13 ms·

Reading these headlines is like living in a dystopian waking nightmare. This is not remotely at all the role that Twitter or any other Silicon Valley tech comp

Reading these headlines is like living in a dystopian waking nightmare. This is not remotely at all the role that Twitter or any other Silicon Valley tech company should play in society.

ibejoeb 6y ago
>Twitter plays a critical role...facilitating meaningful political debate" Has Twitter actually read Twitter?
- zionic 6y ago
  There’s a reason “Twitter twat” is a rapidly growing part of the political vernacular.
tpmx 6y ago
This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)
- snazz 6y ago
  Without getting into the argument of whether any speech is apolitical or whether politics belongs in the workplace, Twitter clearly has a huge place in politics as a result of its nature as the premier social media platform for world leaders and journalists and anyone with an opinion today. Regardless of their internal culture, Twitter will always have to make some political decisions.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    > the premier social media platform for world leaders Mostly one world leader. The rest of them seem to continue to primarily communicate through press conferences, television appearances and other fairly traditional methods.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      .. which they announce on Twitter, or else people and journalists would miss them. Traditional methods are on the way out
- 3np 6y ago
  Hard disagree. It’s inevitable with any company in their position. There should be no company in that position. We need to decentralize and federate. Mastodon is AFAIK the prominent implementation here but regardless, we need to start pushing for and exploring networks and platforms operated under completely different premises.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Just to clarify: You don't disagree with what I wrote, but rather with the existence of something that caused me write something like that in the fist place?
    - 3np 6y ago
      No. I think this has nothing to do with “too much tolerance for political activism in companies”. Perhaps even the opposite.
- _qulr 6y ago
  Why do you think the pressure is coming from inside? There are billions of people watching these platforms. Even governments scrutinizing them. Unruly employees are fairly easy to handle, as long as there's not outside pressure too, but in this case the outside pressures are immense.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    The changes give Twitter employees a vast amount of power over determining what's allowed to be said and what isn't. That fact alone makes me believe this is a result of internal pressure.
    - _qulr 6y ago
      Social network moderators are almost always low-paid, low-power, low-profile employees. It's not a great job. It's a high-volume job, like an assembly line. The highly compensated Twitter and Facebook software engineers are not doing the content moderation. They don't have the time, and they would run away screaming if they had to do it for an hour. It's likely that a lot of this work is even outsourced.
      - tpmx 6y ago
        I assume they have created an hierarchy with a number of different roles. That's generally how you scale people-intensive tasks. I have no idea why you would want to classify all of those roles as "assembly line".
        _qulr 6y ago
        Let me ask this: what evidence is there that the results of Twitter's censorship are actually in line with the political beliefs of Twitter's employees? In many cases, Twitter's rules have been used to suspend accounts that people thought they were supposed to protect. And Twitter has gone out of its way and contorted every rule in order to protect the President from censorship and suspension, out of "public interest", despite the fact that he has repeatedly violated the rules that would have caused anyone else to be suspended.
- JPKab 6y ago
  It's really become a religion at this point, with Capitalization of certain Sacred Words and canonical texts that are required reading to even engage in critical discussion of overwrought, overly broad claims. The worst part is that the people in these companies rarely have any experience with traditional religion, let alone extreme/fundamentalist religion, and therefore don't see the obvious patterns used by these extreme activists. I grew up as a dissenter in a fundamentalist Christian family, and the reactions I got when I stood my ground and said that I believed in evolution and a billions year-old earth are incredibly similar to what I see when trying to argue with these extreme activists. Also similar to my fundamentalist upbringing are the subgroup (minority) of people who obviously derive immense satisfaction from their piety, and won't hesitate to condemn others in the in-group for not demonstrating their full dedication to The Mission. These enforcers fit a personality profile that is identical to what I encounter at my overly woke workplace. Recently one of these enforcers told a guy (he was raised by Polish immigrants in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Philadelphia) that he was wrong when he committed the horrible atrocity of celebrating the purchase of his first car, and saying how he "deserved it" after all these years. She was quick to spoil the happy hour at the outdoor bar by forcing him to acknowledge his privilege.
- googthrowaway42 6y ago
  I completely agree with you and I used to work at Google and see this kind of activism first hand. It's not just activism though, the C-suites of these companies believe in this kind of thing.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    How far up? All the way? Edit: I mean, Sundar must be an opportunist rather than an ideologist, right? Larry and Sergey: I assume very few people know what they actually think about the big issues.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    People forget that SV companies being pro gay rights pre-dated the Obergefell decision.
    - tzs 6y ago
