Or they will have justification for removing "problematic" politicians because their userbase said so. You know, democracy. A userbase that already leans one way...
I was thinking for world leaders' tweets, it should strictly be news, not popularity contests, not hype machine, not rage-inducing machine. I'm thinking of making it strictly news.
In terms of how people can get the world leader's news (tweets). Maybe something like news feed on their twitter feed, like Youtube has some local news on my feed even though I don't subscribe to anything.
No one would be able to see the world leader's tweets in their home feed. They would have to go to the specific world leader's page (or use a 3rd party app too once again see Tweets from the world leaders in the home feed).
The practical effect would be that only people who are very interested in a world leader (and bots) would retweet them. This would make the Twitter experience even more insular.
I actually wanted to suggest the opposite. Make everyone play by the same rules. Remove blue checkmarks. Anything you read could be a lie or someone pretending to be someone else, when taking things at face value is unsustainable one has to learn to think critically.
Of course, this would be against Twitter's interests. They’d rather fit authorities’ stereotypes as to how a public communication channel should behave, and be normalized that way. Safer, more shareholder value.
That's discrimination, unpopular as this may be, world leaders are also people. To fairly implement what you suggest, twitter must make a rule that political personalities must post political content while in office on a dedicated "world leader" handle
>To fairly implement what you suggest, twitter must make a rule that political personalities must post political content while in office on a dedicated "world leader" handle
I struggle to see a problem with this. A political personality making political statements should do so from an account representing the office, for instance, @POTUS. That account should belong to the office, not the individual. Maybe state and corporate accounts should be treated differently than personal accounts.
Yes. That is what i am saying. I think that's fair and good in theory, even if i personally don't think twitter should take that direction. For one thing, it will be hard to moderate and set clear boundaries.
World leaders in developed countries should not be depending on Twitter or private media companies at all.
There is no good reason why the President of the United States cannot publish his (in the case of Trump, ill-formed) thoughts directly to whitehouse.gov.
We should demand and expect that governments publish directly to the web in an immutable way that is archived to satisfy our duty to history.
Twitter made things worse by hiding Trump’s previous tweets. Every voter should be required to read every damn one of them.
Twitter really was horrible, it enabled Trump's keyboard warrior persona. He was too chickenshit (or lazy) to actually say things with a camera and press in front of him, but with Twitter he can just shit post with no consequence.
Agreed. This is so if they’re questioned by Congress at some point they can say “we regret our transgressions, and have reformed by asking the community what we should do better”
I think the streamer you're referring to was just the focal point and scapegoat for a lot of the outrage over the very unequal and sometimes disturbing way Twitch moderates content.
I agree people were already mad but you would have to go pretty far out of your way to find someone with worse optics, she definetely brought a lot of heat to it herself.
We can only know this for certain looking back. Knowing this looking forward is often cynicism, and it's a trap imho
EDIT: The above are mostly something I try to keep in mind with government public consultations. I acknowledge that cynicism is a little more understandable for private industry, as they are not even in theory rooted in anything but shareholder value-maximization, but gov is at least ostensibly aspiring for public good.
That's where it gets interesting, though. Assuming you have a democratically elected official with progressive views in any direction, and they're telling people to act for their self-interest, but the current zeitgeist overall is the given idea is immoral or otherwise objectionable, then what process do you use to make the judgement other than an arbitrary one that supplants the "rule of law"?
Consider if Biden dropped a tweet saying "don't observe DST."
That could be dangerous, right? You've got two distinct groups of people that for some reason or another fail to coalesce, all "hell" breaks loose because some people are showing up to work at different times, logistical break down... Do you squelch him? And how does that compare to a non-violent break-in at the capitol to show congress that their representation of the general public is failing a given demographic?
Personally I think that the channel should be wide open to anything but the most unbearable aspects of communication, like child exploitation. You've got no chance of convincing a white supremacist that his worldview is askew without engaging in a conversation and logically defeating his assertions, not to mention the fact that publicly shaming the ideology (while jointly defeating it) in a widely available forum is certainly the best prophylactic. Instead the "acceptable" rhetoric is one-sided which alienates anybody that has the audacity to even ask the questions proposed, while destroying their ability to come about a rational conclusion through empirical observation. That channel should be equivalently wide for politicians which the people have elected to represent them up to the extent of tangible action to break the law up to the barrier of reason, e.g. meaningfully inciting violent actions against individuals or groups.
And this is all precipitated by the fact that Twitter and the like are commodifying speech, which is a genuine hazard as it creates a serious hurdle at the intersection of liberty and commercial interest. Commercial interests want inoffensive discussion which appeals to the widest possible band of individuals, meaning that the content and discussions are only allowed to span a narrow width, generally. It is not in any meaningful way acting in the public interest at that point, and only seeks to, through largely automatic processes, extend and crystallize the status quo which is genuinely harmful as we're doing little more than discussing how to spin in place at that point. This is driven even further through deplatforming (active or passive) extremist viewpoints, and exposing them disproportionately with algorithmic processes.
I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands.
All that make me think that even tough you're right that the end result will not be democratic, I wouldn't throw them the stone and accuse them of acting in bad faith.
I like the comparison to unclaimed land. While other industries are heavily regulated, requiring legal compliance and investment, Internet publishing is still largely open. In my view this is one of the reasons why the online service economy is booming in the US, where others are in decline.
They banned a sitting president of the United States and yet have allowed for years known despots, genocidal regimes, and terrorists groups to operate with impunity. Bad faith is Twitter's modus operandi until they show otherwise.
Aren't these glamorous tech companies supposed to be employing from the pool of the highest echelons of intellectualism? How is it that they have such exceedingly large valuations but they can't manage to deploy a rationale by which to manage their user-based content?
It is virtually impossible to not offend anyone, so they choose from the basket of all potential customers or products which they believe will be most profitable. If the ~~nazis~~ alt-right were making them more money than centrists and leftists, they wouldn't have banned them by citing freedom of speech and expression. However, their analysts probably deemed that losing the rest of the user base through the #cancel culture isn't worth it.
That argument proves too much, I think. It seems analogous to the question of "Why would anyone ever want higher taxes? If they think the optimal tax rate is higher, they can just pay more taxes."
If one company takes a more principled approach to moderation, and that more principled approach is harmful to revenue, that company will be outcompeted by companies with whatever moderation policies optimize for engagement / revenue / growth. As a result, in the absence of legislation, you get adverse selection i.e. the dominant platforms will be the ones that optimize for engagement/revenue/growth, rather than the ones with good moderation policies.
