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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

#111

Post by iamdbtoo »

_qulr wrote: post #29
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?

> Twitter is a community Twitter has 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily active users. Is that a community? It seems more like an unruly mob. :-) I agree with the point that all online forums should have moderation, but for me the question is, should something like Twitter even exist? A centralized world discussion forum is not necessarily a good and healthy thing. Can humanity handle having Twitte…

Yes, this would be my next point.

Twitter is absolutely a community, it's just buckling under the weight of its scale. The problem we're facing right now, to me, is that Twitter and Facebook have built communities that they are incapable of moderating effectively because of their scale, but they ask us to give them time to manage this difficult problem and we give it to them, absorbing more damage while they make billions. How much time do they need? They've all been around for over a decade. It's time to start demanding results.

These platforms aren't required to exist. If they can't prevent their services from causing damage to societies across the world, then they should be required to fix that. If they can't fix it, then they should be shut down.

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

#112

Post by bobthepanda »

jon37 wrote: post #101
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.

By growing as large as they have, and by building automated systems to amplify content to mass audiences, they have acquired that role. It is unfortunate that their control over their responsibility is unilateral and undemocratic. But at their scale, if they chose not to try and assess the accuracy of information, but instead to blindly amplify it based on engagement metrics, that is also a political choice.

One possible option that never gets discussed is to nuke the amplification methods. If we stop recommending content automatically this ceases to be a problem.

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

#113

Post by tpmx »

_qulr wrote: post #107
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The changes give Twitter employees a vast amount of power over determining what's allowed to be said and what isn't. That fact alone makes me believe this is a result of internal pressure.

Social network moderators are almost always low-paid, low-power, low-profile employees. It's not a great job. It's a high-volume job, like an assembly line. The highly compensated Twitter and Facebook software engineers are not doing the content moderation. They don't have the time, and they would run away screaming if they had to do it for an hour. It's likely that a lot of this work is even outsourced.

I assume they have created an hierarchy with a number of different roles. That's generally how you scale people-intensive tasks. I have no idea why you would want to classify all of those roles as "assembly line".

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

#114

Post by gdulli »

TheSionnach wrote: post #35
km3r wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any platform ought to have the right to prevent falsehoods from being spread on the platform. A platform also should have to right to choose what topic, otherwise a car forum could be overrun by motorcycle enthusiasts. As long as a platform applies its rules in a just and fair way, i see no issue with preventing lies or keeping the topic on track.

But who gets to decide what is truth and lies? If twitter was bi-partisan, sure, but the people in charge clearly have a heavily bias.

> But who gets to decide what is truth and lies?

Twitter does. On Twitter. That's practically a tautology.

Is your point that you didn't know the answer, or that we should descend into anarchy because attempting to answer difficult questions is tricky?

Both sides think Twitter is biased against them. The only reason you think it's biased is because of the same tribalism that you're baselessly accusing them of.

It's blatantly obvious that Twitter can never stray far from the middle because it would lose them one half or the other of their audience and business.

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

#115

Post by driverdan »

pdenton wrote: post #5

How long before the "misleading" label is used on anything that doesn't match their own political views?

I downvoted you because the label is based on facts, not political views.

If you have evidence of the contrary please post it and I'll be happy to change my comment.

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

#116

Post by tpmx »

3np wrote: post #57
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)

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.

Just to clarify: You don't disagree with what I wrote, but rather with the existence of something that caused me write something like that in the fist place?

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

#117

Post by iamdbtoo »

themacguffinman wrote: post #91
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?

Good moderation sets standards for how we communicate that everyone is honestly able to meet regardless of their worldview. Taking this site as an example, the guidelines focus on the tone, relevancy, and novelty of your responses. It encourages civility and curiosity, it does not try to calculate the truth value of what I'm saying. I see many "it's just moderation" takes on what Twitter is doing, but what Twitter an…

But because this forum has guidelines for those aspects of speech, and its members abide by it, it opens up space for disagreements to take place and truth to surface.

Twitter has guidelines rules for things you can and can't say but since the users don't all agree to the same guidelines, and Twitter enforces them very inconsistently, there's no pressure to follow them except to the point you may get suspended or banned from the site.

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

#118

Post by gdulli »

joshfraser wrote: post #3

Free speech has taken quite a beating in recent days. It's weird watching many of my friends and people I respect cheering while it happens. I honestly don't know what we do to fix our current situation where lies so easily go viral, but making Twitter arbiters of truth doesn't seem like the best solution.

> It's weird watching many of my friends and people I respect cheering while it happens

They understand that "free speech" is one of many principles we value, that these principles can clash, and we inevitably have to choose between them in cases. Even if those choices make some people uncomfortable. Before today, speech was neither offline nor online so free as to permit fraud. It's a terrible civic abdication to write off criminal behavior because it's so easy to get away with online and because it looks so much on the surface level like "free speech."

Or because we live with too much fear and paranoia to accept even a discussion of establishing standards. Twitter making any judgment that some content is fraudulent is not the same as becoming the editorial boogeyman from the extremist side of whatever political party is opposite to yours. That's fear. That's an appeal to the slippery slope fallacy.

My trip to the store is better off for knowing that if someone was shouting about about Jesus or conspiracies, they'd be asked to leave. We don't question that limit on speech. There's a reason you see people doing that on street corners. If there was never any deplatforming, all platforms would inevitably suck.

Is it ideal that Twitter and Facebook have so much power? Maybe not, but that's just the reality we're in. We can't be paralyzed into inaction. There's no perfect body that everyone would trust to do the job and someone has to keep Twitter and Facebook from sucking too hard. Don't let your paranoia make you overlook that they'd lose half their audience/business if they ever strayed too far from the middle.

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

#119

Post by driverdan »

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.

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

That would result in 90% of user generated content being spam. There's no law against me sending you 10 spam DMs a day on Twitter. Is that really what you want?

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

#120

Post by _qulr »

scubbo wrote: post #66
_qulr wrote: post #2

I'm not sure why Twitter thinks that quote tweets are better than retweets. Propaganda exists to be spread, and it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. Also, you can disable retweets on accounts you follow but not quote tweets.

> it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. This has never been obvious to me, and I continue to be confused by it as a position. It seems similar to "don't respond to anyone making blatantly false/harmful claims on discussion forums, because engaging with them just encourages them and spreads their message". In fact…

What rdw said in a sibling reply. Also, it's all too easy to raise a troll's profile and turn them into an anti-hero or martyr by dunking on them. This is what happened with the POTUS. It's precisely the reaction he gets, the vehement criticism he gets, that makes him popular. His followers think, if he's pissing off a lot of people, he must be doing something right. The worst possible thing that could happen to him, from his perspective, is to be ignored. "All press is good press", as they say. In attempting to refute the message, you inadvertently make the messenger more prominent than they ought to be. You give them more public influence than they ought to have. This is how trolls rise to prominence, not only in politics, but in all areas. Look at the sports shows, where the loudest blowhards with the dumbest opinions — which they spout on purpose! — have the biggest audience. Dumb opinions make an inviting target to dunk on, and everyone takes the bait. The trolls want to be dunked on, time and time again. They want to be the go-to person for getting dunked on. If I make make a very bad Star Wars analogy, it's like when Obi Wan says "You can't win, Vader. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." (Except Obi Wan is the bad guy in this analogy. Which he kind of is anyway, because he lied to Luke about his father.)
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