      Being pro gay rights has not really been reasonably mainstream in the US for quite a while now. Overall, the majority has been pro gay rights since around 2004. By 2017 it was 70% for, 24% against. Breaking down by party in 2017, Democrats were 83% for, Republicans 54% for. Women 73% for, men 66% for. White 73%, Hispanic 70%, Black 63%. 81% postgrad, 77% college grad, 66% some college, 64% high school or less. 83% 18-29, 79% 30-49, 65% 50-64, 58% 65+. See [1]. When it comes to same sex marriage, by 2019 61% overall approved. That's been above 50% since 2013, and above the percentage opposed since 2011. Republicans still aren't majority in favor, at 44%. Democrats are at 75%. By religion, 79% of the unaffiliated are in favor, 66% of white mainline protestants, 61% of Catholics, 44% of Black protestants, and only 29% of white evangelical protestants. 66% of women, 57% of men. 62% of whites, 58% of Hispanics, and 51% of Blacks. 74% of Millennials, 58% Gen-X, 51% Boomers, and 45% of the Silent Generation. See [2]. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexuality-gender-and-religion/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexual... [2] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
- ssalazar 6y ago
  Silicon Valley tech workers were sold on a dream of “changing the world” rather than building any other normal business, so I would not expect any different really.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Yeah, that backfired spectacularly.
- simias 6y ago
  That makes no sense to me. Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? How would that work? It's the quest for "engagement" and getting always more users and ad views that generates this situation. What can be used to sell you shoes and earphones can also be used to sell you political ideas. When the algorithm wants to show you some inflammatory and misleading political factoid because it knows that it's very likely to make you react, it's working as intended. Not because it was written by a communist, but because it was written by somebody optimizing for this metric. As a counter example: do you think HN manages to remain mostly not completely trash because it's run by apolitical people or because it's effectively run not-for-profit? I think I know the answer to this question. It's amusing how I've seen this "internal politic" boogeyman pop up in discussions over the past month or so. As if all the woes of the silicon valley could suddenly be blamed on those pesky "woke" devs while everybody else just tries to get the job done. This American election can't be over soon enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Well, Paul Graham, YC founder seems to agree with me: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705 Edit: To clarify, he is saying the right way ahead for companies is to be apolitical, or, "mission-founded". Coinbase offered employees not comfortable with the non-political mission-founded way exit packages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899
    - konjin 6y ago
      Those thoughts aren't welcome on HN any more.
      - tpmx 6y ago
        As a European looking at this spectacle from a distance: SV is eating itself. Well, good for Europe, I guess. Edit: but also good for China, and they're a lot better positioned to take advantage of this.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  This is literally the opposite of the conclusion you should be coming to. This is what a lack of will to clamp down on misinformation, and lies from the President on their platform, out of fear of being of subsequently being politically repressed has resulted in. Twitter is twisting and contorting itself in a million knots to avoid simply banning the president's account for the damage it is causing to society, the economy, and literally human life.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    ... and their terms of service. They changed the TOS to account for America electing an internet troll.
isk517 6y ago
Welcome to the future, where we must chose between either drowning in a sea of misinformation or sustaining ourselves on a puddle of information that a "benevolent" third-party has deemed safe.
- grillvogel 6y ago
  its amazing that this exact scenario was described in Metal Gear Solid 2, a ~20 year old video game. >Colonel : But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. >Rose : Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... >Colonel : All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. >Rose : It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    A lot of people--authors, technologists, public intellectuals, and others in what was the broad spectrum of 'nerd culture' at the time--saw this crap coming decades ago but lost the fight to stop it. The writing has been on the wall about the dangers of social media for a very long time. It's just taken this long for people with the power to even consider doing anything about the dangers to start taking it seriously.
    - mostlysimilar 6y ago
      Do you have any recommended reading on this topic?
      - bleepblorp 6y ago
        I'm speaking from remembering things I read over the past few decades on Usenet (yes, that far back) and on blogs. I'd be amazed if any of this is still online.
        6y ago
bleepblorp 6y ago
I vehemently agree with this .... however I think platform intervention against potential incitement is the best of a very bad set of choices available for how to handle the next six months. The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous. The moment where a US president has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election is absolutely not the moment to test how well society can withstand the use of social media as a propaganda platform. Society needs a long term solution for social media--my take is that it should be shut down completely--but this is a short-term emergency and now is not the time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Being cautious is not a virtue when erring on the side of caution may lead to tanks in the streets.
- zionic 6y ago
  > The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous. No it’s not, this is propaganda. If Facebook/Twitter wanted to tomorrow they could limit stuff in your feed to people you know IRL. This would take less than 1 sprint for top tier engineers with the right access to implement and ship. They’re only dangerous because the real problem is social media’s hypergrowth strategies are incompatible with policies that are good for society. Any suggestion otherwise is like oil companies encouraging end users to recycle.
