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“Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”
- Ztynovovk 4y agoElon “free speech” Musk. >Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized. Guess this guy finally realized that a free for all model is not feasible.
- elgenioso 4y agoIt's impossible to detect negative sentiment purely by text. It's an unsolvable problem.
- zamalek 4y agoIt's more fundamental than that. Some forms of speech can indirectly or directly limit the speech of others. Free speech absolutism in an unachievable panacea; it is a logical fallacy.
- hellfish 4y agoThe people who oppose free speech always try to redefine it this way. Freedom of speech is freedom from censorship or moderation. Not freedom from discomfort
- pixl97 4y agoLike the discomfort from being banned from someones private property from saying dumb crap?
- at-w 4y agoLike Comcast deciding they don't want workers discussing unionizing using the internet infrastructure that they privately own. Or financial institutions like PayPal freezing and seizing your money on their "private property" because of speech they don't like. Or when AWS, Microsoft, and the largest and most powerful corporations in human history coordinated to take a separate social network offline because of speech they didn't like. Or when Twitter and Facebook coordinated to falsely label a true story "Russian disinformation" days before an election, literally preventing people from sharing it with each other privately on the world's largest communications networks. Whether Hunter Biden smoking crack with prostitutes would impact the election, or is even anyone's business, is questionable to me. But so is having billionaire tech CEOs decide what people can discuss through private communications with the express intent of suppressing information related to a political campaign. The same goes for credit card monopolies like VISA and Mastercard coordinating to destroy businesses like Mindgeek because of moralist outrage from another "side."
- ibejoeb 4y agoI'm not following you. What can I say that prevents you from saying something? That would seem to violate causality.
- zamalek 4y agoThat causal violation is the exact problem with free speech aboslutism. "You are not allowed to criticize the CCP" is speech. "I order you to kill/hang that vice president" is speech, and the dead don't speak.
- mh- 4y agoThat last one would already fail the Brandenburg test [0], wouldn't it? (I'm not a lawyer.) [0] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/inciting-to-riot-violence-or-insurrection.html https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/inciting-to-...
- zamalek 4y ago> Brandenburg test The Brandenburg Test doesn't apply to free speech absolutism.
- erichocean 4y agoElon Musk has already said he supports unrestricted *legal* speech on Twitter, and that individual cultures should decide what that is for themselves, through their local legal system. He's not a "free speech absolutist."
- krapp 4y agoHe calls himself a free speech absolutist, and he's already banned parody, racist but legal (in the US) speech and criticism of himself and his technical knowledge - which is more restrictive than Twitter was prior. As is the plan to "deboost" negative and hateful tweets - I'll remind the court that when Youtube did the same thing, many people here considered even demonetizing and downranking content to be censorship, and antithetical to free speech.
- elgenioso 4y agoI don't think that's true. The only way to limit speech on an algorithmicially mediated platform is via algorithms and there is no algorithm that can encode non-trivial properties of language regardless of what the AI maximalists might say to the contrary.
- lrvick 4y agoAs someone who specialized in this area for years in social media specifically, I have never seen evidence you can get past 80% accuracy with any known sentiment analysis method. Brute force stats like Naive Bayes is still as good as it gets on platforms like Twitter where speech patterns are too short and irregular for traditional NLP to be very useful.
- elgenioso 4y agoEven non-traditional NLP won't work. There is no way to algorithmically enforce "good" speech. I agree that the character limitations don't help and the 280 character limitation is the main reason Twitter is such a mess. There are no coherent long form texts generated by AI models but 280 characters is very easy because people will give the author the benefit of the doubt and interpolate the missing context.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> 80% accuracy Sentiment analysis is way worse than that in adversarial scenarios, where a human is trying to outwit the machine. My prediction for this whole thing: Elon Musk [again] gets swept up by AI hype, tries to replace humans with software, and it doesn't work. Like at Tesla, so at Twitter.
- garyfirestorm 4y agoTrue! How would it detect sarcasm. For eg. I love what he is doing to Twitter
- lrvick 4y agoIn my experience people most often convey sarcasm on social media with emoji and the emoji is typically the most informative feature. I hate my job :) -> probably loves their job. I love my job :( -> probably hates their job. Without emoji sarcasm is often hard to detect even for a human.
