Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I despise this quote so much, and I'm far from a Trump supporter. If you need to censor speech in order for your side to win, maybe you have bigger issues than Trump's twitter account.
I think it's an interesting question. If you build a tool that ends up being used as a platform to spread misinformation and lies, is that ok? Is it ok to censor that kind of thing?
Set aside laws and general feelings about censorship. If certain kinds of speech are genuinely harmful to society, and if you can actually objectively define that (I know, very hard if not impossible to do in many/most situations), should you still allow that speech?
It's certainly a judgment call, and a lot of people might get that call wrong sometimes or even often. But is it pointless or harmful to try?
Think about moderated message boards. No one would take issue with a moderated message board where the moderators act to keep things on-topic and civil. (Hell, HN tries to be that, and IMO does a pretty good job most of the time.) Twitter has chosen, with the exception of things like hate speech and threatening behavior (etc.) to be hands-off. Was that a good choice? I'm not sure. I don't think it's unreasonable to think they could do just as well -- if not better -- if there was moderation of some kind built in.
That's what they do.
> They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion.
Well, they could, but they don't and as such they are bigger free speech advocates than you are because you want to restrict what they can do on their website, which is a privately run entity and as such not subject to 'free speech' laws.
Free speech is an idea, not an amendment.
If you censor opposing political views, you are antithetical to the concept and idea of free speech and you should be condemned.
You might find the first three to be subjective, and I wouldn't entirely disagree with that, so how about the lies and false information? Should a person in a position of power be permitted to lie to people to sway their opinion? I would have no problem if Twitter were to fact-check Trump's (or anyone else wielding such power) tweets and delete or somehow diminish those that are outright lies, assuming there were checks on such a thing to avoid politicization of that fact checking.
Furthermore, for what reason would you trust such a person?
If you already distrust Trump will you trust him more if some nameless moderator will decide which posts are okay and which aren't?
Besides, he's the POTUS and he has a lot of money, if twitter will start messing with his posts he can easily set up a service on his own.
And will also be selectively enforced, as we've seen on basically every single social media platform today.
Yes.
If you don't like it, then you can counter the speech that you disagree with, using speech of your own.
Let the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
I can read the facts and read competing opinions and then come to a conclusion on my own about who I agree with.
I do not need some gatekeeper deciding for me what I should believe.
The value of allowing "lies", is that you don't have gatekeepers or censors deciding for you about what you should believe.
Stop blocking spam, advertising, and government propaganda then.
Absolutist arguments like this have an obvious problem in that certain classes of speech are a problem.
First of all, the architecture of a service has important influence on the kind of speech that it will foster: for example, the 140 character limit insures that it's almost impossible to get a nuanced argument across. Second, the broadcasting model of twitter often leads to horrible dogpiles.
I am a huge free speech advocate, and I don't like censorship but several key decisions about the architecture of twitter were definitely suboptimal if your goal was building a better town square for the exchange of ideas.
I think Twitter had a net negative effect on political discussion not because of free speech, but because it rewards bombastic language, point scoring, cheerleading and makes substantial arguments impossible.
I don't think there's many popular forms of social media that actually have nuanced, reasonable political discussions though.
EDIT: the only one I really know of is /r/neutralpolitics.
More often than not the argument basically boils on to this [0], and even when it's not, the tweetstorm necessary for a constructive answer gets lost in a sea of raging tweets.
What I mean is that I think the problem currently is as simple (but complex to fix) as people disagreeing over reality.
When I have coherent political discussions with friends of other leanings, we always see the others standpoint, but it ALWAYS boils down to simple disagreement on cost/values.
Let's take wealth inequality: I don't see the utility in the 0.X% population holding YY% of the wealth (instead of YY/2), and think it hurts the economy by stagnating monetary rotation on the market. My more conservative capitalist friend also doesn't see a particular added utility by it, but disagrees about it having the cost I describe, and distributing wealth that way would then be invasive.
We won't get further than that barring a real world experiment, but whether it's healthcare, schooling, infrastructure, etc, it always after 5 minutes or 2 hours boils down to a disagreement on a premise, core values or simply something unprovable (reasonably).
The problem I see publicly (social media etc) is people ignoring reality/facts/common sense in favor of tribalism. At that point there can be no discussion.
