[HN Gopher] Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US E...
___________________________________________________________________
Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election
Author : tosh
Score : 154 points
Date : 2020-10-09 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitter.com)
| blocked_again wrote:
| Twitter should add an option to hide tweets from users that are
| not verified and make it the default.
|
| And charge $5 for verification every year and verify everyone who
| wants to get verified.
| majewsky wrote:
| No serious actor would blink an eye at having to pay a few
| bucks to get 10,000 blue-checkmarked bot accounts.
|
| After a short adjustment period, there would just be no non-
| verified accounts anymore and 5$/year would just be the regular
| price to use Twitter.
| ping_pong wrote:
| Honestly, if one of the billionaires bought Twitter, used patents
| and the legal system to litigate ruthlessly over any new startups
| that tried to emulate it, and kept any similar system off the
| internet for 10-20 years, I honestly think humanity will be
| better off.
| haunter wrote:
| Maybe sites like Twitter, Facebook etc should be US only. I mean
| only US users allowed to use it. If they do this with the US
| election then which will be the next? UK? Australia? And why not
| really? People would even cheer for it
| runarberg wrote:
| I think the situation in the USA is quite unique. UK and
| Australia is not (as of yet) in any serious risk of their
| democracy being undermined in the next election.
|
| Sure you can say they could have had similar measures before
| the Kyrgyzstan or the Belarus elections. But there bad actors
| were perfectly able to undermine the democracy without the aid
| of social media.
| jonmartinwest wrote:
| It might because USA doesn't have something similar to 77th
| Brigade.
| paganel wrote:
| Taking all the necessary steps so that one exact candidate
| (Trump) won't win the next election is "undermining
| democracy" already, especially as those steps now come from
| both business (Twitter, FB) and the media (Washington Post,
| NYTimes).
|
| Maybe the Democrats and the people who are called "liberals"
| don't realise it just yet, but they've lost the game because
| they've started playing Trump's game. Like I said, they might
| technically win it this time around, but the next "Trump"
| will probably be younger and even more charismatic, and he
| (or maybe a she, why not?) will have to conquer a public
| scene which will have already known by that point that the
| democracy rules don't exist for either party, so why care for
| the democratic process anymore?
|
| If it matters I'm not from the US, have never set foot there,
| just saying how I see things from half a world away.
| nbardy wrote:
| It's unfortunate how few people on the inside don't see it
| this way. The slippery slope is real and we shouldn't start
| sliding down it just to beat Trump.
| 3np wrote:
| Or, better, the inverse: non-US only. How well do you think
| either will work?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I think that I support actions like this, though I fear that the
| people who share fake news will also be the people to complain
| about Twitter and Facebook being a part of the mythical "deep
| state" once they start seeing these tags on their posts.
|
| I think about my uncle or cousin who has been posting fake news
| since before it was a phrase, and how they'll react. It's
| probably not gonna be a positive reaction.
| leot wrote:
| When will Twitter provide all users with the ability to easily
| verify their identity?
|
| One of its biggest issues is troll armies -- this would quickly
| vanish if we could filter by whether someone had validated who
| they were and where they were located.
|
| If Bumble can do it, Twitter can.
| rdxm wrote:
| OMG....lmao.....can you say: "5 years to late, and a bazillion
| dollars short"?????
|
| It is unfathomable to me how people can justify working at places
| like twitter and FB knowing the mind-blowing level of damage they
| do to the country, our culture and our species.
|
| The single biggest thing we could to do start righting the ship
| on this place (US or planet, take your pick), is to burn FB,
| Twitter IG, etc TO THE GROUND.
|
| It's that simple.
| crehn wrote:
| How do we ensure Twitter's censorship is and stays reasonable?
| classified wrote:
| And who decides what "reasonable censorship" is?
| axaxs wrote:
| I feel like Twitter thinks it's way more important than it really
| is, with respect to elections at least.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| All pro media are on Twitter and that's why it's the favorite
| battleground for influence campaigns.
| notatoad wrote:
| >Second, we will prevent "liked by" and "followed by"
| recommendations from people you don't follow from showing up in
| your timeline and won't send notifications for these Tweets.
| These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see
| relevant conversations from outside of their network, but we are
| removing them because we don't believe the "Like" button provides
| sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amplifying Tweets
| to people who don't follow the author of the Tweet, or the
| relevant topic that the Tweet is about.
|
| I want to applaud this, because it's clearly a good move. but i
| don't see how they can square "our recommendation engine is
| harmful enough that we need to disable it to protect the security
| of an election" with "we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"
| nullc wrote:
| > but i don't see how they can square
|
| "This makes us money but harms the world as a side effect, but
| if we harm it too much the retaliation will cost us money. As a
| result we're going to only use it as much as we think we can
| get away with."
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?la.
| ..
|
| "turning a big dial that says "Racism" on it and constantly
| looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant
| on the price is right"
| jdofaz wrote:
| I really disliked that "feature", I usually use the
| chronological mode to avoid seeing them.
|
| If I wanted to see that content I would follow it, and if I
| wasn't and the content was good someone I follow might retweet
| it. And if I follow someone who retweets annoying things I can
| disable retweets on that person.
| grishka wrote:
| The chronological mode doesn't help either. That's the reason
| why I keep using half-broken third-party clients on mobile
| and Tweetdeck on desktop.
|
| If I wanted to "discover" or "explore" something, I'd open
| the dedicated section, thank you very much. Modern social
| media is ridiculously user-hostile.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _> Second, we will prevent "liked by" and "followed by"
| recommendations from people you don't follow from showing up in
| your timeline and won't send notifications for these Tweets._
|
| I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes
| in my feed -- _and_ not having an option to turn it off in the
| official mobile app client -- is one big reason I stopped
| consuming tweets.
|
| It's a shame that the only way to opt out of seeing Likes is by
| using a third-party client.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| You can tap the sparkly icon on the feed and change to
| "Latest Tweets".
| ValentineC wrote:
| Wow, thanks, this seems to work for now.
| danudey wrote:
| This, and other timeline muddling they've done, are the
| reasons I use third-party clients like Tweetbot almost
| exclusively (other than when clicking a link opens the
| official app).
|
| The thing that irritates me the most is that they also seem
| to track the last time you logged in via the Twitter website
| or official client, and show me "while you were gone" tweets
| that it thinks I might be interested in. Typically, they're
| right - so right, in fact, that I've often already replied to
| them.
|
| I've always said (until Twitter went full asshole, which
| they're now reversing course on) that I'd pay for a "Twitter
| Pro". Let me use a third-party client to do everything that
| the official client does, but with the option of turning
| things off - provide likes in my timeline, which my client
| can filter out; allow me to access polls via the API (which
| presumably they don't do for everyone because of botting),
| and so on.
|
| Twitter, I will pay you monthly to stop making me choose
| between an incomplete experience (third-party clients) and an
| awful one (inflexible first-party clients). It's guaranteed
| income. Please, sign me up.
| vmception wrote:
| Easy, because the blog post wasnt for you, it was for
| shareholders, advertisers and bot farms.
| munk-a wrote:
| This is the truth. However, bringing attention to it and
| shaming them over it is still worthwhile since, while their
| actions are in line with the desire of their customers, it's
| contrary to the desire of the majority of their user base.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Squaring it is pretty easy, I think.
|
| Recommendation engines are neither inherently good or harmful
| -- think of them as an amplifier.
|
| In normal times, they work pretty well -- it gives you more of
| the stuff you like, which usually isn't harmful. Just
| entertaining/fluff/interesting/whatever.
|
| But closer to an election, they can be gamed and weaponized for
| harm -- Russia can activate botnets, fake accounts, etc. and
| lies spread like wildfire.
|
| So it's not about whether the recommendation engine is good or
| bad -- it _works_. The point is that close to an election, bad
| actors _weaponize_ it 1,000x more or more often than they do
| the rest of the time, so they 're turning it off. When it's not
| being weaponized so much, they can keep it on.
|
| It's like paying for a DDoS protection layer at times when you
| know your site is likely to be attacked, but not using it the
| rest of the time.
| williamdclt wrote:
| > But closer to an election, they can be gamed and weaponized
| for harm
|
| But there's elections all the time. There's many different
| elections in the US alone, any many many more throughout the
| world.
|
| And elections are just one thing, what about influence over
| opinions for bills/law/reforms? Wars? Public opinion about
| basically any subject, from economics to gender/race/class
| tensions?
|
| If you accept that social media is weaponised for this
| election, it seems naive to not accept it is being weaponised
| absolutely all the time
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| > When it's not being weaponized so much, they can keep it
| on.
|
| Clearly you understand the recommendation engine is being
| weaponised _at all times_.
|
| So why are you also trying to defend it?
