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Nearly all attempts to "fix misinformation" on social media I've seen in the last several years ranged from hopelessly clueless to downright sinister. "Birdwat

Nearly all attempts to "fix misinformation" on social media I've seen in the last several years ranged from hopelessly clueless to downright sinister. "Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context." You're not going to fix anything by attacking the symptoms, which is exactly what this seems to propose. To fix the actual problem we need to create systems that generate and propagate trustworthy information, which people actually want to consume rather than attacking information you don't want people to consume. "we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter" There is already a selection bias in play then, because there are large numbers of people who don't use Twitter for various reasons.

throwaway894345 6y ago
I agree with your characterization about attempts to fix misinformation. However, I don't think "what people actually want to consume" is a good signal for "trustworthy content"-if the social media era has shown us anything, it's that (barring a narrow band of critical, independent thinkers) we have an insatiable appetite for any content that reaffirms our tribalist priors, no matter how patently absurd the content may be. To the extent that Twitter's goal is to combat post-truth-ism (as opposed to propagating it by way of its current business model), I think it pretty much has to develop its own strict code of ethics which prizes honesty, integrity, neutrality, and objectivity like the academics and journalists of yore. Specifically, we need a media landscape (including social media) that once again rewards both sides for bringing their best arguments, rather than dual partisan media outlets. There's a very popular straw man counter-argument which is that I'm assuming that abhorrent racist ideas should be given the same attention as, I don't know, climate science, but that's not the case at all. Rather, I'm arguing that a neutralist and objective framework would discourage abhorrent racist ideas and encourage more respectable conservative intellectualism instead of the status quo which is to regard anything to the right of the far-left as uniformly vile (I'm oversimplifying a bit for sake of brevity). Similarly, such a platform wouldn't regard climate science and blank slatism as uniformly virtuous. The best left-wing thought would face-off against the best right-wing thought, and as a moderate liberal, I think the best left-wing thought will win. Importantly, this pulls everyone toward more fact-based positions, which tends to have a moderating effect. Unfortunately, the corollary is that this presents a political obstacle--those who are deeply committed to these kinds of post-truth ideologies tend to vigorously oppose such reforms.
collyw 6y ago
Judging by the "twitter storms" that get reported in the media twitter seems to have quite a political bias already.

throwaway894345 6y ago

I agree with your characterization about attempts to fix misinformation. However, I don't think "what people actually want to consume" is a good signal for "trustworthy content"-if the social media era has shown us anything, it's that (barring a narrow band of critical, independent thinkers) we have an insatiable appetite for any content that reaffirms our tribalist priors, no matter how patently absurd the content may be. To the extent that Twitter's goal is to combat post-truth-ism (as opposed to propagating it by way of its current business model), I think it pretty much has to develop its own strict code of ethics which prizes honesty, integrity, neutrality, and objectivity like the academics and journalists of yore. Specifically, we need a media landscape (including social media) that once again rewards both sides for bringing their best arguments, rather than dual partisan media outlets. There's a very popular straw man counter-argument which is that I'm assuming that abhorrent racist ideas should be given the same attention as, I don't know, climate science, but that's not the case at all. Rather, I'm arguing that a neutralist and objective framework would discourage abhorrent racist ideas and encourage more respectable conservative intellectualism instead of the status quo which is to regard anything to the right of the far-left as uniformly vile (I'm oversimplifying a bit for sake of brevity). Similarly, such a platform wouldn't regard climate science and blank slatism as uniformly virtuous. The best left-wing thought would face-off against the best right-wing thought, and as a moderate liberal, I think the best left-wing thought will win. Importantly, this pulls everyone toward more fact-based positions, which tends to have a moderating effect. Unfortunately, the corollary is that this presents a political obstacle--those who are deeply committed to these kinds of post-truth ideologies tend to vigorously oppose such reforms.

collyw 6y ago

Judging by the "twitter storms" that get reported in the media twitter seems to have quite a political bias already.