- throwaway290 4y agoIt's exceedingly easy to detect sentiment for any human who cares and follows context, next to impossible to do automatically. "Good job Elon :)" can mean diametrically opposing things depending on author's views and what they wrote up to this moment. Same with "I love my job :)", etc. Employing an AI solution could cause some fun blunders but would likely amplify the amount of burning sarcasm overall.
- rcoveson 4y agoThis is wrong as often as it's right. I predect that "I hate my job :)" on social media really does mean the speaker hates their job at least 40% of the time. It's sort of a "this is fine"[0] smiley; the smiley is the sarcasm while the statement is literally true. 0. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-fine https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-fine
- coffeebeqn 4y agoElon is doing a great job at Twitter :) What do I really mean?
- paxys 4y agoHaving Elon in sole control of what is or isn’t acceptable speech is a feature, not a bug.
- bee_rider 4y agoPresumably he’s going to realize this in a couple days and start trying to hire back the folks who were in charge of moderation, etc, on the platform. The possibility that Twitter was configured the way it was when he bought it for a reason apparently didn’t occur to him.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoI mean that whole idea sounds extremely dystopian. You can only post things that the AI considers “positive”. Putin is a piece of shit who bombed my family! I’m sorry Dave, I can’t allow you to post that.
- GloriousKoji 4y agoFree as in capital, not beer.
- mistermann 4y ago> Elon “free speech” Musk. Is your usage of quotations marks intended to adhere to one of these? If so, which one, and how? If not, what is the intent of them? ------------------------------------------------- https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp - Rule 1. Use double quotation marks to set off a direct (word-for-word) quotation. Correct: “I hope you will be here,” he said. Incorrect: He said that he “hoped I would be there.” (The quotation marks are incorrect because hoped I would be there does not state the speaker's exact words.) - Rule 8a. Quotation marks are often used with technical terms, terms used in an unusual way, or other expressions that vary from standard usage. Examples: It's an oil-extraction method known as “fracking.” He did some “experimenting” in his college days. I had a visit from my “friend” the tax man.
- throwaway290 4y agoIf you are serious, it's a common way of specifying a nickname.
- mistermann 4y agoI am serious, and it is indeed that sometimes...but I wonder if that's the intent Ztynovovk had when making the comment (or: what it "is" from within the initial frame of reference, as "is-ness" is relative to the observer). I think it's fun and informative to draw attention to cognitive functionality of humans when they are opining on the cognitive functionality of other humans, particularly in "smart" communities when the topic of discussion tends to exploit cultural norms and catalyze ~unforced (note: speculation) cognitive errors.
- Ztynovovk 4y agoThey indicate how much of a clown he is.
- naniwaduni 4y ago> terms used in an unusual way > I had a visit from my “friend” the tax man. If you're going to pull out the dictionary in bad faith, it would behoove you to read the defs you're pulling out.
- googlryas 4y agoIs there any reason to naively interpret his view of free speech as "anyone can say anything at any time"?
- tootie 4y agoWhat the hell does "demonetize" even mean? YouTube uses that term to mean they won't pay the creator. Twitter doesn't pay anyone. Removing ads just makes the content better.
- kweingar 4y agoFurther in the thread he names some banned accounts that will be reinstated. A couple weeks ago, Elon said that Twitter’s content policy (and account reinstatement) would be decided by a moderation council composed of people with diverse views. There have been no reports of this council being formed yet. Edit: why was this post flagged?
- cguess 4y agoAnd he misspelled two of those three names. And one of those accounts he banned.
- seattle_spring 4y agoThe correct spelling would be “Jordan Balthazar Peterson”.
- nixcraft 4y agoFrom: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512 Kathie Griffin, Jorden Peterson & Babylon Bee have been reinstated. Trump decision has not yet been made.
- memish 4y agoThere's still a question of how "negative/hate" is defined and whether this will be transparent. I'm skeptical, but the general principle of discouraging and not profiting from negativity is, uh, positive.