|
| As others have pointed out, Twitters motivation is entirely
| composed of two motivating factors: financial and cover-your-
| arse.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| It seems hilariously naive to think that the only time people
| will be weaponising it is during an election and that there
| aren't elections happening regularly all over the world so
| that if your point holds true such things should basically
| always be turned off.
| acituan wrote:
| > I want to applaud this, because it's clearly a good move.
|
| It's not that clear to me that this is a net good move.
| Exposure to out-network content, depending on what is exposed,
| could be good for preventing echo chambers and confirmation
| bias too. Twitter likely went the other direction and promoted
| out-network tweets that only increased engagement, and blaming
| the feature itself for this is naive at best.
|
| Second issue everyone seems to be missing is the potential
| partisan-ness of these feature changes. Do the usage of any
| individual feature distribute equally among all demographics?
| If not, feature-shaping a near election could be construed as
| an underhanded way to hamper the discourse of certain
| demographics. Of course this is very easy to dismiss as
| _conspiratorial thinking_ , but I think ideally any
| intellectually honest discourse engine would have gone the
| extra mile to demonstrate the neutrality of their election
| specific changes.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I find it suspect that they are giving as one of their
| criteria for calling the election as two authoritative news
| sources independently calling it. If this were non partisan
| they would have at least said a majority of authoritative
| sources or some other consensus.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Then you run into the problem of "What is authoritative?"
| By limiting it to just two, Twitter can say, "We like these
| guys. They're reputable." Instead of having to line up and
| vet thousands of other sources, and task people with
| monitoring all those thousands of authoritative sources
| around the world.
| yamrzou wrote:
| Their recommendation engine is not harmful in all cases. I used
| to use Twitter to follow some machine learning/programming
| profiles and remember the recommendations being quite good.
| core-questions wrote:
| This is the amazing duality of social networking: as soon as
| it becomes _topic specific_ , the quality of discussion
| improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic
| gets. The moment the conversation is just general babble,
| anonymous / pseudonymous people will find things to argue
| about.
| majewsky wrote:
| > As soon as [social networking] becomes topic specific,
| the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to
| how technical the topic gets.
|
| "5G spreads the coronavirus"
|
| "Measles vaccines cause autism"
|
| "10 scientific proofs why the earth is flat"
| core-questions wrote:
| I mean topic specific in the sense of finding places
| where deep discussions are being had - like, say, a
| mailing list or forum for a very particular thing,
| scientific or programming or cars or whatever you like.
| Not what you see on Facebook. Social networking is not
| just FAANG, look in the long tail for the good stuff.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I sadly don't find this to be true. The caustic subjects in
| all disciplines get talked about more and recommended more.
| I made the mistake of watching some flight videos and now
| get recommended crash montages all the time. I watched the
| C++ con talk on "OO considered harmful" and now have an
| inordinate amount of bullshit in my feed. It feels kind of
| crazy that my YouTube recommendations took such a downturn
| suddenly.
| core-questions wrote:
| I will clarify: I don't mean that _feeds_ are doing well
| with this. I just mean, when you dig down to a place
| where Real Discussion is happening, like a web1.0 message
| board or group or whatever, there's still tons of good,
| good-faith discussion happening. It's just not the stuff
| that percolates up to the top. Relying on your feed
| recommendations for your content is like living off of
| nothing but McDonalds, it's not good for you.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Ahh sorry, I really read that wrong!
| notatoad wrote:
| in my experience, if anybody you follow ever interacts with
| anything political, that quickly drowns out any other
| interesting content in the recommendations. If you
| exclusively follow people who exclusively post and interact
| with programming content, then maybe your recs will be okay.
| but all it takes is one person in your network to interact
| with one other topic to poison your recommendations for good.
| gautamnarula wrote:
| Any recommendations on whom to follow on that front?
| yamrzou wrote:
| In no specific order:
|
| - Andrej Karpathy
|
| - Jeremy Howard
|
| - Francois Chollet
|
| - Adam Paszke
|
| - Thomas Kipf
|
| - Sebastian Ruder
|
| - Julia Evans
|
| - Martin Kleppmann
| gotodengo wrote:
| >"we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"
|
| This is my recurring issue when I see most "changes we're
| making for the election" posts. Sure this seems like a good
| step for this election.
|
| Fake news and the destabilization it can bring isn't just an
| American phenomenon though. Are they going to apply these
| precautions to elections in Brazil, or Myanmar?
| bredren wrote:
| Many people will stop watering their lawns during a drought.
| But they usually start up again after it passes.
| panopticon wrote:
| I'm not sure if this statement is supportive of Twitter's
| decision or opposing the practice of not using drought-
| resistant landscaping.
| waheoo wrote:
| So?
| animationwill wrote:
| >> "we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"
|
| We'll improve our site for 28 days, but the other 47 months
| of the year we will, uh...
| gnome_chomsky wrote:
| It does feel like there have been 48 months this year
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Seen out front of a hotel in Santa Fe recently: "2020 has
| been longer than a CVS receipt"
| hervature wrote:
| Do you live near Jupiter?
| bamboozled wrote:
| I think they're referring to the number of months will
| the next election.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| They're not nearly as accountable to those countries'
| governments
| bamboozled wrote:
| Why not ? They sell a product in those countries which is
| harmful to the democratic process and society overall.
| waheoo wrote:
| 'Cause 'murica, fuck yea'
|
| You can hate me for saying it but we all know it's whats
| going on here.
|
| I see the same garbage approach to politics at work too.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| Nothing shows Twitter's contempt for their users like the "Show
| less often" button on these sorts of notifications.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I've noticed that they've replaced this with surfacing tweets
| from your lists. This is really annoying to me as I've moved
| political follows to a politics list so that I'm not inundated
| with politics and have to explicitly check the list to see that
| content. Now I get it all the time.
| RIMR wrote:
| I think using the word "disputed" is a big mistake. It implies
| that a lie has some validity and that there's actual public
| disagreement.
|
| There's nothing wrong with taking a side between truth and lies.
| Even their example tweet should be clearly labeled as wrong, not
| "disputed". There is no serious dispute, only bad-faith political
| attacks against the democratic process.
| easton wrote:
| Most of these decisions seem to be going in the right direction,
| but there is something ultra dystopian about the phrase
| "monitoring the integrity of the conversation" that gives me the
| jeebies. Why not just say "Moderators will be extra active and
| we'll adjust as necessary until the election is over?"
| roughly wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the comments here, which seem to be assuming
| that Twitter is operating in an environment in which the
| predominate source of trending information is well-meaning
| individuals and not motivated state-level actors intent on
| disrupting an election.
| konjin wrote:
| I'm curious, have you lived outside of a 100k US city in the
| last 10 years?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's a bingo
| JPKab wrote:
| "predominate source of trending information is well-meaning
| individuals and not motivated state-level actors intent on
| disrupting an election."
|
| What evidence do you have that the predominant source of
| trending information is motivated state-level actors? That is
| an incredibly bold statement, and the framing you chose is such
| that there needs to evidence to the contrary, rather than
| evidence to support such a claim.
|
| Edit: A bunch of responses are mistakenly thinking I am denying
| the presence of Twitter bots created and operated by state
| actors. I'm not. I'm arguing with the incredibly bold statement
| that they are the PREDOMINANT SOURCE of trending information.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > What evidence do you have that the predominant source of
| trending information is motivated state-level actors?
|
| I didn't make that post. But the fact that state level actors
| have manipulated Twitter topics with bots, astroturfing, and
| other artificial means is pretty well established. I'm not
| sure I'd agree it's the "Predominant" source of trending
| information, that there has been state-level influence from
| foreign actors has been well documented.
| JPKab wrote:
| I didn't argue that. I was arguing with the "predominant"
| part he stated. I'm not a blind moron. I'm fully aware of
| bot manipulation. Who isn't?
|
| Yet I was downvoted for simply trying to reign in the
| completely overblown nature of these statements. These
| assertions since 2016 have been repeatedly made with
| partial and/or zero evidence.
|
| There is still zero evidence that the manipulation of
| social media by Russian assets in 2016 actually affected
| the votes of the American public. As far as I can tell, the
| blue collar whites in the Rust Belt don't exactly have a
| large presence on social media, let alone any record of
| statements saying they are changing their vote because of
| an advertisement. This is all just playing into the hands
| of the DNC, who for two successive elections have
| manipulated the Democratic primary to kill Bernie Sanders,
| and immediately resort to "the lesser of two evils" mode to
| bamboozle his supporters into supporting their oppressors.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > I was arguing with the "predominant" part he stated.
| I'm fully aware of bot manipulation. Who isn't?
|
| You could have easily pointed this out above without
| being so argumentative. If you are so concerned about
| downvotes, perhaps you should avoid being so
| confrontational.
| staplers wrote:
| You could simply google "twitter bots state level actors" and
| find plenty of reading.
| Covzire wrote:
| There is plenty about the earth being flat too, doesn't
| prove anything.
