8 ms·

Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise

33 points by kanamekun 9y ago

curtisblaine 9y ago
> Is someone making a positive contribution to the service, for example by posting well-liked content and engaging in meaningful conversations? Yep, because these are easily verifiable parameters that don't depend in any way on the ethical beliefs and political alignment of whoever rates users.
- staticassertion 9y ago
  "Does this user have a racial slur in their username?" would knock out like a really good chunk of the problem, tbh. Or like "Is the user saying they are a nazi" would cover a lot too. Pretty basic stuff would go a long way.
  - daxorid 9y ago
    > "Is the user saying they are a nazi" This would only be a fair standard if also applied to Communists. In terms of sheer historical body count, there is no rival. And then, if you did draw ideological lines in the sand, who sets that line? Whom does it emcompass? Does it apply to religions? Do we exclude Christians and Muslims? Do we exclude anybody who ever said anything nice about Genghis Khan or the Achaemenid Immortals? Establishing standards of tolerance is one thing, but defining where the lines are can be difficult, and possibly embroil anyone.
    - croon 9y ago
      > This would only be a fair standard if also applied to Communists. In terms of sheer historical body count, there is no rival. Depending on how I was born, nazis want to get rid of me. Who exactly are these "communists" wanting to get rid of? And how can I spot those people? A lot of people has died in the name of Christianity. Would you call Christianity violent in terms of ideals? I don't disagree that communist regimes have killed innumerable people, and even if I disagree with communism and think it's a terrible idea, there is literally nothing in the tenets against groups of people or violence.
      - daxorid 9y ago
        Advance apologies for getting a little off-topic, but compelled to reply in this case. I'm...not even sure how to respond to this historical misunderstanding, other than Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_... > there is literally nothing in the tenets against groups of people or violence Depending on the particular regime and which groups they designate as the bourgeoisie: Scientists, Farmers, Journalists, Factory Managers, Christians, Jews, Petty Criminals, Tartars, Kurds, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Estonians, Kulaks, Teachers(who taught the wrong thing), Capitalists, etc. The wonderful thing about Communism is that if the Eye of Sauron falls upon your arbitrary group and designated as bourgeoisie, you will be (enslaved|tortured|killed). At least with national socialism you have a chance to get out.
        curtisblaine 9y ago
        I, for one, am a bourgeois and happy to be. I'd be in deep shit if any communist or socialist inspired group hypothetically took power in my country.
        croon 9y ago
        > I'm...not even sure how to respond to this historical misunderstanding, other than Wikipedia: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_.... So you didn't actually even read my post. This is what I wrote: > I don't disagree that communist regimes have killed innumerable people And then you continue: > Depending on the particular regime and which groups they designate as the bourgeoisie: Scientists, Farmers, Journalists, Factory Managers, Christians, Jews, Petty Criminals, Tartars, Kurds, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Estonians, Kulaks, Teachers(who taught the wrong thing), Capitalists, etc. This was exactly my point. > At least with national socialism you have a chance to get out. Not if you're born the wrong way. And I'm curious as to why you didn't comment on Christianity, and how you view killing in the name of Christ/God. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence#War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence#War Is Christianity then the same as Communism in terms of violence?
  - hanbura 9y ago
    Those people wouldn't vanish from Twitter, they would just choose a slightly more subtle username.
    - curtisblaine 9y ago
      Correct. They would use more cryptic slurs which would be used in context and would be not easily differentiable from common words. You can't just silence hate speech with censorship. More generally, you can't silence ideas. If you try, you normally end up in a worse situation.
nathanaldensr 9y ago
Can this be summarized as "Twitter, implement censorship because people are saying things we don't like?" I fully understand that Twitter is a company offering a service and they are intrinsically allowed to police content being posted on their platform. The whole point of democratic society in the United States is to allow people freedom of speech and thought. If we limit the discussion of ideas to only popular/accepted/politically-correct ones, then there is no chance to analyze ideas from a relative perspective; there is nothing to compare those ideas to. We must allow discourse, even at the extremes of the spectrum. To quote various sources, "There can be no light without dark."
- staticassertion 9y ago
  You can say and think whatever you like. Companies giving platforms to hate is not something that democracy requires. It's less "that idea is popular" and more "these people are inciting hatred against other people". I'm baffled that people still repeat this "free speech is important" thing when we're talking about a private service giving an audience to white supremacists.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    hate cannot be precisely defined though. Thats the crux of the argument.
