Birdwatch is a collaborative way to add helpful context to Tweets and keep people better informed
Birdwatch is a pilot program that aims to create a better-informed world. It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
It was explained in the paragraph immediately below the sentence you quoted. Here it is again:
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
I mean... they don't pay anybody for it, or actually have any sort of fact-checking right now... and they're still one of the most dominant cessp... err, social media sites.
This particular technology initiative does appear to be an effort to build a system that harnesses unpaid volunteers as fact-checkers.
However, according to today's front-page Washington Post[1] article, they are also still paying people in the "Trust & Safety" department, to do jobs including fact-checking (and presumably acting on fact-checking done by other humans, and possibly trained-model automated fact-checkers as well).
From what I can understand, the company was recently purchased by an oligarch, who then implemented massive staff cuts of around 50% generally across the board, but the "Trust & Safety" department had a lower level of layoffs, at around 15%. So human staff is apparently still involved in fact-checking, aside from the system described here.
It seems likely that fact-checking on a global "social media" network would necessarily involve various approaches and multiple layers to be effective, so the core idea of this system seems worth trying.
However, it is a difficult problem, with powerful financial and political incentives for various parties to game such a system, it will be interesting to see if this ever yields results, and if so, what those results are.
Elon is not an Oligarch, unless the US is an Oligarchy (it's not).
> An oligarch is one of the select few people who rule or influence leaders in an oligarchy—a government in which power is held by a select few individuals or a small class of powerful people.
There is considerable debate[1] about whether or not the US is, in its contemporary form, an oligarchy (including, I suppose, your (parenthetical) refutation of that notion above).
Personally, I'm persuaded by the argument that it is an oligarchy, or at least, it is more one than it is not.
Unlike some (most?) others, where the government is the seat of ultimate power and chooses its accomplices, in the US that arrangement is inverted; the very rich (the few hundred billioniares, and a few thousand of not-quite-that-rich individuals and families) excercise enormous control over the government, without having to directly participate in its execution or hold office themselves.
(And our politicians themselves almost never achieve that level of wealth; many do become rich by ordinary standards, but its clear where the actual power resides.)
So we could quibble about definitions and degrees of words like "oligarch" and "the klept" but in my view the US is clearly more toward the oligarchy end of the spectrum than the other end.
> Interesting, I remember someone on /r/slatestarcodex having the idea to rate/sort reddit comments by that metric, which I dub "sort by should-be-uncontroversial" (because normally-disagreeing people all think it's correct).
Honestly, that sorting mechanism sounds sane to me? It certainly sounds a lot saner than optimizing for engaging content (which seems to result in arguments), but I would guess is a lot less profitable (and so likely won't happen).
But like, in a world where informative comments actually were sorted highly, wouldn't that mostly obviate the need for this notes / fact checking system in the first place?
Put differently, isn't the very existence of and interest in this second system for voting on content attached to a tweet a demonstration that the primary system (for sorting replies, which are merely content attached to a tweet) sucks?
Such a scoring mechanism sounds useful at first but on websites like Reddit it would likely cause puns, cultural references and such to be even more dominant than they already are, as those are most likely to be similarly appreciated by "normally-disagreeing people".
I could only see it add much value on heavily moderated/high-effort sites like HN, where there's much less need for it in the first place.
Who watches the Birdwatchers? Joke aside that's an experiment I can appreciate at least it will show us how bot invested and deranged twitter and it's users really are. I actually thought it was launched months ago..
You can download all the data apparently, so you could watch the birdwatchers!
However although users get a permanent id it's not possible to get actual Twitter handles from these ids. So identification of who the birdwatchers are is not easy (wisely so)!
From the page: "We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information."
That'll end well! ;) Problem is that on Twitter people aren't "regular", they're either seeking their own echo chamber for confirmation bias or the opposing echo chamber to insult, so crowd sourced feedback will simply be used as a tool for either of those.
It is, but it has the opposite issue. Wikipedia isn't a place for opinions and it doesn't portray itself as a "free speech zone". It easily rejects new information. Too easily, in that "notability" can bias it towards rejecting consequential but obscure historical figures, especially from people who were marginalized at the time.
That's great for making Wikipedia safer from abject misinformation, which is a huge plus. It's less good at ongoing discoveries and news.
Part of the reason this is gettting attention right now is that its users added a note to a White House tweet that was accurate, informative, and so politically embarassing they deleted the tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472161
This is a tad different from the previous approach which involved third-party fact checkers that were, uh, visibly slanted towards the Democrats to put it lightly (and whenever a non-Democrat-aligned news source got blessed as a fact checker by a masjor social media network there was a major media storm over it).
First I've heard that one - trying to take it at face value, is the thesis that truth, equity, justice, etc should (must?) be discarded or suppressed if there is money to be made in the short term?
It's more like: focusing the marketing or intended audience of product on the smallest viable minority of potential customers with the intentional exclusion and or derision of other potential customers is not generally a profitable marketing strategy.
Exceptions that prove the rule are those that focus on exclusivity or rarity, such as products that truly only are needed/desired by a niche audience but at a higher cost to make up for the lack of broad appeal/availability.
Movies and TV shows (about which the "get woke, go broke" saying originated) don't fall under that sort of exclusivity-at-a-higher-price concept. Intentionally alienating 80% of your customer base to appeal to 20% is a risky strategy.
I have lost friends and family to this nonsense. Both literally, to antivax Covid deaths in '20-'21, and figuratively, to the insane and ever-escalating pizzagate-style conspiracy networks from which adherents rarely emerge.
Several Republican friends are dead now due to Covid because they believed the anti-truth ideas being spread by GOP media about the vaccines. Darwin awards are indeed one of the ultimate fact checkers.
Notably yesterday a birdwatcher added a note to one of Elon's tweets, and then later the explanation was removed. They do use opaque algorithms that take other birdwatchers' feedback and decide whether to keep a note. Of course, many immediately suspected Elon had it manually removed.
Regardless of whether he actually did it I think this is a fatal flaw that will prevent birdwatch from ever being trusted.
The note wasn't removed. It's still visible as a potential note; it just dropped below the threshold necessary for general display. This is not common but it's not abnormal either; it happened to one of my notes on a controversial topic.
It is centralised and only for US. I am not going to participate on any platform that is not decentralised, federated and zero trust.
In past I put a lot of effort into various forums. Well sourced information, several thousands hours of work. But very ofter it was all wasted, wiped and deleted.
Now I only write books. There are well established censorship laws. And work I put into writing book will be preserved!
Actually the internet is decentralised. It's just that a lot of people either don't know or simply aren't willing to trade convenience for ideological purity.
Anybody can run a web server at home, get a domain name, write a Twitter clone, host it and publish whatever content they like. And when you exceed your traffic limits you can take that web server, drive to your local co-located provider and in almost all cases they will let you grow that site almost ad infinitum provided the content isn't illegal.
You don't need to ask permission. You don't need to compromise your ideology. You can just do it.
But people don't want freedom or decentralisation. What they want is the ability to say anything they like and for everyone to hear it.