| [deleted]
| johnadams283475 wrote:
| Retweets are propoganda because they are just that: they're
| memes.
| daodedickinson wrote:
| We have zero ability to verify election integrity and now we're
| not allowed to talk about it.
|
| Slavery.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| If the only thing stopping one party from ripping up ballots
| for their opponents is that someone might be able to tweet
| about this happening, then the election has already lost its
| integrity.
|
| It's also worth thinking about which is more likely to happen:
| Twitter suppressing a true claim about election integrity being
| violated, or Twitter suppressing a false claim. Bear in mind
| that anyone can make a false claim.
| troughway wrote:
| From the top:
|
| From Facebook's point of view, we have recently learned that the
| whole circus around Cambridge Analytica was a gigantic farce and
| that they had no more access to anything than anyone else - and
| that they hardly did anything with it to begin with.
|
| 2016 taught us that even if everyone puts their chips on one
| candidate, and says that they have a 99% chance of winning, it
| may not be a reflection of reality whatsoever.
|
| Now, given that Twitter is primarily a Democratic Party platform
| (no silly HN poster, I don't need to post evidence to back that
| up), I wonder why they are deciding to do this.
|
| Do they know something about the election trends and which way
| the winds are blowing that they are intentionally trying to
| silence it to influence things one way or another?
|
| If you have anything left in that head of yours, my dear HN
| reader, it would be a good time to flex it and read between the
| lines when these posts turn up. And to not believe everything you
| read, especially from corporations that hijack social and civic
| responsibilities for financial gains.
|
| At any rate, make sure you get a comfy couch and some popcorn if
| you haven't. This will be a fun ride in a months time.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| I'm not sure why Twitter thinks that quote tweets are better than
| retweets. Propaganda exists to be spread, and it's long been
| obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further
| spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile.
| Also, you can disable retweets on accounts you follow but not
| quote tweets.
| ascorbic wrote:
| It's not that they're better per se, it's that there's more
| effort involved. Pushing people towards quote tweeting instead
| adds a little extra friction and slows down the spread
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Propaganda exists to be spread
|
| Indeed, that is the meaning of the word.
| mike_d wrote:
| It makes it harder for bots to just retweet and amplify without
| having to write unique content. If they all just retweet with
| "I agree", that is easy to Twitter to detect and filter.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| There are millions of real tweets like this though. "++
| [tweet]" "Thread. [tweets]" [downward pointing finger emoji,
| tweet]
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's true, but unless your strategy to is to deplatform a
| viewpoint, adding context is very powerful. Just read the NYT
| or the Washington Post when they talk about foreign countries
| and how bad they are. Sometimes they present innocuous facts
| and you think they're the devil.
| scubbo wrote:
| > it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just
| serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the
| propaganda artist's profile.
|
| This has never been obvious to me, and I continue to be
| confused by it as a position. It seems similar to "don't
| respond to anyone making blatantly false/harmful claims on
| discussion forums, because engaging with them just encourages
| them and spreads their message". In fact, in the Twitter case,
| it's even _more_ nonsensical to me - because the audience in a
| forum is general (and so, is likely to contain folks who are
| "on the fence" or who agree with the troll), but your Twitter
| followers are, by definition, those who hold similar opinions
| to you (and so, are likely to agree with your "takedown").
|
| I'm not saying that you're wrong (I've seen enough apparently-
| smart people espousing this opinion to convince me that _I 'm_
| the one missing something), I'm saying that I don't understand
| it. Can you help me understand what I'm missing?
| classified wrote:
| In a nutshell, "There is no such thing as bad publicity".
| Siblings explain in more detail.
| rdw wrote:
| http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
|
| > Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce
| misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also
| document several instances of a "backfire effect" in which
| corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group
| in question
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| What rdw said in a sibling reply. Also, it's all too easy to
| raise a troll's profile and turn them into an anti-hero or
| martyr by dunking on them. This is what happened with the
| POTUS. It's precisely the reaction he gets, the vehement
| criticism he gets, that makes him popular. His followers
| think, if he's pissing off a lot of people, he must be doing
| something right. The worst possible thing that could happen
| to him, from his perspective, is to be ignored. "All press is
| good press", as they say. In attempting to refute the
| message, you inadvertently make the messenger more prominent
| than they ought to be. You give them more public influence
| than they ought to have. This is how trolls rise to
| prominence, not only in politics, but in all areas. Look at
| the sports shows, where the loudest blowhards with the
| dumbest opinions -- which they spout on purpose! -- have the
| biggest audience. Dumb opinions make an inviting target to
| dunk on, and everyone takes the bait. The trolls want to be
| dunked on, time and time again. They want to be the go-to
| person for getting dunked on. If I make make a very bad Star
| Wars analogy, it's like when Obi Wan says "You can't win,
| Vader. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful
| than you can possibly imagine." (Except Obi Wan is the bad
| guy in this analogy. Which he kind of is anyway, because he
| lied to Luke about his father.)
| bmarquez wrote:
| >First, we will encourage people to add their own commentary
| prior to amplifying content by prompting them to Quote Tweet
| instead of Retweet.
|
| >Second, we will prevent "liked by" and "followed by"
| recommendations from people you don't follow from showing up in
| your timeline and won't send notifications for these Tweets.
|
| These are great, I wish we could have these policies all the
| time, not just election season. This would probably harm
| engagement metrics (since retweeting without commentary is low-
| effort) but increase the quality of the feed by reducing noise
| and increasing context of tweets.
| hartator wrote:
| > a public projection from at least two authoritative, national
| news outlets that make independent election calls
|
| Feels backwards to go back to news outlet now that information
| flows the reverse.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Just turn it off for four months. Just turn the whole thing off
| and everything will be fine.
|
| Honestly I wouldn't mind if the government DDOS'd them, or
| starting blocking all social media sites for four months. This is
| an emergency and these corps are behaving in an irresponsible
| manner which threatens our national security.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Nice steps, but seems a little late. I hope Twitter doesn't
| actually believe we are currently "ahead of the 2020 US
| Election". The election is already underway. More than 4 million
| people have already mailed in their ballots [1]. I guess better
| late than never but any social media company still figuring out
| their 2020 election policies is way, WAY behind.
|
| 1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-early-
| vote/m...
| Fellshard wrote:
| 1. 'Misleading Information' is a targeted category, specified
| only by manual intervention, leaving the door wide open for
| selective enforcement and biased enforcement.
|
| 2. The 'context' they put in the 'Trending' section is often
| highly editorialized and skewed. An example from yesterday:
|
| > Celebrities * Trending
|
| > _Mel Gibson_
|
| > People are expressing disappointment that Mel Gibson has been
| cast in a new film.
|
| > _18.2K Tweets_
|
| Mountain out of a molehill, selectively chosen, click-bait
| editorializing ('people are expressing') - none of this is
| helpful, and doubling down on it as the _only_ content to put in
| that pane seems quite foolish.
| kyuudou wrote:
| How do these steps integrate with Birdwatch[1], I wonder?
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kya4G6z2pw (7m16s)
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| 'Bout bloody time!!
| konjin wrote:
| Sounding more and more like a moral panic.
|
| Can people in the big cities not accept people in rural areas
| reject everything they think is good? It's not a foreign plot,
| it's a fundamental disagreement about values.
| [deleted]
| joshfraser wrote:
| Free speech has taken quite a beating in recent days. It's weird
| watching many of my friends and people I respect cheering while
| it happens. I honestly don't know what we do to fix our current
| situation where lies so easily go viral, but making Twitter
| arbiters of truth doesn't seem like the best solution.
| [deleted]
| godshatter wrote:
| I agree. I'm part of the "let the buyer beware" camp, despite
| the chaos that might entail. I would rather see social media
| sites focus more on not putting people in bubbles rather than
| trying to police what they say.
|
| If people can't see through the BS, then we get what we
| deserve. Every change like this is going to have unconscious
| bias and will likely be taken as proof of manipulation by
| people who don't share that bias. The only winning move is not
| to play.
| jariel wrote:
| a) You have no right to free-speech on Twitter or any other
| platform.
|
| b) When people spread false information at scale, it risks the
| very foundations of civilization.
|
| Anyone with an actively managed platform has to try to ensure
| some kind of intelligent fealty - the trick is to do it without
| bias or and kind of ideological orientation.
| jon37 wrote:
| The classic rebuttal to free speech arguments which I'm sure
| you've heard, is that the first amendment doesn't apply to
| private companies, and that your right to free speech doesn't
| entitle you to a megaphone, etc.
|
| I think a more nuanced and useful way to look at things is to
| think of Twitter as an amplification machine rather than a
| speech machine. I can say what I want out loud, I can write
| whatever letters I want, I can make my own website if I want,
| etc., but putting it on Twitter causes Twitter to amplify it.
