12 ms·

How Twitter poisoned politics

122 points by thatguy_2016 8y ago

protomyth 8y ago
How about we take a look at the relationship of the size of an original tweet and click-bait headlines? Twitter wasn't the beginning, it was just a massive next step on click-bait to get eyeballs on ads. It has evolved to the point of punditry and playing to "your" audience and being actually false. Hey, at least "Headless Body found in Topless Bar" was accurate.
simplecomplex 8y ago
The medium is the message.
- gdubs 8y ago
  I'd love to re-read McCluhan with Twitter and Facebook in mind – but I'll be honest: I've struggled every time I've tried to get through his writings.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    I took a stab at a more readable McLuhanite interpretation of Facebook a few years ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
    - gdubs 8y ago
      Thanks - interesting read. I always took “the medium is the message” a little differently than that author does. To me, I felt like McCluhan was saying that it almost doesn’t matter what the message is — the medium itself is the message, and it’s a message that is consistent regardless of the information being conveyed through it. It’s why Trump is so effective at Twitter — it’s not what he says so much as he is tapped into the medium better than almost anyone else.
jonesdc 8y ago
This took incredibly long to load on Chrome mobile
- billysielu 8y ago
  Yea looks like the site is dead.
- burlesona 8y ago
  Looks like their page is down.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    As far as I can tell, it's only three paragraphs with no actual substance. I wasn't able to get the cached version of it, so here's a dump: > At 3.12pm on 20th November 2014, Emily Thornberry hit tweet. The Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, then serving as Shadow Attorney General, posted a photograph of a house in Kent, decked with three flags bearing the St George’s Cross. Her caption? “Image from #Rochester.” At 6.15pm she tweeted again, apologising for “any offence caused by the three flag picture,” adding that “people should fly the England flag with pride!” By 10.30pm she had resigned from the front bench. > The political autopsy lasted days, focusing largely on the question of whether Thornberry had opened a window on to metropolitan Labour’s cultural alienation from—and perhaps even contempt for—working-class voters in small towns. But looking back, the significance of that episode is not as a snapshot of political turbulence, but as a development in the process that turns turbulence into news. What stands out is the medium, not the message. In autumn 2014, Twitter was already a recreational habit for Britain’s political class. But “Image from #Rochester” marked a watershed moment for the social media website. Without the super-accelerated online frenzy, there was no story. > Four years later, the Twitterstorm is not only routine, it is the qualifying benchmark for newsworthy controversy. Anyone who doesn’t squander hours every day on the platform might be baffled as to why its name occurs with such frequency in news bulletins. A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account. Yet the site’s impact in Westminster and on the way politics works is real and exceptional, not because of how many people use it, but because of who they are—politicians, their devotees and the journalists supposed to be holding them to account.
petermcneeley 8y ago
Noam Chomsky doesnt like twitter either. https://youtu.be/UOX5ghu-h-k?t=35 https://youtu.be/UOX5ghu-h-k?t=35
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
paulsutter 8y ago
Whatever is broken is an opportunity to create something better. Problems wont cause a retreat to three TV networks. It wasn't long ago that we had Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities. The next 20 years will see a fascinating evolution in this space. Nobody should think that competition is over, or that these platforms have won. These issues should feel very exciting to folks in technology.
- save_ferris 8y ago
  How does this mentality address the issue that Twitter and Facebook have evolved into what they are based largely on the capital incentives to grow as quickly as possible, be as opaque as possible, and gather as much consumer data as possible? Twitter still refuses to publicly state how many of its users are bots largely because it knows the financial implications for doing so. Facebook has released the bare minimum amount of information related to Russian interference, despite reports that its still ongoing. What does competition look like against these companies when the financial incentives encourage more consumer data gathering, not less?
  - rayvy 8y ago
    While I agree generally with what you're saying "We're screwed indefinitely until the incentives change", I like to remind myself that IBM was once one of the most dominating companies in the world. Yea, IBM (and my parents were children during this time). All companies come and go, literally all of them. In a few decades we (i.e., our descendants) will be looking back thinking how funny it is that we (i.e., us) ever got sucked into this so viciously. I agree with the parent comment in that - Google and Facebook and the like have exposed some serious problems, that they can't fix (as they are financially incentivized not to fix them), so someone, someday will come along and eat their lunch? Who what when where and why? Your guess is as good as mine.
