I travel a lot and the number of countries where society has gone nuts is unbelievable.
There was a time when people who had experience working a crisis stepped in and worked it. As in things moved forward towards better solutions.
Now they spend their entire day being distracted and reacting to noise generated on social media by people who have no experience doing anything other than making noise.
If Youtube/Twitter/FB et al don't handle and own all these unintended consequences in the same manner they do software bugs we are headed to Chinese style network control very soon.
Similar to climate change, we're not doing a very good job surveying the systemic effects of allowing "unvetted" (to borrow a term) groups and individuals which now have outsized on free society.
Foreign countries now have the ability to silently carpet bomb citizenry with subversive messages that eat at our ability to effectively govern.
This article is one-sided and full of factual inaccuracies.
Leslie did not start the product safety safety and security team in 2014 -- it had been started long before he arrived. He didn't even start the engineering arm of it, which also existed long before he arrived. While I can't say so conclusively, I also do not believe he was the head of engineering at Slack. I believe that was/is Michael Lopp (@rands).
Twitter has regularly been deleting spam, bot, and fake follower clusters for years, at a massive level. A cluster of Turkish fake followers was discovered in my time there and deleting it threw off user growth numbers for the quarter and also forward-looking guidance. That predictably had a negative effect on the stock. I'm sure there was discussion about what the right thing to do was, but they took the action that hurt them financially (both at the company and individual level) over the easy path.
Twitter is not perfect, but the people I worked with there were honestly trying very hard to strike a balance between protecting free speech and removing bad actors from the system.
Btw, just to put more fact-checkable names against my claims:
Bob Lord starting the security team at Twitter. Moxie started the platform engineering wing of security. Del Harvey either started or was a very early employee that went on to lead product safety and still does so today.
Leslie started after all of these people and had a relatively short tenure. He probably did have something to do with user login (that was after my time), but that was and likely still is a very small team.
10 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 30.3 ms ] threadI travel a lot and the number of countries where society has gone nuts is unbelievable.
There was a time when people who had experience working a crisis stepped in and worked it. As in things moved forward towards better solutions. Now they spend their entire day being distracted and reacting to noise generated on social media by people who have no experience doing anything other than making noise.
If Youtube/Twitter/FB et al don't handle and own all these unintended consequences in the same manner they do software bugs we are headed to Chinese style network control very soon.
Foreign countries now have the ability to silently carpet bomb citizenry with subversive messages that eat at our ability to effectively govern.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/russ...
Leslie did not start the product safety safety and security team in 2014 -- it had been started long before he arrived. He didn't even start the engineering arm of it, which also existed long before he arrived. While I can't say so conclusively, I also do not believe he was the head of engineering at Slack. I believe that was/is Michael Lopp (@rands).
Twitter has regularly been deleting spam, bot, and fake follower clusters for years, at a massive level. A cluster of Turkish fake followers was discovered in my time there and deleting it threw off user growth numbers for the quarter and also forward-looking guidance. That predictably had a negative effect on the stock. I'm sure there was discussion about what the right thing to do was, but they took the action that hurt them financially (both at the company and individual level) over the easy path.
Twitter is not perfect, but the people I worked with there were honestly trying very hard to strike a balance between protecting free speech and removing bad actors from the system.
Bob Lord starting the security team at Twitter. Moxie started the platform engineering wing of security. Del Harvey either started or was a very early employee that went on to lead product safety and still does so today.
Leslie started after all of these people and had a relatively short tenure. He probably did have something to do with user login (that was after my time), but that was and likely still is a very small team.