181–190 of 371 posts
There's nothing wrong with taking a side between truth and lies. Even their example tweet should be clearly labeled as wrong, not "disputed". There is no serious dispute, only bad-faith political attacks against the democratic process.
>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…
I really disliked that "feature", I usually use the chronological mode to avoid seeing them. If I wanted to see that content I would follow it, and if I wasn't and the content was good someone I follow might retweet it. And if I follow someone who retweets annoying things I can disable retweets on that person.
If I wanted to "discover" or "explore" something, I'd open the dedicated section, thank you very much. Modern social media is ridiculously user-hostile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's not exactly the boot of fascism stomping on your face forever. Alright. Let's say that all of the major social media platforms ban any discussion of raising their taxes, or enacting more regulation on them, or let's say they straight up ban major politicians from the platform. Oh, and also there is no other significant competitor that matters, and it is unlikely that any competitors will pop up anytime soon.…
>Let's say that all of the major social media platforms ban any discussion of raising their taxes, or enacting more regulation on them, or let's say they straight up ban major politicians from the platform Unless we're talking about a situation where a government controls the internet and makes it illegal for anyone but those social media sites to set up a server or host content, then that might create an immediate m…
They don't even have to all conspire together. Instead, merely one of these companies doing it, alone, could have a huge effect.
For example, a power company, or water company doing this, all on its own, not conspiring with anyone at all, would be very bad for society, if it were legal (fortunately, it is not legal for a power company to do that).
This is because it would be extremely expensive, and difficult to get another power line, or water pipe, to your house. There are huge barriers to entry.
If only a singular power company did this (after the law was changed), if would be very difficult for any of their customers to resist such changes. They'd have to take extreme actions, such as moving, or paying for whole new pipes to be dug in the ground to their house.
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.
To be a complete curmudgeon, this just seems like self-serving nonsense from Twitter. 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, i…
As a result of this, Twitter's changes won't have much effect. It still all depends on whether journalists are reporting tweets to the public, and which tweets. Even if tweets get censored by Twitter, ironically that in itself becomes "newsworthy", and journalists spread the censored tweets.
Politicians love Twitter because it allows them to say whatever they want, without having pesky reporters ask them unpleasant questions. And the reporters nonetheless report these unfiltered messages (often lies) to the public. It's basically free press, free advertising. A politician doesn't have to be invited onto a news program, they can just make "news" whenever they want, in convenient soundbites.
The ultimate danger of Twitter to society is that journalists can't resist the temptation of reporting tweets as news. Of course this is a failing of journalists, not Twitter, but Twitter is giving these people a global public unfiltered platform they wouldn't otherwise have.
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.
That's all Twitter sells is ads. You can't purchase any other service from them. The only purpose of the social platform is for there to be people to serve ads to. That's not a product, that's a marketing strategy.
So why shouldn't they have a moral responsibility to curb the use of their platform to do societal harm through the dissemination of misinformation? They don't exist to provide an uncensored social platform, they exist to generate profit through advertising. If their practices do harm they should answer for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not elected people, not respecting the most basic of constitutional principles. Not only that, but you can't enforce your "set of principles" on billion of tweets each hour of the day, not by people at least, so you defer to bots, which are incapable of discerning what is free speech. They can't apply your principles with the discernment of a human, they can't enforce what's legal or illegal, like they can't recogniz…
Slavery.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)
That makes no sense to me. Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? How would that work? It's the quest for "engagement" and getting always more users and ad views that generates this situation. What can be used to sell you shoes and earphones can also be used to sell you political ideas. When the algorithm wants to show you some inflamma…
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705
Edit: To clarify, he is saying the right way ahead for companies is to be apolitical, or, "mission-founded".
Coinbase offered employees not comfortable with the non-political mission-founded way exit packages:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They are nuking them right now (temporarily). It's not just being discussed, it's being done . But most of the time people like getting content recommended. It's what consumers want.