kibwen 8y ago
Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet. I know enough people that have gone from "totally outwardly normal" to "detached-from-reality, Hillary Clinton is a lizard person" (this isn't an exaggeration, yes, people I know in real life appear to sincerely think this) and I'm struggling to think of what else could contribute to such seeming mass psychosis. It's more than just propaganda, it's people deliberately abandoning critical thinking.
- tuesdayrain 8y ago
  I think the internet creates instability at least partially because 1. Anonymity/distance lets people say things they would never dare say in person and 2. Most people naturally perceive others' internet comments as if they were said in person. It takes a conscious effort to desensitize yourself to the raw bluntness found in heated online discussions, and many people never get to that point. So controversial topics frequently lead to nasty positive feedback loops that would have never occured in a face to face conversation.
- cafard 8y ago
  Here's a link referring to the days somewhat before Twitter: http://prospect.org/article/lbj-and-dallass-mink-coat-mob http://prospect.org/article/lbj-and-dallass-mink-coat-mob
- burlesona 8y ago
  I'd just call it "road rage." There's some research into this and my high-level understanding is that when people feel "safe inside their armor" - whether that's the metal of the car or the semi-anonymity of the internet, their animal instincts come out. It's fueled from both directions. In a tweet you don't really have context or body language or any of the other signals to tell you how someone means their message to be taken, so it's a lot easier to unintentionally offend. And then because you don't have to face the consequences of digitally "throwing a punch" a lot of people just fire off a nasty tweet without really caring. I guess I see it as not surprising. Civilization is fragile, and the institutions that hold it up take generations to build. All of it is basically a thin veneer over our animal selves that helps us individually and collectively function as a higher level creature than we really are. The internet fundamentally changes most things about communication and therefore human interaction and therefore the institutions of civilization itself. And really, looking back at the original internet ethos, that was kind of the point. So it shouldn't be surprising that something we use to "disrupt" civilization is in fact disruptive to civilization.
mhneu 8y ago
When new methods of communication arise, they will eventually be exploited by the powerful and the wealthy to achieve their ends.
fullshark 8y ago
I only see three paragraphs here and I can't make sense of them
cafard 8y ago
I doubt that Twitter has improved politics, but I can remember them being pretty poisonous well before that. I also found a couple of sentences in the article a little bit apart: "A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account." "By 2012, the number of Brits with (more or less active) Twitter accounts had overtaken the number of people who regularly bought a newspaper." Hard times for the newspapers, I guess.
brightball 8y ago
From the moment that news outlets started reporting on things said on Twitter years ago, I assumed this would happen. With enough bots, you gain the ability to create any narrative you want. Create story, then create the image that you want the supporters of one side to have, followed by the image for the other side. Use bots and retweets to amplify. You gain the power to define what's happening culturally if the news reports actually take Twitter trends as what's happening culturally. Create a villian, politicize the villain, popularize / demonize websites, etc. An entire Twitter event can be orchestrated to amplify the irrational into a position believed to be popular/main stream. The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it. The cynic in me says this will never happen for the same reason Twitter even made it into the mainstream in the first place: star power. As long as celebs roost on twitter, the press not be will be right behind to gather the fallen feathers.
  - komali2 8y ago
    This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction. Imagine a twitter where you actually have no way of knowing whether an account is "real" or not. Perhaps people then would take it far less seriously, and the only safe approach for a celebrity to take would be to say "we don't use Twitter" via other channels. Well, then again, that would be Twitter shooting itself in the foot.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction. I've had similar thoughts. My account is "verified", because it was pretty easy to get that blue tick mark. Make my tweets open, and...that was pretty much it. Just wait around a while for the review process. Unknown if that process is more difficult or involved nowadays, but when I did it? I just asked and they gave.
rrggrr 8y ago
Media criticism of Twitter is suspect. If the Weinstein case in the US has demonstrated anything, it is that news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.
- moorhosj 8y ago
