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That's right. Twitter has problems, but that's not one of them. What are the problems? 1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't

by memish 5y ago

That's right. Twitter has problems, but that's not one of them. What are the problems? 1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech! 2. It has a political problem. Twitter bends the knee to the loudest activists and is sympathetic to a specific political party. The town square has been captured by a political party. It doesn't matter which one because being captured by any party is a problem. The town square must be neutral. Free and open debate is paramount for society to progress. 3. It has an anger problem. Twitter rewards anger and fear. 4. It has a transparency problem. How does the algo work? Who are they shadowbanning and downranking and why? What topics do they remove on trending? Which do they boost? What else?

philjohn 5y ago
1. Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech. 2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. They adhere to the Terms of Service. 3. Once again, I mostly see that coming from accounts with a certain political bent 4. Fair
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech Why? Does an ad get contaminated by association? Or it's a minority who gets to call what's "hate speech" and what's not, and pushes advertisers to not want to risk this (who wouldn't give a fuck otherwise)?
  - gumby 5y ago
    > Does an ad get contaminated by association? People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears. And they are the customers.
- kgonza 5y ago
  And 3 is almost always conspiracy bs. They are "shadowbanned" but their tweets somehow get high engagement. It bs political complaints.
  - smaryjerry 5y ago
    Shadowbanning is very real on many platforms. It is a method designed to ban a user without pushback from the user and minimize the ability of them to work around the ban. Explicitly lying to users like this, even the bad ones, should be something that is banned the by government. If you paid money for a service and they tricked you into not receiving the service without telling you this wouldn’t be allowed, but for some reason it’s okay to trample on the expectations of users when giving out free service.
- tekknik 5y ago
  > 2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. As there are left wing people tweeting away (AOC). what’s the point here? We going back to trying to stifle right wing speech?
  - philjohn 5y ago
    No, it's that there is a healthy balance on the site, and the people who get banned have typically posted some REALLY unsavoury stuff - and plenty of left wing people have also been banned for posting unsavoury stuff.
- smaryjerry 5y ago
  The way most of these platforms work your ad is actually never “next to” anything anymore. Most people don’t associate online ads the same way as say a TV show. It is expected that you would get unrelated ads to your content when the content you consume is diverse, unlike TV ads which are very specifically on one topic. Then depending on if you view on mobile, ads again aren’t even part of the broader message. They take up the whole screen and aren’t associated with content again. Sponsorship, meaning your ad specifically supports the product, and online ads are different.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Hm, #1 and #2 here just seems like a copy/paste of a conservative talking point. You're literally in the middle of a discussion about how Twitter isn't the "de facto" public town square, because nearly nobody actually authors original tweets. In any event, fuck the public town square. That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice. Twitter, as awful as it is, is many orders of magnitude better than the town square. May we never return to those times again.
- memish 5y ago
  Free speech is a core liberal value. I can't believe how many people are confused about this. [Free speech and the open town square is how we got away from the atrocities you outline. There is no societal progress without free speech, which twitter is actively clamping down on. It's regressive and taking us back to when dominant ideas couldn't be challenged.]
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Agreed, but what's actually unbelievable is that people seem to not realize that it goes both ways, and I'm just as free to shame and ridicule someone for their speech as they are to express their shitty little racist ideas. [No, we got away from the practices I mentioned above through discussion that did not take place in a "public" town square. Basically anywhere else, but certainly not the "public" town square. One reason, among many, is that a "town square" is not nearly as ubiquitous as you seem to believe, historically. Dominant ideas can easily and are frequently challenged on Twitter and in modern discourse generally, it's just not tolerant of the racist, awful ideas that some might want to discuss. It's not going to lead to progress to continue to discuss how one race is superior to another, for example, and yet that's all some groups seem to want to talk about.]
    - bko 5y ago
      Sure. No one is arguing you shouldn't be able to ridicule someone online (I guess it depends on who you're ridiculing right?). But I don't think you should get banned from the platform for doing so. That's the problem people have with Twitter. Especially since its very inconsistently applied and very out of touch with what the overwhelming majority of the country believes. There's also a cultural aspect that can't really be solved by Twitter, like petitioning someone to be fired for making a gay joke ten years ago.