| Many of these announced changes pertain to what Twitter chooses
| to amplify - and how - rather than what it permits people to
| say. (As far as I can tell, the only tweets they are actually
| _removing_ are those that call for violence, a standard for
| censorship that seems quite reasonable.)
|
| If we think in terms of how and when to amplify speech, rather
| than trying to figure out what kind of speech to censor, we can
| hit upon more workable improvements. Twitter's proposals here,
| under that framing, are a mixed bag.
|
| Twitter provides several ways to amplify posts - some of which
| are intentional on the part of users, some not. For example, if
| I follow a person, I'm telling Twitter to show all that
| person's posts in my feed. If I reply to a tweet, I'm telling
| Twitter to show my post to that person in their notifications,
| and also show it to other people who engage with it. If I
| quote-rt a tweet, I'm telling Twitter to show it to everyone
| who follows me, alongside my commentary. Etc.
|
| On the other hand, if I like a post, or engage with it in any
| way, I'm not telling Twitter to show it to anyone - but my Like
| may cause it to recommend the post to others, sort it upward in
| the algorithmic timeline, etc. This unintentional amplification
| can have unintended consequences, because the system cannot
| tell when engagement metrics are due to positive or negative
| characteristics of the post.
|
| Quote-retweets are also rife with unintended consequences. If
| someone "dunks" on a post by quote-retweeting it with criticism
| or mockery, they're betting that their comment is going to
| lower the status of the person they are quoting or persuade
| people the post is false. But the folks reading their post may
| not agree - and the original post might have been an bad faith
| attempt at distraction, which a dunk then amplifies.
| Alternatively, if a popular account dunks on a much less
| popular account, it can (sometimes intentionally, sometimes
| not) trigger a wave of hostility and harassment.
|
| So I like parts of Twitter's changes here - they have the right
| to try and amplify true information more than false
| information, and removing flagged posts from recommendations
| will do that. Additionally, removing recommended content from
| non-followed accounts from the algorithmic timeline is positive
| as well - it reduces unintentional amplification and puts more
| control in the hands of users. But their encouragement of the
| quote-retweet is concerning. They don't seem to realize how
| effective a weapon it can be.
|
| I would argue that any automated recommendation of user-
| generated content needs to be carefully controlled, if not
| abolished altogether. Recommendation systems cannot distinguish
| between content with high engagement due to quality, and high
| engagement due to emotionally manipulative dishonesty or other
| negative factors. And specially interested (or bigoted)
| political actors, who are simply interested in "the most
| effective way to attack / promote X" rather than arriving at
| the most truthful position, can test and manipulate those
| recommendation systems far more effectively than folks trying
| to engage with nuance and good faith.
|
| This "situation where lies so easily go viral" seems to me to
| have intensified starting in around 2014 to 2015 - when Twitter
| introduced the quote-retweet, and Facebook introduced the
| algorithmic timeline. I don't think "free speech" is the right
| framing for thinking about it. The recent phenomenon is not the
| _existence_ of extremist political movements or medical
| misinformation, but rather, their _amplification_.
| rabuse wrote:
| I have this gut instinct we're veering towards the way China
| censors their internet. The great U.S. firewall, to secure our
| citizens from "disinformation"!
| helen___keller wrote:
| As far as "great firewall style" American censorship (i.e.
| state removal of content on a categorical level) the only
| proposals I'm aware of have been to block TikTok and WeChat
| on the grounds of "national security".
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| Twitter is a community and all communities require some level
| of moderation.
|
| There's never a situation where you let people say whatever
| they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and
| everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard.
| We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend
| to Twitter?
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > Twitter is a community
|
| Twitter has 330 million monthly active users and 145 million
| daily active users. Is that a community? It seems more like
| an unruly mob. :-)
|
| I agree with the point that all online forums should have
| moderation, but for me the question is, should something like
| Twitter even exist? A centralized world discussion forum is
| not necessarily a good and healthy thing. Can humanity handle
| having Twitter?
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Can humanity handle having Twitter?
|
| Even if the answer is no, pandora's box is opened. If
| twitter disappeared, 5 copycat sites/apps would emerge from
| the ashes overnight.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > If twitter disappeared, 5 copycat sites/apps would
| emerge from the ashes overnight.
|
| 5 is not necessarily a problem. 1 is a problem. :-)
|
| It's not easy to reach "critical mass" though. Many
| social networks have tried and failed. Certainly the
| Twitter alternatives (e.g., App Dot Net) tried and
| failed. And _hopefully_ we 've all learned some lessons
| from Twitter and won't make the same mistakes again.
|
| Or if we did make the same mistakes again, then humanity
| is truly doomed, and there's nothing we can do to stop
| it...
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| Yes, this would be my next point.
|
| Twitter is absolutely a community, it's just buckling under
| the weight of its scale. The problem we're facing right
| now, to me, is that Twitter and Facebook have built
| communities that they are incapable of moderating
| effectively because of their scale, but they ask us to give
| them time to manage this difficult problem and we give it
| to them, absorbing more damage while they make billions.
| How much time do they need? They've all been around for
| over a decade. It's time to start demanding results.
|
| These platforms aren't required to exist. If they can't
| prevent their services from causing damage to societies
| across the world, then they should be required to fix that.
| If they can't fix it, then they should be shut down.
| joshfraser wrote:
| How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of
| millions of people with wildly differing world views?
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| Well, you start by acknowledging that by hosting hundreds
| of millions of people to your platform, you're also hosting
| the real world problems that come with them. And how you
| handle that a scale while mitigating the consequences turns
| into a nightmare.
|
| Rather then evolving along with the needs of their users,
| Twitter froze it's functionality years ago. Twitter could
| have added a range of moderation tools, allow users to opt-
| out from re-tweets, trends and such, allowed people to
| create groups and communities, foster active cooperation
| with key users and it's communities,...
|
| Why didn't that happen? Because those hundreds of millions
| of users aren't paying customers. Investing in all of those
| things simply isn't worth the investment or pressing enough
| in terms of optimizing for revenue through advertising and
| business intelligence.
|
| An audience is a valuable commodity, and so what Twitter
| doesn't want is risk losing that commodity. Tweaking the
| functionality of the platform is such a risk.
|
| However, hosting hundreds of millions of people who aren't
| customers, is also a huge liability. Worst case is having
| governments representing those poeple imposing hard
| regulatory frameworks that hurt revenue and profitability.
|
| In a way, it's akin to the lions of the circus. People pay
| good money to see the lions perfom, but the circus has to
| accept the risks that come with keeping lions. Which
| includes getting shut down because the lions escaped and
| went to town.
|
| So, why does Twitter cater to hundreds of millions of
| people, and why does the circus keep lions? Because the
| profits they gain from doing so outmatch the risks they
| have to accept.
|
| Getting back to your original question, Twitter is
| basically Humanity's stream of consciousness materialized.
| It's prohibitively expensive, and rather utopian, to be
| able to moderate that in a meaningful way which caters to
| everyone's contentment. By contrast, Twitter's aspiration
| isn't to provide the best moderation, it's to implement
| just the bare minimum in order to not lose it's value.
|
| Looking back at the blogpost, you'll find that most of what
| they propose is tweaks to how they filter content and a
| small tweak to how you do re-tweeting based on existing
| functionality. No fundamental changes to the feature set
| are put into place. On the scale of Twitter's operation,
| that's mainly targetting low hanging fruit since
| introducing more substantial changes would be a huge gamble
| that might end up hurting the business.
| cmckn wrote:
| I think the "how" is pretty simple: the company is made up
| of people, the people define a set of principles, and
| adhere to them. They don't have to accommodate everyone
| (and in my opinion, shouldn't).
|
| I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money.
| We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist
| because of the economic incentives to do so.
| wyoh wrote:
| Not elected people, not respecting the most basic of
| constitutional principles. Not only that, but you can't
| enforce your "set of principles" on billion of tweets
| each hour of the day, not by people at least, so you
| defer to bots, which are incapable of discerning what is
| free speech. They can't apply your principles with the
| discernment of a human, they can't enforce what's legal
| or illegal, like they can't recognize copyrighted music
| from public domains ones.
| cmckn wrote:
| I disagree with the constitutional angle. I do think
| enforcement is possible, it's really no different from
| enforcing the law IRL. I don't think having no terms
| and/or requiring private companies to have no terms is a
| better situation.
| coldpie wrote:
| Yep, it's hard. Let's try to figure it out instead of just
| throwing our hands up and letting the trolls take over.
| wyoh wrote:
| > We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that
| extend to Twitter?
|
| We don't do this in the US, it's called the 1st amendment.
|
| https://youtu.be/-OhyBJxg9RA?t=170
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| Our libel and slander laws say otherwise.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > There's never a situation where you let people say whatever
| they want
|
| What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on
| what you say, is determined by the law.