I venture into r/neutralpolitics at times too, but I've never once read something fruitful there. It's either entirely noncommittal, or legitimizes both standpoints on an issue that shouldn't reasonably have two sides (whether that's liberal or conservative).
I think that is the real problem, but I'm hesitant to say that's what their argument really is unless there's some actual evidence. At best, it's not backed up properly in the posted article, to the point of (to me) being highly misleading if their problems are with the lack of freedom in Twitter for one.
As a matter of fact, you can't express any serious idea in 140 characters. Twitter really is a tool for mobilizing and organizing mobs of people who are already somewhat familiar with and supportive of your ideas, which is exactly why all sorts of activists and politicians use it for their campaigns.
What made the presidential campaign on twitter look the way it did was not really deficit of censorship, but fighting a political battle on grounds where there is no space for actual exchange of ideas but only for appeals to emotions and prejudices, personal attacks and name calling.
The conclusion is: if you don't want populism to win, maybe you should be careful building such platforms. And twitter has been known to be conducive to ugly flamewars for years, go read about gamergate. Maybe parent thought that founders regret not the lack of control but the fact they built such a thing, but then it seems you are right that they actually don't.
The early US election I remember was Bush v Kerry 2004. If you used those exact same words to describe the campaign back then, I wouldn't have disputed it.
Twitter did not even exist until 2006.
Did the internet enable Donald Trump? Absolutely. It enabled him to go face to face with the likes of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, and beat them at their own dirty game.
Everything is made of atoms.
The sun is an ordinary star.
Infections are caused by germs.
He doesn't say anything that thus people who didn't agree with him should be silenced...
There is no absolute standard for 'a lot of good'.
I can relate to this. I remember thinking, back in the 90s, "once people can directly talk to people from other cultures, and see each other's common humanity, how will there ever be any more war?"
Turns out that was an extremely naive belief. Just the opposite is true in many cases: direct communication can aggravate differences. People's self-righteousness tends to escalate when they are directly exposed to their ideological foes.
2. He didn't even say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevents the world from being a better place
He's noting that free speech and exchange of ideas isn't sufficient on its own.
(That was my takeaway at least)
It's not unreasonable to combat that with moderation, which I don't consider to be "censorship" if done correctly.
If bad ideas are being communicated, then communicate better ones. I understand it's hard, that people can be idiotic and short-sighted, that 140 characters is very limiting, but thinking "<candidate/party/side I support> only lost because of gullible morons" isn't how (in Trump's case) the Dems will end up winning in 2020.
There's a fantastic article about this logic here: https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-26...
FWIW I'm not American either.
I've actually have read the article you point to, and while I don't disagree with it (it makes a lot of good points), it's just an opinion. And it's not even a great one sometimes: just because an opposing view point makes you angry, it doesn't mean you're not wrong to be angry. The opposing view point may actually be bat-shit insane. Sometimes it's hard to determine that sort of thing objectively, but... sometimes it's not.
For some supporting evidence to the contrary, this one: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre... -- that suggests, using per-county voting and education data, that low education and voting for Trump was strongly correlated.
Now the meat of the matter is, as you suggest, "what's the best way to win next time?" And yeah, telling Trump voters that they're idiots (even if/when they are) isn't a particularly great way to win over hearts and minds. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here: we're talking about how/why Trump won in the first place, and if it was a good idea to give him and his supporters a platform to easily spread lies to those who are more susceptible to believing them.
This is assuming that valid arguments always wins. Anyone who's working with technical depth knows that when you start implementing something, your simple idea doesn't jive as well with the thousands of unforeseen caveats, edge cases, and real world conditions.
The truth is always more complicated than a simple lie.
It's similar to how eating junk is much easier than eating healthier, varied food, which is also more expensive.
Exchange "expensive", and "complicated" with "requires more thought" and you'll have the answer. Idiocy always wins unless people make an effort. It's also why politicians talk like they do, and are extremely noncommittal. Speaking frankly about issues pisses off a lot of (pardon the French) idiots, who can't be rational about hard realities.
I still believe that freedom of speech is important because it is freedom for ideas, not "freedom for morons" as some are trying to argue.
Stop blocking spam, advertising, legalize government use of propaganda domestically, etc.
No?
Then clearly your position has an obvious flaw in that you have to censor certain classes of speech. All of those happen on Twitter.
If I choose, I can view ads and I can view spam. I choose not to, just as it's perfectly fine to not follow Donald Trump on Twitter. I am making the decision about what content I view.
