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Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#72Twitter is not a discussion forum. It is great as a polished RSS feeds reader & writer combined though. You can share quick messages and respond to people with Twitter, sure, but that is more like texting. Useful as it may be, it's still not the best way to discuss with someone, let alone with several people together. But brevity and repetition make Twitter an ideal medium for propaganda. No wonder some people use it as such.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#73>“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.
Has anyone else noticed, that we are failing to distinguish between two very different rights:
1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech
All of the platforms that have big problems support the later. Maybe the problem is anonymity rather than freedom of speech.
It is true that Facebook doesn't really support anonymous speech, but even there, most of the fake news spread was anonymously published.
I imagine that when you read this, a dystopia of national Internet ID cards pops into your mind. However, I don't think this necessarily needs to be. I've been working on a project called push to talk: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html and I hope that the existence of a real persons voice behind the scenes would help. I think that youtube also has an advantage, that the distinction between anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech is clear, and the voice synthesized videos are much less popular.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#74AKA: > 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.
Is it, though? I mean, really? In an ideal world, I would absolutely love to agree with you.
But, aside from certain forms of speech (hate speech, illegal speech, etc.), Twitter is pretty hands-off with what it allows. So it has given "sunlight and exposure" to people like Trump, and what has it gotten us...? Trump. A man who has used racism, sexism, xenophobia, lies, and false promises to win the US Presidency, and who used Twitter as a major platform for spreading such. How has sunlight and exposure disinfected his toxicity?
Now, sure, doing otherwise would definitely be silencing an opposing view point. But... when that view point is so toxic, why is that necessarily bad? This might be a controversial opinion for me to hold, but I don't believe all view points are created equal, and I don't believe all view points deserve to be heard, or, more to the point, deserve a platform to be heard. I'm not saying choosing is easy, and not fraught with moral peril, but I think the idea of this big free-flow of ideas being the ideal, given the constraints and issues with our society, is... frankly, a little naive.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#75>“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.
Has anyone else noticed, that we are failing to distinguish between two very different rights: 1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech All of the platforms that have big problems support the later. Maybe the problem is anonymity rather than freedom of speech. It is true that Facebook doesn't really support anonymous speech, but even there, most of the fake news spread was anonymously published. I imagine that whe…
I'm really torn on this. Plenty of non-anonymous people have posted some pretty horrible things on Facebook. And it goes the other way, too: there are plenty of people who would feel justifiably threatened and afraid to speak their true feelings if they could not be anonymous, and their contributions are often just as valuable as people who aren't anonymous.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#76Twitter is a simple technology that connects people, and the current presidency is IMO not their fault. Twitter just brought up to the surface what was already there but hidden. I am sorry that everyone now has to go through a lot of pain with the current presidency. But I think getting there is the only effective way for society to realize that your (US) political, social and educational system (just to name a few)…
> Twitter just brought up to the surface what was already there but hidden.
We "know" through pop science that Facebook makes you miserable:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-mentally-strong-pe...
On some level that's a mechanism that's "already there" in everyone, but Facebook is clearly more than a messenger if it influences how we feel. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that Twitter has a negative impact on us as well.
But I agree that there are many systemic problems that Twitter has nothing to do with.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#77Earlier 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.
What about censoring hate speech? Racist speech? Sexist speech? Xenophobic speech? Outright lies? False information? Trump has tweeted all of the above from time to time. What value does that sort of speech have?
You might find the first three to be subjective, and I wouldn't entirely disagree with that, so how about the lies and false information? Should a person in a position of power be permitted to lie to people to sway their opinion? I would have no problem if Twitter were to fact-check Trump's (or anyone else wielding such power) tweets and delete or somehow diminish those that are outright lies, assuming there were checks on such a thing to avoid politicization of that fact checking.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#78“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…
this is why scientists and technologists should run for office. kind of 'if you don't want to do it, you're qualified'.
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
> how many candidates will enter the next election doing it and how unusual will they be...
2020 is still a while away, but a few leads:
Kanye West:
“Rappers are philosophers of our now, celebrities are the influencers of our now, just look at the president. [Trump] wasn’t in politics and won.”
Mark Zuckerberg:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/zucke...
Re: Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
#80>“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…
> Heinous ideas are important because at the very least - people can define themselves against it.
Heinous ideas are useful for understanding heinous people. Defining oneself against them is what flamewars are made of.
> That's how the brain is designed.
I don't believe in creationism. It's super ironic that throughout the 19th and 20th century many self-proclaimed atheists kept working on the basis of things that actually are intelligent design assumptions.