So the "actshually" meme comes true. Instead of reddit-style legalisms, just try to be more human and understand their perspective for a change.
People do have the desire and right to ask for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. Is it feasible today? Technically: yes, realistically: no.
Why?
Because even MORE people are needed to effectively demand the right for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. You know that. Now be nice to them, please.
Every 12-24 months there’s a five mile long line for the soapbox so all the computer nerds can get up and tell us that they’re putting a line in the sand and that federation is the only answer. Now, just as always, the world will continue spinning without them and this sort of idealism that seems completely blind to reality that for all the Smart People that have put their mind to federated / decentralised social networks, none of them are any good. Now, as always, all that make this claim will inevitably succumb to the reality that their vanity is worth more than their ideals, and will make their way back to Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate and despise both Twitter and Musk. But to act like Mastadon or any of the other attempts at this stuff appeal to people that aren’t tech / privacy wonks is tone deaf. And as much as Twitter is a ‘platform for elites to disseminate their thoughts that’s pretending to be a social network’, “publishing books” is certainly amother step in that direction.
Search doesn't really work on Mastodon and it's full of boring content. It only works if you can get all your friends to use the same server. That's impossible these days. Nobody is going to install and figure out an another app just to be on your personal mastodon instance.
Some third party forum/social media site failing to host your writing for eternity is not even slightly the same thing as censorship.
If you've written a bunch of stuff that you think is valuable and you want to make sure it's available forever then you should make a blog and host it yourself. (Which you have sort of done by writing a book, but you didn't need to go that far if all you cared about was longevity)
There's nothing quite like walking into a bookshop, library
or someones house and seeing a copy of your book.
You can see from the well thumbed edges that it's been read. It's been
around for 10 years and it will be around for another 30 or 40 (modern
bindings notwithstanding) - and some copies will probably outlive you.
The same cannot be said for the "Internet" - although I think what
Brewster Kahle has done with The Internet Archive is amazing - much of
which remains ephemeral.
Once books were the preserve of "elites". Now I think the tables are
turned. Some marginal voices get traction only through traditional
publication forms because they live in repressive technological
regimes or outside the walled gardens of the so-called "town square".
It is not the egalitarian utopia once promised.
Here's an excerpt from Digital Vegan
"With opportunities to fix our digital world from /within/ the
system vanishing, book publishing remains a bastion of open
intelligence. What you hold in your hands (or have as a non-DRM
file) may soon be one of the few remaining means to circulate
critical opinions that would quickly be censored online."
While I agree with most of the comments that it can be easily abused, if the bots can be kicked out, this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better way for all social media to work than what we have now.
In the current situation (showing most liked posts) the only common ground is good looking people (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube shorts) and most outraging posts with lies to get more likes (Twitter/Youtube)
> this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better
But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
The other day I saw "Trending in Sports: The Jews" on the Twitter trending topics page. I do not want to see that. Maybe we need the "echo chambers are better than gas chambers" slogan.
The reason echo chambers are dangerous is precisely because of the lack of dissent. Imagine politics is little more than a math problem. The actual answer is 0, but one group insists the answer can't be any smaller than 43, and another group insists there's no way it can be large than -51.
Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check.
Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history.
So does that mean it's "dangerous" for Jews not to have someone following them around debating their right to exist? After all, their continued existence might be a mistake, and their erroneous insistence on survival merely in-group virtue.
No, but it is _very_ dangerous to Jews for those people to be isolated, never have their ideas challenged, and miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints
It’s also dangerous if those ideas are widely circulated to people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.
What this comes down to is the level of good faith at play: hearing dissenting ideas is good if you’re in a place to take them seriously and the dissenter is being genuine and willing to discuss them in good faith. If those aren’t true, it’s not a win: nobody benefits from giving a liar or propagandist a podium and someone who can’t agree on some kind of objective baseline won’t be able or willing to adjust their beliefs.
> people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.
You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?
I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.
Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.
It’s more the people who might get pushed to the next level as they get positive reinforcement and, especially, as more moderate people leave because they’re tired of dealing with the zealots.
Extremists don’t care about disagreement – they’re there to talk, not listen – and if they see a few fellow travelers they’ll start to tell themselves their position is mainstream.
37% is quite a lot of support tho. It is not majority, but it is a lot in multi party parlament system. Second most popular part got 21%.
Yes, those elections were violent and also final step to power was under threat of violence. At this point, nazi were already clearly violent. Their first steps after getting power were creation of concentration camps for opposition.
Having spent most of my adult life in or near Nuremberg, I am dreading this upcoming election back home, in large part because the various possibly-armed, self-appointed ballot drop box/poll watchers who have been marinating in conspiracy theories for the last several years is just a little too reminiscent of one of the displays at the Dokumentationszentrum in the 1918-1933 section.
> Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]
This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.
If they formed a normal coalition government, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But they did not, and could not. They couldn't get 13% of the other 63% of people to side with them, even in exchange for shared political control!
And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.
I'm in favor of letting people pursue their preferences, but echo chambers are antithetical to civil society - much more dangerous than so-called misinformation (indeed, they are environments in which errors and lies are more likely to flourish), so counteracting then is a valuable goal, in my book.
I think you are diametrically mistaken and echo chambers are actually good for civil society because they allow the illusion that people outside your ingroup are basically good. I think what happened is our echo chambers got punctured and so we suddenly got the realization that other people lived in echo chambers, which is why it seems like those suddenly popped up. But well-insulated echo chambers (ie. not what controversy-driven twitter gives you) are good for mental health and society as a whole.
This has some internal logic, but every experience I've had contradicts your proposition.
For example, I'm in my late forties. When I was growing up, it was rare to encounter (out) gay people outside of major cities, and people would believe practically any negative statement about them, not so much anymore. Conversely, in my college town today, most of my accquaintences have never met a Republican, and they predictably believe in a stupid cartoon caricature of red staters. I'm definitely not buying it.
Maybe if you have safe spaces (echo chambers) and overlapping meeting places, but also a strong standard of not policitizing the meeting places, you can get the best of both worlds?
For me, the "trending topics" show me plenty of people screaming at each other from diverse (and often vile and insane) viewpoints. Maybe I've brought that on myself though.
> No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike.
The relevance of this is way overstated. Most people haven't formed opinions on most topics and just want to hear different viewpoints so they can form an opinion.
> It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap. Might as well ask why subreddits are popular.
> Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap.
i suspect this is exactly what the comment you're replying to means.
i too have a problem with how many times i read people crying out "echo chamber" repeatedly as if this is always a bad thing.
i mean, when i have a party, i don't invite assholes.
when we go to bars, we don't invite spazzy people.
i don't invite people who think its oppressive if they're asked to have common courtesy.
i dont invite abusive people who have the social skills of a tantrum throwing 3 year old.
they just ruin the time for everyone. by many of these people's definitions, this is an echo-chamber.
we exist in the real world. i can have parties with friends and discussions with friends, this doesn't mean im somehow _never_ exposed to different ideas--no one ever shuts up about their ideas. not wanting to be around people we find weird is absolutely normal.
at the end of the day, if a website or party or bar is full of shitty behaving people, ill just go to a different space where people behave with basic social skills. thats not weird. thats not an echo chamber.
every bar or club in the world has different expectations of behaviors, its not evil of them, its not nefarious, its not scandalous of them. its just the culture the owners are curating. that isn't some scary echo-chamber. its a completely normal thing that happens _all_over_the_place_ in the real world.
but oddly theres a weird segment of people who are trying to convince me if someone is just constantly rude or spazzy, and im like "yo, this dudes kinda weird" that everyone should always have to be around them. thats just strange and not the norm in the physical real world. its really odd from the foundations.
edit to add: a perfect example of curation is this site that we all spend a decent amount of time on. dang curates the discussion. its not an echo chamber by any rational definition of the term. the site owners and mods have curated the patrons, the environment, the overall tone of the site--and from an end-users perspective, it works very well. its fun. its an enjoyable experience.
i think you’d find that the vast majority of the time people are removed from spaces due to behavior, not beliefs, despite their personal conspiracy delusions that it’s belief.
as i mentioned above, people who think it’s oppressive when they’re asked to have common courtesy. for example many people have been banned because they can’t stop insulting people of different races—they’re being banned for behaviors, they refuse to have common courtesy. they cry loudly when asked not to be abusive. that’s a behavior. and most of the time these weirdos are banned, it’s because they’re too socially inept to understand basic social skills.
The problem is that people disagree about the term bot.
It should mean an account whose content is controlled exclusively by an algorithm.
But instead it has come to mean anything they consider low-quality which often includes a lot of real people who are either paid to do so by state actors, have been radicalised or are just looking to troll. And it's very hard if not impossible to detect and ban those people.
Not to mention most studies on Twitter bots define one as "fifty interactions per day". If you define "heavy Twitter users" and "bots" to be the same thing, of course Twitter is going to be full of 'bots'.
I have a prior, validated by experience, that anyone spending that much time of their day on Twitter likely has nothing of value to contribute.
It would imply they work in PR, marketing, propaganda, or failing all of those, have little life outside the internet. Either way their content is likely to be of extremely low quality.
> get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints
Sounds good in an internet comment, but in practice that means I end up reading racist propaganda, which is not something that improves my life. So then you eliminate the crap, and boom, you have an echo chamber.
People are capable of deciding content is crap on their own, without an echo chamber leading them to that belief. I’ve looked at the facts, analyzed a lot of situations, and have come to the independent conclusion that bigotry is pretty unhelpful so I don’t want to see it (online or anywhere). I don’t have a responsibility to engage with it online, so I frequent online spaces that have a minimum of it.
I’m of two minds with opposing viewpoint presentation, one of them being I respect giving a reader the opportunity to consider multiple viewpoints for themselves. The other I worry about giving false equivalency to flat earthers or something like that. I don’t know if I want holocaust denial presented as an equal opposing viewpoint to holocaust remembrance, for example.
Totally agree, but how would you go about categorizing ideas into those that are worthy of equivalency and those that aren’t? Seems easy enough for fringe conspiracy theories but harder as you get into the realm of well sourced but bad ideas.
> but how would you go about categorizing ideas into those that are worthy of equivalency and those that aren’t?
obviously this is one of the most complicated questions that would require actual libraries full of books and experienced actual experts to properly come to any solid conclusions, but my suspicions are that some of the pieces that would be important would circle around:
- we start by recognizing that most of us are dumb in most areas. if we're lucky, we have expertise in one or two areas. if we're really lucky, peers in our field will publicly recognize our expertise. outside of our areas of expertise, compared to the experts in those fields, we're dumb. and thats ok. comparatively im an idiot in fluid dynamics, soil sciences, and millions and millions of other areas. i might have some hobby level interests, but compared to recognized experts in those fields, im an idiot. collectively we seem to have forgotten our limitations. i mean, the old phrase is there for a reason: the smartest person is the one who recognizes what they don't know.
- i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.
- often, more speech is not necessarily better. if the more speech is all nonsense babble, the conversation is just DDOSed and the situation is absolutely worse. as yishan said in that incredible HN post the other day [1], its about managing signal-noise. if its just simply "more" speech, we end up with noise.
- if we've already collectively decided that 2+2=4, yet someone keeps screaming they're not convinced, maybe its ok to ignore them. i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.
- this is gonna be a hard pill to swallow for many but, when we're building something with social as the primary, we _need_ to have _more_ people deeply involved in the building process who have expertise in humans. people who understand the human condition. some of us don't understand people very well and its absurd how many of us (myself included) turn our noses up when our projects involve human complexities. could you imagine a party planner building a bridge without heavily including engineers?
this is a hard problem, but the very first place id start is, no, not all of our opinions have equal weight in all topics. i know how difficult that is for some people to take. but its just true.
> i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.
There's no modern cannon to these arguments and their discussion, so the dismantling basically didn't happen. Only the readers of that dismantling know about it
> i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.
Facts are one type of content, but what about these types of prompts?
* An an anesthesiologist walks into a bar…
* I’d rather be an anesthesiologist than a …
* My recent experience with an anesthesiologist was …
* Can someone please explain why an anesthesiologist …
Also, the problem with a peer-reviewed domain expert approach is that if we took a collection of randomly sampled domain experts from 100 years ago, many might have opinions and theories about their own area of expertise that we consider abhorrent or factually wrong today. It’s only through loudly questioning those enshrined, institutional beliefs that we make progress.
And often times those questions are raised by those folks that experience the outcome of those theories. It’s one thing to be a peer reviewed domain expert operating in the realm of controlled studies and intellectual thought. It’s another to be a human being with one life to live, who’s on the receiving / implementation end of these theories.
They don't have to be given equal treatmet, the idea is only that we should not normalize suppressing things that are "distasteful", because that is easily abused by people with power to oppress those without. Speaking truth to power is not possible if arbitrary and capricious rules prevent you from speaking.
Sorry, but no. I tried following people with different political perspectives than mine, and it was a total shit show. These people don't have incentives to post well-thought-out arguments. They have incentives to bander to the base, telling them how smart they are and how bad the people who disagree with them are.
And I purposefully chose a person who had other qualities outside of the political opinions that I very much admired. If the Twitter algorithm were to just show me things outside of my buble, it would be even worse.
For important context, this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe), and has not been introduced by the new owner. It is not related to outsourcing work to unpaid volunteers that was previously done by paid employees who have been made redundant during the layoffs over the last few days.
I didn't intend for my comment to be interpreted that way, I don't think most people are. But you are right, I could have phrased it better.
There has been a lot of rumour and speculation about the moderation teams being sacked. I don't know what's true, but it does sound like they may have had fewer redundancies than in other departments. But what we do know is this "birdwatch" initiative isn't related to it if it has happened.
The post has been made with an editorialised title implying that this is new. Nowhere on the linked page does it say it is new. In the context of this week, and the rumours, it would imply that they are connected. They are not.