TigeriusKirk 6y ago
I strongly believe Twitter the company will come to deeply regret this direction. The employees who made it happen will simply move on to the next thing.
jon37 6y ago
By growing as large as they have, and by building automated systems to amplify content to mass audiences, they have acquired that role. It is unfortunate that their control over their responsibility is unilateral and undemocratic. But at their scale, if they chose not to try and assess the accuracy of information, but instead to blindly amplify it based on engagement metrics, that is also a political choice.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  One possible option that never gets discussed is to nuke the amplification methods. If we stop recommending content automatically this ceases to be a problem.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    They are nuking them right now (temporarily). It's not just being discussed, it's being done. But most of the time people like getting content recommended. It's what consumers want.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      I disagree, this isn't the nuclear option, the nuclear option is forcing these platforms to have a more editorial role in the content they're serving and that comes with a whole bunch of good and a boatload of bad. Gigantic unmoderated platforms existing like this that promote random snippets of speech to drive user engagement and ad-revenue is a thing that shouldn't exist. The problem we still haven't solved is how to specifically kill off platforms of this type without killing forums and discussion boards in general. I think there is a distinction there but I'm not certain precisely what defines it - but if anyone figures it out please let us all know!
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        we've had forums and discussion boards for decades now that do not have recommendation features. I don't see why we can't put that genie back in the bottle. IMO the moment you start highlighting things that people didn't explicitly ask for, it's an endorsement.
akira2501 6y ago
To be a complete curmudgeon, this just seems like self-serving nonsense from Twitter. To pretend that they have some "democracy breaking" power in their platform of the loudest 1% of individuals that actually contribute and that this needs to be tamed with special rules to protect the integrity of elections seems like an absurd fantasy. Either they're right and their platform can be a tool used for evil in general, in which case, why limit these rules purely to one particular federal election? Or they're wrong, and this really is just some bizarre internal marketing effort.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  They absolutely do have a major part of that power. Together with Google/Youtube + FB/insta, they pretty much control the political discourse. What other big platforms are there?
- _qulr 6y ago
  I think Twitter does have that power, but not in a way that Twitter or Twitter users understand. Most people aren't on Twitter and don't get their news directly from Twitter. And people who are on Twitter and who follow politics on Twitter tend to already be hyper-partisan, unlikely to change their minds in response to tweets. The majority still get most of their news from traditional news media. What's really been changed by Twitter is how the traditional news media is produced. Journalists themselves are very active on Twitter and report tweets as if they were news. So Twitter ends up filtering down to the public anyway, even if most of the public isn't on the platform. As a result of this, Twitter's changes won't have much effect. It still all depends on whether journalists are reporting tweets to the public, and which tweets. Even if tweets get censored by Twitter, ironically that in itself becomes "newsworthy", and journalists spread the censored tweets. Politicians love Twitter because it allows them to say whatever they want, without having pesky reporters ask them unpleasant questions. And the reporters nonetheless report these unfiltered messages (often lies) to the public. It's basically free press, free advertising. A politician doesn't have to be invited onto a news program, they can just make "news" whenever they want, in convenient soundbites. The ultimate danger of Twitter to society is that journalists can't resist the temptation of reporting tweets as news. Of course this is a failing of journalists, not Twitter, but Twitter is giving these people a global public unfiltered platform they wouldn't otherwise have.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
8note 6y ago
It's just capitalism; there's nothing special about money having power. What's weird is that they're trying to diminish their power. It seems likely that while doing this, they're still selling more influence or making choices about what people see to benefit their shareholders
RIMR 6y ago
Why not? Is Twitter even really a "tech company"? What tech do they even produce? They seem to me to be an advertising company that uses computers and the Internet to serve ads. They just happen to have a social platform they use to get eyes on those ads. That's all Twitter sells is ads. You can't purchase any other service from them. The only purpose of the social platform is for there to be people to serve ads to. That's not a product, that's a marketing strategy. So why shouldn't they have a moral responsibility to curb the use of their platform to do societal harm through the dissemination of misinformation? They don't exist to provide an uncensored social platform, they exist to generate profit through advertising. If their practices do harm they should answer for it.
lazyjones 6y ago
It's our fault. We neglected and destroyed Usenet and made Twitter so large. Well, the latter is mostly the media's fault for paying so much attention to it.
Constellarise 6y ago
I find it ironic this rhetoric is so prevalent on HN when usually HN users are the ones helping to make these websites.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
It's not your role to tell people to get they aren't allowed to use Twitter if they want to. Twitter's role is highly democratic; they force their content on people.

