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De-escalating social media conflict

nickpunt.com

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Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#131

Post by npunt »

pfooti wrote: post #110
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.

I think we can distinguish apologies into two top-level categories: meaningful and meaningless. Meaningless apologies can be further subdivided ("I'm sorry you were offended", or "It's just my culture to be a jerk"), but I'm not interested in that - they're all meaningless. Meaningful apologies can be easily found via the search engine of your choice, "How to apologize" brings up lots of hits. The thing they all have…

One of the explicit design choices in this was to limit people's tendency to screw up apologies in the heated moments when they haven't yet internalized the outside world's perspective of their message. I'm glad you brought up the searching of how to apologize - it's one of those super important life skills that we haven't done a good job of teaching people about. We have to design with this constraint in mind.

One of the things I think about most in design, especially in design of social products, is limiting self-sabotage. This is because there's really significant emotional risk in social systems of feelings like being exposed, misunderstood, etc.

This is why I favored the approach of not including a Follow-up or further explanations. It makes the choice Mea Culpa very simple, favoring cooling off of conflict over continued debate. Basically people can go back in their corners and think about things, and figure out how to approach things again later if they choose. It is an intentional choice to favor respectful debate over maximal information exchange, acknowledging the medium's tendency to escalate conflict and the presence of many bad faith actors.

Also note this feature does not take the place of the apologies you're talking about, it just offers an acknowledgment of mistake and an opportunity to forgive.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#132

Post by walleeee »

dragontamer wrote: post #17
momokoko wrote: post #11

The only winning move is not to play.

Social Media is increasingly becoming a major source of power for political movements and political organization. Both Obama and Trump campaigns were signified by a major online, social-media presence. I'd expect that many future Presidents will be determined by their command of Social Media. Social Media is the new television, the new Radio. Its the new media that is most significantly consumed by the population. By…

> By "not playing", you resign your power to others who take advantage of this new form of media.

You also set an example among members of your cohort. The incentive to "play" is social, and removing yourself from the game not only gives you more time and energy to devote to games with better ROI, but also increases the odds that people you know will do the same.

Is it really worthwhile to pursue "power" on social media? Wouldn't it be better if people weren't so susceptible to that sort of influence in the first place?

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#133

Post by memexy »

npunt wrote: post #124
memexy wrote: post #113

> Reply to your tweet, posting "I was wrong" There is another option. Quote tweet and say "I was wrong". Quote tweeting is a concept extension mechanism but people mostly use it for dunking. If you make a mistake then quote tweeting is the best way to correct it because people can then search for "I was wrong" and see the wrong tweet in context.

True, quote tweeting (I think you mean retweet with comment) yourself is another option, however I don't see it as fundamentally different to replies. If people are liking, retweeting, or replying to the original tweet, it will continue to show up in the feeds of others through the home feed algorithm. Thus, the same forces apply that strongly favor the original over the correction.

That's a good point but if you actually want to verify whether the original author retracted their statement then you can do localized search, e.g. "from:author 'I was wrong'". It's true the feed will show different results but I only use twitter by searching now and it's a much better experience. Tweetdeck allows me to curate exactly what I want to be aware of instead of being beholden to algorithmic manipulation.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#134

Post by class4behavior »

softwaredoug wrote: post #94
ssalazar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Engagement" is the "paper clip maximizer"[1] of the modern software industry, or more generally an example of "instrumental convergence." Optimizing engagement without regard for negative externalities is a catastrophic ethical failure of the major players in the software industry, and we are finally seeing a backlash both from mainstream advertisers and widespread public outcry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In…

Engagement can also ultimately at odds with retention. We see people leaving Twitter and Facebook all the time due to exhaustion with the toxic conflict. So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.

>So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.

You've referenced engagement first, but then, you've ignored about it in your conclusion. That is, as long as the inflow counters the outflow of participants, the situation will not improve or will even worsen - just as we've experienced in the last decade.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#135

Post by wisty »

rmrfstar wrote: post #108
andrepd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should a for-profit enterprise have any kind of ethical consideration at all? It seems that's your mistake.

Because we live in a society with social norms and a moral code. If anything, we should expect more morality from institutions that avail themselves of limited liability legal forms. This "corporations should be cynical sociopaths" idea is even newer than the limited liability corporate form, which is itself a modern invention. Before the current era of hyper-institutionalization and hyper-legalism there was a concep…

Often, society is wrong and capitalism is right.

When society is prejudiced against a group (not the fake prejudice that society complains about - major broadcasters like Fox and CNN are both probably championing groups who have plenty of support from society, but maybe other groups are actually marginalised but it wouldn't be broadly OK to say it if they were) then it's not society's moral code that helps them (if anything it hurts them), it's businesses that only care about money who will still deal with them.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#136

Post by smabie »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #130
hliyan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was in a "silo" of extremely honorable, incredibly high-quality people for a couple of decades Have you written more about your experiences during this period? I would love to read them!

Not especially. It is a corporation that is very protective of its privacy and secrets. I tend not to name it, even though it's fairly easy to figure out. I don't want to cause them any stress or harm. Even though I wish things had gone somewhat differently, I retain the greatest respect for the corporation, and its employees and officers.

Ricoh?

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#137

Post by YokoZar »

dcow wrote: post #87
FooBarWidget wrote: post #5

Even increasing the content limit will go a long way towards deescalation. I find that, on Twitter, one often has to resort to oversimplified hyperbole and sarcasm because it's very difficult to fit more thoughtful and nuanced messages in the content limit. Yes it's possible to write multiple tweets. But that takes significantly more effort.

Twitter/FB just aren't the right platforms for nuanced discussion. I don't know why people keep trying to treat them that way or keep wanting them to become such. Easy for me to say as someone who has already come to this realization and has actively avoided building dependency on Twitter/FB in my daily life, I guess... But honestly I wish people who wanted to have real meaningful discourse with people would gravitat…

I suggest investigating old-style web forums - the kind without individual upvotes/downvotes on posts, where replies in a thread are in the same chronological order for everyone

They still need close moderation, however

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#138

Post by jackcosgrove »

Years ago I had a rule that I would not post anything after 8pm. I had discovered after some reflection that that was when my "witching hour" for toxic internet posting was most likely to begin. I don't follow the rule anymore as I've slowly disengaged from social media and am less likely to get riled up by that nonsense, but it was a good rule when I did follow it.

Commenting platforms should have "circuit breakers" that slow down activity. It's the easiest thing to measure and control. You don't even need to analyze content. Metafilter had (has?) a similar feature for posting topics, which only allowed one topic per day.

As others have pointed out though, slowing down activity decreases engagement and hurts the bottom line.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#139

Post by doomrobo »

wisty wrote: post #135
rmrfstar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we live in a society with social norms and a moral code. If anything, we should expect more morality from institutions that avail themselves of limited liability legal forms. This "corporations should be cynical sociopaths" idea is even newer than the limited liability corporate form, which is itself a modern invention. Before the current era of hyper-institutionalization and hyper-legalism there was a concep…

Often, society is wrong and capitalism is right. When society is prejudiced against a group (not the fake prejudice that society complains about - major broadcasters like Fox and CNN are both probably championing groups who have plenty of support from society, but maybe other groups are actually marginalised but it wouldn't be broadly OK to say it if they were) then it's not society's moral code that helps them (if a…

Examples?

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#140

Post by pabs3 »

This reminded me of Polis:

https://pol.is/ https://github.com/pol-is/

Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.

https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-min... https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5 https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...

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