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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

#121

Post by driverdan »

eplanit wrote: post #20
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.

10 years ago, it was most China we spoke about regarding censorship and "social credits". The CCP has made deep inroads into US society during this time. They're succeeding in changing peoples' thoughts and feelings regarding free speech.

Save your outrage for when it's government mandated. Until then Twitter can moderate their platform however they want.

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

#122

Post by celdon25 »

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.

Then they shouldn't have become that large to begin with.

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

#123

Post by iamdbtoo »

wyoh wrote: post #84
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?

> We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter? We don't do this in the US, it's called the 1st amendment. https://youtu.be/-OhyBJxg9RA?t=170

Our libel and slander laws say otherwise.

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

#124

Post by cblconfederate »

wongarsu wrote: post #59
snazz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.. which they announce on Twitter, or else people and journalists would miss them. Traditional methods are on the way out

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

#125

Post by iamdbtoo »

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 law is part of my point. It's how we as a society limit free speech in places where it's damaging to other people.

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

#126

Post by dbbk »

Fellshard wrote: post #96
dbbk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter does not have a political view.

A cursory examination of their leadership's own statements makes it clear this is untrue.

You don't believe business leaders have the capacity to separate their personal beliefs from corporate policy for a company that serves over 300 million people across the world?

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

#127

Post by notatoad »

yamrzou wrote: post #58
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.

in my experience, if anybody you follow ever interacts with anything political, that quickly drowns out any other interesting content in the recommendations. If you exclusively follow people who exclusively post and interact with programming content, then maybe your recs will be okay. but all it takes is one person in your network to interact with one other topic to poison your recommendations for good.

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

#128

Post by celdon25 »

krapp wrote: post #4
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.

No one is making Twitter an arbiter of truth. If you don't like the way Twitter does business, there are other platforms that will cater to your alternative truth needs.

Your comment comes across as smug and condescending. Not to mention that moving to another platform doesn't change the secondary and tertiary effects that mass censorship has on society, and therefore you, as a platform user or not.

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

#129

Post by matchbok »

joshfraser wrote: post #44
matchbok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you understand what "free speech" is, because it doesn't apply to Twitter, at all, in any way.

Mmmm the dictionary says it means "the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint"

Again, you don't understand what that means. They are a private entity - "censorship" has no meaning there. You have exactly 0 rights on the twitter platform, as it's not a government entity.

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

#130

Post by ssalazar »

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)

Silicon Valley tech workers were sold on a dream of “changing the world” rather than building any other normal business, so I would not expect any different really.
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