|
| > You have to set some of sort of standard
|
| The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which
| is extremely non restrictive on speech.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| The law is part of my point. It's how we as a society limit
| free speech in places where it's damaging to other people.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| >> There's never a situation where you let people say
| whatever they want
|
| > What? There are tons of places where the only
| restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law.
|
| So there are still restrictions then and people can't say
| whatever they want?
|
| > The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law",
| which is extremely non restrictive on speech.
|
| voat.co is a clone of reddit where the only difference is
| no restriction on speech. The top posts are usually
| extremely racist and antisemitic. It is a horrible horrible
| platform and the only change is no restriction on speech.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > So there are still restrictions
|
| The amount of speech that is allowed by US law is so
| extremely broad that those restrictions may as well not
| exist.
|
| IE, lets say someone were to argue "I think it is totally
| OK for the government to arrest and execute people who
| disagree with the government in any way!", and then
| backed up this belief by saying "Well, you support
| restrictions on free speech as well! You don't think that
| people should be able to send mass death threats to
| everyone, 100 times a day! Therefore, since you support
| restrictions on free speech, it is totally OK to arrest
| anyone who disagrees with the government in any way!"
|
| This is the argument that you are making. And it is a bad
| one.
|
| The reason why it is bad, is because the restrictions on
| speech, in the US are almost non-existent, and that is
| not a good justification to do other things that are much
| more restrictive, such as in my extreme example of
| arresting anyone who disagrees with the government.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| You made some huge leaps in what I was arguing. I never
| said the government should expand their freedom of speech
| restrictions or anything like that. I simply said there
| are still restrictions, even if they are small and that
| sites without restrictions are horrible.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > . I simply said there are still restrictions
|
| But the point is that the fact that they are so extremely
| small and minimal restrictions on speech in the US, is
| not a good excuse to justify much larger restrictions.
|
| If the existing restrictions of US law are so minimal, it
| makes no sense to bring it up, as any sort of
| justification for much larger restrictions.
|
| It is just not relevant to anything, to mention that,
| because those restrictions are small, and are therefore
| not related to much larger restrictions.
| driverdan wrote:
| > The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law",
| which is extremely non restrictive on speech.
|
| That would result in 90% of user generated content being
| spam. There's no law against me sending you 10 spam DMs a
| day on Twitter. Is that really what you want?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Good moderation sets standards for _how_ we communicate that
| everyone is honestly able to meet regardless of their
| worldview. Taking this site as an example, the guidelines
| focus on the tone, relevancy, and novelty of your responses.
| It encourages civility and curiosity, it does not try to
| calculate the truth value of what I 'm saying.
|
| I see many "it's just moderation" takes on what Twitter is
| doing, but what Twitter and other platforms are now doing
| goes beyond what most platforms have traditionally enforced
| in their moderation. Hiding user content that the platform
| unilaterally perceives to be untruthful is really a new
| milestone.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| But because this forum has guidelines for those aspects of
| speech, and its members abide by it, it opens up space for
| disagreements to take place and truth to surface.
|
| Twitter has guidelines rules for things you can and can't
| say but since the users don't all agree to the same
| guidelines, and Twitter enforces them very inconsistently,
| there's no pressure to follow them except to the point you
| may get suspended or banned from the site.
| sg47 wrote:
| Once democracy takes a beating, free speech will be the first
| to go.
| km3r wrote:
| Any platform ought to have the right to prevent falsehoods from
| being spread on the platform. A platform also should have to
| right to choose what topic, otherwise a car forum could be
| overrun by motorcycle enthusiasts. As long as a platform
| applies its rules in a just and fair way, i see no issue with
| preventing lies or keeping the topic on track.
| TheSionnach wrote:
| But who gets to decide what is truth and lies? If twitter was
| bi-partisan, sure, but the people in charge clearly have a
| heavily bias.
| gdulli wrote:
| > But who gets to decide what is truth and lies?
|
| Twitter does. On Twitter. That's practically a tautology.
|
| Is your point that you didn't know the answer, or that we
| should descend into anarchy because attempting to answer
| difficult questions is tricky?
|
| Both sides think Twitter is biased against them. The only
| reason you think it's biased is because of the same
| tribalism that you're baselessly accusing them of.
|
| It's blatantly obvious that Twitter can never stray far
| from the middle because it would lose them one half or the
| other of their audience and business.
| gdulli wrote:
| > It's weird watching many of my friends and people I respect
| cheering while it happens
|
| They understand that "free speech" is one of many principles we
| value, that these principles can clash, and we inevitably have
| to choose between them in cases. Even if those choices make
| some people uncomfortable. Before today, speech was neither
| offline nor online so free as to permit fraud. It's a terrible
| civic abdication to write off criminal behavior because it's so
| easy to get away with online and because it looks so much on
| the surface level like "free speech."
|
| Or because we live with too much fear and paranoia to accept
| even a discussion of establishing standards. Twitter making
| _any_ judgment that some content is fraudulent is not the same
| as becoming the editorial boogeyman from the extremist side of
| whatever political party is opposite to yours. That 's fear.
| That's an appeal to the slippery slope fallacy.
|
| My trip to the store is better off for knowing that if someone
| was shouting about about Jesus or conspiracies, they'd be asked
| to leave. We don't question that limit on speech. There's a
| reason you see people doing that on street corners. If there
| was never any deplatforming, all platforms would inevitably
| suck.
|
| Is it ideal that Twitter and Facebook have so much power? Maybe
| not, but that's just the reality we're in. We can't be
| paralyzed into inaction. There's no perfect body that everyone
| would trust to do the job and someone has to keep Twitter and
| Facebook from sucking too hard. Don't let your paranoia make
| you overlook that they'd lose half their audience/business if
| they ever strayed too far from the middle.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You've never had free speech on somebody else's property.
| clusterfish wrote:
| You also never had the ability to be talking on somebody
| else's property while sitting in your own home until very
| recently. Things change. The streets are still public but the
| streets aren't where we're talking anymore.
| krapp wrote:
| No one is making Twitter an arbiter of truth. If you don't like
| the way Twitter does business, there are other platforms that
| will cater to your alternative truth needs.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Your comment comes across as smug and condescending. Not to
| mention that moving to another platform doesn't change the
| secondary and tertiary effects that mass censorship has on
| society, and therefore you, as a platform user or not.
| joshfraser wrote:
| I'm not seeking alternative truth. Everyone cheers for
| Twitter because they think they are going to censor people in
| a way they agree with. But what about the day that changes?
| What about the day they decide to censor you instead?
|
| On one hand, I agree that businesses should be free to
| operate as they like & you can vote with your feet if you
| don't like the rules. However, we also have to be realistic
| about the fact that the largest tech corporations are now
| more powerful than most countries. Opting out isn't a very
| practical solution.
| krapp wrote:
| >But what about the day that changes? What about the day
| they decide to censor you instead?
|
| What about it? People get banned from Twitter all the time
| - literally every hosted platform and service moderates and
| bans content as they see fit. The terms of service you
| agreed to when using that platform likely includes phrases
| like "for any reason" and "in perpetuity throughout the
| universe."
|
| So I guess I make another account? Or go somewhere else?
| That's not exactly the boot of fascism stomping on your
| face forever.
|
| >However, we also have to be realistic about the fact that
| the largest tech corporations are now more powerful than
| most countries.
|
| No they aren't. Countries have armies and the monopoly on
| violence. Countries can arrest you, torture you, confiscate
| your possessions, make your beliefs illegal, and murder
| you. The only thing Twitter can possibly do to me is delete
| my account or ban me. They only control their one platform,
| they don't control the internet or the entirety of media.
| They're not going to send me to the gulag or throw me into
| the ovens. They're not going to erase me like Stalin.
|
| To say that _any_ social media platform is more powerful
| than most countries is ridiculous.
| joshfraser wrote:
| Social media platforms have an even more powerful weapon:
| the ability to share your perception of reality. Sure,
| they can't arrest you, but they can slowly shift your
| world view just by amplifying some stories and not
| others.
| bavila wrote:
| I do not consider this to be a major achievement on my
| part, but I have successfully managed to navigate my way
| through life without using Facebook or Twitter to
| facilitate my worldview. There seems to be this
| assumption that we are compelled to use these services to
| engage with the world around us. Heartbreaking to see
| this...
| stale2002 wrote:
| > That's not exactly the boot of fascism stomping on your
| face forever.
|
| Alright. Let's say that all of the major social media
| platforms ban any discussion of raising their taxes, or
| enacting more regulation on them, or let's say they
| straight up ban major politicians from the platform.
|
| Oh, and also there is no other significant competitor
| that matters, and it is unlikely that any competitors
| will pop up anytime soon.
|
| Are you just OK with that? You are just going to say
| "well, I guess it is their platform, and they can do what
| they want, and it doesn't matter that no competitor has
| any significant chance of being successful".
