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How Twitter poisoned politics

prospectmagazine.co.uk

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Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#91

Post by lisper »

kibwen wrote: post #9

Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of…

I think anonymity is a major contributing factor. Here's a data point:

I worked at JPL between 1988 and 2000. Somewhere during that time period -- I don't recall exactly when -- the IT people set up an internal Usenet newsgroup that could be posted to anonymously. The idea was that it would be a forum for people to candidly discuss issues that needed to be addressed by management.

Almost immediately it degenerated into a Lord-of-the-Flies style melee of the sort that is all too familiar today, but which was new and shocking back in the days before the WWW was really a thing. And this was not just random people off the street. These were all JPL employees, of which there were about 7000 back in the day.

It went on for several months until IT decided to disallow anonymous posting, and all the acrimony immediately ceased.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#92

Post by mwfunk »

Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls.

There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people interacted and communicated to places that were no more than sources of disinformation and flamewars. Modern social media is like post apocalyptic Usenet, except it’s occupied by the general population, not just scammers and mentally ill CS majors. I think that’s really messed up and can’t possibly be good for anyone.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#93

Post by tomatotomato37 »

eric_h wrote: post #71
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America wasn't like this 20 years ago. Politics has always been bad, and there's times it's been even worse, but that doesn't mean it's not trending downward right now.

> America wasn't like this 20 years ago. 20 years ago was 1998, the year Clinton was impeached - the politics were just as slimy 20 years ago, the reality of it was just not as readily at our fingertips as it is today.

Hell, a bit over 20 years before that Nixon was resigning over the scandal that brought us [x]-gate. Politics has always been a dumpster fire

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#94

Post by dvtrn »

komali2 wrote: post #40
dvtrn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it. The cynic in me says this will never happen for the same reason Twitter even made it into the mainstream in the first place: star power. As long as celebs roost on twitter, the press not be will be right behind to gather the fallen feathers.

This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction. Imagine a twitter where you actually have no way of knowing whether an account is "real" or not. Perhaps people then would take it far less seriously, and the only safe approach for a celebrity to take would be to say "we don't use Twitter" via other channels. Well, then again, that would be Twitter shooting itself in the foot.

This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction.

I've had similar thoughts. My account is "verified", because it was pretty easy to get that blue tick mark. Make my tweets open, and...that was pretty much it. Just wait around a while for the review process.

Unknown if that process is more difficult or involved nowadays, but when I did it? I just asked and they gave.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#95

Post by naravara »

Natsu wrote: post #74
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

No, there's a very long history of political assassinations, civil wars, etc. all of which predate Twitter. Everything is just more public now.

I love how every example of "It was always this bad" involves people reaching back to before the '60s and, in some cases, before The New Deal.

In most cases, reversing several decades of stability and progress would have been considered a very troubling development.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#96

Post by pjc50 »

amreact wrote: post #70
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America wasn't like this 20 years ago. Politics has always been bad, and there's times it's been even worse, but that doesn't mean it's not trending downward right now.

Somewhere I read that the idea proposed that the more money flows from the government to voters, the more mud slinging happens. For example, after the Civil War in the U.S., politics got extremely bad due to the large numbers of voters who were veterans and were receiving money from the government. Things got less nasty after those people died. The idea is that nowadays in the U.S., there are several ways large numbe…

This would imply there's some correlation between countries with large state sectors and political vitriol and dissonance, which absolutely does not appear to be the case.

(Also, politics after the civil war was brutal because Reconstruction was necessarily the destruction and re-building of a culture at gunpoint, that of the slave owners. Their resentment is still a poisonous factor in current US politics, Charlottesville passim)

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#97

Post by pjc50 »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #53
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

The US fought a civil war over politics. But there are times where it is better/worse than others.

Hard to imagine a civil war being apolitical...

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#98

Post by sjg007 »

amreact wrote: post #70
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America wasn't like this 20 years ago. Politics has always been bad, and there's times it's been even worse, but that doesn't mean it's not trending downward right now.

Somewhere I read that the idea proposed that the more money flows from the government to voters, the more mud slinging happens. For example, after the Civil War in the U.S., politics got extremely bad due to the large numbers of voters who were veterans and were receiving money from the government. Things got less nasty after those people died. The idea is that nowadays in the U.S., there are several ways large numbe…

You forgot corporate welfare.
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