The post smells a little like someone generating clickbait for karma.
>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
This is something Elon Musk tweeted out recently. He seems to think that agreement on topic B by people who previously disagreed on topic A means they must be right on topic B.
Would like to see some data on this, but it sounds like an effective rating system. I’d be concerned that getting statistical significance would be challenging without creating pseudo pairs of labelers likely to disagree on issues.
In Europe the political fringes, the far-left and far-right, disagree about almost everything. But they have also agreed on a lot of things like being anti-EU and pro-Russia. Elon Musk's system will consider their opinions about the EU and Russia to be more correct than that of other users.
But (as stated) they disagree on most things. Because they are both usually in the opposition to the governing parties, they do opposition work and present dissenting opinions on vaccine efficacy, war support etc.
Often these few common topics overlap with the libertarian viewpoint.
I don't understand that argument. If the government supports a war, doesn't that make any opposition parties more likely to agree with each other that the war is bad? Of course they can disagree with the war for different reason, but both parties being in opposition and dissenting still makes them more likely to have common ground.
Edit: unless we are talking about one or two party systems, there the dynamics are stranger
They agree on few things and disagree on most. Horse shoe effect is just a way how to dismiss actual real politics and ideologies so one can wave hands.
They disagree on a lot of things, but they also disagree on a lot of things with moderate people, so that observation alone doesn't refute "far-left and far-right are closer to each other than they are to the center".
Of course the horseshoe effect is not some objective truth that's true in every country, that would be silly. I think the interesting part of it is that extreme ends of any political spectrum experience a similar environment: they are often shunned, distrust the mainstream media, attract social outcasts, etc. Just the shared experience of being on the edge of the spectrum often leads to similarities between them.
No no no. You see? If you want to be a Birdwatch contributor, you'll have to pay them. /s
It's actually pretty okay. The contributor & rating system seems to work well, and contributions are anonymous. I participate mostly through rating contributions a little here and there when I see some things that are wildly unfounded or misleading claims.
Hi, birdwatcher here. I resent the implication that the time honored tradition and enjoyment one gets from watching birds could be used as a metaphor for adjudicating the integrity of bad actors on social media. One is a graceful reflection on the pristine experience of being alive, the other is a form of policing bad behavior. It is a shame they had to soil such a worthy endeavor as birdwatching with this name.
Hi. Twatwatcher and lover here. I resent the implication that a twat is a bad thing which need policing.
Yeah, one meaning of the word is synonymous with "fool", but let's not encourage overloading the word since one of the meanings is related to that which is necessary for human life (and is also quite fun) with stupid human behavior.
In my experience, having lived in a few English speaking countries, "twat" is commonly understood as a fool, whereas it's derivative "twot" can be used to describe either a fool or for female genitalia. So given this distinction, I am very much pro twot but anti twat.
I get that. I am familiar with the common usage of that word, although I have never seen the spelling with 'o'. The spelling with 'a' appears in dictionaries with definitions including both meanings.
I'm just objecting to the common usage (and also trying to make a joke related to the Birdwatcher objection above).
It's fascinating and unfortunate that (slang) names for human sexual organs often get used as derogatory adjectives for people.
That guy is a d-ck! She's a real tw-t. What a c-nt!
Likewise, the overloading of f-ck is a shame too.
Edit: fixing formatting stuff related to asterisks.
Then again the beautiful, pleasing sounds of birds tweeting has also been used as a metaphor for short form posts, many of which are not at all beautiful or pleasing.
I've long since lost count of project/product/company names that hijack and overload existing terms with new, possibly opposite meanings. I don't like it either, but if you don't want that you'll essentially have to emigrate from humanity.
There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day. Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs.
> There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day.
If it was necessary to fact check every tweet, this would be a big problem. Luckily though, that is not a requirement. With a proper implementation, it should be reasonably easy to surface a historic list of (a subset of) any given user's incorrect statements, which provides objective evidence to distrust someone's claims and opinions. With the style of epistemology practiced by most people in 2022, everyone is going to have black marks on their history. And if we had a cultural change as a consequence of this, people might start putting some effort into speaking in the form of true statements.
> Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs.
Establish a persistent and centralized list of well fact checked "untruths" (rhetoric, innuendo, etc) from popular media outlets, and we will then have undeniable evidence that can be easily referenced, making common claims that mainstream media is ~"not that bad" transparently false.
> Self-service fact-checking is not scalable.
There is an important difference between scalability and infinite scalability.
If Elon is smart, this feature could be a very big problem for belief shapers.
I'm skeptical that using a wikipedia-like approach will work for small, essentially ephemeral content. There's just not enough time to debate each tweet, especially now that so many people (with large followings) tweet so much debatable content frequently. There's probably also not enough interest... or the interest and fascination with moderating will wane quickly (fatique).
Reading the various recent news items about Twitter, one would think that Musk was trying to revert the company to a crowdsource startup. I don't think that's possible, at least not without shedding a great many of the users. Of course, I also think the entire system and premise behind Twitter is bunk, so it doesn't really matter.
I don't think there's necessarily a need to fact check every tweet. If fact checks are maintained in a list, and one can navigate from a user account to their position in the list which also shows their past history of fact checked falsehoods/untruthfulness/lying, it could make a difference.
I think the general public is intelligent enough to start to come up with strategies to target the most influential people (politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, etc) and work down from there.
Of course, fact checking is a complicated skill, but people can learn new skills. The public learning new skills on social media on an ongoing basis may be problematic for some people, but it could be very healthy for the overall ecosystem.
Does anyone here know how it works and thinks it can be
easily abused? The paper is here[0], but I would be satisfied with an
explanation from anyone who just generally knows what
"bridge-based ranking"[1] is. I'm pretty excited about the idea
and I wonder if people mostly just don't know or if I am being
too optimistic.
I think this problem is similar to fighting spam, or ranking webpages for search queries: you don't want to be too public with your methods, because any metric can be gamed.
I actually suspect "bridge-based ranking" has already been deployed on a large scale, and the group that did so has not publicly disclosed this -- likely for good reason. (There is a big social media site that used to be famous for having terrible comments. You fill in the rest...)
In any case, yes it is very exciting. Including from an epistemological point of view -- the idea of promoting arguments that actually change someone's mind is pretty cool (assuming the argument is sound and truthful).
The greatest weakness in the scoring system [0] that I can see is age. There is a requirement for valid scoring to occur within 48 hours.
> Made within the first 48 hours of the note’s creation (because we publicly release all rating data after 48 hours) [1]
However, in the real world, our understanding of a message's context may actually take much longer than that. Especially when more information can come to light, that changes the landscape.
The second greatest weakness I see is that rater's with a lower mean are automatically filtered. Whilst you can discuss using APIs to do it, if you have large groups of individuals dedicated to promoting specific viewpoints, you can utilise that manpower to de-rate anyone promoting an opposing view by ruining their helpfulness average.
That makes the system easily abused by highly motivated political factions, especially foreign ones that admit to employing large groups of people for such a purpose.
> Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1]
> Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1]
This is a good thing. The rater helpfulness score is how similar you rate a note as helpful/not helpful to how that note eventually is labeled. Because this determination is made based on how well it's rated among those with differing opinions, being accurate means your ratings tend to be less biased. Other accounts aren't voting on your "rater helpfulness score," so it's not subject to brigades.
The 48 hour thing is only for valid ratings, and that's only for the rating helpfulness score, so it's not to do with note ratings. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they were careful about the nuances that you've mentioned.
So if it is, on one hand, "collaborative" and it expects people to work for free, and on the other hand there is apparently so much value in putting misinformation on twitter, wouldn't most people that work on that be paid by the various parties that want to put misinformation on twitter?
You know how amazon reviews are collaborative and volunteer based and 99% of them are made for money and are easily spotted lies.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives.
I'm fascinated by the idea that we have enabled everyone to talk to everyone else and now have to find ways to agree on, what are and are not facts, what is and is not "acceptable".
Eons ago we old buffers dreamed of a new world online - a virtual world. And we built it. And it has the same problems and we are trying to find almost the same solutions - but they fit differently.
And there is opportunity- to share wealth and knowledge and spread out power.
I don't like this at all. The thing that bothers me is the UI appearance of authority. If they found a good algorithmic way to add context, apply it to twits themselves.
Opaque assertions of authority are a dark pattern. Getting someone's "context" stuck on your words when it's just another person's opinion, but your voice has an origin and their voice is given an authoritative appearance without origin feels bad. It tricks people into being more trusting than they should.
Assuming we’re in a world where fact checking by the platform in some capacity makes sense then this then this feels like the right way to do it.
Another way would letting fact checking by an extension of the report feature where you can say, “woah this needs some context” and write a reply or link to your article discussing the issue. And the Twitter moderators just decide whether to show it in the privileged spot with attribution. Bonus if the moderators can highlight a person’s credentials if they happen to be an expert in the topic or directly related to the events.
No, the alterative is that the opinion is voiced by someone specific, anonymous or not, with everyone's intuition about people saying things coming into account.
The way it's implemented, the opinion is practically anonymous, with no one accountable for it, but given a false cover of authority.
If the context is an article by someone, I don't mind if the algorithm somehow finds the relevant twit by the relevant journalist who authored that article, and tends to show them together, as equals. That's fine by me.
I disagree with the UI choice of giving visual significance to a specific opinion.
I’m not a crypto fan but spitballing here: what if it were tokenized? Not necessarily in a distributed blockchain sort of way, after all this is Twitter which is centralized, but rather in terms of setting economic incentives for making good moderation judgements, eg when you make a judgment you stake something of value (money, tokens, reputation, whatever) and set up some mechanism such that making “bad” moderation judgments is an expensive choice. Seems like this is a scenario where there is low levels of trust and therefore can use the thinking of a similarly low-trust domain (crypto).
Isn’t that how most political ads/disinformation campaigns already work? Many absolute truths in politics are self-evident, but if you need to get some lies out there… buy some ads.
The goal is not that far from what birdwatch wants to do, but it's restricted to adding data context to online discourse.
I am frequently pondering those kind of thoughts regarding, low trust and crypto. And I would love to discuss it with you, or other people, if you are interested.
Basically the design dilemna is you want to anchor the moderating behavior to some hard identity or value, without ruining the collaborative spirit task.
Enabling authenticated identity online (personas) is an objectively good thing. Authenticity is a precondition for most of modern life; small things like payments, driver's licenses, voting, education, employment, surgery.
Alas, the $8/mo blue check is not that. Payment method is the only verification. No further effort is made. (Please correct me as Musk's answers change.)
Instead, the blue check is nothing more than flare.
Twitter's pivot towards freemium, gacha, and ultimately Freemium Speeches™ (pay-to-say) could work.
There are precedents. Vanity press and academic journals, for instance.
And I can envision a substack, medium, or twitter that enables a marketplace for value added services. Fact checking, copyediting, visual design, and so forth. An Upwork for content producers.
The question I am wondering is twitter doing any due diligence for the 60/year you're paying to verify you are who you say you are. (Other than charging your credit card) I am guessing probably not.
The problem for him going forward is that he’s burned all trust. Maybe his alt-right bootlicking is theater to get a volatile crowd on board, but it alienates the rest of society, not to mention putting him on the wrong side of Popehat’s rule of goats.
yes, having skin in the game (staking for example) prevents bots, trolls and creates more responsibility. With added benefit of zero-Knowledge, security, and decentralization.
The basic use case for crypto is imposing costs, and a protocol that uses it decides where you or your parties impose those costs. A cryptographic moderation protocol question would be, on what aspect of publishing a statement would you like to impose a cost?
To do that, we would need to break out publishing a statement into a collection of dimensions, like origin, destination, distance/reach, length, entropy/novelty, and likely some dozen or so others, then express our evaluations of them in terms of those criteria. The HN method of 'effect' is pretty good, and an origin's track record of engagement could give a new statement momentum, etc. Not to solution it - but in terms of what you would use tokenization for, it would be to impose costs on criteria expressed in these underlying message dimensions.
>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
This means the political fringes get to decide what is truth. The far-left and far-right disagree on many things but also agree on many things that are bad for the rest of society. Until very recently the anti-EU sentiment in many European countries was high among both the far-left and far-right.
Whats the betting this gets canned pretty quickly. Musk just fired all the teams responsible for ethics, accessibility, accountability, fact checking, content curation, etc. Not just made them smaller - totally removed anyone involved with them.
271 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/twitter/birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective...
How do you achieve that?
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/diversity-of-perspective...
People who lie the most will "fact check" their opponents.
But seriously folks: Twitter is rubbish. Find something more useful to do with your time.
What are you talking about? This program has existed at Twitter for years.
Imagine this as a sarcastic comment about why a country shouldn't move from a monarchy to a republic.
However, according to today's front-page Washington Post[1] article, they are also still paying people in the "Trust & Safety" department, to do jobs including fact-checking (and presumably acting on fact-checking done by other humans, and possibly trained-model automated fact-checkers as well).
From what I can understand, the company was recently purchased by an oligarch, who then implemented massive staff cuts of around 50% generally across the board, but the "Trust & Safety" department had a lower level of layoffs, at around 15%. So human staff is apparently still involved in fact-checking, aside from the system described here.
It seems likely that fact-checking on a global "social media" network would necessarily involve various approaches and multiple layers to be effective, so the core idea of this system seems worth trying.
However, it is a difficult problem, with powerful financial and political incentives for various parties to game such a system, it will be interesting to see if this ever yields results, and if so, what those results are.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/05/twitter...
> An oligarch is one of the select few people who rule or influence leaders in an oligarchy—a government in which power is held by a select few individuals or a small class of powerful people.
Personally, I'm persuaded by the argument that it is an oligarchy, or at least, it is more one than it is not.