|
| > They only control their one platform, they don't
| control the internet
|
| Ok, now what is almost all of the major platforms do it,
| and there are no serious competitors?
|
| Let's expand this out even further. What if Walmart did
| the same thing? Along with multiple other grocery stores.
|
| You want to raise their taxes, well sorry, you probably
| aren't going to be able to buy food from any major
| grocery store.
|
| Or how about if common carrier laws were removed and your
| power company did it? Or the water company, now that this
| is legal?
|
| Your passive acceptance of this type of being can be
| extrapolated out to horrifying results.
| krapp wrote:
| >Let's say that all of the major social media platforms
| ban any discussion of raising their taxes, or enacting
| more regulation on them, or let's say they straight up
| ban major politicians from the platform
|
| Unless we're talking about a situation where a government
| controls the internet and makes it illegal for anyone but
| those social media sites to set up a server or host
| content, then that might create an immediate market
| demand for alternatives and those alternatives would
| appear, although alternatives would very likely already
| exist.
|
| >Oh, and also there is no other significant competitor
| that matters, and it is unlikely that any competitors
| will pop up anytime soon.
|
| You keep piling on qualifiers like "significant" and
| "serious" yet before social media silos it was entirely
| possible to reach millions of people and go viral with
| hosted forums and personal webpages. Hacker News alone
| gets a ton of traffic and it's hardly mainstream. What
| will happen is that the web will adapt as it always has.
|
| It's not as big a problem as you make it out to be. Don't
| confuse the size of these sites' userbases with
| proportional degree of control over anything outside of
| their domain.
|
| >Ok, now what is almost all of the major platforms do it,
| and there are no serious competitors?
|
| >Let's expand this out even further. What if Walmart did
| the same thing? Along with multiple other grocery stores.
|
| >You want to raise their taxes, well sorry, you probably
| aren't going to be able to buy food from any major
| grocery store.
|
| (...)
|
| >Your passive acceptance of this type of being can be
| extrapolated out to horrifying results.
|
| Everything can be extrapolated out to horrifying results
| if you try hard enough and care little enough about
| reality. But your scenario in which every social media
| site (including those hosted in other countries,) and
| every businesses and government utilities and services
| conspire to control all forms of communication and
| deprive people of basic services as a means of oppression
| is so far removed from any conceivable reality that I
| have to question whether you're commenting in good faith.
| Otherwise, you're doing a good job of making my point for
| me.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > and every businesses and government utilities and
| services conspire to control all forms
|
| They don't even have to all conspire together. Instead,
| merely one of these companies doing it, alone, could have
| a huge effect.
|
| For example, a power company, or water company doing
| this, all on its own, not conspiring with anyone at all,
| would be very bad for society, if it were legal
| (fortunately, it is not legal for a power company to do
| that).
|
| This is because it would be extremely expensive, and
| difficult to get another power line, or water pipe, to
| your house. There are huge barriers to entry.
|
| If only a singular power company did this (after the law
| was changed), if would be very difficult for any of their
| customers to resist such changes. They'd have to take
| extreme actions, such as moving, or paying for whole new
| pipes to be dug in the ground to their house.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > the largest tech corporations are now more powerful than
| most countries
|
| I think this is fundamentally the problem, and not free
| speech. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are of
| unprecedented historical size. Nobody really worried about
| whether some little discussion forum allows free speech or
| censors itself. But Twitter and Facebook want to become
| "the world's discussion forum", and I'm not sure that's
| even a thing that should exist. You can't really have free
| speech if there's only a small number of platforms for
| speech.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Then maybe vote in better people who actually give a shit
| and break up tech monopolies, otherwise we're just gonna
| live in hell world. The Clinton's should've broken it up in
| the 90's and Bush's in the 2000's; but they never went all
| the way and we've seen this behavior continue too the
| current admin.
| eplanit wrote:
| 10 years ago, it was most China we spoke about regarding
| censorship and "social credits". The CCP has made deep inroads
| into US society during this time. They're succeeding in
| changing peoples' thoughts and feelings regarding free speech.
| driverdan wrote:
| Save your outrage for when it's government mandated. Until
| then Twitter can moderate their platform however they want.
| matchbok wrote:
| I'm not sure you understand what "free speech" is, because it
| doesn't apply to Twitter, at all, in any way.
| joshfraser wrote:
| Mmmm the dictionary says it means "the right to express any
| opinions without censorship or restraint"
| matchbok wrote:
| Again, you don't understand what that means. They are a
| private entity - "censorship" has no meaning there. You
| have exactly 0 rights on the twitter platform, as it's not
| a government entity.
| newfriend wrote:
| There is a difference between "Freedom of Speech" the
| principle, and "Freedom of Speech" as defined in the 1st
| Amendment.
|
| They are obviously referring to the principle in this
| case. But maybe you don't understand what that means.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| That's not exactly true. The public has the right to have
| all laws applied fairly. The social media platforms have
| enjoyed the rights of a neutral forum without the
| liabilities that come with being a publisher. Yet the
| platforms act like a publisher, deciding what is seen or
| not seen, and the public directly or indirectly suffers
| as a result. This is a pretty clear case of actual rights
| being violated, despite the distracting narrative of "muh
| private company".
|
| The tech companies have a clear liberal bias, despite
| what the media wants you to believe. Tech savvy people
| tend to be more liberal, and tend to spend more time on
| social media, so you have a bubble of opinions that drown
| out the other noise (which already gets downvoted to the
| bottom, shadowbanned, or censored anyway), resulting in
| the faux appearance of a consensus that there isn't a
| real problem here. Anyone with enough influence to have
| this opinion really noticed in the mainstream media, will
| be discounted as a "conspiracy theorist".
| sixstrings wrote:
| I think the only way out is for governments to prohibited
| targeted ads as a business model. It's deeply subversive to the
| informed populace when everyone lives in completely different
| realities based on their advertising profiles.
|
| Making a business model like that illegal would force these
| services to go the paid route, or have less a subversive, and
| alas, less effective, advertising.
| shoes_for_thee wrote:
| bullshit. this measure is twitter deferring the arbitration of
| truth to actual authoritative sources:
|
| "People on Twitter, including candidates for office, may not
| claim an election win before it is authoritatively called"
| blhack wrote:
| Twitter keeps running themselves into a trap, and it is
| unbelievable to me that they don't see it: they _cannot_ be the
| arbiters of truth. It _will not_ work, because inevitably they
| 'll miss something, and then people will assume that that missed
| thing is true.
|
| The solution is NOT to do censorship based on truth. The entire
| system needs to be unreliable, because it is unreliable. People
| need to read things on twitter (and elsewhere on the internet)
| with skepticism, and they need to evaluate wether those things
| are true or false individually.
| allenu wrote:
| The principle of using skepticism is a sound one, but what do
| you do when the majority of your users don't employ that
| practice? Just let misinformation spread and just be okay with
| the ramifications on society because "it's not my problem my
| users are gullible"?
| blhack wrote:
| I don't agree with your characterization.
|
| Ideally twitter shouldn't really be able to spread
| "misinformation" because people shouldn't be using it as a
| source of information to begin with. These moves they have
| been making around fact checking, censoring things etc, make
| this problem _worse_. They 're trying to increase people's
| trust in twitter, which they shouldn't be doing, they should
| be actively trying to do the opposite, and they _will_ fail
| to remove all of the misinformation.
|
| So the result will be that people will still see
| misinformation, but they'll trust it more. It's the exact
| opposite.
| core-questions wrote:
| This is a good take. Skepticism is one of the most important
| aspects of thinking critically, and building a library of
| skeptical techniques so as to be able to sniff out things that
| aren't true is crucial to being able to navigate through a sea
| of information.
|
| It's sort of like the Godel incompleteness theorem of social
| networking: you can either be incomplete or inconsistent; any
| system which tries to be perfectly consistent will find itself
| excluding massive amounts of potential dialogue. This in turn
| will result in a user exodus.
| lxe wrote:
| Wow, some of these measures like removing out of network "liked
| by" and comment-retweeting by default are actually worse for
| Twitter's business. Looks like they are really trying to do the
| right thing even if it hurts them.
| rsynnott wrote:
| (For four weeks).
|
| I mean, it's definitely better than nothing, but it's not a
| "we're fixing our business model" moment.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| Reading these headlines is like living in a dystopian waking
| nightmare.
|
| This is not remotely at all the role that Twitter or any other
| Silicon Valley tech company should play in society.
| isk517 wrote:
| Welcome to the future, where we must chose between either
| drowning in a sea of misinformation or sustaining ourselves on
| a puddle of information that a "benevolent" third-party has
| deemed safe.
| grillvogel wrote:
| its amazing that this exact scenario was described in Metal
| Gear Solid 2, a ~20 year old video game.
