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It’s not a conflation; the point is that if Twitter _as a communication channel_ holds so much away that Russians can upvote or retweet things to manipulate our

It’s not a conflation; the point is that if Twitter _as a communication channel_ holds so much away that Russians can upvote or retweet things to manipulate our democracy, the _how in the world_ are we okay with a private company having the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate that channel?

abathur 7y ago
I roughly agree that we should require vastly more transparency than we do for all large-platform decisions (traffic/ad/metadata/data-sharing agreements between any number of firms, developer accounts, payment/donation platform accounts, social media accounts, etc.) that can have a really big effect on normal people relative to the platforms implementing them. But this is still conflation. 1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers. I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform. I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X). 2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples. ----- I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like: 1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform 2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.) But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
- wolco 7y ago
  So if the private Russian company pays Twitter all is okay?
- weberc2 7y ago
  I think we’re mostly in agreement. Clearly today’s Twitter has a legal right to do what they want with their platform. I think it’s hypocritical to be concerned about Russians manipulating our Democracy indirectly, but not concerned at all about Twitter manipulating it much more directly. And my acknowledging that some people are hypocrites doesn’t imply that everyone who is concerned about Russian meddling is not also concerned about Twitter meddling or vice versa. I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction because there is little consolation to be had in that Twitter can corrupt our Democracy legally. I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully. I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
  - abathur 7y ago
    > I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc. 1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text. A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take. In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion. The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds. I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions. 2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?) Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for. --- Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.

abathur 7y ago

I roughly agree that we should require vastly more transparency than we do for all large-platform decisions (traffic/ad/metadata/data-sharing agreements between any number of firms, developer accounts, payment/donation platform accounts, social media accounts, etc.) that can have a really big effect on normal people relative to the platforms implementing them. But this is still conflation. 1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers. I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform. I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X). 2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples. ----- I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like: 1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform 2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.) But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.

wolco 7y ago
So if the private Russian company pays Twitter all is okay?
weberc2 7y ago
I think we’re mostly in agreement. Clearly today’s Twitter has a legal right to do what they want with their platform. I think it’s hypocritical to be concerned about Russians manipulating our Democracy indirectly, but not concerned at all about Twitter manipulating it much more directly. And my acknowledging that some people are hypocrites doesn’t imply that everyone who is concerned about Russian meddling is not also concerned about Twitter meddling or vice versa. I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction because there is little consolation to be had in that Twitter can corrupt our Democracy legally. I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully. I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
- abathur 7y ago
  > I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc. 1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text. A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take. In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion. The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds. I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions. 2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?) Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for. --- Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.