Unlike some (most?) others, where the government is the seat of ultimate power and chooses its accomplices, in the US that arrangement is inverted; the very rich (the few hundred billioniares, and a few thousand of not-quite-that-rich individuals and families) excercise enormous control over the government, without having to directly participate in its execution or hold office themselves.
(And our politicians themselves almost never achieve that level of wealth; many do become rich by ordinary standards, but its clear where the actual power resides.)
So we could quibble about definitions and degrees of words like "oligarch" and "the klept" but in my view the US is clearly more toward the oligarchy end of the spectrum than the other end.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_United_States#...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906775
An article arguing for a different UI:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935407
Discussion from yesterday on a thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
In that final discussion SilasX noted:
> Interesting, I remember someone on /r/slatestarcodex having the idea to rate/sort reddit comments by that metric, which I dub "sort by should-be-uncontroversial" (because normally-disagreeing people all think it's correct).
Honestly, that sorting mechanism sounds sane to me? It certainly sounds a lot saner than optimizing for engaging content (which seems to result in arguments), but I would guess is a lot less profitable (and so likely won't happen).
But like, in a world where informative comments actually were sorted highly, wouldn't that mostly obviate the need for this notes / fact checking system in the first place?
Put differently, isn't the very existence of and interest in this second system for voting on content attached to a tweet a demonstration that the primary system (for sorting replies, which are merely content attached to a tweet) sucks?
Part of the scoring metric is awarding more weight to historically diaposed views. Bold strategy, let’s see if it pans out for them Cotton etc.
At worst it stays a cesspool, but maybe we find a way to (shock horror) promote actual civil discourse on the Internet.
I could only see it add much value on heavily moderated/high-effort sites like HN, where there's much less need for it in the first place.
However although users get a permanent id it's not possible to get actual Twitter handles from these ids. So identification of who the birdwatchers are is not easy (wisely so)!
That'll end well! ;) Problem is that on Twitter people aren't "regular", they're either seeking their own echo chamber for confirmation bias or the opposing echo chamber to insult, so crowd sourced feedback will simply be used as a tool for either of those.
That's great for making Wikipedia safer from abject misinformation, which is a huge plus. It's less good at ongoing discoveries and news.
This is a tad different from the previous approach which involved third-party fact checkers that were, uh, visibly slanted towards the Democrats to put it lightly (and whenever a non-Democrat-aligned news source got blessed as a fact checker by a masjor social media network there was a major media storm over it).
There is also another popular expression: 'Get woke, go broke.'
Exceptions that prove the rule are those that focus on exclusivity or rarity, such as products that truly only are needed/desired by a niche audience but at a higher cost to make up for the lack of broad appeal/availability.
Movies and TV shows (about which the "get woke, go broke" saying originated) don't fall under that sort of exclusivity-at-a-higher-price concept. Intentionally alienating 80% of your customer base to appeal to 20% is a risky strategy.
The linked article is a fantastic example of what. "Partial truth" and "missing context" can be said about absolutely everything.
Who was it that chopped up a journalist and enjoys the association of a world figure? Quite a few people. Let's condemn the lot.
Did fact checkers tell you that?
Would you count those as fact checkers?
Regardless of whether he actually did it I think this is a fatal flaw that will prevent birdwatch from ever being trusted.
I see the fact check still there.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...
The note wasn't removed. It's still visible as a potential note; it just dropped below the threshold necessary for general display. This is not common but it's not abnormal either; it happened to one of my notes on a controversial topic.
In past I put a lot of effort into various forums. Well sourced information, several thousands hours of work. But very ofter it was all wasted, wiped and deleted.
Now I only write books. There are well established censorship laws. And work I put into writing book will be preserved!
Maybe you forgot internet is not decentralized.
Anybody can run a web server at home, get a domain name, write a Twitter clone, host it and publish whatever content they like. And when you exceed your traffic limits you can take that web server, drive to your local co-located provider and in almost all cases they will let you grow that site almost ad infinitum provided the content isn't illegal.
You don't need to ask permission. You don't need to compromise your ideology. You can just do it.
But people don't want freedom or decentralisation. What they want is the ability to say anything they like and for everyone to hear it.
People do have the desire and right to ask for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. Is it feasible today? Technically: yes, realistically: no.
Why?
Because even MORE people are needed to effectively demand the right for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. You know that. Now be nice to them, please.
Well you just did.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate and despise both Twitter and Musk. But to act like Mastadon or any of the other attempts at this stuff appeal to people that aren’t tech / privacy wonks is tone deaf. And as much as Twitter is a ‘platform for elites to disseminate their thoughts that’s pretending to be a social network’, “publishing books” is certainly amother step in that direction.
how could one get to a level of “hate and despise both Twitter and Musk”?
I'm the only user on my server and I have a bunch of (not on my server) friends on my timeline. I'm not sure what you're suggesting isn't happening?
If you've written a bunch of stuff that you think is valuable and you want to make sure it's available forever then you should make a blog and host it yourself. (Which you have sort of done by writing a book, but you didn't need to go that far if all you cared about was longevity)
You can see from the well thumbed edges that it's been read. It's been around for 10 years and it will be around for another 30 or 40 (modern bindings notwithstanding) - and some copies will probably outlive you.
The same cannot be said for the "Internet" - although I think what Brewster Kahle has done with The Internet Archive is amazing - much of which remains ephemeral.
Once books were the preserve of "elites". Now I think the tables are turned. Some marginal voices get traction only through traditional publication forms because they live in repressive technological regimes or outside the walled gardens of the so-called "town square". It is not the egalitarian utopia once promised.
Here's an excerpt from Digital Vegan
In the current situation (showing most liked posts) the only common ground is good looking people (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube shorts) and most outraging posts with lies to get more likes (Twitter/Youtube)
But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check.
Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_elect...
What this comes down to is the level of good faith at play: hearing dissenting ideas is good if you’re in a place to take them seriously and the dissenter is being genuine and willing to discuss them in good faith. If those aren’t true, it’s not a win: nobody benefits from giving a liar or propagandist a podium and someone who can’t agree on some kind of objective baseline won’t be able or willing to adjust their beliefs.
You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?
I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.
Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.
Extremists don’t care about disagreement – they’re there to talk, not listen – and if they see a few fellow travelers they’ll start to tell themselves their position is mainstream.
Yes, those elections were violent and also final step to power was under threat of violence. At this point, nazi were already clearly violent. Their first steps after getting power were creation of concentration camps for opposition.
This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.
And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.
For example, I'm in my late forties. When I was growing up, it was rare to encounter (out) gay people outside of major cities, and people would believe practically any negative statement about them, not so much anymore. Conversely, in my college town today, most of my accquaintences have never met a Republican, and they predictably believe in a stupid cartoon caricature of red staters. I'm definitely not buying it.
The relevance of this is way overstated. Most people haven't formed opinions on most topics and just want to hear different viewpoints so they can form an opinion.
