I wonder if he gets the irony, or he just doesn't get it?
A large part of why people lashed out and voted Trump was their impression places like Twitter censored their point of view.
Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
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Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#62afas
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#63In 2016 the US was still vulnerable to a Kardashian style PR stunt attack. Trump performed this attack over and over again and garnered an estimated $2B of free advertising from it. Trump used Twitter to do this, but he could have used other social media. Trump's tweets were not newsworthy because Twitter routed them to millions of people but because large media firms wanted to monetize the hysteria created by the tw…
> In 2016 the US was still vulnerable to a Kardashian style PR stunt attack. Trump performed this attack over and over again and garnered an estimated $2B of free advertising from it. This hits the nail on the head. Late stage capitalism has completely fused media, news, and entertainment. This means that any person or organization who manages to "hack" the news cycle (i.e. finds a way to be in the spotlight on a ver…
> I don't agree that he could have used any other social media to the same effect. Information propagates and decays on Twitter much, much faster than on other mainstream platforms
I certainly agree that Twitter's characteristics are unique, but I think there was also a lot of awareness of Trump going into the election and so I wonder if he could have done the same thing with a simple blog.
My biggest curiosity is that now that he's shown that the attack can work, how many candidates will enter the next election doing it and how unusual will they be...
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#64I'd say this is an Orwellian statement, but at this point i got so used to Twitter silencing voices they disagree with i'm shocked they didn't just ban Trump long ago, since they banned people for pettier reasons multiple times.
Hillary got more support on Twitter than Trump. The reason places like Twitter helped Trump in any signifficant fashion was that they let Trump reach people directly, and not through the media which are still lying, and slandering the president, and trying to paint a false picture of what's going on in the country.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#65>“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Williams told the Times. “I was wrong about that.” I despise this quote so much, and I'm far from a Trump supporter. If you need to censor speech in order for your side to win, maybe you have bigger issues than Trump's twitter account.
This idea of unfettered free speech is going to kick the bucket, and very very soon - I am sorry to say. Be well warned - the stuff happening on reddit, the tools being developed by moderators are the epitome of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The old generalized ideological position of Free Speech is no longer tenable, whether we like it or not. I'm a proponent of Free Speech, and I've spent the t…
I don't understand why nobody came up with a technical solution for this problems yet. It can't be that complicated.
Make a better Twitter. Add reputation management. Enforce strict rules on argumentation. Reduce/forbid redundant arguments. Add better structure for arguments. Arguments should be as short as possible but not shorter. Add ratings to arguments (a la hackernews).
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#66“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place”
- Ev Williams
"Really don't want to get in politics. I just want to help invent and develop technologies that improve lives. Feels so bizarre."
- Elon Musk
"For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens."
- HN Moderation team
It's okay, maybe some day Silicon Valley will realize that technology and politics aren't two concepts that you can neatly disentangle from one another, and that building tech never "automatically" makes the world a better place on its own. If you are touching human lives, you are "in politics".
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#67AKA: > Twitter co-founder: I'm sorry we didn't use our platform to silence an opposing view point. Shame. Silencing someone else because you disagree makes you many, many times worse than them. Sunlight and exposure is the best disinfectant, not this play.
Hey, if you want to legalize government propaganda go ahead. It's pretty clear sunlight is an ineffective disinfectant in that scenario.
> if you want to legalize government propaganda
Some argue that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 already did that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#68In 2016 the US was still vulnerable to a Kardashian style PR stunt attack. Trump performed this attack over and over again and garnered an estimated $2B of free advertising from it. Trump used Twitter to do this, but he could have used other social media. Trump's tweets were not newsworthy because Twitter routed them to millions of people but because large media firms wanted to monetize the hysteria created by the tw…
And for the most part they still do.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#69“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place” - Ev Williams "Really don't want to get in politics. I just want to help invent and develop technologies that improve lives. Feels so bizarre." - Elon Musk "For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. F…
Thank you.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). That's what they do. > They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion. Well, they could, but they don't and as such they are bigger free speech advocates than you are because you want to restrict what they can do on their website, which is a privately run entity and as such not subje…
Oh this again. Free speech is an idea, not an amendment. If you censor opposing political views, you are antithetical to the concept and idea of free speech and you should be condemned.
If you operate a private platform that very explicitly does not censor opposing political views even if you could do so within the law then you are very much not against free speech.