If you instead have legislation for what "good moderation" looks like, it applies equally to all companies and mitigates the adverse selection problem.
Of course, it is still entirely possible for bad legislation to introduce worse problems than the adverse selection problem. It depends on the object level of what exactly the legislation is, rather than being a blanket "legislation bad" or "legislation good" sort of thing.
I'm speaking less about the leaders, but more of the mass. Silicon Valley has practically been deified as the brain capitol of the US, if not the world, but they're unable to meaningfully address the question? I think not, they're not addressing it, but with a sleight of hand pretending action to subdue their consumer base with a sense of security and imply a democratic process. An act of vanity, which I hope will be seen through.
Seriously this is such a BS cover their rear-end from congress move. Now they want to poll the public, get feedback, and move in a democratic fashion? It’s now after the fact they selectively decided which US presidents can be on Twitter and which cannot with zero debate or thoughtfulness of consequences of free speech.
The BBC, with its explicit "public interest" mandate, funded by public money, is constantly criticised for being simultaneously too deferential, opinionated, conservative, and liberal - and that's only in the UK.
How on earth is Twitter going to make a policy that pleases worldwide shareholders, governments (and their oppositions), and the general public?
Maybe I lack imagination, but it feels like Twitter is constantly trying to kick its inevitable fragmentation down the road.
Facebook, when I used to use it, felt like a reasonably structured glut of content. Twitter on the other hand feels like a poorly structured glut of opinions. I sometimes can't even differentiate between the original tweet, the reply, and I find it hard to know how many replies there are. It feels like trying to have a coherent conversation in the middle of an old fashioned stock exchange - virtually impossible - I think twitter's UI is at least partly to blame for this.
I think Twitter's problem is that there isn't enough feel good content. Facebook shows you the dark pattern engagement content, but they also have pictures of your family, kids selling girl scout cookies, 10 minute videos about how to turn ramen noodles into a combine harvester, etc.
Twitter only has the dark pattern engagement content and it makes people sick after too long. Maybe they should buy a Flicker type platform just to try and tone down the outrage a bit.
I think they should bring out personalized, customizable and curatable blocking/block-lists for both accounts and topics, and perhaps content sentiment as well.
E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow.
Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
I believe that you are asking for a more isolated filter bubble here. This is nice when it’s all positive but never engaging with opposing viewpoints is a serious problem. Polarization and atomization make it hard to cooperate as a society.
If you have a "no liberals" filter, you'll get a worse bubble. But if you implement it as a "no politics" filter, you can get all the benefits without directly affecting bubbles.
"No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
Any time I see people make sweeping claims about what the content on some social media site/app "is", I feel compelled to point out that your Twitter and my Twitter are likely much more different than you realize. Because the UI looks the same, people naturally assume the content is similar, but your experience is highly dependent on who you follow.
My Twitter feed is 50% pixel artists sharing beautiful content, 30% programming language people having interesting discussions on language nerd stuff, 10% authors talking about fiction, and 10% politics and other stuff. I get a lot of feel good content.
But that's because I chose to make my Twitter feed be that by who I follow. Reddit and YouTube are likewise highly nourishing to me. I do wish social media sites made it easier to curate like this, but I disagree with the notion that there is any singular view of what content on these sites is like.
Heck, an individual's Twitter experience can be radically changed just by making some changes. A few years ago, I had pretty much abandoned Twitter. Like the GP says, it was a cesspool of negativity. And then I heard someone talk about the "cocktail party" strategy: "If you were at a cocktail party and ended up next to this person, would you hang out and chat? Or would you excuse yourself and go somewhere else?"
I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
Maybe, although I'm quite curious to see how people who mostly talk about old computers and crazy debugging stories are going to do that.
Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.
Huh. While I was using Twitter I was mostly exclusively following people I agreed with. I was still angry all the time, because those people were posting stuff like "another cop kills another civilian" or "the US military defended freedumbz by bombing more brown people, yay!".
Following only people you want to chat with doesn't necessarily mean talking about nice things.
People you agree with politically are not always the people you would want to talk to at a party. I know many people who I would agree with ideologically but bring it up so often that it is difficult to actually have a conversation with them about anything else. I know people I don’t agree with in some topics but agree with in others, and I know some people I talk to specifically because I disagree with them but would like to hear what they have to say. This isn’t to say that you should immediately go out and surround yourself with people who don’t agree with you, but I’ve found that exclusively selecting for people you agree with is pretty bland. Try to mix it up a little and you’ll probably appreciate it.
>> a policy that pleases worldwide shareholders, governments (and their oppositions), and the general public?
They won't. The final policy will please twitter shareholders. That means they will not do anything that might give rise to a competitor service. They aren't going to kick out the alt-right. They aren't going to kick out Trump 2.0. If Putin wants a Twitter account he is going to get it. If Trump wins office again he too will get one too. Twitter is not in the business of angering people in power, people who could put barriers between twitter and profits.
It's already fragmenting. The far-right has essentially left the platform at this point, the mainstream-right is feeling a strong pull in that direction I think.
I would suggest that besides concentrating on the world leader issue that Twitter consider some sort of expiration, short at that, for all tweets so as to put down this revenge/vengeance oriented the woke have created.
people complain about fake news and rightly so but the cycle of hatred that results from these purity tests applied to anyone because of past tweets is worse
We need a public place where anyone can get verified and only verified people are allowed to interact (in addition to more traditional as well as anonymous spaces)
Except maybe it's a bit more complex than your ridiculously simplified pithy one-liner.
Seriously, what the fuck is that even supposed to mean? It's literally duckspeak – a reflexive slogan uttered without any thought. It elides all of the complexity of understanding what free speech is, or what a platform is.
Oddly, until recently they were. It only became different recently and obv xkcd popularized the idea, but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech.
Everyone in the world has the right to free speech because they can literally talk and say whatever they want, but if the society that speech is spoken in doesn’t agree to allow that speech to be spoken freely (as in beer) it’s not a truly progressive society. Apparently the brits have been struggling with this for years[0]
>but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech.
Given that every government in history which has recognized the concept of "free speech", including the United States, has regulated and even outlawed some forms of speech, and given that "consequence" is a natural, emergent property of societies and the fact that humans are social, emotional animals who don't process speech as mere passive data, one must come to the conclusion that free speech has never existed at any point in space or time.
