The core problem is that verification comes with perks. If veryifing someone just meant "Yep, it's that person alright" I don't think there would be all these issues with twitter saying "Yep, this is really the spokesperson of the KKK" or something similar. But because there are perks it comes off more as Twitter endorsing the person as someone who has interesting things to say.
The very assertion that you must protect people from exposure to various ideas is deeply problematic and against everything the Enlightenment taught us.
The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts. The Enlightenment imagined rhetoric and persuasion as something like single combat: one man’s reason pitted against another. It didn’t imagine massively resources organizations throwing millions of dollars at studying quirks of human cognition so as to optimize the short-circuiting of reason itself.
I’m a proponent of Enlightenment values, but the bottom line lessons that we derive from those values were derived in a wildly different context. An Enlightenment for the modern day may very well look different than “old school” Enlightenment. It may very well one day shape up to being open-minded about what socioeconomic datasets you let your pet AI graze on, rather than being foolish enough to ingest slogans from all comers.
You’re not wrong, but it’s also true that at various times the written word and advances in its production and distribution were seen much the same way. Any new technology which represents a massive improvement in communication is going to radically change society in unpredictable ways. Needless to say, rapid and irreversible change is monstrous to live through especially if you’ve historically enjoyed the advantages of a previous system.
So the solution is to fight those things (with e.g. laws and education), not bring back taboos. How many times must we re-learn the lessons of the past? Censorship is not the path forward and even if you disagree, surely you can understand that, at an absolute minimum, we can't let random noisy members of the internet, or certain specific monopolies make the descision on what ideas can't be thought or expressed.
I didn't say you have to protect them. I did say you might want to not spread ideas you disagree with.
It's one thing to debate with friends at a bar. It's another to retweet something to your 6,000 followers and adding "lol dumb". At least some of those followers will disregard your comment and just absorb the message.
Just like my maths professor in high school would say. I'd show you how most of you do this wrong, but then you're just going to remember the wrong way. Let me just show you how to do it right.
Then there's the argument that any signal of approval (share, comment, retweet, engage) tells algorithmic timelines that this message gets much engagement and sharing it to a broader audience.
A key tenet of human cognition is that we agree more with things we hear more often. You can convince people of pretty much anything through sheer bruteforce of Being Everywhere. Doesn't matter if those who share agree or disagree, just that they shared.
The sad thing is that this strategy doesn't even work. It's analogous to trying to fix prices in an economy. All that does is create black markets. You end up with bubbles, preference falsification and preference cascades of increasing severity due to the illiquidity.
>I did say you might want to not spread ideas you disagree with.
Well, I can imagine one would do this in abscence of any proper argument against said ideas. Maybe you should revisit whether these ideas have some merit to them or not?
...Because that’s how Twitter used it. They didn’t offer verification to any verifiable person, it was a “big thing” with benefits. By design I would guess.
Yeah. If it was simple user verification, they would have long time ago verified the likes of Assange. Obviously they use it as a political tool, because they do verify other activists they are more in line with.
Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green check for "Valued Community Member". Give your racists, weirdos, trolls, etc the blue check and no perks if you can identify them, and reporters, politicians, whatever the green check and the perks.
I really hate how big companies get paralyzed over problems like this. A small group would have solved this the same day the realized it was an issue.
> Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green check for "Valued Community Member".
Because then we will be having this same conversation about Twitter mismanagement of green checks. Identity is not the problem. What bigots, racist, nazis and political actors are demanding is status, not recognition. Milo followers know he is who he say he is.
But that's exactly the problem. Twitter started the blue check as verification and then it slowly transitioned to mean "valuable member", through, I imagine, employees taking small steps at a time ("hey, we only blue check famous people, so we might as well report that on the shareholder meetings").
Thus, the blue check slowly became something different than intended, and realizing this and having a second check for that ("blue is only for verification!") would have solved the problem.
I agree with you, though I think the "green check" should be an internal status. They even already have a designation for them - "Very Important Tweeters", but they conflated that with verification status.
Keep the Verified checkmark, but have a separate internal flag that designates a user as a VIT. Most of the time someone will be both. But in cases like Milo, you can take away the VIT, but keep the Verified checkmark.
Pretty much. If the checkmark didn’t have benefits then it becomes gray. The only way it becomes neutral is if they genuinely mean it as a validation. Ie even the most dispicable person gets one if they are validated.
Just a query, forgive me, why not use the word "ban" instead of perma-suspend. A suspension means a kind of state between other states. Permanent suspension doesn't make sense to me with this context. perhaps it's an American English thing?
I don't think it's an American English thing. It does clarify that a suspension is temporary. Using ban instead would make the difference between a ban and suspension more ambiguous imo.
Orwell seems to indicate that some of the British were notorious for it at one point, too. From "Politics and the English Language"[1]:
"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
Permanent suspension makes it clear that it is the same thing as time-limited suspension except for being unbound in time. It makes relationships between different consequences clear, at the expense of being a less natural term for the individual state in isolation.
Twitter could have avoided so many problems by sticking to verification as they advertised it - that the blue check mark just meant you were who you said you were and nothing more. It should have provided no benefits other than followers know they're following the right person.
