4 ms·

The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is. But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two oppos

by aazaa 7y ago

The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is. But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain old lies are told. Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. The idea of verified identities as a prerequisite to post has been floated, and will no doubt resurface. All of this leads to a dead-end. Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police. The same problem applies to Facebook, Medium, and all the others. The reason to blog is simple. Because sooner or later a rational human exploring the bounds of human knowledge through writing will post something that will make one or more powerful people scared, angry, or offended. A blog makes retaliatory deplatforming much more difficult to pull off.

jasonv 7y ago
> Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the same content problem). And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or reference "concerning developments") when they don't like the moderation, and scream for regulation when they deem the moderation too absent.
- fossuser 7y ago
  I think Zuckerberg is more right on this issue than Jack and twitter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb... The hard part is who is deciding what is true and what is not. It’s important to verify authenticity of the message (who the message claims to come from is actually who it’s coming from), but deciding what to disallow based on truthiness is a lot more problematic.
  - jasonv 7y ago
    I can't read that, but nothing Facebook/Zuckerberg has done feels aligned with any principled standing that I agree with. From a slightly different direction.. for instance: banning any content that contravenes the WHO's official recommendations for pandemic response definitely feels too narrow, esp given that the WHO might reverse course or admit they weren't optimal. I completely disagree with Trump's defunding of support for the WHO, I don't agree with everything the WHO says, but I also can't see how conferring 100% content authority to that body is aligned with democratic free speech. That position is also consistent with the idea of banning any content that isn't aligned with, say, this American administration's positions.
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      That was a link to Zuckerberg's speech at Georgetown in October 2019, which was basically his defense of not fact-checking politicians on the site. Quoting the Zuck: "We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. And if content is newsworthy, we also won’t take it down even if it would otherwise conflict with many of our standards. I know many people disagree, but in general, I don't think it's right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy." Ben Thompson of Stratechery quoted the same bit I just did, and wrote, "I couldn't agree more. The only hangup is the person who was saying it. [...] The very structure of [Facebook] is antithetical to what is necessary for free expression to flourish; I believe that Zuckerberg is well-intentioned, but that doesn’t change the fact he is completely unaccountable."
      - dfxm12 7y ago
        "We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying..." This is such a cop out. Many (I'd even venture on most) political ads on Facebook don't represent what politicians say.
      - lonelappde 7y ago
aaron-lebo 7y ago
It doesn't help that Dorsey is terrified of making the smallest changes to the platform. I guess he's too busy meditating with Himalayan salts or something. He works 80 hours a week at his companies (or did), but increasing the Tweet size took a decade. Check out Hatching Twitter. It presents the entire foundation, with Dorsey and Ev Williams as well meaning but flawed leaders that were more than happy to stab each other in the back when it helped them. That Medium turned out as it did, and that Twitter has changed little in the last 15 years isn't surprising. They were accidents of history and they're now stuck trying to please their existing power users and Wall Street, regardless of if that's what we really need as societies. It goes without saying, but our families and friends are literally dying because these platforms are so bad at handling disinformation. The question is if they are even capable and if not, why? We're either going to see the net balkanize (as it has in some places) or lose the freedom and hope that it used to entail or both. It is an existential threat, which is why these guys should be criticized all day until they show some real responsibility. Here's an article that was on HN by the same author that sounds similarly skeptical about Dorsey: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/in-the-coronavirus-era-the-force-is-still-with-jack-dorsey https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/in-the-coronavirus-e... Several former board members and high-level executives at Twitter (who have since become apostates of Dorsey), for example, have pointed out to me how even his morning ritual is full of holes and is not too dissimilar to Holmes’s and Neumann’s rituals. As for the 45 total minutes Dorsey allegedly spends in his 220-degree sauna at night (which he breaks up into three separate stints), two World Sauna Championship competitors (yes, that’s a thing) collapsed after spending six minutes in a sauna only 10 degrees warmer than Dorsey’s (which is already hotter than boiling water). After being dragged out, the competitors were treated for severe burns, and one of the men died. Then there is Dorsey’s assertion that he is running both publicly traded companies while he works from home two days a week.
AgentME 7y ago
>Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police. What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda? I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more support than complaining about people getting banned for targeted harassment or encouraging forcible removal of non-whites... Shout-out to a pithy evergreen tweet on this: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744 https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174....
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms Ten people want to say thing 1 on twitter. Ten people want to say thing 2 on Twitter. Ten want to say thing 3, and so on for ten million things. Twenty people don't want to say anything particularly controversial and don't think anyone else should either. If the groups of ten don't address free speech as an abstract ideal, each of the hundred million will be individually silenced by the twenty.
  - AgentME 7y ago
    The site already doesn't allow child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, posting of private information, targeted harassment, spambots, etc., and people almost exclusively choose sites using rules like these over ones that don't. (Is it not interesting that we're having this conversation on the heavily-moderated HN, and not on a free-for-all 4chan spinoff? That's not coincidental.) Either the site and the internet populace in general doesn't embrace the pure ideal of absolute free speech, or people accept that the ideal is best deployed with specific limitations. Arguably calls to violence and ethnonationalist propaganda are things that should be similarly prohibited. I find it interesting that whenever there's a thread about an instance of that stuff being banned, people complaining about the ban rarely defend it specifically. They always go to arguing about some ideal of absolute free speech, but completely avoid the topic of what else that would allow. This setup makes me pretty suspicious of other cases that people avoid specifics and argue for absolute free speech on popular platforms. Whenever a platform bans something that's more defensible, people will always readily talk about and defend the specific thing that got banned rather than falling back to absolute generalizations about free speech.