    - croon 9y ago
      Sure it can. It means "intense dislike". If that is directed at an intrinsic property of a group of people, that's hate speech. Example: black people as opposed to smokers.
      - nileshtrivedi 9y ago
        Very soon that leads to any speech criticizing, say, the capitalists or the politicians in power.
gthtjtkt 9y ago
> where even the vilest, most hateful and antisocial behavior should be tolerated. I'm confused, I see stories complaining about Twitter's heavy-handed censorship all the time, whether it's banning accounts or simply removing objectionable hashtags from the "Trending" list. When did they suddenly develop the opposite problem?
- dasil003 9y ago
  It's just one more battle Twitter can't win. The problem with Twitter is not any particular political view, it's that Twitter is an extreme polarizer and troll amplifier.
- MBCook 9y ago
  They’ve never done a good job of dealing with problem people. There are two stories you hear: 1. Twitter killed the account of normal person X for no reason (or for arguing with someone who deserves to have their account killed but don’t) 2. Twitter, for once, killed the account of someone who really deserved it and all their followers/ideological believers scream CENSORSHIP LIBERAL MEDIA at the top of their lungs
ravenstine 9y ago
When was the last time anyone referred to Twitter as "anything-goes"? NYT, it's time to end your "editorials are news" dystopia.
- anonemouse145 9y ago
  Funny how NYT seems to want those advertisers to move back from Twitter to NYT ain't it
- rhcom2 9y ago
  It's a columnist presenting their own views, something newspapers have always had.
  - ravenstine 9y ago
    That's true, except it used to be common to label such articles as "editorial" or "opinion". Granted, you and I can already recognize that it's an opinion piece, but not having an explicit distinction is obviously intended to blur the lines between fact and opinion. I'm just not a fan of this practice.
    - rhcom2 9y ago
      Very fair. I have seen people share opinion pieces as news articles before too. Very similar to the ads that look exactly like articles.
martin_bech 9y ago
I feel like making a service where people can post public 140 character messages, and other people can follow them, and thats the entire app, and call it twitter classic.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Spam?
  - lin_lin 9y ago
    How's it spam? I select people/accounts I want to follow, and tweets from them show up in chronological order in my timeline. Sounds brilliant, someone should get on that!
    - pjc50 9y ago
      So no @ and no #, ie no way to discover what people you're not following are talking about unless linked by someone you do follow?
      - ashark 9y ago
        # — sure, allow it. If you ask for all the comments that mention a hashtag, you're requesting a drink from the firehose, and you should get it. @ — maybe allow it, but only for users who mutually follow one another.
- ashark 9y ago
  Hm. Spin it up under a non-profit, create or build upon an open protocol. Appeal to the folks who think the Internet would be better off with something twitter-like but as kind-of a public service, and more open. If you do allow responses/conversations, allow it only between users who follow one another. But maybe just don't allow it at all. [EDIT] actually, if anyone's thinking about doing this and wants to chat... email's in my profile.
lin_lin 9y ago
Anything goes? Twitter have been actively censoring hashtags, banning people, shadow-banning accounts and most recently "de-verifiying" people due to political differences.
- PrimHelios 9y ago
  They've been deverifying people for breaking their ToS.
ProAm 9y ago
I'm surprised this is an actual article from the NY Times and not an editorial. Im very surprised any journalist would plead for censorship on the internet.
- sparkzilla 9y ago
  Many journalists are happy to censor opposing views.
- rhcom2 9y ago
  It's a column expressing one person's (Farhad Manjoo's) viewpoint. It isn't a news article or opinion from the NYT editorial staff.
  - ProAm 9y ago
    Im not extremely familiar with how newspapers categorize their content, but wouldnt this still go under an opinion piece or be labeled as such? Honest question.
    - rhcom2 9y ago
      Usually repeating columns in newspapers have names next to the byline. So this one is attributed to Farhad Manjoo - STATE OF THE ART which is explained as "A column from Farhad Manjoo that examines how technology is changing business and society." Columns are very much opinion pieces. Editorials are opinion pieces written by the editorial staff and usually are looked at as having the support of the paper (like endorsing a candidate). It definitely be more clear though.
- GVIrish 9y ago
  Is he pleading for actual censorship though? It sounds more like he's saying that the platform should help people avoid content they find offensive. So someone is free to post their racist and misogynist memes but someone who doesn't wish to see that content just wouldn't see it.
  - 9y ago
douglaswlance 9y ago
How do you determine what is "hate"?
snvzz 9y ago
Twitter is turning into a platform for censorship. Or rather, a platform for nothing. RIP Twitter.