|
| >Colonel : But in the current, digitized world, trivial
| information is accumulating every second, preserved in all
| its triteness. Never fading, always accessible.
|
| >Rose : Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations,
| slander...
|
| >Colonel : All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered
| state, growing at an alarming rate.
|
| >Rose : It will only slow down social progress, reduce the
| rate of evolution.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| A lot of people--authors, technologists, public
| intellectuals, and others in what was the broad spectrum of
| 'nerd culture' at the time--saw this crap coming decades
| ago but lost the fight to stop it.
|
| The writing has been on the wall about the dangers of
| social media for a very long time. It's just taken this
| long for people with the power to even consider doing
| anything about the dangers to start taking it seriously.
| konjin wrote:
| Or, we stop frothing at the mouth every time we hear someone
| disagree with everything we hold dear. People in big cities
| seem to think that their morals are the only ones around. To
| the point where anyone who acts like Obama did before 2012 is
| a Nazi.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| I vehemently agree with this .... however I think platform
| intervention against potential incitement is the best of a very
| bad set of choices available for how to handle the next six
| months.
|
| The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious
| propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous.
| The moment where a US president has refused to commit to a
| peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election is
| absolutely not the moment to test how well society can
| withstand the use of social media as a propaganda platform.
|
| Society needs a long term solution for social media--my take is
| that it should be shut down completely--but this is a short-
| term emergency and now is not the time to let the perfect be
| the enemy of the good.
|
| Being cautious is not a virtue when erring on the side of
| caution may lead to tanks in the streets.
| tpmx wrote:
| This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political
| activism inside SV companies has resulted in.
|
| (European observer)
| JPKab wrote:
| It's really become a religion at this point, with
| Capitalization of certain Sacred Words and canonical texts
| that are required reading to even engage in critical
| discussion of overwrought, overly broad claims.
|
| The worst part is that the people in these companies rarely
| have any experience with traditional religion, let alone
| extreme/fundamentalist religion, and therefore don't see the
| obvious patterns used by these extreme activists. I grew up
| as a dissenter in a fundamentalist Christian family, and the
| reactions I got when I stood my ground and said that I
| believed in evolution and a billions year-old earth are
| incredibly similar to what I see when trying to argue with
| these extreme activists. Also similar to my fundamentalist
| upbringing are the subgroup (minority) of people who
| obviously derive immense satisfaction from their piety, and
| won't hesitate to condemn others in the in-group for not
| demonstrating their full dedication to The Mission. These
| enforcers fit a personality profile that is identical to what
| I encounter at my overly woke workplace. Recently one of
| these enforcers told a guy (he was raised by Polish
| immigrants in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of
| Philadelphia) that he was wrong when he committed the
| horrible atrocity of celebrating the purchase of his first
| car, and saying how he "deserved it" after all these years.
| She was quick to spoil the happy hour at the outdoor bar by
| forcing him to acknowledge his privilege.
| simias wrote:
| That makes no sense to me. Do you think social networks would
| be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or
| Twitter were apolitical? How would that work?
|
| It's the quest for "engagement" and getting always more users
| and ad views that generates this situation. What can be used
| to sell you shoes and earphones can also be used to sell you
| political ideas. When the algorithm wants to show you some
| inflammatory and misleading political factoid because it
| knows that it's very likely to make you react, it's working
| as intended. Not because it was written by a communist, but
| because it was written by somebody optimizing for this
| metric.
|
| As a counter example: do you think HN manages to remain
| mostly not completely trash because it's run by apolitical
| people or because it's effectively run not-for-profit? I
| think I know the answer to this question.
|
| It's amusing how I've seen this "internal politic" boogeyman
| pop up in discussions over the past month or so. As if all
| the woes of the silicon valley could suddenly be blamed on
| those pesky "woke" devs while everybody else just tries to
| get the job done. This American election can't be over soon
| enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.
| dudul wrote:
| > This American election can't be over soon enough,
| everybody seems to be losing their marbles.
|
| Brace yourself then, because this election will not end on
| November 3rd. And the craziness we see today will be
| nothing compared to whats coming next. Regardless of which
| side "wins".
| tpmx wrote:
| Well, Paul Graham, YC founder seems to agree with me:
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705
|
| Edit: To clarify, he is saying the right way ahead for
| companies is to be apolitical, or, "mission-founded".
|
| Coinbase offered employees not comfortable with the non-
| political mission-founded way exit packages:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899
| konjin wrote:
| Those thoughts aren't welcome on HN any more.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less
| abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were
| apolitical?
|
| It isn't possible to be completely "apolitical" but you can
| be non-partisan. For me this isn't a left vs right or
| Republican vs Democrat issue, its an establishment vs
| everyone else issue. If this policy was in effect in 2002
| and 2003 people would be getting censored and banned for
| disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD. Just a few days ago
| NATO members blocked the former OPCW chief from giving
| testimony on the (very much disputed) narratives regarding
| the alleged chemical attacks in Syria. You can be sure the
| people being blocked and censored by Twitter won't be those
| pushing the official US government narrative. The argument
| Twitter is making that, "people are too dumb to figure out
| what is true, so we will tell them what is true" is very
| dangerous when Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the
| truth, and is run by people with a vested interest and
| belief in "establishment" narratives - no matter how
| questionable (or provably false) those narratives are.
| googthrowaway42 wrote:
| I completely agree with you and I used to work at Google and
| see this kind of activism first hand. It's not just activism
| though, the C-suites of these companies believe in this kind
| of thing.
| tpmx wrote:
| How far up? All the way?
|
| Edit: I mean, Sundar must be an opportunist rather than an
| ideologist, right?
|
| Larry and Sergey: I assume very few people know what they
| actually think about the big issues.
| ssalazar wrote:
| Silicon Valley tech workers were sold on a dream of "changing
| the world" rather than building any other normal business, so
| I would not expect any different really.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, that backfired spectacularly.
| snazz wrote:
| Without getting into the argument of whether any speech is
| apolitical or whether politics belongs in the workplace,
| Twitter clearly has a huge place in politics as a result of
| its nature as the premier social media platform for world
| leaders and journalists and anyone with an opinion today.
|
| Regardless of their internal culture, Twitter will always
| have to make some political decisions.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > the premier social media platform for world leaders
|
| Mostly one world leader. The rest of them seem to continue
| to primarily communicate through press conferences,
| television appearances and other fairly traditional
| methods.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| .. which they announce on Twitter, or else people and
| journalists would miss them. Traditional methods are on
| the way out
| 3np wrote:
| Hard disagree. It's inevitable with any company in their
| position. There should be no company in that position. We
| need to decentralize and federate. Mastodon is AFAIK the
| prominent implementation here but regardless, we need to
| start pushing for and exploring networks and platforms
| operated under completely different premises.
| tpmx wrote:
| Just to clarify: You don't disagree with what I wrote, but
| rather with the existence of something that caused me write
| something like that in the fist place?
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| Why do you think the pressure is coming from inside? There
| are billions of people watching these platforms. Even
| governments scrutinizing them. Unruly employees are fairly
| easy to handle, as long as there's not outside pressure too,
| but in this case the outside pressures are immense.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The changes give Twitter employees a vast amount of power
| over determining what's allowed to be said and what isn't.
|
| That fact alone makes me believe this is a result of
| internal pressure.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| Social network moderators are almost always low-paid,
| low-power, low-profile employees. It's not a great job.
| It's a high-volume job, like an assembly line. The highly
| compensated Twitter and Facebook software engineers are
| not doing the content moderation. They don't have the
| time, and they would run away screaming if they had to do
| it for an hour. It's likely that a lot of this work is
| even outsourced.
| tpmx wrote:
| I assume they have created an hierarchy with a number of
| different roles. That's generally how you scale people-
| intensive tasks. I have no idea why you would want to
| classify _all_ of those roles as "assembly line".
