De-escalating social media conflict • Hacker News Board

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#71

Post by dcow » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

meowfly wrote: post #34

I'm very much convinced that one should never admit a mistake on social media after a dogpile. I think there is too much bad faith for a Mea Culpa option to even work. Apologies work well in smaller circles because an apology implies a correction in behavior that's necessary for those around you to trust you again. In social media people are signalling they don't like your behavior but they don't actually care about…

I don't see how the stance that you should never admit a mistake after a mob dog pile means the feature described here would never work. There are plenty of cases where people just straight up make real mistakes and don't feel pressured to apologize out of desire to appease the mob but rather simply have aggregated additional input, and reassessed their original statement in light of new information, and decided it needs correction.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#72

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #66

zozbot234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about this proposal is precisely how it replaces the problematic "apology" dynamic with a neutral retraction. Apologies may or may not be rejected as insincere, but a retraction is simply a factual statement that the user no longer stands behind what they wrote, while preserving the content itself (unlike tweet deletion, which in practice tends to escalate reposts) for the sake of transparency.

Well, if you have someone determined to go after someone else, the most nuanced approach is not going to get you much. The attacker just rephrases it as they wish. Which is to say, when you have a medium like Twitter, where the entire world can march in and get involved with conversation X, a proposal for de-escalation seems futile and a bit absurd. Among other things, a lot of media personalities have built their en…

> Well, if you have someone determined to go after someone else, the most nuanced approach is not going to get you much. The attacker just rephrases it as they wish.

They can do this but they no longer have plausible deniability, since they're attacking something that the other user has unambiguously disclaimed. They'll just look like a loser who is obviously not acting in good faith.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#73

Post by gridlockd » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #16

rvz wrote: post #9

> By admitting a mistake, the poster stops the runaway train of replies and amplifications of their mistake, and the reputation damage that follows. No matter the apology of the mistake, those who demand them to apologise will still reject it and push further for calls for the accused to be cancelled. The replies and amplifications will divert into real life instead of Twitter.

The nice thing about this proposal is precisely how it replaces the problematic "apology" dynamic with a neutral retraction. Apologies may or may not be rejected as insincere, but a retraction is simply a factual statement that the user no longer stands behind what they wrote, while preserving the content itself (unlike tweet deletion, which in practice tends to escalate reposts) for the sake of transparency.

Not effective. Now you have “a history of” making this or that statement.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#74

Post by gridlockd » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

npunt wrote: post #14

rvz wrote: post #9

> By admitting a mistake, the poster stops the runaway train of replies and amplifications of their mistake, and the reputation damage that follows. No matter the apology of the mistake, those who demand them to apologise will still reject it and push further for calls for the accused to be cancelled. The replies and amplifications will divert into real life instead of Twitter.

It certainly won't work for all cases of conflict, but don't you think it would work for some? The goal was not a complete solution but a step towards changing community norms.

It would only work in situations that are not actually problems, like being confronted with a mob of reasonable people.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#75

Post by dcow » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:13 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #62

koluna wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To that, genuinely curious - what is the alternative you see to social media to build influence and visibility? One of the key benefits of Twitter is that you can make your work, be it in the arts, software or literally anything else, visible to a large audience. What’s the alternative if one is not to use Twitter? How do you publicize your findings or insights to a broad population?

> What’s the alternative if one is not to use Twitter? How do you publicize your findings or insights to a broad population? If you can, you do it behind the shield of a faceless corporate entity (that you own) doing the promoting, rather than tying statements to your own personal identity. You don't stop using Twitter or Instagram et al., you stop using them to project your personal opinions out into the world. Your…

In other words: self-censor. Sorry not my style.

I believe you have good points about keeping your work and personal lives as separate as possible and I believe your advice is very pragmatic. I don't, however, think it should be necessary nor is it realistic. Let's all go into sterile work environments for 8+ hours a day where we have to self-censor based solely on observations of how other people fucked up and angered the mob. Let's never celebrate each other's humanity at work in case they accidentally "twitch the wrong way", as you put it. Let's all just sand in line, the oppressed among us silent and powerless because they've been told they have no voice.