- kweingar 4y agoNegativity is an extremely broad concept. There is no chance that “negative” tweets will be uniformly deboosted. Will Elon deboost tweets from Ukrainians condemning Russian war crimes? Will he deboost his own negative tweets toward US politicians? Will he deboost US politicians’ tweets criticizing the other party? Will he deboost tweets critical of his management of Twitter? Discouraging “negativity” necessarily means “discouraging negativity based on some ideological priors”
- ibejoeb 4y agoWant to make some money? Users can pay to boost their own tweets. But I think that's just advertising...
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- sn0w_crash 4y agoWe have laws that define this. What changed was that a small group of technocrats took it upon themselves that any questioning of their ideology was “hate speech.”
- pessimizer 4y agoWe have bad laws that badly define this. The US has done no better than Musk at defining "hate."
- brookst 4y agoDisagree. We don't have laws banning hate speech. We have laws that allow "hate" to be an aggravating factors in crimes. And we have juries to determine whether the application of hate crime statutes is appropriate for a particular crime. US laws are wildly imperfect, but the laws are at least applied by people rather than algorithms.
- detaro 4y agoNow I'm curious how many of his tweets would count as "negative"
- minimaxir 4y agoNote that this is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning, which is the primary thing the free speech advocates on Twitter were hoping Elon would stop Twitter from doing.
- Hamuko 4y agohttps://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517716718382166016 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517716718382166016
- leereeves 4y agoNo, as explained in the thread following that tweet: "Note, this applies just to the individual tweet, not the whole account" Shadowbanning applies to accounts. Also, nowhere in that thread does it say that the user won't be told the Tweet was demonetized, which is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning.
- datastack 4y agoThe difference between hiding a particular problematic tweet and all tweets of an account is important though. It seems Elon refers to the former, while shadow banning refers to the latter. Let's hope it is so.
- commandlinefan 4y agoIt also virtually requires human content moderation who, as we've seen time and time again, will classify more and more conservative opinions as "negative/hate" and fewer and fewer liberal opinions. So in other words, Jack Dorsey's Twitter all over again.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y agoPeople have been seeing it as one big moderation problem and it's a bunch of smaller problems, plus the problem of people actively gaming the system and operating at large enough scale for it to always be bigger than humans can handle. But that's only true when you delete posts and block users. It makes mistakes so costly (and with machines being so easily manipulated) that we need to run too many decisions past people because our decisions here are making huge impact at a personal level for those involved. But if you're willing to accept "hidden at default-browse-level" wrongly appearing every now and then it becomes totally solvable. We were trying to scale fact-checkers and playground-nannies but the trick is to get rid of those roles and use users to flag what users like and/or don't like directly. You can do a staggered release to previously critical people, and known-objective people, once a few posts have been flagged.
- boringg 4y agoHasn't he figured out that whatever the rules end up people will game them for their own benefit? Dynamic system next to impossible to police.
- Imnimo 4y agoI'm excited to see what the new policy will be tomorrow.
- deeg 4y agoThis is a perfect example of how an algorithm will fail. I suppose someone could argue that your comment isn't negative (or negative enough to warrant de-boosting).
- guelo 4y agoI think he's heading towards making people pay for reach to try to get more subscription revenue. In my opinion paying for reach is what started Facebook's decline, when people realize that "your" followers are not actually theirs they lose interest.
- pessimizer 4y agoThe worst aspect of twitter is the anti-fans who follow people just to disrupt any conversations that they're having, and the organized trolling groups. You could interpret this is saying that those people are going to be pushed out of threads, but you could interpret it in any way. He's really not saying anything. The organized groups and the anti-fans would be easy to automate discovery of. Just flag people who reply in a similar manner no matter what they're replying to, and cross them with voting rings. Declaring war on negativity and hate is pretty silly, though.
- mabbo 4y agoIt's all about economics of demand for what Twitter is offering: advertising. Elon's changes have massively harmed the value of an ad on Twitter. Moderation teams are massively cut, meaning advertisers have to worry about their products beside hate speech or worse. At the same time, Elon is explicitly un-banning people who were banned for hate speech, promising that no ads will show beside their future hate speech- it will just show to their many many followers who come to the site to see that exact thing. I'm not certain advertisers will be encouraged by this. Engineering is massively reduced, meaning the operational excellence of the system is in question- what good is paying for ads if the site is down so often that users don't come back? And there's all of the potential issues with the SEC and other legal problems that aren't being addressed because Elon fired the teams that handled those things. No sane advertising agency is signing a long-term contract with Twitter. There's just too much uncertainty. Elon Musk is not cut out to be the CEO of a software company. The problem is that he is the only person that isn't aware of that at this point.