Reading these headlines is like living in a dystopian waking nightmare. This is not remotely at all the role that Twitter or any other Silicon Valley tech company should play in society.

ibejoeb 6y ago

>Twitter plays a critical role...facilitating meaningful political debate" Has Twitter actually read Twitter?

zionic 6y ago
There’s a reason “Twitter twat” is a rapidly growing part of the political vernacular.

tpmx 6y ago

This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)

snazz 6y ago
Without getting into the argument of whether any speech is apolitical or whether politics belongs in the workplace, Twitter clearly has a huge place in politics as a result of its nature as the premier social media platform for world leaders and journalists and anyone with an opinion today. Regardless of their internal culture, Twitter will always have to make some political decisions.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  > the premier social media platform for world leaders Mostly one world leader. The rest of them seem to continue to primarily communicate through press conferences, television appearances and other fairly traditional methods.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    .. which they announce on Twitter, or else people and journalists would miss them. Traditional methods are on the way out
3np 6y ago
Hard disagree. It’s inevitable with any company in their position. There should be no company in that position. We need to decentralize and federate. Mastodon is AFAIK the prominent implementation here but regardless, we need to start pushing for and exploring networks and platforms operated under completely different premises.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Just to clarify: You don't disagree with what I wrote, but rather with the existence of something that caused me write something like that in the fist place?
  - 3np 6y ago
    No. I think this has nothing to do with “too much tolerance for political activism in companies”. Perhaps even the opposite.
_qulr 6y ago
Why do you think the pressure is coming from inside? There are billions of people watching these platforms. Even governments scrutinizing them. Unruly employees are fairly easy to handle, as long as there's not outside pressure too, but in this case the outside pressures are immense.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  The changes give Twitter employees a vast amount of power over determining what's allowed to be said and what isn't. That fact alone makes me believe this is a result of internal pressure.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    Social network moderators are almost always low-paid, low-power, low-profile employees. It's not a great job. It's a high-volume job, like an assembly line. The highly compensated Twitter and Facebook software engineers are not doing the content moderation. They don't have the time, and they would run away screaming if they had to do it for an hour. It's likely that a lot of this work is even outsourced.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      I assume they have created an hierarchy with a number of different roles. That's generally how you scale people-intensive tasks. I have no idea why you would want to classify all of those roles as "assembly line".
      - _qulr 6y ago
        Let me ask this: what evidence is there that the results of Twitter's censorship are actually in line with the political beliefs of Twitter's employees? In many cases, Twitter's rules have been used to suspend accounts that people thought they were supposed to protect. And Twitter has gone out of its way and contorted every rule in order to protect the President from censorship and suspension, out of "public interest", despite the fact that he has repeatedly violated the rules that would have caused anyone else to be suspended.
JPKab 6y ago
It's really become a religion at this point, with Capitalization of certain Sacred Words and canonical texts that are required reading to even engage in critical discussion of overwrought, overly broad claims. The worst part is that the people in these companies rarely have any experience with traditional religion, let alone extreme/fundamentalist religion, and therefore don't see the obvious patterns used by these extreme activists. I grew up as a dissenter in a fundamentalist Christian family, and the reactions I got when I stood my ground and said that I believed in evolution and a billions year-old earth are incredibly similar to what I see when trying to argue with these extreme activists. Also similar to my fundamentalist upbringing are the subgroup (minority) of people who obviously derive immense satisfaction from their piety, and won't hesitate to condemn others in the in-group for not demonstrating their full dedication to The Mission. These enforcers fit a personality profile that is identical to what I encounter at my overly woke workplace. Recently one of these enforcers told a guy (he was raised by Polish immigrants in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Philadelphia) that he was wrong when he committed the horrible atrocity of celebrating the purchase of his first car, and saying how he "deserved it" after all these years. She was quick to spoil the happy hour at the outdoor bar by forcing him to acknowledge his privilege.