PatientTrades 9y ago
> It’s no accident that it is President Trump’s social network of choice. This writer does realize that President Obama was the first President to consistently utilize twitter right? Of course President Trump took it to another level, but he is insinuating that President Trump is using to twitter to sway "small minded" Americans, but ignoring the fact that President Obama did the exact same thing on a smaller scale.
dvdhnt 9y ago
Maybe, I'm missing some larger point, but it seems like the real dilemma here is that people lack the discipline to give up things that do not benefit them. As per constant discussion here on HN, many of us continue to untangle social networks from our lives. If Twitter has become a place where users spend more time complaining about the platform rather than actually using the platform, they should quit. Not because I have some utopian capitalist view where each user can just go off and build their own Twitter clone or because of some "don't like it, leave" mentality. I'm saying this because I believe it's conducive to their mental health. Otherwise, people become quite cynical and make choices they wouldn't normally make - as in limiting free speech for the sake of corporate gains.
tomp 9y ago
I don't understand why Twitter doesn't generate some general "white/blacklist" feature that people could opt in/out of? Things like, a "porn" filter, a "n-word" filter, a "faminist"/"mysogynist" filter, etc. Some of these could be automatic (e.g. porn and spam and virus links), some manual (e.g. "all people who this particular user disagrees with"), they could be curated by Twitter itself or by any other entity/user, and some general would be default/opt-out (e.g. porn, hate speech, gore), others would be opt-in (e.g. "no politics" filter). IMO that solves most of the problems - allowing unbiased freedom of speech/communication, while still preserving basic decency for the majority of people. In addition, you'd have a capitalist market/competition for ideas - if a curator of a filter becomes untrustworthy (starts abusing their "power" by "censoring" too many voices) the filter could simply by forked, improved, and users would migrate to something better! Edit: In addition, this would also solve all kinds of legal issues - you could simply make a per-country level filters that users connecting from that country would automatically be exposed to, but all such government-imposed censorship would be implemented in a very transparent manner!
- pjc50 9y ago
  Per-country filters already exist. https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222# https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222# https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kz57j/this-is-how-twitter-blocks-far-right-tweets-in-germany https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kz57j/this-is-ho... User-curated blocklists were tool deployed by both sides in Gamergate. https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block-lists-to-help-make-twitter-safer.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block...
- tomschlick 9y ago
  > IMO that solves most of the problems And creates echo chambers. That's part of the problem with Facebook, once you start posting and interacting with certain types of content you get the same type of content more often. Leaving out the opposing viewpoints and giving you the impression that everyone agrees with you.
GVIrish 9y ago
People are getting all caught up on the idea of censorship here but it is really about what Twitter is, and what does it want to be. Does Twitter want to be a dumb pipe where it doesn't do anything at all about what people post? If that is the case, then yeah, don't do anything about bots, trolls, harassment/abuse, etc. Is Twitter actually an online community? If that is what they want it to be, then it will need at least some mechanisms to deal with toxic users. Maybe that's just giving users robust tools for filtering what they want to see. Maybe you could use sentiment analysis to give people the ability to block certain types of tweets from reaching them. And indeed, they already have some of that with the 'sensitive content' setting on images and video. The author here wants to go further into a reputation system, which may or may not be the right choice for Twitter. That seems to be a harder thing to do technically, but I'm pretty sure they could come up with something that tones down the impact of the worst abuse. At the end of the day, if a general public social media platform becomes too toxic for too many users, it probably won't survive. And that's not even getting into the real world consequences that we're starting to see from foreign intelligence services attempting to manipulate them.
ScottAS 9y ago
There's a MUCH bigger problem to talk about. Air, it's time to end your anything-goes paradise. Your medium allows murderers, rapists and my crotchety old neighbor to create vibrations that will reach the ears of others. Why are we allowing these criminals to vibrate molecules of air? We should be ashamed of ourselves. I'm happy to announce Airfilter. A new device that uses machine learning-based active noise cancellation (and a blockchain reputation system) to selectively remove offensive vibrations from the entire atmosphere of the earth. We're hiring!
tempodox 9y ago
I find it astonishing how presumably sober people think it's reasonable to cry for censorship.