- pschuegr 4y agoIt seems a little unfair that people who hang out in hateful places get a better UX (ie no ads). If anything, they should generate ads for anti-hate groups and therapy providers and plaster the feed with them.
- Macha 4y agoYou can feel potentially relieved that mostly they get trashier ads, rather than no ads. Supplements and gambling and anime blow up dolls used to be the order of the day on 4chan at least.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoExactly. This is the same thing youtube did by taking away the downvote count. This is all about advertising.
- inglor_cz 4y ago"It's all about economics of demand for what Twitter is offering: advertising. Elon's changes have massively harmed the value of an ad on Twitter." This is actually something that would be in line with Musk's previous communications. Twitter needs to become less dependent on advertising, much less so, so that its value as a public forum isn't held hostage by a few shy giants that would love to see cute kittens and meaningless platitudes next to their ads. The idea that free services supported by extensive ads is the only way to go has been too long taken for revealed wisdom. The downsides are only now becoming apparent. That said, the method chosen by Musk seems to be very chaotic and destructive, and it is totally unclear to me if Twitter can actually build a different business model without going belly-up first.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoI'm certainly not a fan of how Musk has handled the Twitter takeover, but this sentiment, "New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach", seems highly reasonable to me, no? That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than what people actually post. That said, I think that, realistically, being at the bottom of the heap won't actually be much different from being banned - which I actually think is a good thing.
- seydor 4y agoI don't see a difference between censorship and demonetization/"deboosting". end up in the same situation via different means. No centralized medium can claim to do that seriously, it's a waste of resources and attention.
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- elgenioso 4y agoThis is not a solvable problem. There is no algorithmic way to detect speech that needs to be boosted and deboosted on social media because there is no way to actually algorithmically detect what is truthful and what is just manipulative propaganda and marketing.
- drooby 4y agoQuick! Someone write an AI that classifies the likelihood of informal fallacies.
- brookst 4y ago100%
- achenatx 4y agoit isnt about truth or fiction, it is negative/hate tweets. I run a politics forum and the one rule is no insulting other people, groups, or positions. This makes for a very civil, but bland conversation. People engage with negative/hate tweets. I personally like talking politics without insults, but most people are incapable of it. It is easy to detect insults.
- hunglee2 4y agoFumbling forward, path still unclear. Who and how is negative determined? Is opposing oppression considered to be negative? Sentiment analysis of the protest orientated tweets would probably deem them so
- paxys 4y agoPretty much going according to plan. Next step will be tweets from the political left being downranked by the algorithm/shadowbanned because Elon considers them “hate speech”.
- nimbius 4y agoNot to put too fine a point on it, but this is the sort of damage control id expect to see from someone only peripherally aware of or involved in their businesses accountability or strategic operations. This concern from advertisers has existed far too long for an executive action to have any meaning. the marketing conference call on november 3rd was your red flag where advertisers voiced their displeasure with firing large swaths of the content moderation team. The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday of active trading left a pretty sore spot with them as well that you never seemed to completely address. To corporations looking at this release today youre just some guy dragging a plumbing fixture through the lobby of your new office demanding hardcore work and cutting staff and --lets be honest-- at least Chainsaw Al Dunlap made stockholders rich in the process of scorching earth. So far youve just made the entire platform look like the bombing of dresden. by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely. but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
- thomascgalvin 4y ago> At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business. I think this is inevitable. One, Elon is trying to prop up Twitter by using SpaceX money to buy ads. He's dipping his hand into other companies to keep his new toy afloat for a while longer. I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises. And two, I think a lot of customers are going to start rethinking Elon's offerings. Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment. Now, Tesla is "that company Elon owns." There is no way this doesn't hurt Tesla's bottom line, and there's no way investors don't realize this. All Elon had to do was shut up and bask in the accomplishments of others, but he couldn't manage to take his own ego out of it. Will it ruin him? Probably not. We he still be the richest man in the world in a year or two? Also probably not.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoSo free speech absolutist is starting to adapt rules which are roughly similar to Twitter's current rules. And those rules are existing for a reason, rules don't popup from a thin air. What a surprise... Now he will figure out that the bloat of microservices and employees was there also for a reason.