googthrowaway42 6y ago
I completely agree with you and I used to work at Google and see this kind of activism first hand. It's not just activism though, the C-suites of these companies believe in this kind of thing.
- tpmx 6y ago
  How far up? All the way? Edit: I mean, Sundar must be an opportunist rather than an ideologist, right? Larry and Sergey: I assume very few people know what they actually think about the big issues.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  People forget that SV companies being pro gay rights pre-dated the Obergefell decision.
  - tzs 6y ago
    Being pro gay rights has not really been reasonably mainstream in the US for quite a while now. Overall, the majority has been pro gay rights since around 2004. By 2017 it was 70% for, 24% against. Breaking down by party in 2017, Democrats were 83% for, Republicans 54% for. Women 73% for, men 66% for. White 73%, Hispanic 70%, Black 63%. 81% postgrad, 77% college grad, 66% some college, 64% high school or less. 83% 18-29, 79% 30-49, 65% 50-64, 58% 65+. See [1]. When it comes to same sex marriage, by 2019 61% overall approved. That's been above 50% since 2013, and above the percentage opposed since 2011. Republicans still aren't majority in favor, at 44%. Democrats are at 75%. By religion, 79% of the unaffiliated are in favor, 66% of white mainline protestants, 61% of Catholics, 44% of Black protestants, and only 29% of white evangelical protestants. 66% of women, 57% of men. 62% of whites, 58% of Hispanics, and 51% of Blacks. 74% of Millennials, 58% Gen-X, 51% Boomers, and 45% of the Silent Generation. See [2]. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexuality-gender-and-religion/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexual... [2] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
ssalazar 6y ago
Silicon Valley tech workers were sold on a dream of “changing the world” rather than building any other normal business, so I would not expect any different really.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yeah, that backfired spectacularly.
simias 6y ago
That makes no sense to me. Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? How would that work? It's the quest for "engagement" and getting always more users and ad views that generates this situation. What can be used to sell you shoes and earphones can also be used to sell you political ideas. When the algorithm wants to show you some inflammatory and misleading political factoid because it knows that it's very likely to make you react, it's working as intended. Not because it was written by a communist, but because it was written by somebody optimizing for this metric. As a counter example: do you think HN manages to remain mostly not completely trash because it's run by apolitical people or because it's effectively run not-for-profit? I think I know the answer to this question. It's amusing how I've seen this "internal politic" boogeyman pop up in discussions over the past month or so. As if all the woes of the silicon valley could suddenly be blamed on those pesky "woke" devs while everybody else just tries to get the job done. This American election can't be over soon enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Well, Paul Graham, YC founder seems to agree with me: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705 Edit: To clarify, he is saying the right way ahead for companies is to be apolitical, or, "mission-founded". Coinbase offered employees not comfortable with the non-political mission-founded way exit packages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899
  - konjin 6y ago
    Those thoughts aren't welcome on HN any more.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      As a European looking at this spectacle from a distance: SV is eating itself. Well, good for Europe, I guess. Edit: but also good for China, and they're a lot better positioned to take advantage of this.
deanCommie 6y ago
This is literally the opposite of the conclusion you should be coming to. This is what a lack of will to clamp down on misinformation, and lies from the President on their platform, out of fear of being of subsequently being politically repressed has resulted in. Twitter is twisting and contorting itself in a million knots to avoid simply banning the president's account for the damage it is causing to society, the economy, and literally human life.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  ... and their terms of service. They changed the TOS to account for America electing an internet troll.