  ==news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.== Except Twitter can be used to accumulate and wield power just the same. There are clearly bots on the platform trying to push certain narratives and bury others. ==Twitter has admitted that more than 50,000 Russia-linked accounts used its service to post automated material about the 2016 US election== [1] How is that better? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-admits-far-more-russian-bots-posted-on-election-than-it-had-disclosed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...
nbeleski 8y ago
I am of the opinion that in a couple of decades we will look back at all these social networks and find that they caused a lot of problems, in social and personal levels. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Linkedin, do they really bring more benefits than detriments? I personally don't think so.
pso 8y ago
http://archive.is/7gle4 http://archive.is/7gle4 Cached version, no login required
enraged_camel 8y ago
Twitter should start placing a visual marker on Tweets that have been posted via their API. Maybe a yellow exclamation mark around the same location as the blue check mark (which is for verified accounts).
pteredactyl 8y ago
How people poisoned politics.
ordinaryperson 8y ago
Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting. But politics have never been pure, it's a myth. Don't blame communication platforms (although again, they can do better), blame the humans that use them.
- Natsu 8y ago
  No, there's a very long history of political assassinations, civil wars, etc. all of which predate Twitter. Everything is just more public now.
  - naravara 8y ago
    I love how every example of "It was always this bad" involves people reaching back to before the '60s and, in some cases, before The New Deal. In most cases, reversing several decades of stability and progress would have been considered a very troubling development.
    - Chinjut 8y ago
      You think the examples are all before the 60s? There were some very prominent political assassinations during the 60s, Watergate happened during the 70s, etc.
      - moorhosj 8y ago
        The 70s were over 40 years ago.
        Natsu 8y ago
        I posted above, but I see no reason to limit things to the USA and I see no reason to limit assassinations to only the successful ones. Just because politicians have better security and actually thwart more assassination attempts, that doesn't mean that the underlying willingness to murder people over politics has gone anywhere. There are plenty of close calls to show that the schemes were serious: Bolsonaro was stabbed, Reagan was shot, etc.
gaius 8y ago
I can’t remember who originally said this, but the problem with Twitter is that you think you’re engaging in jokey banter with your mates but random strangers are reading each tweet without context in absolute seriousness and judging you
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Exactly! "Kill all white people" sounds way different from the outside than from the inside.
- CM30 8y ago
  Makes sense. Then again, I think the more general explanation here is that social media removes the 'multiple faces' people put on for different situations. In real life, no one acts the same way towards their family, their friends, their colleagues, their boss, the police/government, random people on the street, etc. They say different things to different people based on whats socially acceptable in that situation. Social media sites are like if everyone in the world could hear everything you said, without the necessary context to understand why you said it. They've unintentionally exposed the fact everyone has skeletons in the closet and that all kinds of disturbing things are said/done outside of the public view.
dc2 8y ago
Twitter is like trying to watch a football game where all 40,000 members of the audience have a microphone and each think they should be the announcer. You turn the TV volume off, but members of the media have been perusing the seats for a interesting cherry-picked "announcer". Finding one, they parrot it to the rest of the world and that guy's opinion shows up on your phone anyway.
- pjc50 8y ago
  But when this works well, it's actually one of the things I most enjoy about Twitter: kibitzing live events.
komali2 8y ago
I just wish it wasn't full of bots... facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum I have access to (friends in SF, Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and then internationally). Despite subscribing to one of those bot blocklists, it's still incessant. There's just so many bots. It's become a mild hobby of mine to hop on the latest "Twitter Moment" about politics just to refresh my public blocklist.
- justtopost 8y ago
  > facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum I... uhh... think that is arguably just about as biased as twitter. Maybe go talk to people, you know, outside? A dark bar if outsides not your thing? If you feel someones online statements are the truth in their heart, I am afraid we are at an impasse.
  - komali2 8y ago
    The only people I talk to on Facebook are my real life friends. Why wouldn't their posts be the truth in their heart? Why are you presuming I don't talk to people at bars? Just last night I had the opportunity to talk to some of the flood of young conservatives shipped into the city for fleet week, at a bar.
ola 8y ago