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| Let me ask this: what evidence is there that the results
| of Twitter's censorship are actually in line with the
| political beliefs of Twitter's employees?
|
| In many cases, Twitter's rules have been used to suspend
| accounts that people thought they were supposed to
| protect. And Twitter has gone out of its way and
| contorted every rule in order to protect the President
| from censorship and suspension, out of "public interest",
| despite the fact that he has repeatedly violated the
| rules that would have caused anyone else to be suspended.
| tpmx wrote:
| Exactly. Being a Twitter employee is now a political
| force, in practice.
| [deleted]
| ibejoeb wrote:
| >Twitter plays a critical role...facilitating meaningful
| political debate"
|
| Has Twitter actually read Twitter?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I strongly believe Twitter the company will come to deeply
| regret this direction. The employees who made it happen will
| simply move on to the next thing.
| akira2501 wrote:
| To be a complete curmudgeon, this just seems like self-serving
| nonsense from Twitter.
|
| To pretend that they have some "democracy breaking" power in
| their platform of the loudest 1% of individuals that actually
| contribute and that this needs to be tamed with special rules
| to protect the integrity of elections seems like an absurd
| fantasy.
|
| Either they're right and their platform can be a tool used for
| evil in general, in which case, why limit these rules purely to
| one particular federal election? Or they're wrong, and this
| really is just some bizarre internal marketing effort.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| I think Twitter does have that power, but not in a way that
| Twitter or Twitter users understand. Most people aren't on
| Twitter and don't get their news directly from Twitter. And
| people who are on Twitter and who follow politics on Twitter
| tend to already be hyper-partisan, unlikely to change their
| minds in response to tweets. The majority still get most of
| their news from traditional news media. What's really been
| changed by Twitter is how the traditional news media is
| produced. Journalists themselves are very active on Twitter
| and report tweets as if they were news. So Twitter ends up
| filtering down to the public anyway, even if most of the
| public isn't on the platform.
|
| As a result of this, Twitter's changes won't have much
| effect. It still all depends on whether journalists are
| reporting tweets to the public, and which tweets. Even if
| tweets get censored by Twitter, ironically that in itself
| becomes "newsworthy", and journalists spread the censored
| tweets.
|
| Politicians love Twitter because it allows them to say
| whatever they want, without having pesky reporters ask them
| unpleasant questions. And the reporters nonetheless report
| these unfiltered messages (often lies) to the public. It's
| basically free press, free advertising. A politician doesn't
| have to be invited onto a news program, they can just make
| "news" whenever they want, in convenient soundbites.
|
| The ultimate danger of Twitter to society is that journalists
| can't resist the temptation of reporting tweets as news. Of
| course this is a failing of journalists, not Twitter, but
| Twitter is giving these people a global public unfiltered
| platform they wouldn't otherwise have.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| They absolutely do have a major part of that power. Together
| with Google/Youtube + FB/insta, they pretty much control the
| political discourse. What other big platforms are there?
| RIMR wrote:
| Why not? Is Twitter even really a "tech company"? What tech do
| they even produce? They seem to me to be an advertising company
| that uses computers and the Internet to serve ads. They just
| happen to have a social platform they use to get eyes on those
| ads.
|
| That's all Twitter sells is ads. You can't purchase any other
| service from them. The only purpose of the social platform is
| for there to be people to serve ads to. That's not a product,
| that's a marketing strategy.
|
| So why shouldn't they have a moral responsibility to curb the
| use of their platform to do societal harm through the
| dissemination of misinformation? They don't exist to provide an
| uncensored social platform, they exist to generate profit
| through advertising. If their practices do harm they should
| answer for it.
| lazyjones wrote:
| It's our fault. We neglected and destroyed Usenet and made
| Twitter so large. Well, the latter is mostly the media's fault
| for paying so much attention to it.
| Constellarise wrote:
| I find it ironic this rhetoric is so prevalent on HN when
| usually HN users are the ones helping to make these websites.
| jon37 wrote:
| By growing as large as they have, and by building automated
| systems to amplify content to mass audiences, they have
| acquired that role. It is unfortunate that their control over
| their responsibility is unilateral and undemocratic. But at
| their scale, if they chose not to try and assess the accuracy
| of information, but instead to blindly amplify it based on
| engagement metrics, that is also a political choice.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| One possible option that never gets discussed is to nuke the
| amplification methods. If we stop recommending content
| automatically this ceases to be a problem.
| crazygringo wrote:
| They _are_ nuking them right now (temporarily). It 's not
| just being discussed, it's being _done_.
|
| But most of the time people like getting content
| recommended. It's what consumers want.
| grishka wrote:
| As someone who's worked at a big social media company --
| no, that's not at all what consumers want. They want
| chronological feeds with zero garbage mixed in. It's okay
| to have a separate recommendations feed, some (not all!)
| people want to discover new things, but it's totally not
| okay to meddle with the main one, and it's nothing but
| mockery to give users no control over it. People also
| want their preferences respected, they certainly don't
| want them reset every now and then.
|
| The only reason people keep using services like Twitter
| is because their network keeps them there.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > But most of the time people like getting content
| recommended. It's what consumers want.
|
| _Do_ they, or do they just boost some KPI that suits
| proxy for actual utility?
|
| Anecdotally even in non-tech circles most of my friends
| complain about how bad recommended content has gotten, or
| roll their eyes at whatever "personalized" ad for garbage
| they've been recommended.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > It's what consumers want.
|
| Do consumers _want_ it, or is it merely taking advantage
| of some more subconscious human behavior patterns. And if
| the latter, is this something that is bad for humankind?
| RIMR wrote:
| Consumers also want cocaine, but that doesn't mean you
| get to sell it to them with impunity.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| We cross a threshold if we treat information like
| cocaine.
|
| A threshold that calls the First Amendment in the US into
| question.
| munk-a wrote:
| I disagree, this isn't the nuclear option, the nuclear
| option is forcing these platforms to have a more
| editorial role in the content they're serving and that
| comes with a whole bunch of good and a boatload of bad.
|
| Gigantic unmoderated platforms existing like this that
| promote random snippets of speech to drive user
| engagement and ad-revenue is a thing that shouldn't
| exist. The problem we still haven't solved is how to
| specifically kill off platforms of this type without
| killing forums and discussion boards in general. I think
| there is a distinction there but I'm not certain
| precisely what defines it - but if anyone figures it out
| please let us all know!
| bobthepanda wrote:
| we've had forums and discussion boards for decades now
| that do not have recommendation features. I don't see why
| we can't put that genie back in the bottle.
|
| IMO the moment you start highlighting things that people
| didn't explicitly ask for, it's an endorsement.
| jon37 wrote:
| Consumers want a lot of things with negative
| externalities - goods that cost less because they're
| produced with slave labor, transportation that emits
| greenhouse gases, etc. Their preference shouldn't trump
| the obligation not to harm third parties.
|
| Automated recommendations of a human-curated set of
| content - e.g. Netflix recommendations for its suite of
| programming - are much less objectionable, because they
| can't amplify anything the organization has not
| intentionally decided to present. It's the combination of
| UGC and ML recommendations that presents problems.
| konjin wrote:
| >But at their scale, if they chose not to try and assess the
| accuracy of information, but instead to blindly amplify it
| based on engagement metrics, that is also a political choice.
|
| No that's an apolitical choice.
|
| The political choice was not doing this in 2012 when it was
| Obama benefiting from it.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Then they shouldn't have become that large to begin with.
| pdenton wrote:
| How long before the "misleading" label is used on anything that
| doesn't match their own political views?
| dbbk wrote:
| Twitter does not have a political view.
| Fellshard wrote:
| A cursory examination of their leadership's own statements
| makes it clear this is untrue.
| dbbk wrote:
| You don't believe business leaders have the capacity to
| separate their personal beliefs from corporate policy for a
| company that serves over 300 million people across the
| world?
| Fellshard wrote:
| I believe, on the basis of evidenced behaviour, that that
| is not the case, no. They will consistently feel morally
| compelled or externally pressured by peers to put their
| finger on the scale.
| qball wrote:
| Tell that to Brendan Eich.
| rvz wrote:
| Speaking of which: [0]
|
| It is clear as day that the views of the CEO and the
| Twitter platform has influenced the policies and biases
| against certain groups and enforced bans or shadow-bans on
| certain users and flags tweets from certain users.
|
| If they themselves are compromised or are part of a
| scandal, they will ban anyone else from spreading this
| information to try covering it up.
|
| [0] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/402495-twitter-
| ceo-jac...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://reason.com/2020/10/07/phony-fact-checking-on-forest-...
|
| (Facebook, not Twitter)
| matchbok wrote:
| Reason is not a reputable source on anything.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Is there anything in the link that you dispute?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > In my video, Shellenberger dares say, "A small change
| in temperature is not the difference between normalcy and
| catastrophe." Climate Feedback doesn't want people to
| hear that.
|
| If you are sailing on a boat made of ice through (salt)
| water that is 3 degrees below freezing, then a "small"
| change of 3 degrees absolutely could be the difference
| between normalcy and catastrophe.
|
| Of course that's an extreme example, but presumably
| Climate Feedback wanted the video to acknowledge that the
| climate is a non-linear system, with feedback loops and
| potential phase transitions.
|
| It seems absolutely possible that a change in temperature
| outside of the range that forests are historically used
| to could cause dramatically different outcomes for those
| forests.
| haunter wrote:
| Well according to Twitter they are reputable so there it
| goes
| driverdan wrote:
| I downvoted you because the label is based on facts, not
| political views.
|
| If you have evidence of the contrary please post it and I'll be
| happy to change my comment.
| classified wrote:
| And who, exactly, gets to decide what is or isn't a fact?
| eplanit wrote:
| I think about 6 months ago, at least.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-10-09 23:00 UTC)