That being the case, one wonders why everyone is so concerned now about something that, clearly, humanity has never needed up until this point?
When did I claim to be okay with every loss of speech?
Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. Despite common arguments, sites like Twitter are not the public commons, nor do they hold a monopoly on human communication, nor do they control public discourse.
Even Benjamin Franklin sometimes turned away people who wanted to publish slanderous material in his newspaper. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate all platforms to carry your speech - it never has. Twitter being able to moderate content and ban accounts - even the personal accounts of Presidents of the United States - does not violate freedom of speech.
> Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not.
This is false. As you said in your previous comment the government has always had a very heavy hand in regulating what people could and couldn't do, it's very much regulated who you can do business with and what you can stock and sell and to whom. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a society that protects the rights of both the buyer and seller as much as possible.
Your two comments contradict each other in such a stark way it quite frankly makes my head spin.
None of that really follows, the idea that because something hasn't existed until now proves it isn't necessary is again a reductive argument that simply doesn't make sense.
There are many things that didn't exist and thus, were unnecessary for "modern" living and yet once they were invented and adopted it would be hard to go without them.
You've stated what you think freedom of speech isn't, but can you actually define what you think freedom of speech is?
It's funny how this mantra of "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences of speech" seemingly originated at precisely the same time that big tech corporations and social media mobs began punishing people en masse for lawful (but politically incorrect) speech.
It seems like doublespeak really. I.e.: "Welcome, no tresspassing"
I'm on mobile so I can't provide sources too well, but it's fairly clear if you study the American Founding.
Source: political science undergraduate
Of course you are welcome to form your own interpretation, but I feel it is a fairly clear distinction. Happy to further this discussion when I'm at a computer with more access to info.
Indeed I have read through Farrand's records of the constitutional convention, I've read many of the founders personal writings (both federalists and anti federalists), I've read many works of prominent Enlightenment thinkers, and I've studied much of the history of the oppression and censorship of the Church which helped inspire the ideal of freedom of speech.
Nowhere have I seen anything resembling "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences", except from the Church.
After all, heretics and blasphemers were indeed free to say what they wanted to say (they had larynxes, after all), but they were not free from the consequences of their speech.
Please do tell me what you think freedom of speech is, in your own words, when you are at a keyboard.
In my own words, freedom of speech is an ideal, like the ideal "that all men are created equal". This ideal seeks to liberate human kind from being systematically punished for expressing offensive ideas, because ever so many of the greatest human revelations were profoundly offensive to society at large at their inception.
"I cannot contemplate human affairs, without laughing or crying. I choose to laugh. When People talk of the Freedom of Writing Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist, But it must be hundreds of years after you and I Shall write and Speak no more."
I think we may actually be on the same side, then - my implication was that America is "freedom from persecution," _not_ freedom from criticism and/or private consequence. When I say _private_ consequence, I primarily mean if you say something that the owner of a restaraunt you dine in does not like, you can get kicked out from that private enterprise, but the government cannot stifle your ability to say the words that got you kicked out nor can you go to jail for face legal action.
TL;DR I believe we may be thinking of different ideas of "consequence" :)
Defenders of slavery used that same "private enterprise" line to assert their rights over people; as did restaurant owners 100 years after slavery was abolished to justify kicking out people with offensive skin color.
It was not an existing law, but the ideal "that all men are created equal" which abolishonists and civil rights leaders pointed to in their quest for equality.
Likewise it is the ideal of freedom of expression which we are pointing to now that should protect humans from being banned from the digital town square for expressing offensive ideas.
Your response was less constructive then the one you replied to, not only did you fail to adequately explain what is wrong with asking a platform to be a place for free speech, but you failed while using truly reductive decisive rhetoric that just serves to make someone dig into their position instead of being open to hearing why they’re wrong.
"Be a free speech platform" means nothing by itself. It's a sentence without meaning. It communicates no ideas – because we all already like the idea of free speech, and the challenge is to understand what that means in a modern context.
(Of course, underneath all that, it's a dogwhistle. We all know what "free speech platform" means, because it's what Parler called itself. I'm doing the parent the justice of assuming they weren't deliberately using a tired dogwhistle phrase.)
Are you suggesting that these international platforms should keep track of location (and nationality?) of everyone who is on them and apply different standards based on that?
Or just on the basis of the one or more places the company itself is are incorporated? Will they shop around for communication laws the same way they do for taxes?
How about we all admit that this is a simplistic position that flies in the face of centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?
> > centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?
> platform that removes illegal speech
What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not.
EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence?
How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.
This false dichotomy of authoritarian governance or 'cesspool' keeps coming up.
There exist other options.
Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement.
Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it.
Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient.
These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.
World leaders can tweet, they shouldn't be able to untweet. It's public record.
They shouldn't be able to block users - If the feedback is so bad, then twitter should be banning those users under regular T&C's
The T&C's that apply to me should apply to them. If they cross they line they should be handled like I would etc.
World leaders should not "be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter", they should be held to a higher standard; if some random loser writes a Tweet justifying genocide, reasonable people can disagree on whether that loser should be banned. But when it's people who are backed by a military which can actually carry out a genocide (and, e.g. in the case of Netanyahu and his ministers, the Assad regime, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Burmese military junta, has already been carrying one out for years), they must be banned, full stop.
I'd like to see the tweet and read their genocidal rhetoric directly. If the alternative is a news outlet digesting and editorializing their words, I'd rather hear it directly from the source.
Sometimes the genocidal rhetoric is not subtle, but sometimes they market it as "protecting minorities" (Assad, who is decimating the Sunni Muslim majority), or "liberating women from being baby factories" (Chinese Communist Party, on forced sterilization of Uighur women).
Hitler and Mussolini were not debated, they were defeated. Dissent is good if it's your only option, but we're talking about external parties not under the control of these "leaders".
This came up when Trump was threatening social media with restraints. I wrote this at the time and haven't changed my view:
For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.
In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
So absent power dynamics, speech shouldn't be free? I rather think of it as a fundamental human faculty which one has the right to exercise. Not everything is about your hierarchies.
What is free speech? I argue it is not even a concept. Concepts divide people. There is no person against free speech. Please don't bring up Russia and China. I've been to these countries and people they cherish free speech;they just have freely spoken to have an explicit authoritarian ruler. Free speech is conversation to have out of laziness.