It's not only Twitter or politics. I've been playing some Heroes of the Storm as team building with my company and when we are not a full team the toxicity can get intense, with some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over. Mind you this in a no-stakes free to play game and the phenomenon seems common. Sometimes I think our culture is not ready for a substantial part of our communication not to be face to face.
- iak8god 8y ago
  > some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over. It sounds like your company needs to fire these toxic individuals ASAP before the company gets taken to the cleaners in a lawsuit for allowing this to go on.
  - ola 8y ago
    I phrased that badly, these aren't individuals inside the company but people we play against or play with if we don't have enough for full teams.
bobbygoodlatte 8y ago
I'm glad the article mentioned Twitter's engagement algorithm — I don't think enough attention is being paid to it. With a different algorithm Twitter could be a remarkably different experience. The current one has a strong bias toward engagement & velocity. It amplifies anger, outrage, and bad faith arguments over less "engaging" content. If Twitter let off the engagement pedal a bit and re-factored the algorithm, our political climate might be less hostile overnight. These companies have long claimed their algorithms are politically unbiased. That's not true. While I don't believe they lean left or right, they certainly have a strong bias towards extremism. Extremism keeps you engaged, which maximizes the time you spend in their apps. Imagine if Twitter instead decided to bias their algorithm towards positivity
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  But engagement is what makes them the money! The profit for them is in never seeing that this is a problem. There may be no way to fix this.
desireco42 8y ago
I would say politics and people involved with it poisoned Twitter.
samstave 8y ago
How many people/resources does twitter have on staff specifically dedicated to coddling the POTUS? Given that twitter has achieved a defacto ligitimized status as a mouthpiece of US policy - how should it be viewed/regulated/handled differently, if any? Also - what efforts is twitter taking to use the fact that POTUS has compulsive tweeting issues to sell the service to less sophisticated power systems in the world. Are people in other countries, namely more developing countries, encouraged by twitter to use twitter as an official messaging system for their political machinations? I mean, the philippines is one of the most connected-via-mobile developing nations, with a large population in the US and a very western society -- is twitter attempting to be an official platform in the philippines? I would expect so. What about other nations? Then, when they are a defacto standard medium for power structures communicating to their populations, then what standards is twitter held to? What implications does/will this have?
hockeybias 8y ago
Twitter doesn't poison politics, people poison politics.
mwfunk 8y ago
Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls. There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people interacted and communicated to places that were no more than sources of disinformation and flamewars. Modern social media is like post apocalyptic Usenet, except it’s occupied by the general population, not just scammers and mentally ill CS majors. I think that’s really messed up and can’t possibly be good for anyone.
- jeffwass 8y ago
  It’s worse than the bad usenet because social media curated the content you engage with into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Eg, my twitter feed shows me tweets of similar themes to those that I recently engage with. The more I engage the more that theme dominates my feed. So it’s easy to see that someone who engages with tweets of any partisan political commentary can easily get pulled deeper and deeper into that murk with an echo chamber that filters out the opposing viewpoints. Besides politics the same can happen with conspiracy theories and religious zealotry.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thundershine 8y ago
Normal people got access to the internet. It all went downhill from there.
- throwaway5250 8y ago
  It was like the September burst of freshmen that never ended? LOL. (Not that I'm disagreeing, exactly.) And before #MeToo, there was "Me too!" :-) Maybe the world is just a better place when almost all of us keep our mouths shut almost all of the time.
- CM30 8y ago
  So in other words, Eternal September writ large.
tareqak 8y ago
The cost of communication has fallen much faster (quantity of discourse) than the cost of education (quality of discourse). I don't just mean monetary cost: time, effort, and attention required to communicate is much less than the amount of those three required to keep yourself informed.
afinlayson 8y ago
Instead of crapping all over one platform or another, or thinking politics is full of cheats and con men, what are we doing to promote ideas that aren't my half will chant at your half. We have a lot of power in tech to make things better, but we often pass it on, and let those who want to exploit it take advantage of our passiveness.
vmarshall23 8y ago
Loudest voices to the dumbest people
kgin 8y ago
Twitter is great for publishing information updates. It's terrible for having a conversation or reasoned debate. Almost all of the built-in incentives are the exact opposite of what you'd want if you were creating a place for conversation and debate.

