5 ms·
The answer is much simpler than you are making this appear. Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication. Your email
by zaroth 7y ago
The answer is much simpler than you are making this appear.
Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication.
Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform.
Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that publishers sometimes face for the communications that they publish.
To say twitter is not for fit for its purpose is bizarre. Twitter is one of the most powerful publishing tools ever created.
- heisenbit 7y agoA publishing tool that can mimic private communication tools. Not for well thought out letters but for words spoken in a conversation. Which makes it so powerful. Which makes it so problematic.
- lr4444lr 7y agoI believe that's an artificial distinction. Companies like Mailchimp have already started implementing protections like mandatory opt-out mechanisms to protect themselves from liability. If networks of mailing lists around political rather than business interests were more common, I'd expect no less this kind of self-policing. The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.
- frenchyatwork 7y agoI think the more relevant distinction here is that email is federated. Once Mailchimp has sent out the emails, there's not much it can do, and it would be pretty unreasonable to force Mailchimp to review filter all their emails. Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has to be concerned about it's brand. The more public nature of Twitter also help this along, of course. If something like this was to happen in the ActivityPub or XMPP space, the way of handling it would probably be something in closer to email than twitter.
- zaroth 7y agoDo you think Federation will be a distinction the public and politicians will make when the next manifesto is posted on Mastadon instead of 8chan? It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.
- frenchyatwork 7y agoYou have a good point. I suspect if the manifesto was private on mastodon it would be pretty similar to email, but if it was a public post, like public twitter posts, the effect would be the same.
- zaroth 7y agoMandatory opt-out is part of the CAN SPAM act, and has nothing to do with liability for the content of the messages.
- basch 7y agoEmail, ActivityPub, and Wordpress are decentralized publishing communication standards. Email one-to-many distribution / spam being the thing youre ignoring. Facebook and Twitter are proprietary, centralized, and closed systems. Shifting the conversation from publishing to the audience, completely glosses over the actual minutia at hand.
- zaroth 7y agoLiterally no one is censoring email, or even discussing the possibility of censoring emails, unless you’re into totalitarian regimes. OP meant to say publishing platforms not communication provider because of course there is absolutely no natural monopoly for email providers, but clearly natural monopolies for social networks. Spam is a nuisance. It’s simply not how someone reaches 100 million followers.
- basch 7y agoPlatforms can be decentralized. Look at WordPress. You can host it anywhere. ActivityPub let's you build federated interconnected social networks, an interoperable solution like email.