isk517 6y ago

Welcome to the future, where we must chose between either drowning in a sea of misinformation or sustaining ourselves on a puddle of information that a "benevolent" third-party has deemed safe.

grillvogel 6y ago
its amazing that this exact scenario was described in Metal Gear Solid 2, a ~20 year old video game. >Colonel : But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. >Rose : Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... >Colonel : All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. >Rose : It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  A lot of people--authors, technologists, public intellectuals, and others in what was the broad spectrum of 'nerd culture' at the time--saw this crap coming decades ago but lost the fight to stop it. The writing has been on the wall about the dangers of social media for a very long time. It's just taken this long for people with the power to even consider doing anything about the dangers to start taking it seriously.
  - mostlysimilar 6y ago
    Do you have any recommended reading on this topic?
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      I'm speaking from remembering things I read over the past few decades on Usenet (yes, that far back) and on blogs. I'd be amazed if any of this is still online.
      - 6y ago

bleepblorp 6y ago

I vehemently agree with this .... however I think platform intervention against potential incitement is the best of a very bad set of choices available for how to handle the next six months. The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous. The moment where a US president has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election is absolutely not the moment to test how well society can withstand the use of social media as a propaganda platform. Society needs a long term solution for social media--my take is that it should be shut down completely--but this is a short-term emergency and now is not the time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Being cautious is not a virtue when erring on the side of caution may lead to tanks in the streets.

zionic 6y ago
> The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous. No it’s not, this is propaganda. If Facebook/Twitter wanted to tomorrow they could limit stuff in your feed to people you know IRL. This would take less than 1 sprint for top tier engineers with the right access to implement and ship. They’re only dangerous because the real problem is social media’s hypergrowth strategies are incompatible with policies that are good for society. Any suggestion otherwise is like oil companies encouraging end users to recycle.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago

I strongly believe Twitter the company will come to deeply regret this direction. The employees who made it happen will simply move on to the next thing.

jon37 6y ago

By growing as large as they have, and by building automated systems to amplify content to mass audiences, they have acquired that role. It is unfortunate that their control over their responsibility is unilateral and undemocratic. But at their scale, if they chose not to try and assess the accuracy of information, but instead to blindly amplify it based on engagement metrics, that is also a political choice.