122 points by thatguy_2016 8y ago

How about we take a look at the relationship of the size of an original tweet and click-bait headlines? Twitter wasn't the beginning, it was just a massive next step on click-bait to get eyeballs on ads. It has evolved to the point of punditry and playing to "your" audience and being actually false. Hey, at least "Headless Body found in Topless Bar" was accurate.

simplecomplex 8y ago

The medium is the message.

gdubs 8y ago
I'd love to re-read McCluhan with Twitter and Facebook in mind – but I'll be honest: I've struggled every time I've tried to get through his writings.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  I took a stab at a more readable McLuhanite interpretation of Facebook a few years ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/
  - gdubs 8y ago
    Thanks - interesting read. I always took “the medium is the message” a little differently than that author does. To me, I felt like McCluhan was saying that it almost doesn’t matter what the message is — the medium itself is the message, and it’s a message that is consistent regardless of the information being conveyed through it. It’s why Trump is so effective at Twitter — it’s not what he says so much as he is tapped into the medium better than almost anyone else.

jonesdc 8y ago

This took incredibly long to load on Chrome mobile

billysielu 8y ago
Yea looks like the site is dead.
burlesona 8y ago
Looks like their page is down.
- r3bl 8y ago
  As far as I can tell, it's only three paragraphs with no actual substance. I wasn't able to get the cached version of it, so here's a dump: > At 3.12pm on 20th November 2014, Emily Thornberry hit tweet. The Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, then serving as Shadow Attorney General, posted a photograph of a house in Kent, decked with three flags bearing the St George’s Cross. Her caption? “Image from #Rochester.” At 6.15pm she tweeted again, apologising for “any offence caused by the three flag picture,” adding that “people should fly the England flag with pride!” By 10.30pm she had resigned from the front bench. > The political autopsy lasted days, focusing largely on the question of whether Thornberry had opened a window on to metropolitan Labour’s cultural alienation from—and perhaps even contempt for—working-class voters in small towns. But looking back, the significance of that episode is not as a snapshot of political turbulence, but as a development in the process that turns turbulence into news. What stands out is the medium, not the message. In autumn 2014, Twitter was already a recreational habit for Britain’s political class. But “Image from #Rochester” marked a watershed moment for the social media website. Without the super-accelerated online frenzy, there was no story. > Four years later, the Twitterstorm is not only routine, it is the qualifying benchmark for newsworthy controversy. Anyone who doesn’t squander hours every day on the platform might be baffled as to why its name occurs with such frequency in news bulletins. A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account. Yet the site’s impact in Westminster and on the way politics works is real and exceptional, not because of how many people use it, but because of who they are—politicians, their devotees and the journalists supposed to be holding them to account.

petermcneeley 8y ago

Noam Chomsky doesnt like twitter either. https://youtu.be/UOX5ghu-h-k?t=35 https://youtu.be/UOX5ghu-h-k?t=35

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

paulsutter 8y ago

Whatever is broken is an opportunity to create something better. Problems wont cause a retreat to three TV networks. It wasn't long ago that we had Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities. The next 20 years will see a fascinating evolution in this space. Nobody should think that competition is over, or that these platforms have won. These issues should feel very exciting to folks in technology.

save_ferris 8y ago
How does this mentality address the issue that Twitter and Facebook have evolved into what they are based largely on the capital incentives to grow as quickly as possible, be as opaque as possible, and gather as much consumer data as possible? Twitter still refuses to publicly state how many of its users are bots largely because it knows the financial implications for doing so. Facebook has released the bare minimum amount of information related to Russian interference, despite reports that its still ongoing. What does competition look like against these companies when the financial incentives encourage more consumer data gathering, not less?
- rayvy 8y ago
  While I agree generally with what you're saying "We're screwed indefinitely until the incentives change", I like to remind myself that IBM was once one of the most dominating companies in the world. Yea, IBM (and my parents were children during this time). All companies come and go, literally all of them. In a few decades we (i.e., our descendants) will be looking back thinking how funny it is that we (i.e., us) ever got sucked into this so viciously. I agree with the parent comment in that - Google and Facebook and the like have exposed some serious problems, that they can't fix (as they are financially incentivized not to fix them), so someone, someday will come along and eat their lunch? Who what when where and why? Your guess is as good as mine.