- commandlinefan 4y ago> those rules are existing for a reason If they had applied the rules consistently, they'd be reasonable enough, but they never did or even particularly tried. I don't have any hope that Elon will, either, though.
- pixl97 4y agoFor profit businesses will never apply rules consistently, there is too much profit in inconsistency. Hell, anything ran by humans, in by belief, is incapable of applying any set of complex rules consistently. Individuals can't even apply moderation rules consistently as our emotions and how we're feeling on a particular day can dictate what we ignore and the punishments we choose.
- anticensor 4y ago> For profit businesses will never apply rules consistently, there is too much profit in inconsistency. A for profit business definitely could definitely codify how to profit and how to price in its charter. Too much profit is just a bad excuse.
- root_axis 4y ago"apply the rules consistently" is like "unbiased journalism", it is an impossible standard that literally nobody adheres to. Further, anyone claiming intentional bias in moderation behavior is just making it up because there are thousands of moderation decisions made every day, the details of which they are not privy to.
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- phailhaus 4y agoOh great, more unaccountable black-box "algorithms" that invisibly classify your tweets. Machines can't detect satire, they don't understand nuance or context, they don't understand tone. This will affect platform speech in strange ways as people naturally attempt to evade the algorithm. Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it. Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago> Twitter needs a dislike button. This IS twitters dislike button.
- phailhaus 4y agoNo it isn't. It's an algorithm using rough sentiment analysis and god knows what else to judge your tweet, unaccountably and invisibly. "I hate mondays" I tweet. Whoops! Tripped the "negative tweet detector" and my tweet is deprioritized! No problem you say, let's just tweak the detector to let that through. So you're going to write exceptions? What happens when "mondays" becomes some sort of code word for racial epithets? How do you detect that? This has happened before, look up what happened to r/clownworld. This is straight up an unsolvable problem. You need human labeling, which is what a dislike button accomplishes.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoHow do you know it will be an algorithm? He did not even say how it would be implemented yet. It may be a dislike button. FWIW, I do not like the dislike or like buttons.
- duskwuff 4y ago> How do you know it will be an algorithm? Well, it seems unlikely to be human-driven, given how many of the employees and contractors who were responsible for content moderation have been laid off. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-outsourced-content-moderators/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-outso...
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoYou know this is all about the advertisers. He does not want to make Twitter better for people, he wants to make it better for corporate advertisers. This is the YouTube "Dislike" button for Twitter.
- paxys 4y agoI have lost count of the number of caveats that have been applied daily to his “free speech absolutism”. Any bets on how soon he will permanently ban folks like AOC and Elizabeth Warren under some new “policy”?
- commandlinefan 4y ago> ban folks like AOC and Elizabeth Warren If he does, look for the exact same people who defended Twitter bans a year ago to suddenly become "free speech absolutists" (for a while...)
- triceratops 4y agoNope. Private property, owner makes the rules, it is his right. But in this case, I will criticize those decisions and say they are bad. Go free speech!
- vkou 4y agoNah, they'll probably still have the opinion that Nazis and hate speech doesn't belong on Twitter. They'll also probably still be of the opinion that equating those groups with EW is utterly pants-on-head bonkers, and is a poster child of the kind of both-sides brain rot that the media inflicts on us a daily basis.
- memish 4y agoHopefully not. This would bring Twitter back to where it was, just swapping one bias for another.
- friend_and_foe 4y agoSounds reasonable. I'm a bit of a free speech absolutist, so I say no to censorship no matter how insulting the content may be, but that doesn't mean anyone is required to amplify anything. The argument I hear most often from pro censorship people is that it's not as simple as having a voice, your voice is amplified by algorithms on these sites, you're giving someone a megaphone. This decision appears to solve that problem while not censoring anyone. I'd say a shadow ban would go too far, but just not promoting it sounds like a reasonable compromise.
- 6510 4y agoThis is like when you set up a forum for the first time and have all of these weird moderation ideas.