cm2187 5y ago
I’d add a minor item to the list: it is progressively raising garden walls. I do not have a twitter account, I will not give my mobile number to twitter to get one. Right now I can still follow the few accounts I find interesting with nitter and browser favorites. The twitter website itself has become unusable.
adamredwoods 5y ago
Before labeling "problems" I wish people would define what is the ideal social platform? What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship?
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship? I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement. No commercial network with a company backing it could ever offer a space like that, because they are liable to monitor and moderate the worst content that goes through their property, thus creating a single centralized culture based on the company's values.
  - awb 5y ago
    > I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement. That sounds like a free market. A government provides a minimal container and you’re free to create your own sub-pocket with your own rules inside of that structure. If you don’t like the rules of sub-pocket A (ex. Twitter), you can go create sub-pocket B (Truth Social). And they have no centralized style of rule enforcement because they are their own unique private enterprises. Maybe the problem isn’t Twitter. Maybe the problem is expecting Twitter to act like an unbiased government when they’re not. They’re a for-profit sub-pocket with their own subculture. Just like Reddit, YT, FB, TikTok, etc. They’re all competing for eyeballs and ad dollars while independently enforcing their own rules.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      A free society, yes. A free market no, because you are not setting prices for making transactions for exchanging limited products; the information distributed through the network can be indefinitely replicated and multiplied. The different 'subpockets' will be competing for expansion as organisms in an evolutionary environment, but describing it was a market would be using the wrong model. The trend of simplifying every free organizations as markets is harmful to rational analysis, and I'd say it comes from over-reliance on a set of values that see it as the only valid tool for solving every problem - i.e. an irrational prejudice. We should do better in our analysis of the evolving world, since society is going through never-seen changes and applying old recipes will limit our understanding.
MrMan 5y ago
I follow links onto twitter sometimes, though I dont use it. how does it have a "free speech problem?" what does this even mean in practical terms. I think that talking point is completely made up.
- tekknik 5y ago
  One cannot make a comment on the site that’s counter-narrative without having the mob of social activists bombarding you, and ultimately canceling you.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Few dozen million too many people making "counter-narrative" comments on Twitter for that to be believable.
    - tekknik 5y ago
      Or perhaps they’re the wrong people?
      - detaro 5y ago
        define "wrong"? Your comment fairly clearly said any.
        tekknik 5y ago
        It actually doesn’t clearly say any at all. Like literally. Random Joes that have no voice will not be banned. Make a name for yourself and start gaining followers and you most certainly will unless it’s too damaging to twitters reputation. Their sporadic treatment of these types of people are what allow you to hide behind this reasoning, they keep you guessing on their procedures.
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
> The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech! Twitter is not “the defacto (sic) town square”. The claim that it is is most typically deployed as an argument that it should be regulated. The rest of this comment continues apace. These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).
- tekknik 5y ago
  Somehow you got it twisted that the right is the one controlling or attempting to control free speech. Clearly you’ve not been on HN long as it was nearly exactly on party lines, with the left wanting to stifle the speech of some, and the right wanting it completely open.
- stale2002 5y ago
  Well hey, in this case it seems that Elon musk has purchased 9% of Twitter and is likely going to use that influence to make Twitter's moderation promote open discourse more. I hope you don't complain about this ever in the future and just accept that Elon is allowed to pressure Twitter to change it's moderation policy to support the principles of open discourse more.
  - HereIGoAgain 5y ago
    Man, you should see how the same type of people are reacting on twitter right now and around the net.. The cries of "private exception" have suddenly become "NO NOT THAT WAY!" overnight. lol
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies). Government mandating tech companies to censor information is supported by a far higher percentage of Democrat voters: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/18/glenn_greenwald_the_mountain_of_data_showing_how_authoritarian_democrats_have_become.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/18/glenn_gre...
thirdwhrldPzz 5y ago
anamax 5y ago
> 1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
HereIGoAgain 5y ago
Yup, pretty much all of these are true.. for a lot of the new net and all of SM.. but especially twitter.
madeofpalk 5y ago
Twitter is not the defacto public square. Only "New York Media Types" believe this.