by aazaa 7y ago

jasonv 7y ago

> Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the same content problem). And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or reference "concerning developments") when they don't like the moderation, and scream for regulation when they deem the moderation too absent.

fossuser 7y ago
I think Zuckerberg is more right on this issue than Jack and twitter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb... The hard part is who is deciding what is true and what is not. It’s important to verify authenticity of the message (who the message claims to come from is actually who it’s coming from), but deciding what to disallow based on truthiness is a lot more problematic.
- jasonv 7y ago
  I can't read that, but nothing Facebook/Zuckerberg has done feels aligned with any principled standing that I agree with. From a slightly different direction.. for instance: banning any content that contravenes the WHO's official recommendations for pandemic response definitely feels too narrow, esp given that the WHO might reverse course or admit they weren't optimal. I completely disagree with Trump's defunding of support for the WHO, I don't agree with everything the WHO says, but I also can't see how conferring 100% content authority to that body is aligned with democratic free speech. That position is also consistent with the idea of banning any content that isn't aligned with, say, this American administration's positions.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    That was a link to Zuckerberg's speech at Georgetown in October 2019, which was basically his defense of not fact-checking politicians on the site. Quoting the Zuck: "We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. And if content is newsworthy, we also won’t take it down even if it would otherwise conflict with many of our standards. I know many people disagree, but in general, I don't think it's right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy." Ben Thompson of Stratechery quoted the same bit I just did, and wrote, "I couldn't agree more. The only hangup is the person who was saying it. [...] The very structure of [Facebook] is antithetical to what is necessary for free expression to flourish; I believe that Zuckerberg is well-intentioned, but that doesn’t change the fact he is completely unaccountable."
    - dfxm12 7y ago
      "We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying..." This is such a cop out. Many (I'd even venture on most) political ads on Facebook don't represent what politicians say.
    - lonelappde 7y ago

aaron-lebo 7y ago

It doesn't help that Dorsey is terrified of making the smallest changes to the platform. I guess he's too busy meditating with Himalayan salts or something. He works 80 hours a week at his companies (or did), but increasing the Tweet size took a decade. Check out Hatching Twitter. It presents the entire foundation, with Dorsey and Ev Williams as well meaning but flawed leaders that were more than happy to stab each other in the back when it helped them. That Medium turned out as it did, and that Twitter has changed little in the last 15 years isn't surprising. They were accidents of history and they're now stuck trying to please their existing power users and Wall Street, regardless of if that's what we really need as societies. It goes without saying, but our families and friends are literally dying because these platforms are so bad at handling disinformation. The question is if they are even capable and if not, why? We're either going to see the net balkanize (as it has in some places) or lose the freedom and hope that it used to entail or both. It is an existential threat, which is why these guys should be criticized all day until they show some real responsibility. Here's an article that was on HN by the same author that sounds similarly skeptical about Dorsey: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/in-the-coronavirus-era-the-force-is-still-with-jack-dorsey https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/in-the-coronavirus-e... Several former board members and high-level executives at Twitter (who have since become apostates of Dorsey), for example, have pointed out to me how even his morning ritual is full of holes and is not too dissimilar to Holmes’s and Neumann’s rituals. As for the 45 total minutes Dorsey allegedly spends in his 220-degree sauna at night (which he breaks up into three separate stints), two World Sauna Championship competitors (yes, that’s a thing) collapsed after spending six minutes in a sauna only 10 degrees warmer than Dorsey’s (which is already hotter than boiling water). After being dragged out, the competitors were treated for severe burns, and one of the men died. Then there is Dorsey’s assertion that he is running both publicly traded companies while he works from home two days a week.

AgentME 7y ago

>Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police. What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda? I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more support than complaining about people getting banned for targeted harassment or encouraging forcible removal of non-whites... Shout-out to a pithy evergreen tweet on this: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744 https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174....

whatshisface 7y ago
>I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms Ten people want to say thing 1 on twitter. Ten people want to say thing 2 on Twitter. Ten want to say thing 3, and so on for ten million things. Twenty people don't want to say anything particularly controversial and don't think anyone else should either. If the groups of ten don't address free speech as an abstract ideal, each of the hundred million will be individually silenced by the twenty.
- AgentME 7y ago
  The site already doesn't allow child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, posting of private information, targeted harassment, spambots, etc., and people almost exclusively choose sites using rules like these over ones that don't. (Is it not interesting that we're having this conversation on the heavily-moderated HN, and not on a free-for-all 4chan spinoff? That's not coincidental.) Either the site and the internet populace in general doesn't embrace the pure ideal of absolute free speech, or people accept that the ideal is best deployed with specific limitations. Arguably calls to violence and ethnonationalist propaganda are things that should be similarly prohibited. I find it interesting that whenever there's a thread about an instance of that stuff being banned, people complaining about the ban rarely defend it specifically. They always go to arguing about some ideal of absolute free speech, but completely avoid the topic of what else that would allow. This setup makes me pretty suspicious of other cases that people avoid specifics and argue for absolute free speech on popular platforms. Whenever a platform bans something that's more defensible, people will always readily talk about and defend the specific thing that got banned rather than falling back to absolute generalizations about free speech.