- hedora 4y agoSo, what percentage of Musk's tweets would be max deboosted? Examples start about halfway down the list. https://www.insidehook.com/article/tech/elon-musk-worst-tweets https://www.insidehook.com/article/tech/elon-musk-worst-twee...
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- Ptchd 4y agoE. Musk could probably make a lot of money if he started a religion...
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- socialismisok 4y agoThere goes the free speech absolutist. (FWIW, I've always believed that moderation is a good thing on Twitter, and that free speech absolutism is just not tenable on the platform.) It's been fascinating to watch this guy come in and absolutely crush any dissenting voices then immediately start restricting speech on the "free speech zone" platform of his.
- boole1854 4y agoMany commentators seem to think this is a sudden, recent backpedaling from a previous absolutist view on free speech. However, Musk has been promoting the "freedom of speech" vs "freedom of reach" distinction for a while, at least months before his takeover, including describing how such a policy should be implemented at Twitter. Here's one example quote from June, 2022: “I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble. “So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...” Source: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter-free-speech-vs-free-reach/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter...
- socialismisok 4y agoWhat is a "negative tweet" or a "hate tweet"? Those two concepts sure seem ambiguous. Hate tweet, I suppose, is marginally easier to understand than a hate tweet, I guess... But what does this mean for like, the Babylon Bee or The Lincoln Project? I'd say both of them can be negative at times. What does it mean for libertarians or anti capitalists who are strongly averse to the way things are run today? (I deliberately tried to highlight that this sort of change could impact people of various political persuasions, trying to not "pick a favorite" by only showing how this could impact my "team".)
- gnicholas 4y agoSo they will treat the following two tweets differently? • down with people who believe X! • long live people who believe not-X! The line between negativity and positivity is just a matter of framing.
- kuramitropolis 4y agoSpot on. The terms "negativity" and "positivity" are basically tools for abuse.
- gnicholas 4y agoYou mean abuse by twitter, since it introduces subjectivity in the decision making process?
- kuramitropolis 4y agoBy anyone who uses them as the loaded terms that they are. Oh, how I would hope that "positivity" and "negativity" would be understood as relating to position and negation, like in your example! But in practical usage (as in "stay positive" or "we don't want that kind of negativity around here") they're semantic stopsigns for silencing voices that express unhappiness. I think the term for a culture of only accepting expressions of happiness as valid, with the goal of suppressing constructive disagreement, is "toxic positivity".
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago> demonetized You guys are getting paid?
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- heavyset_go 4y agoMusk's vision for Twitter has finally been realized: if you want to whistleblow or say not nice things about Tesla, SpaceX, or Musk himself, no one will see it. Nothing bad about him or his companies will trend on Twitter ever again.
- gnicholas 4y agoSo how does this work of people are using the chronological view?
- aquova 4y agoThere's some interesting discussion in this thread about whether this is the right or wrong move for Twitter. However, after the debacle last night, I think it's a moot point, I simply don't see twitter.com still running within the next few months, possibly within the next few weeks. He's fired 50% of the company, reports seem that conservatively 50% of the remainder just quit yesterday, their subscription service had to be cancelled in the process scaring off their primary revenue source. They don't seem to be in any position to moderate, develop features, or, if some ex-employees can be believed, even keep the service running with who they have left. I honestly think within the next week or two we'll see a significant outage of the platform, and it'll never be brought back up to 100%, if at all. It's a stunning display of incompetence from the once admired richest man on Earth. So he can make all the policy changes he wishes, I don't think anyone will be around to see them happen.
- abzolv 4y agoThis is the correct take. Without the staff and institutional knowledge of a 16 year old service, no amount of hand waving will keep the service healthy. It’s a stunning display of what not to do.
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- dilap 4y agoPerhaps the Twitter code is convoluted and messy, but really, you think to such a degree that even a small team of highly-motivated, skilled engineers could not figure it out and keep it running?
- fzeroracer 4y agoAny motivated, highly skilled engineers that's worked on long running global software systems will tell you that maintaining systems is hard, and coldbooting a system is even harder.