Using it as a stamp of approval is an absolute minefield for a public company. So far the competition is, well, incompetent, but eventually somebody's going to come along and take advantage of these kinds of mistakes.
They could just have a second badge like LinkedIn does for "influencer" or something of the like, that would convey the current benefits of the verification badge.
Yes, but it would at least stop getting in the way of
Twitter's usability like the current button does, they could verify all the celebrities and political activists that they haven't yet who people want them to, and then they could go bestowing perks on people they like, or pay them money.
Or like Facebook has with two different levels/color verification checkmarks. A gray check for verified business which doesn't mean much other than they verified a phone number, or a blue check for verified person/business/etc.. of greater importance.
I feel like these quotes simply show a reasonable, deliberative process. Of course there was confusion regarding the meaning of verification–they admitted as much. These emails are exactly what I would have expected.
They also do not contradict Twitter's public statements. Quote: “verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice, but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance.”
They may have agonized about removing Milo’s check but they’ve been handing them out willy nilly for a few years now. There are tons of business people and friends of Twitter employees with the blue check. People who would not be known outside of their social circle yet they get “verified” as if they were under any risk of impersonation whatsoever.
My personal observation is that these random blue check people skew very heavy to the left of the political spectrum, but I have no data to back that up. Certainly the people I’ve seen are much less notable than Milo though.
They should just keep verification as a technical thing, verifying that someone is who he claims to be, they can charge a small amount for the procedure and that's it, everybody happy.
As for all the other banning stuff, just take a queue from much smarter people, the founding fathers and apply the first amendment to Twitter. This way people can say whatever they want and they will not have to deal with all those procedures of who to ban and why. The American high court already ruled what is included in this first amendment so just follow their ruling and ban people if the break the low, simple.
the verification check is completely useless for me. it has forever been. is that just me?
everything twitter management does is just complete selfish bullshit. they should be a 50 people operation and do one thing: publish 140 char messages and show ads. problems solved.
52 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadThat naturally puts them in the position of having to prioritized verification, but based on what?
If it's only meant to prove identity then they should follow the lead of Keybase and verify yourself by proving control over other accounts.
I don't know that there's a fix for that.
I’m a proponent of Enlightenment values, but the bottom line lessons that we derive from those values were derived in a wildly different context. An Enlightenment for the modern day may very well look different than “old school” Enlightenment. It may very well one day shape up to being open-minded about what socioeconomic datasets you let your pet AI graze on, rather than being foolish enough to ingest slogans from all comers.
So the solution is to fight those things (with e.g. laws and education), not bring back taboos. How many times must we re-learn the lessons of the past? Censorship is not the path forward and even if you disagree, surely you can understand that, at an absolute minimum, we can't let random noisy members of the internet, or certain specific monopolies make the descision on what ideas can't be thought or expressed.
It's one thing to debate with friends at a bar. It's another to retweet something to your 6,000 followers and adding "lol dumb". At least some of those followers will disregard your comment and just absorb the message.
Just like my maths professor in high school would say. I'd show you how most of you do this wrong, but then you're just going to remember the wrong way. Let me just show you how to do it right.
Then there's the argument that any signal of approval (share, comment, retweet, engage) tells algorithmic timelines that this message gets much engagement and sharing it to a broader audience.
A key tenet of human cognition is that we agree more with things we hear more often. You can convince people of pretty much anything through sheer bruteforce of Being Everywhere. Doesn't matter if those who share agree or disagree, just that they shared.
Well, I can imagine one would do this in abscence of any proper argument against said ideas. Maybe you should revisit whether these ideas have some merit to them or not?
How can a person become not-themselves when they've been verified to be themselves already?
It made it incredibly obvious that "Verified" actually means "Morally approved by Twitter Inc."
I really hate how big companies get paralyzed over problems like this. A small group would have solved this the same day the realized it was an issue.
Because then we will be having this same conversation about Twitter mismanagement of green checks. Identity is not the problem. What bigots, racist, nazis and political actors are demanding is status, not recognition. Milo followers know he is who he say he is.
Thus, the blue check slowly became something different than intended, and realizing this and having a second check for that ("blue is only for verification!") would have solved the problem.
Keep the Verified checkmark, but have a separate internal flag that designates a user as a VIT. Most of the time someone will be both. But in cases like Milo, you can take away the VIT, but keep the Verified checkmark.
Problem solved.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/the-hard-lessons-of-blue-c...
It's an American mental gymnastics thing. When we're not inventing euphemisms to obscure our purpose we use straightforward words like "ban".
"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
[1] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
Using it as a stamp of approval is an absolute minefield for a public company. So far the competition is, well, incompetent, but eventually somebody's going to come along and take advantage of these kinds of mistakes.
They also do not contradict Twitter's public statements. Quote: “verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice, but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance.”
Is that not exactly what happened?
My personal observation is that these random blue check people skew very heavy to the left of the political spectrum, but I have no data to back that up. Certainly the people I’ve seen are much less notable than Milo though.
everything twitter management does is just complete selfish bullshit. they should be a 50 people operation and do one thing: publish 140 char messages and show ads. problems solved.