> It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap. Might as well ask why subreddits are popular.
i suspect this is exactly what the comment you're replying to means.
i too have a problem with how many times i read people crying out "echo chamber" repeatedly as if this is always a bad thing.
i mean, when i have a party, i don't invite assholes.
when we go to bars, we don't invite spazzy people.
i don't invite people who think its oppressive if they're asked to have common courtesy.
i dont invite abusive people who have the social skills of a tantrum throwing 3 year old.
they just ruin the time for everyone. by many of these people's definitions, this is an echo-chamber.
we exist in the real world. i can have parties with friends and discussions with friends, this doesn't mean im somehow _never_ exposed to different ideas--no one ever shuts up about their ideas. not wanting to be around people we find weird is absolutely normal.
at the end of the day, if a website or party or bar is full of shitty behaving people, ill just go to a different space where people behave with basic social skills. thats not weird. thats not an echo chamber.
every bar or club in the world has different expectations of behaviors, its not evil of them, its not nefarious, its not scandalous of them. its just the culture the owners are curating. that isn't some scary echo-chamber. its a completely normal thing that happens _all_over_the_place_ in the real world.
but oddly theres a weird segment of people who are trying to convince me if someone is just constantly rude or spazzy, and im like "yo, this dudes kinda weird" that everyone should always have to be around them. thats just strange and not the norm in the physical real world. its really odd from the foundations.
edit to add: a perfect example of curation is this site that we all spend a decent amount of time on. dang curates the discussion. its not an echo chamber by any rational definition of the term. the site owners and mods have curated the patrons, the environment, the overall tone of the site--and from an end-users perspective, it works very well. its fun. its an enjoyable experience.
as i mentioned above, people who think it’s oppressive when they’re asked to have common courtesy. for example many people have been banned because they can’t stop insulting people of different races—they’re being banned for behaviors, they refuse to have common courtesy. they cry loudly when asked not to be abusive. that’s a behavior. and most of the time these weirdos are banned, it’s because they’re too socially inept to understand basic social skills.
The problem is that people disagree about the term bot.
It should mean an account whose content is controlled exclusively by an algorithm.
But instead it has come to mean anything they consider low-quality which often includes a lot of real people who are either paid to do so by state actors, have been radicalised or are just looking to troll. And it's very hard if not impossible to detect and ban those people.
It would imply they work in PR, marketing, propaganda, or failing all of those, have little life outside the internet. Either way their content is likely to be of extremely low quality.
Sounds good in an internet comment, but in practice that means I end up reading racist propaganda, which is not something that improves my life. So then you eliminate the crap, and boom, you have an echo chamber.
obviously this is one of the most complicated questions that would require actual libraries full of books and experienced actual experts to properly come to any solid conclusions, but my suspicions are that some of the pieces that would be important would circle around:
- we start by recognizing that most of us are dumb in most areas. if we're lucky, we have expertise in one or two areas. if we're really lucky, peers in our field will publicly recognize our expertise. outside of our areas of expertise, compared to the experts in those fields, we're dumb. and thats ok. comparatively im an idiot in fluid dynamics, soil sciences, and millions and millions of other areas. i might have some hobby level interests, but compared to recognized experts in those fields, im an idiot. collectively we seem to have forgotten our limitations. i mean, the old phrase is there for a reason: the smartest person is the one who recognizes what they don't know.
- i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.
- often, more speech is not necessarily better. if the more speech is all nonsense babble, the conversation is just DDOSed and the situation is absolutely worse. as yishan said in that incredible HN post the other day [1], its about managing signal-noise. if its just simply "more" speech, we end up with noise.
- if we've already collectively decided that 2+2=4, yet someone keeps screaming they're not convinced, maybe its ok to ignore them. i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.
- this is gonna be a hard pill to swallow for many but, when we're building something with social as the primary, we _need_ to have _more_ people deeply involved in the building process who have expertise in humans. people who understand the human condition. some of us don't understand people very well and its absurd how many of us (myself included) turn our noses up when our projects involve human complexities. could you imagine a party planner building a bridge without heavily including engineers?
this is a hard problem, but the very first place id start is, no, not all of our opinions have equal weight in all topics. i know how difficult that is for some people to take. but its just true.
[1] https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289
There's no modern cannon to these arguments and their discussion, so the dismantling basically didn't happen. Only the readers of that dismantling know about it
Facts are one type of content, but what about these types of prompts?
* An an anesthesiologist walks into a bar…
* I’d rather be an anesthesiologist than a …
* My recent experience with an anesthesiologist was …
* Can someone please explain why an anesthesiologist …
Also, the problem with a peer-reviewed domain expert approach is that if we took a collection of randomly sampled domain experts from 100 years ago, many might have opinions and theories about their own area of expertise that we consider abhorrent or factually wrong today. It’s only through loudly questioning those enshrined, institutional beliefs that we make progress.
And often times those questions are raised by those folks that experience the outcome of those theories. It’s one thing to be a peer reviewed domain expert operating in the realm of controlled studies and intellectual thought. It’s another to be a human being with one life to live, who’s on the receiving / implementation end of these theories.
And I purposefully chose a person who had other qualities outside of the political opinions that I very much admired. If the Twitter algorithm were to just show me things outside of my buble, it would be even worse.
4 CEOs have supported this project ... so far.
Could you cite this. I'm not saying you are a liar pushing misinformation, but it's fair and important that you link the proof I think.
For instance we know Keith Coleman wasn't sacked and Musk said the project is awesome https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925 so your fact is surprising.
We should be able to read for ourselves. Especially if we tell other people this information it allows us to link back. A chain of facts.
If you know it personally, that also gives us context.
'it is not related to X' suggests that X exists in order to be the subject of such a relation.
There has been a lot of rumour and speculation about the moderation teams being sacked. I don't know what's true, but it does sound like they may have had fewer redundancies than in other departments. But what we do know is this "birdwatch" initiative isn't related to it if it has happened.
The post has been made with an editorialised title implying that this is new. Nowhere on the linked page does it say it is new. In the context of this week, and the rumours, it would imply that they are connected. They are not.
The post smells a little like someone generating clickbait for karma.
>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
This is something Elon Musk tweeted out recently. He seems to think that agreement on topic B by people who previously disagreed on topic A means they must be right on topic B.
Speculation. Also, this system predates Musk's acquisition.
It doesn't necessarily doom the system though, as long as people with extreme views don't outnumber more moderate people.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Often these few common topics overlap with the libertarian viewpoint.
Edit: unless we are talking about one or two party systems, there the dynamics are stranger
Of course the horseshoe effect is not some objective truth that's true in every country, that would be silly. I think the interesting part of it is that extreme ends of any political spectrum experience a similar environment: they are often shunned, distrust the mainstream media, attract social outcasts, etc. Just the shared experience of being on the edge of the spectrum often leads to similarities between them.
The documentation is checked into GitHub[1]. It was checked in on March 2nd, 2022. This was a month before Musk bought his 9.2% share of Twitter.
[1] https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/content/diver...
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
Really, a for-profit company can't host some static pages properly under its own domain.
It's actually pretty okay. The contributor & rating system seems to work well, and contributions are anonymous. I participate mostly through rating contributions a little here and there when I see some things that are wildly unfounded or misleading claims.