You might want to aim your comment bot more accurately next time. I offered a definition which your copypasta conspicuously fails to address, and your geopolitical tangent has no relevance.
This is pretty extraordinary. Close to 6 years of Donald Trump brazenly breaking twitter rules as candidate and president. Repeated violations, culminating in a riot at the capitol. March of 2021 and Jack Dorsey rocks up "Hey guys, I think we should think about our policies with regard to politicians".
Suppose you run a message broadcasting service hosting three hypothetical world leaders. One posts propaganda about an ongoing genocide in his country, namely that the genocide is highly beneficial to those being genocided. The second posts racist messages threatening another country with annihilation. The third posts that his recent election loss was "stolen," and subsequent to these posts a few of his supporters stage a riot in the capital (without coordination from the leader).
Which messages do you allow? Which do you censor? And which world leaders do you ban?
Politicians like everyone else are entitled to their own opinions, but they aren't entitled to their own facts. We should hold all of our politicians accountable to provide factual information.
It's one thing to say "I believe the election was rigged based on facts X,Y,Z" and quite another thing to say (real tweet): " “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
Maybe world leaders need two accounts/streams, one for 'official' government business and one for political rhetoric which has some sort of limitations (can't be RT'd, etc.)
Isn’t spreading political disinformation, hate speech, etc. not allowed on Twitter? I think that’s generally a good policy; and they should just treat this kind of speech from political leaders, the rich and powerful, etc. the same way they’d treat it coming from a nobody.
The most visible accounts should be the ones subject to the highest level of scrutiny and moderation. Doing it the other way round is bizarre, IMO.
We’re living in a time where most people on Earth have an unprecedented ability to broadcast their opinions to the world, effectively free of editorial oversight, and I think a lot of people forget that. Especially given how quickly this change has happened, it’s kind of nuts to see so much hand-wringing over media platforms exercising a bare minimum editorial oversight to prevent incoherent toxic bullshit from dominating the information landscape they host.
On Twitter you can find promoted full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies and government officials. These same governments ban Twitter in their own countries and would never allow similar content on their own platforms. Twitter's solution here is to insert a tiny "State affiliated" footer text below the account name.
Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being allowed to broadcast propaganda ads bought and paid for by the Soviet Union?
"Seriously because the aliens are already here and I have proof!" -- Joking aside sometimes pushing a truth whether it's true or not has an impact on inflaming conspiracy theories... Youtube's covid, election banners for example IMO did more to incite deep state conspiracy then to reduce it... "One often meets their fate on the path they take to avoid it..." - Kung Fu panda
I was struck by the Chinese embassy that got banned a couple months ago. They said that their fight against radical islam is good for uighur women.. which is propaganda but also the exact same propaganda that western interventionists use all the time. One is ok, the other is not.
Like I said, the 'good guys' propaganda is good :)
If you track down some of the claims you're making, you'll find that most of them originate with this guy Adrian Zenz who is literally a paid propagandist for his job at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation".
Not that anybody who claims to be 'liberating the muslims' is ever up to any good. But some more objective measures might be things like, what is the body count associated with either nation, or has the population been going up or down in a given region.
I don't think it's comparable - however yes, bad actors and bad actions are decentralized to a degree. The different between China and the US is the CCP is in "permanent" tyrannical control vs. the US et al have democratic elections and at least the society, the people, have the chance to evolve society to elect better people who will steer the ship better towards the ideal global society.
Electoral politics in the US has done nothing to stop the US from invading countries around the world (particularly in the Middle East) for the past half a century+. Who would I vote for if I wanted to stop bombing people? There is no one.
Also consider that Chinese narrative of Counter Insurgency / Deradicalization is the majority diplomatic position with plurality of UN support. The opposition to XinJiang block is not only smaller, but the "genocide" position is also currently the absolute minority position. It's a case where Twitter content policy goes out of the way to align with US propaganda.
Of course, Twitter DID take action against a Western leader who was leading an attempted coup, and they got absolutely creamed by the “freedom of speech” folks for doing so. So Twitter has been willing to draw the line for Western leaders as well.
But that raises a good point: if the media outlets in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion (I won’t even mention the 2001 Afghanistan invasion as there just was not the same level of meaningful opposition) had stood up to Bush’s propaganda even with the limp-wristed[0] way Twitter stood up to Trump’s, perhaps we wouldn’t have been dragged so deep into Middle East interventionism to begin with.
I guess it depends on how you split it, there's not a significant population of Uyghur nationalists of twitter. It's mostly westerners using them as a bludgeon to try and strike the chinese.
Our lies are probably the most harmful as we have the world's largest military and it's deployed worldwide. Do you not remember the NYT lying to get the Iraq War started? I can't think of a more devastating instance of propaganda.
So once again, along with naming the CCP vs. naming China as the bad actor, we need to instead of naming the US as the bad actor, we have to name the industrial complexes including the duopoly that has been allowed to develop over the last many decades - allowing the duopoly's two core narratives to be the majority of what people get fed through mainstream media conglomerates (the media industrial complex) owned by a handful of individuals.
If we don't correctly, accurately label who is the real target - our anger will be misplaced - and that is something the bad actors want to have happen, and will certainly perpetuate themselves. And we don't learn then. Quick soundbites spread easily but it's not the way.
You might want to take a look at Voice of America, a Congress-funded network that broadcasts almost exclusively outside the US as US propaganda: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
Sorry, I'm not making the connection to what OP was saying. Can you expand? Does Voice of America pretend to be a domestic news source to the areas it broadcasts?
No it doesn’t. I think the OP was making a what-about counter argument, that the CIA was blasting pro-NATO radio programs into the Eastern Block. Of course the Soviets hated this and constantly tried to jam the signal so I think this example supports the root comment that most governments have a serious interest in curtailing adversarial propaganda.
Protip about wiki links. Posting the mobile link loads the mobile site for both desktop and mobile users however posting the desktop link will load the appropriate version for both desktop and mobile users. Always post the desktop version link.
I always take care to remove m. from a wiki link I'm sharing if I'm using a mobile device.
Not sure if you have read or watched VOA as of late but there is a lot of "America bad" content in there as well. If it's propaganda, it sure is doing a bad job at it.
Even the folks who worked for the VOA and its parent the
United States Information Agency acknowledge that was created as a Cold War propaganda channel[1]. The broadcasts were heavily influenced by the CIA. The agency was reorganized in 1999 and the USIA abolished, but it's still mostly about presenting the State Department's view of international news.