33 points by kanamekun 9y ago

> Is someone making a positive contribution to the service, for example by posting well-liked content and engaging in meaningful conversations? Yep, because these are easily verifiable parameters that don't depend in any way on the ethical beliefs and political alignment of whoever rates users.

staticassertion 9y ago
"Does this user have a racial slur in their username?" would knock out like a really good chunk of the problem, tbh. Or like "Is the user saying they are a nazi" would cover a lot too. Pretty basic stuff would go a long way.
- daxorid 9y ago
  > "Is the user saying they are a nazi" This would only be a fair standard if also applied to Communists. In terms of sheer historical body count, there is no rival. And then, if you did draw ideological lines in the sand, who sets that line? Whom does it emcompass? Does it apply to religions? Do we exclude Christians and Muslims? Do we exclude anybody who ever said anything nice about Genghis Khan or the Achaemenid Immortals? Establishing standards of tolerance is one thing, but defining where the lines are can be difficult, and possibly embroil anyone.
  - croon 9y ago
    > This would only be a fair standard if also applied to Communists. In terms of sheer historical body count, there is no rival. Depending on how I was born, nazis want to get rid of me. Who exactly are these "communists" wanting to get rid of? And how can I spot those people? A lot of people has died in the name of Christianity. Would you call Christianity violent in terms of ideals? I don't disagree that communist regimes have killed innumerable people, and even if I disagree with communism and think it's a terrible idea, there is literally nothing in the tenets against groups of people or violence.
    - daxorid 9y ago
      Advance apologies for getting a little off-topic, but compelled to reply in this case. I'm...not even sure how to respond to this historical misunderstanding, other than Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_... > there is literally nothing in the tenets against groups of people or violence Depending on the particular regime and which groups they designate as the bourgeoisie: Scientists, Farmers, Journalists, Factory Managers, Christians, Jews, Petty Criminals, Tartars, Kurds, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Estonians, Kulaks, Teachers(who taught the wrong thing), Capitalists, etc. The wonderful thing about Communism is that if the Eye of Sauron falls upon your arbitrary group and designated as bourgeoisie, you will be (enslaved|tortured|killed). At least with national socialism you have a chance to get out.
      - curtisblaine 9y ago
        I, for one, am a bourgeois and happy to be. I'd be in deep shit if any communist or socialist inspired group hypothetically took power in my country.
      - croon 9y ago
        > I'm...not even sure how to respond to this historical misunderstanding, other than Wikipedia: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_.... So you didn't actually even read my post. This is what I wrote: > I don't disagree that communist regimes have killed innumerable people And then you continue: > Depending on the particular regime and which groups they designate as the bourgeoisie: Scientists, Farmers, Journalists, Factory Managers, Christians, Jews, Petty Criminals, Tartars, Kurds, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Estonians, Kulaks, Teachers(who taught the wrong thing), Capitalists, etc. This was exactly my point. > At least with national socialism you have a chance to get out. Not if you're born the wrong way. And I'm curious as to why you didn't comment on Christianity, and how you view killing in the name of Christ/God. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence#War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence#War Is Christianity then the same as Communism in terms of violence?
- hanbura 9y ago
  Those people wouldn't vanish from Twitter, they would just choose a slightly more subtle username.
  - curtisblaine 9y ago
    Correct. They would use more cryptic slurs which would be used in context and would be not easily differentiable from common words. You can't just silence hate speech with censorship. More generally, you can't silence ideas. If you try, you normally end up in a worse situation.

nathanaldensr 9y ago

Can this be summarized as "Twitter, implement censorship because people are saying things we don't like?" I fully understand that Twitter is a company offering a service and they are intrinsically allowed to police content being posted on their platform. The whole point of democratic society in the United States is to allow people freedom of speech and thought. If we limit the discussion of ideas to only popular/accepted/politically-correct ones, then there is no chance to analyze ideas from a relative perspective; there is nothing to compare those ideas to. We must allow discourse, even at the extremes of the spectrum. To quote various sources, "There can be no light without dark."

