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This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner. He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US

This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner. He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam. That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution. And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.

p_j_w 4y ago
>He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam. He's used to making these sorts of promises.
hellojesus 4y ago
He could change it to a pay-to-play model where the payment is miniscule. It may not eliminate all spam, but I wouldn't be surprised if accounts have to go through a kyc payment mechanism in order to prove their identity. It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.
- panarky 4y ago
  A pay-per-Tweet scheme would reduce the total number of Tweets by 90% or more. We can all discuss whether that would be net-good or net-bad, but the vast majority of that reduction of speech would come from speech that is legal under the US constitution.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    I think he means something like WhatsApp, which was 1 dollar per year in the beginning. But then again their model wouldn't work here either, because you could gift a 1 year membership to someone else. Given how much more valuable those bots are than 1 dollar per year, it would mean nothing to gift it to large amounts of people. Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.

p_j_w 4y ago

>He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam. He's used to making these sorts of promises.

hellojesus 4y ago

He could change it to a pay-to-play model where the payment is miniscule. It may not eliminate all spam, but I wouldn't be surprised if accounts have to go through a kyc payment mechanism in order to prove their identity. It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.

panarky 4y ago
A pay-per-Tweet scheme would reduce the total number of Tweets by 90% or more. We can all discuss whether that would be net-good or net-bad, but the vast majority of that reduction of speech would come from speech that is legal under the US constitution.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  I think he means something like WhatsApp, which was 1 dollar per year in the beginning. But then again their model wouldn't work here either, because you could gift a 1 year membership to someone else. Given how much more valuable those bots are than 1 dollar per year, it would mean nothing to gift it to large amounts of people. Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.