It's possible to be completely accurate and show no obvious bias, but be propaganda by careful choice of what is and is not mentioned and how it is framed. The best propaganda doesn't isn't obviously propagandistic, it simply sets the agenda according to a pre-determined point of view.
> full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies
twitter is available freely on the Internet in any country that doesn't block it. with that in mind it's extremely difficult to remain "neutral" or be expected to be the arbiter of truth.
there are some obvious (easy) ways to implement constraints against state-affiliated propaganda outlets but with the above in mind what is "propaganda" to a European audience might just be news in a FVEY country. facebook has the same problem and I think it's not solvable in a "fair" way.
Say if they really went after anything that is "propaganda" should they also be pointing out that Bellingcat is having very strong ties with Atlantic Council (and collaborates with GCHQ), or should @NatSecGeek be called out for only doxing non-US organizations and individuals? There simply are too many small players that participate in InfoOps and their alignment isn't always as straight forward.
note: I personally think both bellingcat/NatSecGeek do excellent work but none of them are unbiased (or unaffiliated) which means they will at times end up as useful idiots (whether it suits them or not).
Why does it matter if propaganda is coming from a foreign state actor or domestic groups, like activist groups that seek to shut down any opposing views?
A good article by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, on "credible neutrality" as a guiding principle for the protocol:
https://nakamoto.com/credible-neutrality/
Twitter has long lost credible neutrality as a platform which is why it's ultimately going to die.
I understand "credibly neutral" here to mean the idea that you appear neutral, whether or not you are actually neutral. Compare with: plausible deniability.
The goal of credible neutrality is to convince people that you have acted fairly and gain political acceptance [Vitalik does this by appealing to the standards for property ownership under capitalism]; the goal is not to act fairly [as Vitalik softly admits, the true goal is to do whatever is necessary to support (his) wealth accumulation].
I would much rather credible neutrality did not exist as a justification for particular actions, and that it faced automatic criticism.
Give Bob 1000 coins and admit that you did so, rather than set up a system of rules which is designed for Bob to receive 1000 coins. The use of passive voice is an indicator that someone has disguised their responsibility.
I have quite literally no idea what the correct answer is, and I reckon anyone who claims to have an easy answer is lying, because the landscape is fundamentally different to anything we've seen before.
Twitter is both a public forum and a private enterprise. The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation. Is it the responsibility of the platform to prevent its abuse to that end? Or is it essential for it to remain entirely neutral? How does that work across different legal, social, and political environments? How does that apply differently to democratically-elected leaders? What constitutes harassment or targeted abuse? What counts as impersonation or parody?
It feels like it's going to be a fairly unpleasant period while we figure that all out.
>The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation.
If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing?
I find the premise troubling. People can disagree and interpret events differently. Without that, there's very little to discuss.
> If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing?
We're realizing that it's no longer as simple as "people should just know better", because the forces they're up against are armed with all the latest psychological tricks to induce belief even in people who /do/ know better.
People have been lying to and manipulating others since the beginning of recorded history. Even mythological figures exhibited deceptive behavior. The Pulitzer prize is named for the creator of "yellow journalism". There's nothing new here.
This reads as "this time is different", an appeal to special circumstances without addressing the crux of the issue, subjectivity & diversity of opinion.
In practical terms this requires "fact checkers" supposedly impartial arbiters of objective truth. We can disagree on philosophy and the nature of man, but this premise is a non-starter for me.
In addition to the bad actors (these are the same throughout time) themselves, they now have capabilities that _are_ different:
- They can be heard at will be heard by millions to billions of people
- They can track in real time whether their messaging is working, and adjust it for maximum effect using everything we've learned about human psychology in the last century
- They can target their messaging at scale, varying it to match what will work best for a given narrowly-defined demographic
- They can do all of this with an iteration cycle of hours, instead of days or weeks
Where is the historical parallel that invalidates the premise?
Advances in technology do not address the underlying philosophical or moral premises. The pushback against the Gutenberg press was argued along similar lines. Technocrats appear to be the new priestly class.
Narrowly focusing on technological minutiae deliberately misses the point.
I remember when the rallying cry of opensrc and hacker culture was: "information wants to be free". Shameless political FUD is the same parlor trick played again and again. Disappointing to see it getting so much play here.
If you're opening the door for invites to prove a negative, then perhaps you can prove that your rationale isn't misinformation? In terms of real politik, it buttresses authoritarian "fact check" narratives.
We disagree and that's not only healthy and normal, but the entire point. We should be able to disagree without characterizing arguments or subjective observations as misinformation deviating from an authority's concept of "objective truth".
Much like the global economy made morality an infinitely complex problem (thanks The Good Place), the global Internet made digesting information equally as complex.
We don't equip people to do it through our education systems in America. What we're doing is sending millions of people out into the world, wholly unprepared to navigate it successfully, which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
I don't personally blame Twitter. This is such a gigantic problem, that pinning it to a single source is just understating what's happening. If America wants to survive another 100 years, it will have to find a way to fix its "lack of critical thinking skills" problem in a way that flips the statistics, which is more or less impossible, without swift and decisive action to make large changes to how we educate our children.
Yes, the state has an incentive to create critical thinkers, the incentive is just obfuscated substantially from the average decision maker in "the state".
I don't believe so. The state by its nature wants to find equilibrium like practically every other system. One of the paths of least resistance is the manipulation of the public into an unthinking, docile, and generally inert individual. This makes everything much more predictable and controllable, which brings it closer to equilibrium.
You could intuit this sort of outcome, perhaps, from a reading of "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Humans don't really do well with probability, we want definitive binary outcomes that aren't reliant on probability. We want a quiet, well defined day to day. Politicians want the same thing (alongside a disproportionately large allotment of control and wealth in return). Want though, is the difficulty, because the reality is that the underpinnings of practically all human functions and the world in itself are fairly chaotic.
I think you're under the impression it's a noble goal in the name of progress, but [genuine] progress is disruptive in every field. That disruption breaks the equilibrium, and makes the quiet day a rather loud lifetime.
The state is people. There is no difference between "the state" and "its people". If its people are manipulated, the state is manipulated itself.
The state wants compliance as much as the people want compliance, which is certainly one incentive, but it exists in parallel with other, competing incentives.
"The state" doesn't exist as an independent thinking body. I don't think it's healthy to treat it like it does.
