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Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

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Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#51

Post by ceilingcorner »

system16 wrote: post #47

On Twitter you can find promoted full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies and government officials. These same governments ban Twitter in their own countries and would never allow similar content on their own platforms. Twitter's solution here is to insert a tiny "State affiliated" footer text below the account name. Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being all…

It is allowed because the gatekeepers today are much more financially involved with hostile states. The same situation didn’t exist with the Soviets.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#52

Post by loceng »

refenestrator wrote: post #50
system16 wrote: post #47

On Twitter you can find promoted full blown propaganda paid for by hostile (to the US at least) state sponsored news agencies and government officials. These same governments ban Twitter in their own countries and would never allow similar content on their own platforms. Twitter's solution here is to insert a tiny "State affiliated" footer text below the account name. Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being all…

Plenty of it by our own government and allies as well. Maybe we can be a little more principled than "good guy nations" and "bad guy nations" if the goal is truth?

Who's truth is more truthful, who's lies are more harmful/helpful?

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#53

Post by DC1350 »

debacle wrote: post #30
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #8

Marketing tip: Always ask the public for input and consult with "experts" before doing what you intended to all along.

Twitch did this with some sort of committee late last year and it blew up in their faces.

The deer incident?

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#54

Post by patcon »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #8

Marketing tip: Always ask the public for input and consult with "experts" before doing what you intended to all along.

We can only know this for certain looking back. Knowing this looking forward is often cynicism, and it's a trap imho

EDIT: The above are mostly something I try to keep in mind with government public consultations. I acknowledge that cynicism is a little more understandable for private industry, as they are not even in theory rooted in anything but shareholder value-maximization, but gov is at least ostensibly aspiring for public good.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#55

Post by readflaggedcomm »

kitd wrote: post #34

This came up when Trump was threatening social media with restraints. I wrote this at the time and haven't changed my view: For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the a…

So absent power dynamics, speech shouldn't be free? I rather think of it as a fundamental human faculty which one has the right to exercise. Not everything is about your hierarchies.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#56

Post by strogonoff »

christiansakai wrote: post #5

Remove the ability to have followers from world leaders, remove the ability to be liked from world leaders' tweets. Keep the ability to retweet world leaders' tweets, but prevent retweets to be added more from the retweeters.

I actually wanted to suggest the opposite. Make everyone play by the same rules. Remove blue checkmarks. Anything you read could be a lie or someone pretending to be someone else, when taking things at face value is unsustainable one has to learn to think critically.

Of course, this would be against Twitter's interests. They’d rather fit authorities’ stereotypes as to how a public communication channel should behave, and be normalized that way. Safer, more shareholder value.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#57

Post by aww_dang »

ralmidani wrote: post #26

World leaders should not "be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter", they should be held to a higher standard; if some random loser writes a Tweet justifying genocide, reasonable people can disagree on whether that loser should be banned. But when it's people who are backed by a military which can actually carry out a genocide (and, e.g. in the case of Netanyahu and his ministers, the Assad regime, the Chine…

I'd like to see the tweet and read their genocidal rhetoric directly. If the alternative is a news outlet digesting and editorializing their words, I'd rather hear it directly from the source.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#58

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

A good article by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, on "credible neutrality" as a guiding principle for the protocol: https://nakamoto.com/credible-neutrality/

Twitter has long lost credible neutrality as a platform which is why it's ultimately going to die.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#59

Post by matthewmacleod »

I have quite literally no idea what the correct answer is, and I reckon anyone who claims to have an easy answer is lying, because the landscape is fundamentally different to anything we've seen before.

Twitter is both a public forum and a private enterprise. The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation. Is it the responsibility of the platform to prevent its abuse to that end? Or is it essential for it to remain entirely neutral? How does that work across different legal, social, and political environments? How does that apply differently to democratically-elected leaders? What constitutes harassment or targeted abuse? What counts as impersonation or parody?

It feels like it's going to be a fairly unpleasant period while we figure that all out.

Re: Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders

#60

Post by marshmallow_12 »

christiansakai wrote: post #5

Remove the ability to have followers from world leaders, remove the ability to be liked from world leaders' tweets. Keep the ability to retweet world leaders' tweets, but prevent retweets to be added more from the retweeters.

That's discrimination, unpopular as this may be, world leaders are also people. To fairly implement what you suggest, twitter must make a rule that political personalities must post political content while in office on a dedicated "world leader" handle
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