by memish 5y ago

philjohn 5y ago

1. Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech. 2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. They adhere to the Terms of Service. 3. Once again, I mostly see that coming from accounts with a certain political bent 4. Fair

coldtea 5y ago
>Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech Why? Does an ad get contaminated by association? Or it's a minority who gets to call what's "hate speech" and what's not, and pushes advertisers to not want to risk this (who wouldn't give a fuck otherwise)?
- gumby 5y ago
  > Does an ad get contaminated by association? People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears. And they are the customers.
kgonza 5y ago
And 3 is almost always conspiracy bs. They are "shadowbanned" but their tweets somehow get high engagement. It bs political complaints.
- smaryjerry 5y ago
  Shadowbanning is very real on many platforms. It is a method designed to ban a user without pushback from the user and minimize the ability of them to work around the ban. Explicitly lying to users like this, even the bad ones, should be something that is banned the by government. If you paid money for a service and they tricked you into not receiving the service without telling you this wouldn’t be allowed, but for some reason it’s okay to trample on the expectations of users when giving out free service.
tekknik 5y ago
> 2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. As there are left wing people tweeting away (AOC). what’s the point here? We going back to trying to stifle right wing speech?
- philjohn 5y ago
  No, it's that there is a healthy balance on the site, and the people who get banned have typically posted some REALLY unsavoury stuff - and plenty of left wing people have also been banned for posting unsavoury stuff.
smaryjerry 5y ago
The way most of these platforms work your ad is actually never “next to” anything anymore. Most people don’t associate online ads the same way as say a TV show. It is expected that you would get unrelated ads to your content when the content you consume is diverse, unlike TV ads which are very specifically on one topic. Then depending on if you view on mobile, ads again aren’t even part of the broader message. They take up the whole screen and aren’t associated with content again. Sponsorship, meaning your ad specifically supports the product, and online ads are different.

TameAntelope 5y ago

Hm, #1 and #2 here just seems like a copy/paste of a conservative talking point. You're literally in the middle of a discussion about how Twitter isn't the "de facto" public town square, because nearly nobody actually authors original tweets. In any event, fuck the public town square. That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice. Twitter, as awful as it is, is many orders of magnitude better than the town square. May we never return to those times again.

memish 5y ago
Free speech is a core liberal value. I can't believe how many people are confused about this. [Free speech and the open town square is how we got away from the atrocities you outline. There is no societal progress without free speech, which twitter is actively clamping down on. It's regressive and taking us back to when dominant ideas couldn't be challenged.]
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Agreed, but what's actually unbelievable is that people seem to not realize that it goes both ways, and I'm just as free to shame and ridicule someone for their speech as they are to express their shitty little racist ideas. [No, we got away from the practices I mentioned above through discussion that did not take place in a "public" town square. Basically anywhere else, but certainly not the "public" town square. One reason, among many, is that a "town square" is not nearly as ubiquitous as you seem to believe, historically. Dominant ideas can easily and are frequently challenged on Twitter and in modern discourse generally, it's just not tolerant of the racist, awful ideas that some might want to discuss. It's not going to lead to progress to continue to discuss how one race is superior to another, for example, and yet that's all some groups seem to want to talk about.]
  - bko 5y ago
    Sure. No one is arguing you shouldn't be able to ridicule someone online (I guess it depends on who you're ridiculing right?). But I don't think you should get banned from the platform for doing so. That's the problem people have with Twitter. Especially since its very inconsistently applied and very out of touch with what the overwhelming majority of the country believes. There's also a cultural aspect that can't really be solved by Twitter, like petitioning someone to be fired for making a gay joke ten years ago.

cm2187 5y ago

I’d add a minor item to the list: it is progressively raising garden walls. I do not have a twitter account, I will not give my mobile number to twitter to get one. Right now I can still follow the few accounts I find interesting with nitter and browser favorites. The twitter website itself has become unusable.

adamredwoods 5y ago

Before labeling "problems" I wish people would define what is the ideal social platform? What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship?