I do agree though, the incentives are hidden, non-obvious. Progress is incentivized because it helps the state, and it helps the state because it helps the people.
I disagree with your premise. There has been a stratification of interests since the 70's which has isolated the state and has homogenized the state's interest with that of the elite echelon, they've intermingled to the point where they should be more accurately called the ruling class. Of course the body of the state as a whole is a different discussion, but the mind is what drives it forwards and is certainly interested, singularly, in maintaining current momentum and directionality over utilitarian or technological developments.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadThey are going to do whatever they want at the end of the day, they've given me absoloutely no confidence to believe that they want to do whats right.
Keep the ability to retweet world leaders' tweets, but prevent retweets to be added more from the retweeters.
In terms of how people can get the world leader's news (tweets). Maybe something like news feed on their twitter feed, like Youtube has some local news on my feed even though I don't subscribe to anything.
The practical effect would be that only people who are very interested in a world leader (and bots) would retweet them. This would make the Twitter experience even more insular.
Essentially their accounts should serve strictly as a broadcast of info, and nothing more.
Their tweets should be strictly treated like a one-way broadcast for them to convey info to their constituents.
Of course, this would be against Twitter's interests. They’d rather fit authorities’ stereotypes as to how a public communication channel should behave, and be normalized that way. Safer, more shareholder value.
I struggle to see a problem with this. A political personality making political statements should do so from an account representing the office, for instance, @POTUS. That account should belong to the office, not the individual. Maybe state and corporate accounts should be treated differently than personal accounts.
There is no good reason why the President of the United States cannot publish his (in the case of Trump, ill-formed) thoughts directly to whitehouse.gov.
We should demand and expect that governments publish directly to the web in an immutable way that is archived to satisfy our duty to history.
Twitter made things worse by hiding Trump’s previous tweets. Every voter should be required to read every damn one of them.
Twitter and Trump danced this together and now Twitter wants to be the good guy?
Almost like act first, ask permission later.
EDIT: The above are mostly something I try to keep in mind with government public consultations. I acknowledge that cynicism is a little more understandable for private industry, as they are not even in theory rooted in anything but shareholder value-maximization, but gov is at least ostensibly aspiring for public good.
Consider if Biden dropped a tweet saying "don't observe DST."
That could be dangerous, right? You've got two distinct groups of people that for some reason or another fail to coalesce, all "hell" breaks loose because some people are showing up to work at different times, logistical break down... Do you squelch him? And how does that compare to a non-violent break-in at the capitol to show congress that their representation of the general public is failing a given demographic?
Personally I think that the channel should be wide open to anything but the most unbearable aspects of communication, like child exploitation. You've got no chance of convincing a white supremacist that his worldview is askew without engaging in a conversation and logically defeating his assertions, not to mention the fact that publicly shaming the ideology (while jointly defeating it) in a widely available forum is certainly the best prophylactic. Instead the "acceptable" rhetoric is one-sided which alienates anybody that has the audacity to even ask the questions proposed, while destroying their ability to come about a rational conclusion through empirical observation. That channel should be equivalently wide for politicians which the people have elected to represent them up to the extent of tangible action to break the law up to the barrier of reason, e.g. meaningfully inciting violent actions against individuals or groups.
And this is all precipitated by the fact that Twitter and the like are commodifying speech, which is a genuine hazard as it creates a serious hurdle at the intersection of liberty and commercial interest. Commercial interests want inoffensive discussion which appeals to the widest possible band of individuals, meaning that the content and discussions are only allowed to span a narrow width, generally. It is not in any meaningful way acting in the public interest at that point, and only seeks to, through largely automatic processes, extend and crystallize the status quo which is genuinely harmful as we're doing little more than discussing how to spin in place at that point. This is driven even further through deplatforming (active or passive) extremist viewpoints, and exposing them disproportionately with algorithmic processes.
I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands.
All that make me think that even tough you're right that the end result will not be democratic, I wouldn't throw them the stone and accuse them of acting in bad faith.
Twitter can and do ask for user feedback all the time, without making a press release about it.
I don't find it cynical to ask why they are doing this in public - it seems likely that the parent has hit upon a good part of the reason.
If one company takes a more principled approach to moderation, and that more principled approach is harmful to revenue, that company will be outcompeted by companies with whatever moderation policies optimize for engagement / revenue / growth. As a result, in the absence of legislation, you get adverse selection i.e. the dominant platforms will be the ones that optimize for engagement/revenue/growth, rather than the ones with good moderation policies.
If you instead have legislation for what "good moderation" looks like, it applies equally to all companies and mitigates the adverse selection problem.
Of course, it is still entirely possible for bad legislation to introduce worse problems than the adverse selection problem. It depends on the object level of what exactly the legislation is, rather than being a blanket "legislation bad" or "legislation good" sort of thing.
They do have a rationale. The issue is that it's biased.
How on earth is Twitter going to make a policy that pleases worldwide shareholders, governments (and their oppositions), and the general public?
Maybe I lack imagination, but it feels like Twitter is constantly trying to kick its inevitable fragmentation down the road.
Twitter only has the dark pattern engagement content and it makes people sick after too long. Maybe they should buy a Flicker type platform just to try and tone down the outrage a bit.
E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow.
Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
"No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
Any time I see people make sweeping claims about what the content on some social media site/app "is", I feel compelled to point out that your Twitter and my Twitter are likely much more different than you realize. Because the UI looks the same, people naturally assume the content is similar, but your experience is highly dependent on who you follow.
My Twitter feed is 50% pixel artists sharing beautiful content, 30% programming language people having interesting discussions on language nerd stuff, 10% authors talking about fiction, and 10% politics and other stuff. I get a lot of feel good content.
But that's because I chose to make my Twitter feed be that by who I follow. Reddit and YouTube are likewise highly nourishing to me. I do wish social media sites made it easier to curate like this, but I disagree with the notion that there is any singular view of what content on these sites is like.
I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.
Following only people you want to chat with doesn't necessarily mean talking about nice things.
They won't. The final policy will please twitter shareholders. That means they will not do anything that might give rise to a competitor service. They aren't going to kick out the alt-right. They aren't going to kick out Trump 2.0. If Putin wants a Twitter account he is going to get it. If Trump wins office again he too will get one too. Twitter is not in the business of angering people in power, people who could put barriers between twitter and profits.
people complain about fake news and rightly so but the cycle of hatred that results from these purity tests applied to anyone because of past tweets is worse
Logistically it’s infeasible. Someone will create a database of archived tweets, or screenshots will circle the web. Etc.
