote:
| Cancel culture in action.
| foobiter wrote:
| 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
| ufmace wrote:
| 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.
| Jcowell wrote:
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| 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.
| tobylane wrote:
| > 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.
| astrea wrote:
| > 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.
| kaiju0 wrote:
| Shes has only been removed from twitter for spreading false
| information. Her free speech has not been violated.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| andyxor wrote:
| freedom of speech protections exist to protect against
| this exact sentiment.
|
| You can't just silence everyone you disagree with.
|
| They have their right for 'spewing' their 'bs' just like
| you have for 'spewing' yours.
|
| And it's not up to you, me or Twitter to decide which
| opinions are right or wrong.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > freedom of speech protections exist to protect against
| this exact sentiment.
|
| Sorry, but that's plainly false. No legal scholar will
| agree with you.
| williesleg wrote:
| Oh that's just a twitter way of collecting more data. They're
| assholes.
| dirtyid wrote:
| 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.
| AlwaysBCoding wrote:
| 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.
| statstutor wrote:
| 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| All things ultimately die, I dunno how useful that is as a
| prediction...
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| 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.
| matz1 wrote:
| There is no correct answer. There is only answer that you want
| and what you can do is to fight for your answer to become the
| outcome.
|
| That being said I prefer twitter to be as hands off as possible
| when dealing with this.
| aww_dang wrote:
| >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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| >We don't equip people to do it through our education
| systems in America.
|
| Does the largely state run education system have an
| incentive to create critical thinkers?
|
| Institutions trend towards group think. Credentials are
| granted by authorities. I'm not sure we can get there using
| the tools at hand.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Yes, the state has an incentive to create critical
| thinkers, the incentive is just obfuscated substantially
| from the average decision maker in "the state".
| Tossitto wrote:
| 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.
|
| "May you live in interesting times."
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > 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.
| jtdev wrote:
| 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.
| nonotreally wrote:
| My gut says that you are right.
|
| 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.
|
| How do we account for these edge cases?
| jtdev wrote:
| 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.
| nonotreally wrote:
| Are there any cases where more speech is not the answer?
|
| Can we agree that calls for violence is a limit of speech
| that is good?
| jtdev wrote:
| That would fall into the "illegal" [0] category if people
| are in fact calling for violence.
|
| [0]
| https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-
| prelim...
| driverdan wrote:
| 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.
| nonotreally wrote:
| 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.
| jtdev wrote:
| 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.
| nonotreally wrote:
| What if it's a private company?
|
| Hackernews famously moderates their comment section, to
| the benefit of all.
|
| Why can't this happen on Twitter?
| jtdev wrote:
| 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.
| nonotreally wrote:
| That is a really good point - HN is much smaller and
| attracts a very different audience.
|
| I agree, they have created a really unfortunate situation
| for us and for them.
|
| In principal, forgetting the practicalities, would you
| support HN style moderation on Twitter/FB?
|
| My gut reaction is yes. It seems to be a good balance of
| gut check and "we don't have time for this".
|
| o/t
|
| 5 star online conversation dude.
| alexashka wrote:
| Yup. Tragically, I have a feeling they are actually doing it
| out of good intentions.
|
| They actually think their Stalin approach of banning people is
| good, because the world is made up of right and wrong, which
| they know and need to enforce upon the rest of humanity, who
| don't know any better.
|
| You know, kind of like America installs 'democracy' around the
| world using its military industrial complex, because other
| countries don't know how to govern themselves without daddy
| America installing their dictators to show them the way.
| kaiju0 wrote:
| Here is a leader calling for Jewish genocide
|
| https://nypost.com/2020/07/30/twitter-execs-refused-request-...
|
| It must be moderated.
| ars wrote:
| I'm not sure how to find the survey, but my take:
|
| 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.
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| teraflop wrote:
| > 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?
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| 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.
| kitd wrote:
| 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.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| 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.
| curation wrote:
| 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.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| 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.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of
| those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
|
| That would be nice, but all they'll do is push their own
| agenda. They've already proven that.
| Traster wrote:
| 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".
| andrew_ wrote:
| Color me dubious that any policy will be enforced evenly.
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| >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.
|
| -Marshall Mcluhan, 1966
| Iv wrote:
| Twitter, decide what you are:
|
| 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.
| known wrote:
| Wisdom of Crowds is mot always correct; You may want to consult
| with socioeconomic experts;
| stakkur wrote:
| 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.
| baryphonic wrote:
| 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?
| lupire wrote:
| They have several years of public input in their Tweet database
| already.
| 6510 wrote:
| Why isn't this message a tweet?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| 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.)
| caconym_ wrote:
| 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.
| lgleason wrote:
| 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.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| This feels like a honeypot for twitter to keep tabs on people
| that disagree with their policy.
|
| They are going to do whatever they want at the end of the day,
| they've given me absoloutely no confidence to believe that they
| want to do whats right.
| zpeti wrote:
| Or they will have justification for removing "problematic"
| politicians because their userbase said so. You know,
| democracy. A userbase that already leans one way...
| meepmorp wrote:
| You really overestimate the level of importance that everyone
| else places on whatever it is you have to say.
| square_usual wrote:
| Yeah, this is Twitter, not Cultural Revolution China. Jack
| isn't Mao with his Hundred Flowers campaign.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Do not underestimate the limits of Jack's desire for
| control
| meepmorp wrote:
| Yeah, he's basically Pol Pot without the humanitarian
| streak.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _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.
| geoelkh wrote:
| How do we give feedback?
|
| 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.
| jtdev wrote:
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| nonotreally wrote:
| I think this is a useful idea. They have platforms already, and
| we give them platforms on TV and in papers.
|
| Unfiltered access to their hyperbole seems to be a net-
| negative.
| ars wrote:
| The problem is that ever since banning Trump they have less
| usage on the site.
|
| So they need those "exciting" world leaders. Telling Twitter to
| ban all world leaders is the opposite of what they want.
|
| They want to be able to have all those people on there, while
| not being blamed for leaving "bad" content up.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| The capitol hill thing was planned on Facebook, not Twitter
| (or Gab for that matter).
|
| Twitter has an inflated sense of its own importance.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| On the plus side, the lower traffic seems to have helped with
| links to twitter threads, which actually work now (or at
| least better)
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| 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?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| No. What's naive is to think that the United States
| President being banned wasn't political. This is an
| admission of that and an attempt to save face.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Wow, too little, too late. Such bravery asking _after_ Trump left
| office.
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