TuringTest 5y ago
> What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship? I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement. No commercial network with a company backing it could ever offer a space like that, because they are liable to monitor and moderate the worst content that goes through their property, thus creating a single centralized culture based on the company's values.
- awb 5y ago
  > I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement. That sounds like a free market. A government provides a minimal container and you’re free to create your own sub-pocket with your own rules inside of that structure. If you don’t like the rules of sub-pocket A (ex. Twitter), you can go create sub-pocket B (Truth Social). And they have no centralized style of rule enforcement because they are their own unique private enterprises. Maybe the problem isn’t Twitter. Maybe the problem is expecting Twitter to act like an unbiased government when they’re not. They’re a for-profit sub-pocket with their own subculture. Just like Reddit, YT, FB, TikTok, etc. They’re all competing for eyeballs and ad dollars while independently enforcing their own rules.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    A free society, yes. A free market no, because you are not setting prices for making transactions for exchanging limited products; the information distributed through the network can be indefinitely replicated and multiplied. The different 'subpockets' will be competing for expansion as organisms in an evolutionary environment, but describing it was a market would be using the wrong model. The trend of simplifying every free organizations as markets is harmful to rational analysis, and I'd say it comes from over-reliance on a set of values that see it as the only valid tool for solving every problem - i.e. an irrational prejudice. We should do better in our analysis of the evolving world, since society is going through never-seen changes and applying old recipes will limit our understanding.

MrMan 5y ago

I follow links onto twitter sometimes, though I dont use it. how does it have a "free speech problem?" what does this even mean in practical terms. I think that talking point is completely made up.

tekknik 5y ago
One cannot make a comment on the site that’s counter-narrative without having the mob of social activists bombarding you, and ultimately canceling you.
- detaro 5y ago
  Few dozen million too many people making "counter-narrative" comments on Twitter for that to be believable.
  - tekknik 5y ago
    Or perhaps they’re the wrong people?
    - detaro 5y ago
      define "wrong"? Your comment fairly clearly said any.
      - tekknik 5y ago
        It actually doesn’t clearly say any at all. Like literally. Random Joes that have no voice will not be banned. Make a name for yourself and start gaining followers and you most certainly will unless it’s too damaging to twitters reputation. Their sporadic treatment of these types of people are what allow you to hide behind this reasoning, they keep you guessing on their procedures.

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

> The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech! Twitter is not “the defacto (sic) town square”. The claim that it is is most typically deployed as an argument that it should be regulated. The rest of this comment continues apace. These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).

tekknik 5y ago
Somehow you got it twisted that the right is the one controlling or attempting to control free speech. Clearly you’ve not been on HN long as it was nearly exactly on party lines, with the left wanting to stifle the speech of some, and the right wanting it completely open.
stale2002 5y ago
Well hey, in this case it seems that Elon musk has purchased 9% of Twitter and is likely going to use that influence to make Twitter's moderation promote open discourse more. I hope you don't complain about this ever in the future and just accept that Elon is allowed to pressure Twitter to change it's moderation policy to support the principles of open discourse more.
- HereIGoAgain 5y ago
  Man, you should see how the same type of people are reacting on twitter right now and around the net.. The cries of "private exception" have suddenly become "NO NOT THAT WAY!" overnight. lol
CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies). Government mandating tech companies to censor information is supported by a far higher percentage of Democrat voters: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/18/glenn_greenwald_the_mountain_of_data_showing_how_authoritarian_democrats_have_become.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/18/glenn_gre...

thirdwhrldPzz 5y ago

anamax 5y ago

> 1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

HereIGoAgain 5y ago

Yup, pretty much all of these are true.. for a lot of the new net and all of SM.. but especially twitter.

madeofpalk 5y ago

Twitter is not the defacto public square. Only "New York Media Types" believe this.