kibwen 8y ago

Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet. I know enough people that have gone from "totally outwardly normal" to "detached-from-reality, Hillary Clinton is a lizard person" (this isn't an exaggeration, yes, people I know in real life appear to sincerely think this) and I'm struggling to think of what else could contribute to such seeming mass psychosis. It's more than just propaganda, it's people deliberately abandoning critical thinking.

tuesdayrain 8y ago
I think the internet creates instability at least partially because 1. Anonymity/distance lets people say things they would never dare say in person and 2. Most people naturally perceive others' internet comments as if they were said in person. It takes a conscious effort to desensitize yourself to the raw bluntness found in heated online discussions, and many people never get to that point. So controversial topics frequently lead to nasty positive feedback loops that would have never occured in a face to face conversation.
cafard 8y ago
Here's a link referring to the days somewhat before Twitter: http://prospect.org/article/lbj-and-dallass-mink-coat-mob http://prospect.org/article/lbj-and-dallass-mink-coat-mob
burlesona 8y ago
I'd just call it "road rage." There's some research into this and my high-level understanding is that when people feel "safe inside their armor" - whether that's the metal of the car or the semi-anonymity of the internet, their animal instincts come out. It's fueled from both directions. In a tweet you don't really have context or body language or any of the other signals to tell you how someone means their message to be taken, so it's a lot easier to unintentionally offend. And then because you don't have to face the consequences of digitally "throwing a punch" a lot of people just fire off a nasty tweet without really caring. I guess I see it as not surprising. Civilization is fragile, and the institutions that hold it up take generations to build. All of it is basically a thin veneer over our animal selves that helps us individually and collectively function as a higher level creature than we really are. The internet fundamentally changes most things about communication and therefore human interaction and therefore the institutions of civilization itself. And really, looking back at the original internet ethos, that was kind of the point. So it shouldn't be surprising that something we use to "disrupt" civilization is in fact disruptive to civilization.

mhneu 8y ago

When new methods of communication arise, they will eventually be exploited by the powerful and the wealthy to achieve their ends.

fullshark 8y ago

I only see three paragraphs here and I can't make sense of them

cafard 8y ago

I doubt that Twitter has improved politics, but I can remember them being pretty poisonous well before that. I also found a couple of sentences in the article a little bit apart: "A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account." "By 2012, the number of Brits with (more or less active) Twitter accounts had overtaken the number of people who regularly bought a newspaper." Hard times for the newspapers, I guess.

brightball 8y ago

From the moment that news outlets started reporting on things said on Twitter years ago, I assumed this would happen. With enough bots, you gain the ability to create any narrative you want. Create story, then create the image that you want the supporters of one side to have, followed by the image for the other side. Use bots and retweets to amplify. You gain the power to define what's happening culturally if the news reports actually take Twitter trends as what's happening culturally. Create a villian, politicize the villain, popularize / demonize websites, etc. An entire Twitter event can be orchestrated to amplify the irrational into a position believed to be popular/main stream. The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it.

dvtrn 8y ago
The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it. The cynic in me says this will never happen for the same reason Twitter even made it into the mainstream in the first place: star power. As long as celebs roost on twitter, the press not be will be right behind to gather the fallen feathers.
- komali2 8y ago
  This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction. Imagine a twitter where you actually have no way of knowing whether an account is "real" or not. Perhaps people then would take it far less seriously, and the only safe approach for a celebrity to take would be to say "we don't use Twitter" via other channels. Well, then again, that would be Twitter shooting itself in the foot.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction. I've had similar thoughts. My account is "verified", because it was pretty easy to get that blue tick mark. Make my tweets open, and...that was pretty much it. Just wait around a while for the review process. Unknown if that process is more difficult or involved nowadays, but when I did it? I just asked and they gave.

rrggrr 8y ago

Media criticism of Twitter is suspect. If the Weinstein case in the US has demonstrated anything, it is that news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.