- abzolv 4y ago
- ProAm 4y agoWhat is not discussed is who decides what is negative and what is hate? (or what is parody). No one is going to disagree that hate speech has no place, but who is the watcher and who is the decider? Probably a bot.
- pelorat 4y agoNon-US governments? 80% of Twitter is international users.
- rojobuffalo 4y agowhat's the difference between a valid criticism and negativity? it would be hard enough to identify "hate", but "negative"...that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
- kornhole 4y agoThe main reason some of us go on Twitter is it is where the politicians and other leaders tweet. It is the only place where we can talk back to them. This talking back is probably considered negative. If our voices will be silenced, I will just subscribe to a few of the people still there using RSS feeds. All real discussion will move elsewhere.
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y agoAnd all the above is very bad for commerce. Social media should be lubricants for commerce, that's how they make money. Or in Twitter case they dont. Given all that, the only way to monetize twitter is to use it as leverage on political leaders and business leaders. This was most likely Musk plan, he then got out-framed by the Delaware courts and lost all his confidence to punch up, so he's punching down by abusing employees.
- kornhole 4y agoGood points. As rich as he is, he is heavily dependent on defense contracts and the global financial system who can pull his strings. He is also punching down on the regular working class who want a voice against the powerful. A more neutered and sanitized environment seems to be the future of Twitter. The fediverse looks more beautiful every day.
- cm2187 4y agoWhat does deboosted mean? Does twitter show you tweets from people you don't follow (and people you follow don't retweet)? Or does that mean you won't see the tweets from the people you follow?
- Whatarethese 4y agoShadowbanned I'm guessing. Cant have Jordan Peterson anti-trans tweets reaching anyone but his followers.
- cm2187 4y agoYou mean hide retweets? Because I thought you only saw people you follow in your feed.
- wiredfool 4y agoDemonetized? Was anyone getting paid by twitter to tweet?
- AceJohnny2 4y agoI'm looking forward to seeing new forms of sarcasm evolve.
- de6u99er 4y agoLloks like Musk is starting to understand the difference between free speech and hate-speech.
- tipsytoad 4y agoSo hypothetically could 4chan-esk threads live on twitte but not be found unless someone searches for them? Perhaps through a hashtag?
- plaguepilled 4y agoAh yes, reach. That thing that is definitely independent of your ability to actually have your opinion heard. Mmmhm. /s
- bawolff 4y agoWhat's the point of demonitizing a tweet? Its not like youtube where the author is getting a share of the profits.
- dopa42365 4y agoI guess that was directed at advertisers ("your ad won't appear on double-plus-ungood tweets"), not users.
- Havoc 4y agoOn the face of it this seems really good, even if what is "hate" is a tricky question. The whole bad news/outrage gets eyeballs is a major part of why the internet is more shit lately in my opinion. Whether that works out remains to be seen but conceptually I like the idea.
- idlewords 4y agoThe interesting question to me is whether Twitter will still allow a strictly reverse chronological feed of tweets from accounts you follow. It's been getting harder and harder to hold onto that as a user.
- anhncommenter25 4y agoSounds like a complicated moderation position to take. "Negative" and "hate" are a matter of perspective and Twitter is a global product. What meets a legal definition of "hate" in one nation is state-sponsored "religious belief" in another. Do you weigh the tweets differently based on who's looking at it? I'm by no means a proponent of the fediverse but this is one arena it has a leg up in. Federators are free to draw their own cultural borders online rather than relying on a centralized for-profit company to draw them. (Or leave them undrawn, which has been Twitter's stance so far.)
- __derek__ 4y agoI really enjoy "max deboosted" as unintentional newspeak.
- iainmerrick 4y agoI’m confused about what’s actually being suggested here, if anything. Regardless of whether stuff is “boosted” and “monetized” or not, people can still retweet stuff, right? If they’re going to restrict the ability to retweet, that sounds a lot like shadow-banning, which is exactly what many people complain about, the people Musk seems to be listening to. I guess it makes sense if people are really using the “home timeline” rather than chronological. That just seems bizarre to me as it misses the whole essence of Twitter. How is it a real-time news source if the newest stuff isn’t always front and centre? How is it a crowd-sourced “public square” if a black box algorithm decides what you read, rather than your own hand-curated list of followed accounts? This whole debate would make sense if it were about YouTube, but Twitter?