Yeah, one meaning of the word is synonymous with "fool", but let's not encourage overloading the word since one of the meanings is related to that which is necessary for human life (and is also quite fun) with stupid human behavior.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat
I'm just objecting to the common usage (and also trying to make a joke related to the Birdwatcher objection above).
It's fascinating and unfortunate that (slang) names for human sexual organs often get used as derogatory adjectives for people.
That guy is a d-ck! She's a real tw-t. What a c-nt!
Likewise, the overloading of f-ck is a shame too.
Edit: fixing formatting stuff related to asterisks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/magazine/how-to-be-an-imp...
Self-service fact-checking is not scalable.
If it was necessary to fact check every tweet, this would be a big problem. Luckily though, that is not a requirement. With a proper implementation, it should be reasonably easy to surface a historic list of (a subset of) any given user's incorrect statements, which provides objective evidence to distrust someone's claims and opinions. With the style of epistemology practiced by most people in 2022, everyone is going to have black marks on their history. And if we had a cultural change as a consequence of this, people might start putting some effort into speaking in the form of true statements.
> Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs.
Establish a persistent and centralized list of well fact checked "untruths" (rhetoric, innuendo, etc) from popular media outlets, and we will then have undeniable evidence that can be easily referenced, making common claims that mainstream media is ~"not that bad" transparently false.
> Self-service fact-checking is not scalable.
There is an important difference between scalability and infinite scalability.
If Elon is smart, this feature could be a very big problem for belief shapers.
Does it have some sort of a "raid" prevention? What about sleeper accounts made earlier to abuse this system?
Reading the various recent news items about Twitter, one would think that Musk was trying to revert the company to a crowdsource startup. I don't think that's possible, at least not without shedding a great many of the users. Of course, I also think the entire system and premise behind Twitter is bunk, so it doesn't really matter.
I think the general public is intelligent enough to start to come up with strategies to target the most influential people (politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, etc) and work down from there.
Of course, fact checking is a complicated skill, but people can learn new skills. The public learning new skills on social media on an ongoing basis may be problematic for some people, but it could be very healthy for the overall ecosystem.
[0]: https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_pap...
[1]: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank...
I actually suspect "bridge-based ranking" has already been deployed on a large scale, and the group that did so has not publicly disclosed this -- likely for good reason. (There is a big social media site that used to be famous for having terrible comments. You fill in the rest...)
In any case, yes it is very exciting. Including from an epistemological point of view -- the idea of promoting arguments that actually change someone's mind is pretty cool (assuming the argument is sound and truthful).
> Made within the first 48 hours of the note’s creation (because we publicly release all rating data after 48 hours) [1]
However, in the real world, our understanding of a message's context may actually take much longer than that. Especially when more information can come to light, that changes the landscape.
The second greatest weakness I see is that rater's with a lower mean are automatically filtered. Whilst you can discuss using APIs to do it, if you have large groups of individuals dedicated to promoting specific viewpoints, you can utilise that manpower to de-rate anyone promoting an opposing view by ruining their helpfulness average.
That makes the system easily abused by highly motivated political factions, especially foreign ones that admit to employing large groups of people for such a purpose.
> Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1]
[0] https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/static/source...
[1] https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/contributor-scores/#vali...
This is a good thing. The rater helpfulness score is how similar you rate a note as helpful/not helpful to how that note eventually is labeled. Because this determination is made based on how well it's rated among those with differing opinions, being accurate means your ratings tend to be less biased. Other accounts aren't voting on your "rater helpfulness score," so it's not subject to brigades.
The 48 hour thing is only for valid ratings, and that's only for the rating helpfulness score, so it's not to do with note ratings. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they were careful about the nuances that you've mentioned.
You know how amazon reviews are collaborative and volunteer based and 99% of them are made for money and are easily spotted lies.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives.
I'm fascinated by the idea that we have enabled everyone to talk to everyone else and now have to find ways to agree on, what are and are not facts, what is and is not "acceptable".
Eons ago we old buffers dreamed of a new world online - a virtual world. And we built it. And it has the same problems and we are trying to find almost the same solutions - but they fit differently.
And there is opportunity- to share wealth and knowledge and spread out power.
It should be a more democratic world. Virtually.
Opaque assertions of authority are a dark pattern. Getting someone's "context" stuck on your words when it's just another person's opinion, but your voice has an origin and their voice is given an authoritative appearance without origin feels bad. It tricks people into being more trusting than they should.
Another way would letting fact checking by an extension of the report feature where you can say, “woah this needs some context” and write a reply or link to your article discussing the issue. And the Twitter moderators just decide whether to show it in the privileged spot with attribution. Bonus if the moderators can highlight a person’s credentials if they happen to be an expert in the topic or directly related to the events.
Q: Agreed upon by whom?
I'm reminded of this quotation:
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
which The Big Short (2015) says is Twain but I gather probably isn't.
i've already seen some birdwatch "fact checks" that were much more misleading than the thing they were "fact checking"
The way it's implemented, the opinion is practically anonymous, with no one accountable for it, but given a false cover of authority.
If the context is an article by someone, I don't mind if the algorithm somehow finds the relevant twit by the relevant journalist who authored that article, and tends to show them together, as equals. That's fine by me.
I disagree with the UI choice of giving visual significance to a specific opinion.
The goal is not that far from what birdwatch wants to do, but it's restricted to adding data context to online discourse.
I am frequently pondering those kind of thoughts regarding, low trust and crypto. And I would love to discuss it with you, or other people, if you are interested.
Basically the design dilemna is you want to anchor the moderating behavior to some hard identity or value, without ruining the collaborative spirit task.
Alas, the $8/mo blue check is not that. Payment method is the only verification. No further effort is made. (Please correct me as Musk's answers change.)
Instead, the blue check is nothing more than flare.
Twitter's pivot towards freemium, gacha, and ultimately Freemium Speeches™ (pay-to-say) could work.
There are precedents. Vanity press and academic journals, for instance.
And I can envision a substack, medium, or twitter that enables a marketplace for value added services. Fact checking, copyediting, visual design, and so forth. An Upwork for content producers.
Alas, I doubt that's Musk's vision for Twitter.
For that, I recommend historian Jill Lepore's podcast The Evening Rocket. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket
Spoiler: With the purchase of Twitter.com, Musk is likely rejuvenating his original goal for X.com.
To do that, we would need to break out publishing a statement into a collection of dimensions, like origin, destination, distance/reach, length, entropy/novelty, and likely some dozen or so others, then express our evaluations of them in terms of those criteria. The HN method of 'effect' is pretty good, and an origin's track record of engagement could give a new statement momentum, etc. Not to solution it - but in terms of what you would use tokenization for, it would be to impose costs on criteria expressed in these underlying message dimensions.
This means the political fringes get to decide what is truth. The far-left and far-right disagree on many things but also agree on many things that are bad for the rest of society. Until very recently the anti-EU sentiment in many European countries was high among both the far-left and far-right.
https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657227035918337