moorhosj 8y ago
==news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.== Except Twitter can be used to accumulate and wield power just the same. There are clearly bots on the platform trying to push certain narratives and bury others. ==Twitter has admitted that more than 50,000 Russia-linked accounts used its service to post automated material about the 2016 US election== [1] How is that better? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-admits-far-more-russian-bots-posted-on-election-than-it-had-disclosed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...

nbeleski 8y ago

I am of the opinion that in a couple of decades we will look back at all these social networks and find that they caused a lot of problems, in social and personal levels. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Linkedin, do they really bring more benefits than detriments? I personally don't think so.

pso 8y ago

http://archive.is/7gle4 http://archive.is/7gle4 Cached version, no login required

enraged_camel 8y ago

Twitter should start placing a visual marker on Tweets that have been posted via their API. Maybe a yellow exclamation mark around the same location as the blue check mark (which is for verified accounts).

pteredactyl 8y ago

How people poisoned politics.

ordinaryperson 8y ago

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting. But politics have never been pure, it's a myth. Don't blame communication platforms (although again, they can do better), blame the humans that use them.

Natsu 8y ago
No, there's a very long history of political assassinations, civil wars, etc. all of which predate Twitter. Everything is just more public now.
- naravara 8y ago
  I love how every example of "It was always this bad" involves people reaching back to before the '60s and, in some cases, before The New Deal. In most cases, reversing several decades of stability and progress would have been considered a very troubling development.
  - Chinjut 8y ago
    You think the examples are all before the 60s? There were some very prominent political assassinations during the 60s, Watergate happened during the 70s, etc.
    - moorhosj 8y ago
      The 70s were over 40 years ago.
      - Natsu 8y ago
        I posted above, but I see no reason to limit things to the USA and I see no reason to limit assassinations to only the successful ones. Just because politicians have better security and actually thwart more assassination attempts, that doesn't mean that the underlying willingness to murder people over politics has gone anywhere. There are plenty of close calls to show that the schemes were serious: Bolsonaro was stabbed, Reagan was shot, etc.

gaius 8y ago

I can’t remember who originally said this, but the problem with Twitter is that you think you’re engaging in jokey banter with your mates but random strangers are reading each tweet without context in absolute seriousness and judging you

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
Exactly! "Kill all white people" sounds way different from the outside than from the inside.
CM30 8y ago
Makes sense. Then again, I think the more general explanation here is that social media removes the 'multiple faces' people put on for different situations. In real life, no one acts the same way towards their family, their friends, their colleagues, their boss, the police/government, random people on the street, etc. They say different things to different people based on whats socially acceptable in that situation. Social media sites are like if everyone in the world could hear everything you said, without the necessary context to understand why you said it. They've unintentionally exposed the fact everyone has skeletons in the closet and that all kinds of disturbing things are said/done outside of the public view.

dc2 8y ago

Twitter is like trying to watch a football game where all 40,000 members of the audience have a microphone and each think they should be the announcer. You turn the TV volume off, but members of the media have been perusing the seats for a interesting cherry-picked "announcer". Finding one, they parrot it to the rest of the world and that guy's opinion shows up on your phone anyway.

pjc50 8y ago
But when this works well, it's actually one of the things I most enjoy about Twitter: kibitzing live events.

komali2 8y ago

I just wish it wasn't full of bots... facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum I have access to (friends in SF, Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and then internationally). Despite subscribing to one of those bot blocklists, it's still incessant. There's just so many bots. It's become a mild hobby of mine to hop on the latest "Twitter Moment" about politics just to refresh my public blocklist.

justtopost 8y ago
> facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum I... uhh... think that is arguably just about as biased as twitter. Maybe go talk to people, you know, outside? A dark bar if outsides not your thing? If you feel someones online statements are the truth in their heart, I am afraid we are at an impasse.
- komali2 8y ago
  The only people I talk to on Facebook are my real life friends. Why wouldn't their posts be the truth in their heart? Why are you presuming I don't talk to people at bars? Just last night I had the opportunity to talk to some of the flood of young conservatives shipped into the city for fleet week, at a bar.