staticassertion 9y ago
You can say and think whatever you like. Companies giving platforms to hate is not something that democracy requires. It's less "that idea is popular" and more "these people are inciting hatred against other people". I'm baffled that people still repeat this "free speech is important" thing when we're talking about a private service giving an audience to white supremacists.
- dominotw 9y ago
  hate cannot be precisely defined though. Thats the crux of the argument.
  - croon 9y ago
    Sure it can. It means "intense dislike". If that is directed at an intrinsic property of a group of people, that's hate speech. Example: black people as opposed to smokers.
    - nileshtrivedi 9y ago
      Very soon that leads to any speech criticizing, say, the capitalists or the politicians in power.

gthtjtkt 9y ago

> where even the vilest, most hateful and antisocial behavior should be tolerated. I'm confused, I see stories complaining about Twitter's heavy-handed censorship all the time, whether it's banning accounts or simply removing objectionable hashtags from the "Trending" list. When did they suddenly develop the opposite problem?

dasil003 9y ago
It's just one more battle Twitter can't win. The problem with Twitter is not any particular political view, it's that Twitter is an extreme polarizer and troll amplifier.
MBCook 9y ago
They’ve never done a good job of dealing with problem people. There are two stories you hear: 1. Twitter killed the account of normal person X for no reason (or for arguing with someone who deserves to have their account killed but don’t) 2. Twitter, for once, killed the account of someone who really deserved it and all their followers/ideological believers scream CENSORSHIP LIBERAL MEDIA at the top of their lungs

ravenstine 9y ago

When was the last time anyone referred to Twitter as "anything-goes"? NYT, it's time to end your "editorials are news" dystopia.

anonemouse145 9y ago
Funny how NYT seems to want those advertisers to move back from Twitter to NYT ain't it
rhcom2 9y ago
It's a columnist presenting their own views, something newspapers have always had.
- ravenstine 9y ago
  That's true, except it used to be common to label such articles as "editorial" or "opinion". Granted, you and I can already recognize that it's an opinion piece, but not having an explicit distinction is obviously intended to blur the lines between fact and opinion. I'm just not a fan of this practice.
  - rhcom2 9y ago
    Very fair. I have seen people share opinion pieces as news articles before too. Very similar to the ads that look exactly like articles.

martin_bech 9y ago

I feel like making a service where people can post public 140 character messages, and other people can follow them, and thats the entire app, and call it twitter classic.

pjc50 9y ago
Spam?
- lin_lin 9y ago
  How's it spam? I select people/accounts I want to follow, and tweets from them show up in chronological order in my timeline. Sounds brilliant, someone should get on that!
  - pjc50 9y ago
    So no @ and no #, ie no way to discover what people you're not following are talking about unless linked by someone you do follow?
    - ashark 9y ago
      # — sure, allow it. If you ask for all the comments that mention a hashtag, you're requesting a drink from the firehose, and you should get it. @ — maybe allow it, but only for users who mutually follow one another.
ashark 9y ago
Hm. Spin it up under a non-profit, create or build upon an open protocol. Appeal to the folks who think the Internet would be better off with something twitter-like but as kind-of a public service, and more open. If you do allow responses/conversations, allow it only between users who follow one another. But maybe just don't allow it at all. [EDIT] actually, if anyone's thinking about doing this and wants to chat... email's in my profile.

lin_lin 9y ago

Anything goes? Twitter have been actively censoring hashtags, banning people, shadow-banning accounts and most recently "de-verifiying" people due to political differences.

PrimHelios 9y ago
They've been deverifying people for breaking their ToS.

ProAm 9y ago

I'm surprised this is an actual article from the NY Times and not an editorial. Im very surprised any journalist would plead for censorship on the internet.

sparkzilla 9y ago
Many journalists are happy to censor opposing views.
rhcom2 9y ago
It's a column expressing one person's (Farhad Manjoo's) viewpoint. It isn't a news article or opinion from the NYT editorial staff.
- ProAm 9y ago
  Im not extremely familiar with how newspapers categorize their content, but wouldnt this still go under an opinion piece or be labeled as such? Honest question.
  - rhcom2 9y ago
    Usually repeating columns in newspapers have names next to the byline. So this one is attributed to Farhad Manjoo - STATE OF THE ART which is explained as "A column from Farhad Manjoo that examines how technology is changing business and society." Columns are very much opinion pieces. Editorials are opinion pieces written by the editorial staff and usually are looked at as having the support of the paper (like endorsing a candidate). It definitely be more clear though.
GVIrish 9y ago
Is he pleading for actual censorship though? It sounds more like he's saying that the platform should help people avoid content they find offensive. So someone is free to post their racist and misogynist memes but someone who doesn't wish to see that content just wouldn't see it.
- 9y ago

douglaswlance 9y ago

How do you determine what is "hate"?

snvzz 9y ago

Twitter is turning into a platform for censorship. Or rather, a platform for nothing. RIP Twitter.