bobthepanda 6y ago
One possible option that never gets discussed is to nuke the amplification methods. If we stop recommending content automatically this ceases to be a problem.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  They are nuking them right now (temporarily). It's not just being discussed, it's being done. But most of the time people like getting content recommended. It's what consumers want.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I disagree, this isn't the nuclear option, the nuclear option is forcing these platforms to have a more editorial role in the content they're serving and that comes with a whole bunch of good and a boatload of bad. Gigantic unmoderated platforms existing like this that promote random snippets of speech to drive user engagement and ad-revenue is a thing that shouldn't exist. The problem we still haven't solved is how to specifically kill off platforms of this type without killing forums and discussion boards in general. I think there is a distinction there but I'm not certain precisely what defines it - but if anyone figures it out please let us all know!
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      we've had forums and discussion boards for decades now that do not have recommendation features. I don't see why we can't put that genie back in the bottle. IMO the moment you start highlighting things that people didn't explicitly ask for, it's an endorsement.

akira2501 6y ago

To be a complete curmudgeon, this just seems like self-serving nonsense from Twitter. To pretend that they have some "democracy breaking" power in their platform of the loudest 1% of individuals that actually contribute and that this needs to be tamed with special rules to protect the integrity of elections seems like an absurd fantasy. Either they're right and their platform can be a tool used for evil in general, in which case, why limit these rules purely to one particular federal election? Or they're wrong, and this really is just some bizarre internal marketing effort.

bufferoverflow 6y ago
They absolutely do have a major part of that power. Together with Google/Youtube + FB/insta, they pretty much control the political discourse. What other big platforms are there?
_qulr 6y ago
I think Twitter does have that power, but not in a way that Twitter or Twitter users understand. Most people aren't on Twitter and don't get their news directly from Twitter. And people who are on Twitter and who follow politics on Twitter tend to already be hyper-partisan, unlikely to change their minds in response to tweets. The majority still get most of their news from traditional news media. What's really been changed by Twitter is how the traditional news media is produced. Journalists themselves are very active on Twitter and report tweets as if they were news. So Twitter ends up filtering down to the public anyway, even if most of the public isn't on the platform. As a result of this, Twitter's changes won't have much effect. It still all depends on whether journalists are reporting tweets to the public, and which tweets. Even if tweets get censored by Twitter, ironically that in itself becomes "newsworthy", and journalists spread the censored tweets. Politicians love Twitter because it allows them to say whatever they want, without having pesky reporters ask them unpleasant questions. And the reporters nonetheless report these unfiltered messages (often lies) to the public. It's basically free press, free advertising. A politician doesn't have to be invited onto a news program, they can just make "news" whenever they want, in convenient soundbites. The ultimate danger of Twitter to society is that journalists can't resist the temptation of reporting tweets as news. Of course this is a failing of journalists, not Twitter, but Twitter is giving these people a global public unfiltered platform they wouldn't otherwise have.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

8note 6y ago

It's just capitalism; there's nothing special about money having power. What's weird is that they're trying to diminish their power. It seems likely that while doing this, they're still selling more influence or making choices about what people see to benefit their shareholders

RIMR 6y ago

Why not? Is Twitter even really a "tech company"? What tech do they even produce? They seem to me to be an advertising company that uses computers and the Internet to serve ads. They just happen to have a social platform they use to get eyes on those ads. That's all Twitter sells is ads. You can't purchase any other service from them. The only purpose of the social platform is for there to be people to serve ads to. That's not a product, that's a marketing strategy. So why shouldn't they have a moral responsibility to curb the use of their platform to do societal harm through the dissemination of misinformation? They don't exist to provide an uncensored social platform, they exist to generate profit through advertising. If their practices do harm they should answer for it.

lazyjones 6y ago

It's our fault. We neglected and destroyed Usenet and made Twitter so large. Well, the latter is mostly the media's fault for paying so much attention to it.

Constellarise 6y ago

I find it ironic this rhetoric is so prevalent on HN when usually HN users are the ones helping to make these websites.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

It's not your role to tell people to get they aren't allowed to use Twitter if they want to. Twitter's role is highly democratic; they force their content on people.