They've proven to be incapable and overwhelmed about making legitimate decisions.
They should get regulated and they should stop regulating.
I think this is just a PR stunt, nothing will change that isn’t already planned before this public input session. Move along, status quo.
Seriously, what the fuck is that even supposed to mean? It's literally duckspeak – a reflexive slogan uttered without any thought. It elides all of the complexity of understanding what free speech is, or what a platform is.
Everyone in the world has the right to free speech because they can literally talk and say whatever they want, but if the society that speech is spoken in doesn’t agree to allow that speech to be spoken freely (as in beer) it’s not a truly progressive society. Apparently the brits have been struggling with this for years[0]
[0] https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
Given that every government in history which has recognized the concept of "free speech", including the United States, has regulated and even outlawed some forms of speech, and given that "consequence" is a natural, emergent property of societies and the fact that humans are social, emotional animals who don't process speech as mere passive data, one must come to the conclusion that free speech has never existed at any point in space or time.
That being the case, one wonders why everyone is so concerned now about something that, clearly, humanity has never needed up until this point?
Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. Despite common arguments, sites like Twitter are not the public commons, nor do they hold a monopoly on human communication, nor do they control public discourse.
Even Benjamin Franklin sometimes turned away people who wanted to publish slanderous material in his newspaper. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate all platforms to carry your speech - it never has. Twitter being able to moderate content and ban accounts - even the personal accounts of Presidents of the United States - does not violate freedom of speech.
This is false. As you said in your previous comment the government has always had a very heavy hand in regulating what people could and couldn't do, it's very much regulated who you can do business with and what you can stock and sell and to whom. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a society that protects the rights of both the buyer and seller as much as possible.
Your two comments contradict each other in such a stark way it quite frankly makes my head spin.
There are many things that didn't exist and thus, were unnecessary for "modern" living and yet once they were invented and adopted it would be hard to go without them.
It's funny how this mantra of "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences of speech" seemingly originated at precisely the same time that big tech corporations and social media mobs began punishing people en masse for lawful (but politically incorrect) speech.
It seems like doublespeak really. I.e.: "Welcome, no tresspassing"
Source: political science undergraduate
Of course you are welcome to form your own interpretation, but I feel it is a fairly clear distinction. Happy to further this discussion when I'm at a computer with more access to info.
Nowhere have I seen anything resembling "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences", except from the Church.
After all, heretics and blasphemers were indeed free to say what they wanted to say (they had larynxes, after all), but they were not free from the consequences of their speech.
Please do tell me what you think freedom of speech is, in your own words, when you are at a keyboard.
In my own words, freedom of speech is an ideal, like the ideal "that all men are created equal". This ideal seeks to liberate human kind from being systematically punished for expressing offensive ideas, because ever so many of the greatest human revelations were profoundly offensive to society at large at their inception.
"I cannot contemplate human affairs, without laughing or crying. I choose to laugh. When People talk of the Freedom of Writing Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist, But it must be hundreds of years after you and I Shall write and Speak no more."
-John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1817
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6790
TL;DR I believe we may be thinking of different ideas of "consequence" :)
It was not an existing law, but the ideal "that all men are created equal" which abolishonists and civil rights leaders pointed to in their quest for equality.
Likewise it is the ideal of freedom of expression which we are pointing to now that should protect humans from being banned from the digital town square for expressing offensive ideas.
"Be a free speech platform" means nothing by itself. It's a sentence without meaning. It communicates no ideas – because we all already like the idea of free speech, and the challenge is to understand what that means in a modern context.
(Of course, underneath all that, it's a dogwhistle. We all know what "free speech platform" means, because it's what Parler called itself. I'm doing the parent the justice of assuming they weren't deliberately using a tired dogwhistle phrase.)
Are we agreeing that there are in fact limits on Freedom of Speech?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat
I'm trying to understand what people mean when they say "free speech platform".
It seems to be a get out of jail free card of sorts.
"Free speech" without any limits obviously doesn't work. Where are the limits of the parent comment? The devil is in the details.
Communication platforms in the US should adhere to the US constitution.
Isn't this where the entire problem is coming from? If this were a state run service, we know the answer and can apply it easily.
The confusion is coming entirely from it being something other than the state.
Or just on the basis of the one or more places the company itself is are incorporated? Will they shop around for communication laws the same way they do for taxes?
Facebook and Twitter run websites.
Web and email hosting companies don't have an issue figuring it out. Twitter shouldn't either.
I'd like a platform that removes illegal speech, nothing else. Such a platform should be legal.
> platform that removes illegal speech
What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not.
EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence?
There are no clear answers.
Sounds conceptually great to me.
How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.
Part of the value proposition of their competitors is that they do moderate their content, to some extent.
I don't see why we should force all platforms to operate essentially without moderation.
There exist other options.
Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement.
Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it.
Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient.
These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.
Pretty simple IMO.
> "whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter".
E.g. Twitter in 2020 was rife with "inciting violence" but largely depending on your point of view/politics, and if it was "justified". Etc.
For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.
In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
That would be nice, but all they'll do is push their own agenda. They've already proven that.
Which messages do you allow? Which do you censor? And which world leaders do you ban?
It's one thing to say "I believe the election was rigged based on facts X,Y,Z" and quite another thing to say (real tweet): " “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
Maybe world leaders need two accounts/streams, one for 'official' government business and one for political rhetoric which has some sort of limitations (can't be RT'd, etc.)
The most visible accounts should be the ones subject to the highest level of scrutiny and moderation. Doing it the other way round is bizarre, IMO.
We’re living in a time where most people on Earth have an unprecedented ability to broadcast their opinions to the world, effectively free of editorial oversight, and I think a lot of people forget that. Especially given how quickly this change has happened, it’s kind of nuts to see so much hand-wringing over media platforms exercising a bare minimum editorial oversight to prevent incoherent toxic bullshit from dominating the information landscape they host.
Without metrics there is less incentive to game the system and less feedback when attempting to game it.
Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being allowed to broadcast propaganda ads bought and paid for by the Soviet Union?
Maybe we can be a little more principled than "good guy nations" and "bad guy nations" if the goal is truth?
Fighting a multi-national ground war against ISIS is a bit different then genocide against your own citizens.
