Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Twitter poisoned politics

prospectmagazine.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 174 posts

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#11

Post by save_ferris »

paulsutter wrote: post #7

Whatever is broken is an opportunity to create something better. Problems wont cause a retreat to three TV networks. It wasn't long ago that we had Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities. The next 20 years will see a fascinating evolution in this space. Nobody should think that competition is over, or that these platforms have won. These issues should feel very exciting to folks in technology.

How does this mentality address the issue that Twitter and Facebook have evolved into what they are based largely on the capital incentives to grow as quickly as possible, be as opaque as possible, and gather as much consumer data as possible?

Twitter still refuses to publicly state how many of its users are bots largely because it knows the financial implications for doing so.

Facebook has released the bare minimum amount of information related to Russian interference, despite reports that its still ongoing.

What does competition look like against these companies when the financial incentives encourage more consumer data gathering, not less?

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#15

Post by burlesona »

kibwen wrote: post #9

Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of…

I'd just call it "road rage." There's some research into this and my high-level understanding is that when people feel "safe inside their armor" - whether that's the metal of the car or the semi-anonymity of the internet, their animal instincts come out.

It's fueled from both directions. In a tweet you don't really have context or body language or any of the other signals to tell you how someone means their message to be taken, so it's a lot easier to unintentionally offend. And then because you don't have to face the consequences of digitally "throwing a punch" a lot of people just fire off a nasty tweet without really caring.

I guess I see it as not surprising. Civilization is fragile, and the institutions that hold it up take generations to build. All of it is basically a thin veneer over our animal selves that helps us individually and collectively function as a higher level creature than we really are.

The internet fundamentally changes most things about communication and therefore human interaction and therefore the institutions of civilization itself. And really, looking back at the original internet ethos, that was kind of the point. So it shouldn't be surprising that something we use to "disrupt" civilization is in fact disruptive to civilization.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#16

Post by cafard »

I doubt that Twitter has improved politics, but I can remember them being pretty poisonous well before that. I also found a couple of sentences in the article a little bit apart:

"A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account."

"By 2012, the number of Brits with (more or less active) Twitter accounts had overtaken the number of people who regularly bought a newspaper."

Hard times for the newspapers, I guess.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#17

Post by chongli »

kibwen wrote: post #9

Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of…

I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet.

The answer you're looking for is Dunbar's Number [1] and it's been an issue since the agricultural revolution. Humans simply struggle to cooperate with, care about, and even understand people outside of a small group. Human societies have developed governments and legal codes in response. It's not a perfect system, though, and the Internet has begun to reveal the cracks in the mortar.

Prior to the Internet, groups of people tended to segregate themselves geographically. This allowed independent cultures, governments, and legal systems to develop. The Internet has broken down those barriers and revealed the contradiction to all of us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#19

Post by brightball »

From the moment that news outlets started reporting on things said on Twitter years ago, I assumed this would happen.

With enough bots, you gain the ability to create any narrative you want. Create story, then create the image that you want the supporters of one side to have, followed by the image for the other side. Use bots and retweets to amplify.

You gain the power to define what's happening culturally if the news reports actually take Twitter trends as what's happening culturally. Create a villian, politicize the villain, popularize / demonize websites, etc.

An entire Twitter event can be orchestrated to amplify the irrational into a position believed to be popular/main stream.

The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#20

Post by cafard »

kibwen wrote: post #9

Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of…

Here's a link referring to the days somewhat before Twitter:

http://prospect.org/article/lbj-and-dallass-mink-coat-mob

Post reply on HN