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Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

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Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#51

Post by chickenpotpie »

stale2002 wrote: post #43
iamdbtoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a community and all communities require some level of moderation. There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

> There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law. > You have to set some of sort of standard The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.

>> There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want

> What? There are tons of places where the only restrictions on what you say, is determined by the law.

So there are still restrictions then and people can't say whatever they want?

> The standard could be "Whatever is allowed by US law", which is extremely non restrictive on speech.

voat.co is a clone of reddit where the only difference is no restriction on speech. The top posts are usually extremely racist and antisemitic. It is a horrible horrible platform and the only change is no restriction on speech.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#52

Post by JPKab »

roughly wrote: post #47

I'm fascinated by the comments here, which seem to be assuming that Twitter is operating in an environment in which the predominate source of trending information is well-meaning individuals and not motivated state-level actors intent on disrupting an election.

"predominate source of trending information is well-meaning individuals and not motivated state-level actors intent on disrupting an election."

What evidence do you have that the predominant source of trending information is motivated state-level actors? That is an incredibly bold statement, and the framing you chose is such that there needs to evidence to the contrary, rather than evidence to support such a claim.

Edit: A bunch of responses are mistakenly thinking I am denying the presence of Twitter bots created and operated by state actors. I'm not. I'm arguing with the incredibly bold statement that they are the PREDOMINANT SOURCE of trending information.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#53

Post by bmarquez »

>First, we will encourage people to add their own commentary prior to amplifying content by prompting them to Quote Tweet instead of Retweet.

>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets.

These are great, I wish we could have these policies all the time, not just election season. This would probably harm engagement metrics (since retweeting without commentary is low-effort) but increase the quality of the feed by reducing noise and increasing context of tweets.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#54

Post by cmckn »

joshfraser wrote: post #30
iamdbtoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a community and all communities require some level of moderation. There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of millions of people with wildly differing world views?

I think the “how” is pretty simple: the company is made up of people, the people define a set of principles, and adhere to them. They don’t have to accommodate everyone (and in my opinion, shouldn’t).

I think the hard part is doing this in the face of money. We have all seen how platforms allow awful things to exist because of the economic incentives to do so.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#55

Post by coldpie »

joshfraser wrote: post #30
iamdbtoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a community and all communities require some level of moderation. There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of millions of people with wildly differing world views?

Yep, it's hard. Let's try to figure it out instead of just throwing our hands up and letting the trolls take over.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#56

Post by ryandrake »

Nice steps, but seems a little late. I hope Twitter doesn't actually believe we are currently "ahead of the 2020 US Election". The election is already underway. More than 4 million people have already mailed in their ballots [1]. I guess better late than never but any social media company still figuring out their 2020 election policies is way, WAY behind.

1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-early-vote/m...

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#57

Post by 3np »

tpmx wrote: post #38
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #24

Reading these headlines is like living in a dystopian waking nightmare. This is not remotely at all the role that Twitter or any other Silicon Valley tech company should play in society.

This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)

Hard disagree. It’s inevitable with any company in their position. There should be no company in that position. We need to decentralize and federate. Mastodon is AFAIK the prominent implementation here but regardless, we need to start pushing for and exploring networks and platforms operated under completely different premises.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#58

Post by yamrzou »

notatoad wrote: post #8

>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see relevant conversations from outside of their network, but we are removing them because we don’t believe the “Like” button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amp…

Their recommendation engine is not harmful in all cases. I used to use Twitter to follow some machine learning/programming profiles and remember the recommendations being quite good.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#59

Post by wongarsu »

snazz wrote: post #45
tpmx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)

Without getting into the argument of whether any speech is apolitical or whether politics belongs in the workplace, Twitter clearly has a huge place in politics as a result of its nature as the premier social media platform for world leaders and journalists and anyone with an opinion today. Regardless of their internal culture, Twitter will always have to make some political decisions.

> the premier social media platform for world leaders

Mostly one world leader. The rest of them seem to continue to primarily communicate through press conferences, television appearances and other fairly traditional methods.

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