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Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Could be wrong though. Not much happened after the Experian breach after al

Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Could be wrong though. Not much happened after the Experian breach after all.

capableweb 4y ago
> Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Alternative take: Lawmakers are finally waking up and realizing how much these platforms can affect our daily lives, mostly because most common folk are signed up and use these platforms, and are starting to figure out how we can limit the damage for when things go wrong.
- dantheman 4y ago
  What damage?
  - nathancahill 4y ago
    And even further.. what wrong?
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I think Twitter(and other social media) genuinely makes people's mental health worse. We have coined terms like "doomscrolling" and have studies to evidence that Instagram has a negative effect on the psychological wellbeing of teenage girls. I think that this can arguably fall into the category of "damage".
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    In Twitter's case, for starters, the time they heavily incentivized sharing phone numbers with them and then used that information to accidentally build an open phone number harvester. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-settings-can-leak-your-phone-number https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-s...
- zhxshen 4y ago
  It's easy for us to be sanguine about knocking down the ladder after most of us have already scurried our ways to the top. Think of existing regulation (banks, environment, agriculture, pharma... you name it). Is it really there to protect the little guy? Or, is it a revolving-door between the regulator and the regulated, where megacorps can use public funds & resources to defend their own private interests?
  - mc32 4y ago
    Regulation is a double edged sword. At least in some industries much of it is to protect the little guy, but it’s also a whole new jobs program. Just like most “guest speakers” invited to a company. They’re a cottage industry and they give the Corp some cred cover.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    You can look at see what a unregulated us banking system looks like, it's alive and well right now. Crypto is a hot mess of scams and fraud. It wasn't far in the past that rivers caught on fire, either. Regulation isn't perfect but neither is megacorps having free reign to conduct psychological tests on the public at large to see how much stupid shit they can manipulate them into thinking as their whole business model.
    - zhxshen 4y ago
      Company dumps creosote into the ground for 40+ years. Somebody blows the whistle, EPA prosecutes the whistleblower. Company gets a slap-on-the-wrist fine, while the whistleblower gets house arrest. https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-and-jail-a-mississippi-lab-owner-because-of-her-activism/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-an... Administrative law is broken. Doubling-down on it isn't going to solve the problem.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    It's obviously a mix of both, and it's up to us to make the system tilt more towards the former.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  I would bet good money that whatever form "limit the damage" takes will be indistinguishable from "get their cut of this power to influence the masses" in practice. These are federal politicians, not the board of a nonprofit that runs a summer camp for poor kids. While some of them may have noble goals on specific issues here and there the sum of their actions as a group basically always winds up being to increase their own power.
- mindslight 4y ago
  The problem is the direction they will tend to head. Politicians see a centralized power center and think "we need to control that", and so will just create laws aimed at reforming the centralized service rather than breaking it up. While what we really need is API access, data portability, privacy ala GDPR, and other laws that will foster competition between services, to straight up end their current playbook of creating mini-monopolies via Metcalfe's law. The standard tech-literate workflow to interact with Twitter should involve a third party client that abstracts over all such publishing services, and not defaulting to Twitter's proprietary web/mobile apps.
- kornhole 4y ago
  The intelligence agencies are well aware and like the current situation of a handful of giant data pots from which to pull. Some lawmakers are well aware as well. Who knows which of these lawmakers is just putting on a show and acting surprised.
riffic 4y ago
good! Get every single publicly funded institution off of these awful services. Public comms can go on publicly funded infrastructure, using open protocols like the W3C's ActivityPub (or just RSS if we want to keep things adequate). Twitter is absolutely not immune from being a member of this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Could be wrong though. Not much happened after the Experian breach after all.

capableweb 4y ago

> Feeling like Twitter is just about to ruin the low-regulation party for everybody. Alternative take: Lawmakers are finally waking up and realizing how much these platforms can affect our daily lives, mostly because most common folk are signed up and use these platforms, and are starting to figure out how we can limit the damage for when things go wrong.

dantheman 4y ago
What damage?
- nathancahill 4y ago
  And even further.. what wrong?
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I think Twitter(and other social media) genuinely makes people's mental health worse. We have coined terms like "doomscrolling" and have studies to evidence that Instagram has a negative effect on the psychological wellbeing of teenage girls. I think that this can arguably fall into the category of "damage".
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  In Twitter's case, for starters, the time they heavily incentivized sharing phone numbers with them and then used that information to accidentally build an open phone number harvester. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-settings-can-leak-your-phone-number https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/how-twitters-default-s...
zhxshen 4y ago
It's easy for us to be sanguine about knocking down the ladder after most of us have already scurried our ways to the top. Think of existing regulation (banks, environment, agriculture, pharma... you name it). Is it really there to protect the little guy? Or, is it a revolving-door between the regulator and the regulated, where megacorps can use public funds & resources to defend their own private interests?
- mc32 4y ago
  Regulation is a double edged sword. At least in some industries much of it is to protect the little guy, but it’s also a whole new jobs program. Just like most “guest speakers” invited to a company. They’re a cottage industry and they give the Corp some cred cover.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  You can look at see what a unregulated us banking system looks like, it's alive and well right now. Crypto is a hot mess of scams and fraud. It wasn't far in the past that rivers caught on fire, either. Regulation isn't perfect but neither is megacorps having free reign to conduct psychological tests on the public at large to see how much stupid shit they can manipulate them into thinking as their whole business model.
  - zhxshen 4y ago
    Company dumps creosote into the ground for 40+ years. Somebody blows the whistle, EPA prosecutes the whistleblower. Company gets a slap-on-the-wrist fine, while the whistleblower gets house arrest. https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-and-jail-a-mississippi-lab-owner-because-of-her-activism/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-an... Administrative law is broken. Doubling-down on it isn't going to solve the problem.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  It's obviously a mix of both, and it's up to us to make the system tilt more towards the former.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
I would bet good money that whatever form "limit the damage" takes will be indistinguishable from "get their cut of this power to influence the masses" in practice. These are federal politicians, not the board of a nonprofit that runs a summer camp for poor kids. While some of them may have noble goals on specific issues here and there the sum of their actions as a group basically always winds up being to increase their own power.
mindslight 4y ago
The problem is the direction they will tend to head. Politicians see a centralized power center and think "we need to control that", and so will just create laws aimed at reforming the centralized service rather than breaking it up. While what we really need is API access, data portability, privacy ala GDPR, and other laws that will foster competition between services, to straight up end their current playbook of creating mini-monopolies via Metcalfe's law. The standard tech-literate workflow to interact with Twitter should involve a third party client that abstracts over all such publishing services, and not defaulting to Twitter's proprietary web/mobile apps.
kornhole 4y ago
The intelligence agencies are well aware and like the current situation of a handful of giant data pots from which to pull. Some lawmakers are well aware as well. Who knows which of these lawmakers is just putting on a show and acting surprised.

riffic 4y ago

good! Get every single publicly funded institution off of these awful services. Public comms can go on publicly funded infrastructure, using open protocols like the W3C's ActivityPub (or just RSS if we want to keep things adequate). Twitter is absolutely not immune from being a member of this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...