- holyharvey 4y agoLmao. Dang contain this thread pls we need your obligatory “everyone, please behave” post at the top.
- greatgib 4y agoLet's translate him: "Tweets that are negative about him, Tweeter, Tesla, and things he likes will be shadow banned from public reach".
- twitybirdisrot 4y agoThings like these will lead to Twitter losing market share eventually to a more non-authoritarian platform "eventually". People want to police themselves. Nobody likes to be policed this way. The road to tyranny is paved with good intentions. We went from "the bird is free" to the bird is free according to one minds view. Hitler also had a vision to cleanse what was deemed rotten and also had one mind. He surrounded himself with yes men and we all know where that story ended up. It's very difficult for one mind to be aware of it's own biases especially when so much power is concentrated towards it and around you are a bunch of ass kissers who want to claw at your pockets. Let's all call it what it is: Twiranny!
- krick 4y agoI'm not using twitter (and not going to), so please explain, what that means, exactly. So, let's say it is decided by Musk&co that X (written by xxx) is a hateful Tweet. - I am a follower of xxx. Will I see it? - I specifically go to twitter.com/xxx. Will I find X on that page? - X is a reply to a popular thread I'm reading right now. Will I see X? So, what exactly being "deboosted" means on Twitter? It just won't appear among all the recommended trash on some "most popular" feed, or does it mean that it's basically invisible unless I somehow guess the specific ID of that tweet?
- georgeg23 4y agoI've discovered that if you tweet the name "Michael Griffin" + "Elon" (or "Musk"), nobody will see your tweet organically unless they search for it directly. Michael Griffin is an important person in Elon's real (non-mythical) history that he'd probably rather you not know about, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
- krick 4y agoWas it that way before Musk bougth Twitter? Or you didn't check before? Also, I'm still confused by what "search for it directly" means. Like, you won't see it in author's feed at all unless you have an id of that tweet? Can you find it by searching Griffin + Musk in Twitter's search bar?
- ecshafer 4y agoIsn't it more possible than something nefarious that no one is interested and the twitter algorithm just doesn't think people will care so its downranked in searches?
- null0pointer 4y agoIs this comment a copypasta campaign from some community that hates Musk? There’s an identical comment [0] posted by another user in this thread. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33665436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33665436
- sangnoir 4y agoHow would Twitter demonetization work? No ads shown above/below the tweet? Have no ad above the fold when bad tweets are detected?
- kidme5 4y agoI've discovered that if you tweet the name "Michael Griffin" + "Elon" (or "Musk"), nobody will see your tweet organically unless they search for it directly. Michael Griffin is an important person in Elon's real (non-mythical) history that he'd probably rather you not know about, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
- Pulcinella 4y agoCan you clarify your point? Is the accusation that Musk received CIA money from Griffin? Or that Space X had an easier time of getting government co tracts because he was buddies with Griffin?
- wazer5 4y agoBesides COTS and CRS contracts, Griffin connected Elon with his early employees (incl Tom Mueller) and gave the reusable rocket idea. Dwarfing all that in the long term is the missile defense system (Space Development Agency project) that Griffin started in 2019.
- kidme5 4y ago"SpaceX also designs and launches custom military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a new missile defense system in low Earth orbit. The constellation would give the United States new capabilities to sense, target and potentially intercept nuclear missiles and hypersonic weapons launched from anywhere on Earth. Both China and Russia brought concerns to the United Nations about the program, and various organizations warn it could be destabilizing and trigger an arms race in space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Starlink
- swayvil 4y agoI must not tweet bad tweets.
- 4oo4 4y agoWill this cover his own hateful and negative tweets as well? And what are the new policies for what constitutes hateful/negative?
- somat 4y agoA question, I am used to monetized in the youtube sense, where you get a portion of your videos ad revenue, I did not think twitter did this. Does demonetized mean something different there?
- Pxtl 4y agoThis is his worst idea yet, it's basically the ideal approach for bullying. Only the target will see the bullying so their supporters will be ignorant, and continuous bullies will be permitted to continue indefinitely. People treating this as a backpedal or a commitment to keep back moderation have not thought this through -- this is a fig-leaf.