PatientTrades 9y ago

> It’s no accident that it is President Trump’s social network of choice. This writer does realize that President Obama was the first President to consistently utilize twitter right? Of course President Trump took it to another level, but he is insinuating that President Trump is using to twitter to sway "small minded" Americans, but ignoring the fact that President Obama did the exact same thing on a smaller scale.

dvdhnt 9y ago

Maybe, I'm missing some larger point, but it seems like the real dilemma here is that people lack the discipline to give up things that do not benefit them. As per constant discussion here on HN, many of us continue to untangle social networks from our lives. If Twitter has become a place where users spend more time complaining about the platform rather than actually using the platform, they should quit. Not because I have some utopian capitalist view where each user can just go off and build their own Twitter clone or because of some "don't like it, leave" mentality. I'm saying this because I believe it's conducive to their mental health. Otherwise, people become quite cynical and make choices they wouldn't normally make - as in limiting free speech for the sake of corporate gains.

tomp 9y ago

I don't understand why Twitter doesn't generate some general "white/blacklist" feature that people could opt in/out of? Things like, a "porn" filter, a "n-word" filter, a "faminist"/"mysogynist" filter, etc. Some of these could be automatic (e.g. porn and spam and virus links), some manual (e.g. "all people who this particular user disagrees with"), they could be curated by Twitter itself or by any other entity/user, and some general would be default/opt-out (e.g. porn, hate speech, gore), others would be opt-in (e.g. "no politics" filter). IMO that solves most of the problems - allowing unbiased freedom of speech/communication, while still preserving basic decency for the majority of people. In addition, you'd have a capitalist market/competition for ideas - if a curator of a filter becomes untrustworthy (starts abusing their "power" by "censoring" too many voices) the filter could simply by forked, improved, and users would migrate to something better! Edit: In addition, this would also solve all kinds of legal issues - you could simply make a per-country level filters that users connecting from that country would automatically be exposed to, but all such government-imposed censorship would be implemented in a very transparent manner!

pjc50 9y ago
Per-country filters already exist. https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222# https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222# https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kz57j/this-is-how-twitter-blocks-far-right-tweets-in-germany https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kz57j/this-is-ho... User-curated blocklists were tool deployed by both sides in Gamergate. https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block-lists-to-help-make-twitter-safer.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block...
tomschlick 9y ago
> IMO that solves most of the problems And creates echo chambers. That's part of the problem with Facebook, once you start posting and interacting with certain types of content you get the same type of content more often. Leaving out the opposing viewpoints and giving you the impression that everyone agrees with you.

GVIrish 9y ago

People are getting all caught up on the idea of censorship here but it is really about what Twitter is, and what does it want to be. Does Twitter want to be a dumb pipe where it doesn't do anything at all about what people post? If that is the case, then yeah, don't do anything about bots, trolls, harassment/abuse, etc. Is Twitter actually an online community? If that is what they want it to be, then it will need at least some mechanisms to deal with toxic users. Maybe that's just giving users robust tools for filtering what they want to see. Maybe you could use sentiment analysis to give people the ability to block certain types of tweets from reaching them. And indeed, they already have some of that with the 'sensitive content' setting on images and video. The author here wants to go further into a reputation system, which may or may not be the right choice for Twitter. That seems to be a harder thing to do technically, but I'm pretty sure they could come up with something that tones down the impact of the worst abuse. At the end of the day, if a general public social media platform becomes too toxic for too many users, it probably won't survive. And that's not even getting into the real world consequences that we're starting to see from foreign intelligence services attempting to manipulate them.

ScottAS 9y ago

There's a MUCH bigger problem to talk about. Air, it's time to end your anything-goes paradise. Your medium allows murderers, rapists and my crotchety old neighbor to create vibrations that will reach the ears of others. Why are we allowing these criminals to vibrate molecules of air? We should be ashamed of ourselves. I'm happy to announce Airfilter. A new device that uses machine learning-based active noise cancellation (and a blockchain reputation system) to selectively remove offensive vibrations from the entire atmosphere of the earth. We're hiring!

tempodox 9y ago

I find it astonishing how presumably sober people think it's reasonable to cry for censorship.