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

It is clear as day that the views of the CEO and the Twitter platform has influenced the policies and biases against certain groups and enforced bans or shadow-bans on certain users and flags tweets from certain users.

If they themselves are compromised or are part of a scandal, they will ban anyone else from spreading this information to try covering it up.

[0] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/402495-twitter-ceo-jac...

Recommendation engines are neither inherently good or harmful -- think of them as an amplifier.

In normal times, they work pretty well -- it gives you more of the stuff you like, which usually isn't harmful. Just entertaining/fluff/interesting/whatever.

But closer to an election, they can be gamed and weaponized for harm -- Russia can activate botnets, fake accounts, etc. and lies spread like wildfire.

So it's not about whether the recommendation engine is good or bad -- it works. The point is that close to an election, bad actors weaponize it 1,000x more or more often than they do the rest of the time, so they're turning it off. When it's not being weaponized so much, they can keep it on.

It's like paying for a DDoS protection layer at times when you know your site is likely to be attacked, but not using it the rest of the time.

But most of the time people like getting content recommended. It's what consumers want.

To pretend that they have some "democracy breaking" power in their platform of the loudest 1% of individuals that actually contribute and that this needs to be tamed with special rules to protect the integrity of elections seems like an absurd fantasy.

Either they're right and their platform can be a tool used for evil in general, in which case, why limit these rules purely to one particular federal election? Or they're wrong, and this really is just some bizarre internal marketing effort.

From Facebook's point of view, we have recently learned that the whole circus around Cambridge Analytica was a gigantic farce and that they had no more access to anything than anyone else - and that they hardly did anything with it to begin with.

2016 taught us that even if everyone puts their chips on one candidate, and says that they have a 99% chance of winning, it may not be a reflection of reality whatsoever.

Now, given that Twitter is primarily a Democratic Party platform (no silly HN poster, I don't need to post evidence to back that up), I wonder why they are deciding to do this.

Do they know something about the election trends and which way the winds are blowing that they are intentionally trying to silence it to influence things one way or another?

If you have anything left in that head of yours, my dear HN reader, it would be a good time to flex it and read between the lines when these posts turn up. And to not believe everything you read, especially from corporations that hijack social and civic responsibilities for financial gains.

At any rate, make sure you get a comfy couch and some popcorn if you haven't. This will be a fun ride in a months time.