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Why do you think the pressure is coming from inside? There are billions of people watching these platforms. Even governments scrutinizing them. Unruly employees
by _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 agoThe 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 agoSocial 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 agoI 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 agoLet 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.
- tpmx 6y agoExactly. Being a Twitter employee is now a political force, in practice.