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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

#141

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

chmod775 wrote: post #102
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misreading the history. For years, Twitter refused to ban basically any world leader, including the US president, despite many calls for them to do so and many tweets that would've gotten you or I banned. But events 2 months ago rendered that stance untenable. So now they've gotta come up with a new one, since they don't want the rule to be "special privileges, but only for leaders who Twitter, Inc. ha…

> But events 2 months ago rendered that stance untenable. Now that's just not true. What trump did was a relatively minor infraction compared to what is happening in some countries around the world. Like it just doesn't come close on any scale. The realization here is that people at twitter have an opinion on US politics, and are generally oblivious to the rest of the world. The waters they're in would've been way le…

It was relatively minor, but it was a lot more relevant to Twitter because it happened in the country where most of their employees and servers are located. What they realized, I think, is that their prior stance of "we'll never ban a world leader" was naive; they hadn't fully thought through the potential negative effects, because the full spectrum of consequences that a government leader's speech can have was outside the personal experience of the policy setters.

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

#142

Post by TameAntelope »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #58

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.

All things ultimately die, I dunno how useful that is as a prediction...

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

#143

Post by jtdev »

nonotreally wrote: post #133
jtdev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would fall into the "illegal" [0] category if people are in fact calling for violence. [0] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

Sounds like we agree on this. I want to push you here though. Did twitter contribute to the events on the 6th? Do they have any role to play? Do you have to use the words "go and kill them" in order for it to be violence? I'm trying to be genuine here, because I don't know. I will say it certainly feels like we saw the violence being induced for months ahead of time on twitter without explicit calls for violence. Sho…

If the speech is legal it should not be censored or moderated in any way. Any deviation from that results in the technocrats interfering with the flow of legal information and manipulation of social, economic, and political processes - which is in large part how we ended up with the events of recent months in my opinion.

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

#144

Post by president »

IgorPartola wrote: post #76
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…

You might want to take a look at Voice of America, a Congress-funded network that broadcasts almost exclusively outside the US as US propaganda: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America

Not sure if you have read or watched VOA as of late but there is a lot of "America bad" content in there as well. If it's propaganda, it sure is doing a bad job at it.

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

#145

Post by TameAntelope »

aww_dang wrote: post #66
matthewmacleod wrote: post #59

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…

>The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation. If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing? I find the premise troubling. People can disagree and interpret events differently. Without that, there's very little to discuss.

Much like the global economy made morality an infinitely complex problem (thanks The Good Place), the global Internet made digesting information equally as complex.

We don't equip people to do it through our education systems in America. What we're doing is sending millions of people out into the world, wholly unprepared to navigate it successfully, which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.

I don't personally blame Twitter. This is such a gigantic problem, that pinning it to a single source is just understating what's happening. If America wants to survive another 100 years, it will have to find a way to fix its "lack of critical thinking skills" problem in a way that flips the statistics, which is more or less impossible, without swift and decisive action to make large changes to how we educate our children.

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

#146

Post by tacostakohashi »

I don't really have much of an opinion on how twitter should approach world leaders.

I'm more interested in the approach of world leaders to twitter. As far as I'm concerned, people receiving salaries from the taxpayer shouldn't be spending their time writing free copy for twitter. They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites, or press conferences covered by multiple media organizations.

If the president feels a need to push out realtime text snippets, it can be done via an RSS feed on whitehouse.gov, and people can consume it via whatever app / client they want. If twitter wanted to scrape that and provide access to it, fine, but they shouldn't be given a free monopoly on that content.

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

#147

Post by curation »

readflaggedcomm wrote: post #55
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.

What is free speech? I argue it is not even a concept. Concepts divide people. There is no person against free speech. Please don't bring up Russia and China. I've been to these countries and people they cherish free speech;they just have freely spoken to have an explicit authoritarian ruler. Free speech is conversation to have out of laziness.

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

#148

Post by loceng »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #126
loceng wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Our lies are probably the most harmful as we have the world's largest military and it's deployed worldwide. Do you not remember the NYT lying to get the Iraq War started? I can't think of a more devastating instance of propaganda.

So once again, along with naming the CCP vs. naming China as the bad actor, we need to instead of naming the US as the bad actor, we have to name the industrial complexes including the duopoly that has been allowed to develop over the last many decades - allowing the duopoly's two core narratives to be the majority of what people get fed through mainstream media conglomerates (the media industrial complex) owned by a handful of individuals.

If we don't correctly, accurately label who is the real target - our anger will be misplaced - and that is something the bad actors want to have happen, and will certainly perpetuate themselves. And we don't learn then. Quick soundbites spread easily but it's not the way.

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

#150

Post by christiansakai »

anoncow wrote: post #28
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.

Are we asking Twitter to stop being Twitter?

Only for world leaders.
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