4 ms·
Posting online consists of an individual speaking and a platform publishing it. Social media is not a passive medium like a telephone; it acts as an editor, al
by biophysboy 4y ago
Posting online consists of an individual speaking and a platform publishing it.
Social media is not a passive medium like a telephone; it acts as an editor, albeit algorithmically.
In my opinion, the fact that speech online has this dual nature is why there is so much debate about it. Here's a mock interaction...
Individual: "You shadowbanned me. Why?"
Platform: "We don't want to publish you 1 billion times on the internet"
Individual: "Then don't be an editor. Don't give people special treatment."
Platform: "We tried that at first; it did not go well. I can make my platform however I want to."
Individual: "But there are only handful of people making choices that affect billions."
Platform: "The vast majority of these people are not banned or censored"
Etc etc, the debate never ends, because the two sides have opposing financial interests and political opinions/values.
- gnicholas 4y agoThis is perhaps true for social media in general, but less so for twitter. For example, twitter doesn't "publish you 1 billion times on the internet" unless you have a million followers. It's less convincing to say "because we don't want to transmit your message to the 1 billion people who actively chose to follow you". How does this argument fare when it comes to email? Should I expect gmail to inspect my messages and not deliver them if they don't like what I'm talking about?
- guelo 4y agoThe default algorithmic twitter feed is filled with tweets from people you don't follow. Plus there's all the "trending" and other engagement features that boost tweets.
- gnicholas 4y agoSure, and I don't think anyone would say "shadowbanning" is when your tweets don't show up in the timelines of people who don't follow you, or in the trending section. It's about down-weighting in the feeds of people who do follow you.
- biophysboy 4y agoFirst, I'm not on team platform; apologies if my message implied this. Most of the controversial decisions by platforms have been about people with millions of followers. I also exaggerate when saying "billions"; it can be thousands. I think email is different because it is a much more passive technology. It doesn't have a news feed, just things like spam filters, etc
- andsoitis 4y ago> twitter doesn't "publish you Worth noting that Twitter just announced that users will see more tweets from people they don’t follow: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/30/twitter-recommended-tweets/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/30/twitter-recommended-tweets...
- gnicholas 4y agoGood to know. Hopefully it won't affect the reverse chron feed!
- amadeuspagel 4y agoTwitter has a "latest tweets" mode, where you see all the tweets from people you follow in reverse chronological order.
- anotherevan 4y agoRegarding shadow banning: In just the last hour I came across the concept of "heaven banning" which tickles me. https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561 https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561 (Note: The article in the image is fake, hence the word "hypothetical" in the tweet.)
- wutbrodo 4y agoThe first time I read about this, I got a strong feeling of Ellisonian existential dread.
- mk_stjames 4y agoCurious, when you say 'Ellisonian existential dread'.. are you referring to Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) or to Harlan Ellision, the Scifi writer (e.g. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream)? Because... it works for both in this case I think.
- Gigachad 4y agoYou can not be your own platform on the internet. As we have seen, they will go after your CDN, then your domain name, even your personal phone number and email address, then they will go after random ISPs getting them to drop packets to your site. We can accept that social media platforms can engage in censorship. But net neutrality needs to be restored so ISPs can’t disrupt legal traffic.