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

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

#141

Post by bufferoverflow »

akira2501 wrote: post #137
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #24

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…

They absolutely do have a major part of that power. Together with Google/Youtube + FB/insta, they pretty much control the political discourse. What other big platforms are there?

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

#142

Post by meheleventyone »

crazygringo wrote: post #133
notatoad wrote: post #8

>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…

Squaring it is pretty easy, I think. 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…

It seems hilariously naive to think that the only time people will be weaponising it is during an election and that there aren’t elections happening regularly all over the world so that if your point holds true such things should basically always be turned off.

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

#143

Post by sg47 »

joshfraser wrote: post #3

Free speech has taken quite a beating in recent days. It's weird watching many of my friends and people I respect cheering while it happens. I honestly don't know what we do to fix our current situation where lies so easily go viral, but making Twitter arbiters of truth doesn't seem like the best solution.

Once democracy takes a beating, free speech will be the first to go.

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

#144

Post by jon37 »

crazygringo wrote: post #135
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

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.

Consumers want a lot of things with negative externalities - goods that cost less because they're produced with slave labor, transportation that emits greenhouse gases, etc. Their preference shouldn't trump the obligation not to harm third parties.

Automated recommendations of a human-curated set of content - e.g. Netflix recommendations for its suite of programming - are much less objectionable, because they can't amplify anything the organization has not intentionally decided to present. It's the combination of UGC and ML recommendations that presents problems.

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

#145

Post by tpmx »

ssalazar wrote: post #130
tpmx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the outsized tolerance for internal political activism inside SV companies has resulted in. (European observer)

Silicon Valley tech workers were sold on a dream of “changing the world” rather than building any other normal business, so I would not expect any different really.

Yeah, that backfired spectacularly.

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

#146

Post by meheleventyone »

core-questions wrote: post #71
yamrzou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their recommendation engine is not harmful in all cases. I used to use Twitter to follow some machine learning/programming profiles and remember the recommendations being quite good.

This is the amazing duality of social networking: as soon as it becomes topic specific , the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic gets. The moment the conversation is just general babble, anonymous / pseudonymous people will find things to argue about.

I sadly don’t find this to be true. The caustic subjects in all disciplines get talked about more and recommended more. I made the mistake of watching some flight videos and now get recommended crash montages all the time. I watched the C++ con talk on “OO considered harmful” and now have an inordinate amount of bullshit in my feed. It feels kind of crazy that my YouTube recommendations took such a downturn suddenly.

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

#147

Post by simias »

tpmx wrote: post #38
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #24

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.

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 inflammatory and misleading political factoid because it knows that it's very likely to make you react, it's working as intended. Not because it was written by a communist, but because it was written by somebody optimizing for this metric.

As a counter example: do you think HN manages to remain mostly not completely trash because it's run by apolitical people or because it's effectively run not-for-profit? I think I know the answer to this question.

It's amusing how I've seen this "internal politic" boogeyman pop up in discussions over the past month or so. As if all the woes of the silicon valley could suddenly be blamed on those pesky "woke" devs while everybody else just tries to get the job done. This American election can't be over soon enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.

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

#148

Post by bobthepanda »

crazygringo wrote: post #135
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

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.

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

Do they, or do they just boost some KPI that suits proxy for actual utility?

Anecdotally even in non-tech circles most of my friends complain about how bad recommended content has gotten, or roll their eyes at whatever "personalized" ad for garbage they've been recommended.

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

#150

Post by classified »

scubbo wrote: post #66
_qulr wrote: post #2

I'm not sure why Twitter thinks that quote tweets are better than retweets. Propaganda exists to be spread, and it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. Also, you can disable retweets on accounts you follow but not quote tweets.

> it's long been obvious that "This is wrong/bad [quote]" just serves to further spread the propaganda and raise the propaganda artist's profile. This has never been obvious to me, and I continue to be confused by it as a position. It seems similar to "don't respond to anyone making blatantly false/harmful claims on discussion forums, because engaging with them just encourages them and spreads their message". In fact…

In a nutshell, “There is no such thing as bad publicity”. Siblings explain in more detail.
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