251–260 of 367 posts
I started using Twitter back in 2008. Before the age of smart phones Talk about erasing the past. I dearly hope knowledge of what came before iPhone and Android isn't washed over like all the non-Apple 8-bit computers.
Exactly. That should really read "I started using Twitter back in 2008. A decade after Windows CE phones became quite common, and 5 years after the launch of Windows Mobile."
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>Why would Youtube or Twitter have to? Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
No they don't. A huge section of the population is not on Twitter and gets their news from old media.
which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.
Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need…
Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.
Everyone is compelled to use Twitter. Its success, influence, and profit, derive largely from its semi-official adoption by so many corporations and government actors.
It isn't private, and if it wants to be, it can't be used for public business.
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The answer is much simpler than you are making this appear. Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication. Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform. Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that p…
I believe that's an artificial distinction. Companies like Mailchimp have already started implementing protections like mandatory opt-out mechanisms to protect themselves from liability. If networks of mailing lists around political rather than business interests were more common, I'd expect no less this kind of self-policing. The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.
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It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of t…
>It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The Constitution limits the Governmental Powers to make laws restricting speech, the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places of business or platforms to disseminate their speech.
Twitter shouldn't be able to, either.
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I believe that's an artificial distinction. Companies like Mailchimp have already started implementing protections like mandatory opt-out mechanisms to protect themselves from liability. If networks of mailing lists around political rather than business interests were more common, I'd expect no less this kind of self-policing. The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.
I think the more relevant distinction here is that email is federated. Once Mailchimp has sent out the emails, there's not much it can do, and it would be pretty unreasonable to force Mailchimp to review filter all their emails. Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has…
It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.
Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need…
You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public. It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we look at some differences between Twitter (or insert your favorite social media platform here) and email: * Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information * Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends" * Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual serv…
From your last paragraph the term you are looking for is "common carrier". Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
Any time Twitter has been called to account for what it publishes, it claims it's not a publisher. Give them what they want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of t…
Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?