In reality, people's work is important and meaningful to them. People need the freedom to express themselves without having to calculate whether it's worth finding a new job tomorrow because a mob sniffed them out.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#76

Post by secondcoming » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #57

I think this work is great and interesting, and I respect it. One of the things I feel like it lacks is a discussion of the broader context: we all sort of suspect that one of the reasons Twitter does not generally allow for de-escalation (like FB not censoring misleading news articles) is that such escalation is in fact part of their revenue stream (escalation=more engagement), so while I think ideas like this would…

If there's anyone out there who wants to earn money from advertising there are two words you need to be aware of:

"BRAND SAFETY"

No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic. This is why YouTube is demonetising any video that mentions Covid-19. YouTube themselves technically probably don't care, but brand safety conscious advertisers certainly do, and so YouTube must too.

They've realised that Twitter and FB, and others, are currently toxic platforms. The discussion threads can be awful, driven by fascists on both the far-left and far-right of the political debate. They no longer want to buy this advertising space, it's too much of a reputational risk (I will say that advertisers outsource the buying of advertising space to Ad agencies who may not be as savvy since they're under pressure to spend allotted advertising budgets).

Hence the news about big brands pulling budgets from social media.

Another issue that I've never seen discussed is that if Twitter (and other social media platforms) relies completely on advertising revenue, it can be forced to only allow content that advertisers approve of. In other words, advertisers can in theory control political debate. Social media platforms then ban or remove content that's undesirable for advertisers because they can't monetise it.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#77

Post by dcow » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:17 PM UTC

I think this is a great idea. I would love to see it implemented immediately as an experiment rather than tring to figure out on principle whether it would work etc. etc. etc. Only one way to know how it impacts the social climate... try it out!

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#78

Post by intended » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #16

rvz wrote: post #9

> By admitting a mistake, the poster stops the runaway train of replies and amplifications of their mistake, and the reputation damage that follows. No matter the apology of the mistake, those who demand them to apologise will still reject it and push further for calls for the accused to be cancelled. The replies and amplifications will divert into real life instead of Twitter.

The nice thing about this proposal is precisely how it replaces the problematic "apology" dynamic with a neutral retraction. Apologies may or may not be rejected as insincere, but a retraction is simply a factual statement that the user no longer stands behind what they wrote, while preserving the content itself (unlike tweet deletion, which in practice tends to escalate reposts) for the sake of transparency.

Neutral is contextual.

If you consider social interactions, they can be described as an interaction where signal is identified against noise - given a specific context. Its natural then for a context to exist such that the signal and noise are inverted, or neutrality is lost.

Not everyone can afford a mea culpa.

That said this is precisely the kind of interesting dynamic that is worth testing out to see what sort of affordance it creates, and how the medium changes to incorporate mea culpas.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#79

Post by gallegojaime » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

jennyyang wrote: post #50

It's actually a simple solution. Have a flamewar detector similar to HN, and then for that thread and those users, have it look like the other people in the thread respond "Ok, I'm sorry." Obviously randomized using machine learning so that people will think that it's a real apology. Everyone on the thread will think the other person apologized and will simply move on. Or, if they respond, no one except the writer wi…

I might see this working only if it doesn't curtail freedom of speech that much. But it's too eerie. Without UX cues I don't know if Twitter wrote something or you did.

Train it slightly wrong and Twitter takes control of some important figure's public viewpoint, perhaps even replacing something worth being angry about in the first place.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#80

Post by dilandau » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

For small scale, acknowledging my mistakes is vital.

If I'm being attacked by a crowd of people I don't even know, who don't know me, fuck em. I've seen this time and again where someone gets called out. Even when they apologize they usually still get cancelled. It's only the people who refuse to apologize to sjw's who have, ironically, been safe (joe Rogan, the draftkings guy, etc).

Twitter is, and always will be, a hate machine.