If you track down some of the claims you're making, you'll find that most of them originate with this guy Adrian Zenz who is literally a paid propagandist for his job at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation".
Not that anybody who claims to be 'liberating the muslims' is ever up to any good. But some more objective measures might be things like, what is the body count associated with either nation, or has the population been going up or down in a given region.
But that raises a good point: if the media outlets in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion (I won’t even mention the 2001 Afghanistan invasion as there just was not the same level of meaningful opposition) had stood up to Bush’s propaganda even with the limp-wristed[0] way Twitter stood up to Trump’s, perhaps we wouldn’t have been dragged so deep into Middle East interventionism to begin with.
[0]It really was.
I saw reports of posts from air force bases supporting our attempted coup in Bolivia, for example.
It’s not about Uyghur nationalism (although I suppose more Uyghurs may desire that if China keeps this up) but about human rights.
This eagerness to defend the CCP is not going to help anyone abused by Western nations. One genocide does not justify another.
If we don't correctly, accurately label who is the real target - our anger will be misplaced - and that is something the bad actors want to have happen, and will certainly perpetuate themselves. And we don't learn then. Quick soundbites spread easily but it's not the way.
I always take care to remove m. from a wiki link I'm sharing if I'm using a mobile device.
I think people that call it propaganda are judging it based on the Cold War era VOA.
[1] https://archive.org/details/warriorsofdisinf0000alvi
[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/voice-america-bias-and-reliabi... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/
twitter is available freely on the Internet in any country that doesn't block it. with that in mind it's extremely difficult to remain "neutral" or be expected to be the arbiter of truth.
there are some obvious (easy) ways to implement constraints against state-affiliated propaganda outlets but with the above in mind what is "propaganda" to a European audience might just be news in a FVEY country. facebook has the same problem and I think it's not solvable in a "fair" way.
Say if they really went after anything that is "propaganda" should they also be pointing out that Bellingcat is having very strong ties with Atlantic Council (and collaborates with GCHQ), or should @NatSecGeek be called out for only doxing non-US organizations and individuals? There simply are too many small players that participate in InfoOps and their alignment isn't always as straight forward.
note: I personally think both bellingcat/NatSecGeek do excellent work but none of them are unbiased (or unaffiliated) which means they will at times end up as useful idiots (whether it suits them or not).
Twitter has long lost credible neutrality as a platform which is why it's ultimately going to die.
The goal of credible neutrality is to convince people that you have acted fairly and gain political acceptance [Vitalik does this by appealing to the standards for property ownership under capitalism]; the goal is not to act fairly [as Vitalik softly admits, the true goal is to do whatever is necessary to support (his) wealth accumulation].
I would much rather credible neutrality did not exist as a justification for particular actions, and that it faced automatic criticism.
Give Bob 1000 coins and admit that you did so, rather than set up a system of rules which is designed for Bob to receive 1000 coins. The use of passive voice is an indicator that someone has disguised their responsibility.
Twitter is both a public forum and a private enterprise. The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation. Is it the responsibility of the platform to prevent its abuse to that end? Or is it essential for it to remain entirely neutral? How does that work across different legal, social, and political environments? How does that apply differently to democratically-elected leaders? What constitutes harassment or targeted abuse? What counts as impersonation or parody?
It feels like it's going to be a fairly unpleasant period while we figure that all out.
If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing?
I find the premise troubling. People can disagree and interpret events differently. Without that, there's very little to discuss.
We're realizing that it's no longer as simple as "people should just know better", because the forces they're up against are armed with all the latest psychological tricks to induce belief even in people who /do/ know better.
This reads as "this time is different", an appeal to special circumstances without addressing the crux of the issue, subjectivity & diversity of opinion.
In practical terms this requires "fact checkers" supposedly impartial arbiters of objective truth. We can disagree on philosophy and the nature of man, but this premise is a non-starter for me.
In addition to the bad actors (these are the same throughout time) themselves, they now have capabilities that _are_ different:
- They can be heard at will be heard by millions to billions of people
- They can track in real time whether their messaging is working, and adjust it for maximum effect using everything we've learned about human psychology in the last century
- They can target their messaging at scale, varying it to match what will work best for a given narrowly-defined demographic
- They can do all of this with an iteration cycle of hours, instead of days or weeks
Where is the historical parallel that invalidates the premise?
Narrowly focusing on technological minutiae deliberately misses the point.
I remember when the rallying cry of opensrc and hacker culture was: "information wants to be free". Shameless political FUD is the same parlor trick played again and again. Disappointing to see it getting so much play here.
If you're opening the door for invites to prove a negative, then perhaps you can prove that your rationale isn't misinformation? In terms of real politik, it buttresses authoritarian "fact check" narratives.
We disagree and that's not only healthy and normal, but the entire point. We should be able to disagree without characterizing arguments or subjective observations as misinformation deviating from an authority's concept of "objective truth".
We don't equip people to do it through our education systems in America. What we're doing is sending millions of people out into the world, wholly unprepared to navigate it successfully, which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
I don't personally blame Twitter. This is such a gigantic problem, that pinning it to a single source is just understating what's happening. If America wants to survive another 100 years, it will have to find a way to fix its "lack of critical thinking skills" problem in a way that flips the statistics, which is more or less impossible, without swift and decisive action to make large changes to how we educate our children.
Does the largely state run education system have an incentive to create critical thinkers?
Institutions trend towards group think. Credentials are granted by authorities. I'm not sure we can get there using the tools at hand.
You could intuit this sort of outcome, perhaps, from a reading of "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Humans don't really do well with probability, we want definitive binary outcomes that aren't reliant on probability. We want a quiet, well defined day to day. Politicians want the same thing (alongside a disproportionately large allotment of control and wealth in return). Want though, is the difficulty, because the reality is that the underpinnings of practically all human functions and the world in itself are fairly chaotic.
I think you're under the impression it's a noble goal in the name of progress, but [genuine] progress is disruptive in every field. That disruption breaks the equilibrium, and makes the quiet day a rather loud lifetime.
"May you live in interesting times."
The state wants compliance as much as the people want compliance, which is certainly one incentive, but it exists in parallel with other, competing incentives.
"The state" doesn't exist as an independent thinking body. I don't think it's healthy to treat it like it does.
I do agree though, the incentives are hidden, non-obvious. Progress is incentivized because it helps the state, and it helps the state because it helps the people.
That being said I prefer twitter to be as hands off as possible when dealing with this.