ola 8y ago

It's not only Twitter or politics. I've been playing some Heroes of the Storm as team building with my company and when we are not a full team the toxicity can get intense, with some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over. Mind you this in a no-stakes free to play game and the phenomenon seems common. Sometimes I think our culture is not ready for a substantial part of our communication not to be face to face.

iak8god 8y ago
> some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over. It sounds like your company needs to fire these toxic individuals ASAP before the company gets taken to the cleaners in a lawsuit for allowing this to go on.
- ola 8y ago
  I phrased that badly, these aren't individuals inside the company but people we play against or play with if we don't have enough for full teams.

bobbygoodlatte 8y ago

I'm glad the article mentioned Twitter's engagement algorithm — I don't think enough attention is being paid to it. With a different algorithm Twitter could be a remarkably different experience. The current one has a strong bias toward engagement & velocity. It amplifies anger, outrage, and bad faith arguments over less "engaging" content. If Twitter let off the engagement pedal a bit and re-factored the algorithm, our political climate might be less hostile overnight. These companies have long claimed their algorithms are politically unbiased. That's not true. While I don't believe they lean left or right, they certainly have a strong bias towards extremism. Extremism keeps you engaged, which maximizes the time you spend in their apps. Imagine if Twitter instead decided to bias their algorithm towards positivity

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
But engagement is what makes them the money! The profit for them is in never seeing that this is a problem. There may be no way to fix this.

desireco42 8y ago

I would say politics and people involved with it poisoned Twitter.

samstave 8y ago

How many people/resources does twitter have on staff specifically dedicated to coddling the POTUS? Given that twitter has achieved a defacto ligitimized status as a mouthpiece of US policy - how should it be viewed/regulated/handled differently, if any? Also - what efforts is twitter taking to use the fact that POTUS has compulsive tweeting issues to sell the service to less sophisticated power systems in the world. Are people in other countries, namely more developing countries, encouraged by twitter to use twitter as an official messaging system for their political machinations? I mean, the philippines is one of the most connected-via-mobile developing nations, with a large population in the US and a very western society -- is twitter attempting to be an official platform in the philippines? I would expect so. What about other nations? Then, when they are a defacto standard medium for power structures communicating to their populations, then what standards is twitter held to? What implications does/will this have?

hockeybias 8y ago

Twitter doesn't poison politics, people poison politics.

mwfunk 8y ago

Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls. There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people interacted and communicated to places that were no more than sources of disinformation and flamewars. Modern social media is like post apocalyptic Usenet, except it’s occupied by the general population, not just scammers and mentally ill CS majors. I think that’s really messed up and can’t possibly be good for anyone.

jeffwass 8y ago
It’s worse than the bad usenet because social media curated the content you engage with into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Eg, my twitter feed shows me tweets of similar themes to those that I recently engage with. The more I engage the more that theme dominates my feed. So it’s easy to see that someone who engages with tweets of any partisan political commentary can easily get pulled deeper and deeper into that murk with an echo chamber that filters out the opposing viewpoints. Besides politics the same can happen with conspiracy theories and religious zealotry.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thundershine 8y ago

Normal people got access to the internet. It all went downhill from there.

throwaway5250 8y ago
It was like the September burst of freshmen that never ended? LOL. (Not that I'm disagreeing, exactly.) And before #MeToo, there was "Me too!" :-) Maybe the world is just a better place when almost all of us keep our mouths shut almost all of the time.
CM30 8y ago
So in other words, Eternal September writ large.

tareqak 8y ago

The cost of communication has fallen much faster (quantity of discourse) than the cost of education (quality of discourse). I don't just mean monetary cost: time, effort, and attention required to communicate is much less than the amount of those three required to keep yourself informed.

afinlayson 8y ago

Instead of crapping all over one platform or another, or thinking politics is full of cheats and con men, what are we doing to promote ideas that aren't my half will chant at your half. We have a lot of power in tech to make things better, but we often pass it on, and let those who want to exploit it take advantage of our passiveness.

vmarshall23 8y ago

Loudest voices to the dumbest people

kgin 8y ago

Twitter is great for publishing information updates. It's terrible for having a conversation or reasoned debate. Almost all of the built-in incentives are the exact opposite of what you'd want if you were creating a place for conversation and debate.