An entity in power making that decision for me is censoring free speech. My choosing not to see things, is not.
Be well warned - the stuff happening on reddit, the tools being developed by moderators are the epitome of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
The old generalized ideological position of Free Speech is no longer tenable, whether we like it or not.
I'm a proponent of Free Speech, and I've spent the time to understand why its important, and why Humanity has valued it and argued for it.
The ideas behind it are sound.
It falls flat when having to deal with the modern internet.
In the simplest explanation - Free Speech was NEVER designed to deal with things like channel saturation and specialized targeting of the human hind brain which happens today.
The Free speech model is the bazaar of ideas model. Everyone can see all ideas, and decide for themselves what is best. Heinous ideas are important because at the very least - people can define themselves against it.
Modern impediments to free speech arise because small groups of humans have new abilities to disrupt the bazaar.
They can spam a single message, they can overwhelm normal discourse, and we have learnt that emotion over comes reason regularly. That's how the brain is designed.
In the same way environmental rules are made to prevent abuse of the commons, or pollution of common land, rules will be made to "protect" free speech.
How those conflicting ideas will be meshed, is beyond me.
Without such rules, motivated people can and will abuse/spam the shit out of a communication channel in order to take control of it.
fundamentally - the human brain itself is un-prepared for this environment.
Therefore, rules will be made to ensure that the human brain is not completely harmed by it.
But any system can be gamed. The moment the community creates any value - political/advertising/creative
People will swoop in to take advantage of it.
This sets of a cycle
1) If no moderation, debate on the need of moderation - given time this will be resolved in favor of moderation
2) Moderators try to deal with attackers, posers, abusers
3) Attackers start masking their presence, they start debating the rules, they develop increasing sophisticated counter attacks to the rules
At this stage, its important to note that common sense is thrown to the window. People will argue incessantly whether X post/comment is within the scope of the rules or not. The term is forum lawyer.
4) Moderators have to start going to greater and greater lengths to deal with rule breaking, rule defining and disruption. The best case scenario is indifference and manageable rule breaking.
5) Eventually if the process escalates, we end up at profiling users based on words, either through mod experience, or worse - automated means. IP addresses are tagged, users are tagged.
Moderation is the intersection of being a debate adjudicator and a full fledged editorial board for a newspaper.
ANY technical solution should be looked at with DEEP discomfort. Any solution to this problem can and will eventually be used to suppress or modify behavior on forums.
Whats worrisome is that this arms race is escalating, if you see how mod tools have expanded on reddit, they have completely stopped entire methods of grass roots retaliation to mod power.
Earlier - if a forum had an issue, it could split organically into a subreddit. Users would vote with their feet. Famously the split of weed lovers to r/trees.
With the creation of automod, any mention of an opposing sub can completely be removed. Stopping that entire method of dealing with mods.
Sub splits do still happen, but its a lot harder to achieve and organize.
>Add reputation management
Doesn't work at all for reddit, the "karma" means nothing, the karma requirements for some subreddits only make it harder for new users to join or to have any kind of a meaningful discussion. On top of that posting in some subreddits automatically gets you banned from many others, regardless of the opinions actually expressed, which means you can't even try to have a meaningful discussion with people holding an opposing view. Not like it matters though, any solid argument is labeled as "concern trolling" anyway and thus deemed banworthy.
>Enforce strict rules on argumentation. Add better structure for arguments. Arguments should be as short as possible but not shorter.
Again, a human will have to do that, which in case of reddit means biased moderator decisions, selective enforcement of ToS and admins editing your comments.
>Add ratings to arguments
Easily gamed, as evidenced by any upvote system (reddit especially, their "anti-brigade" measures are laughable and pretty much punish everyone aside from the people who are actually "brigading").
Heinous ideas are useful for understanding heinous people. Defining oneself against them is what flamewars are made of.
> That's how the brain is designed.
I don't believe in creationism. It's super ironic that throughout the 19th and 20th century many self-proclaimed atheists kept working on the basis of things that actually are intelligent design assumptions.
Even if we ignore that, you can simply see that if moderation and corrective action is not applied forums tend to become circle jerks of in-jokes and memes.
Eg. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/04/nigel-oakes...
That's a far cry from the small stand in the bazzar of ideas.
>They can spam a single message, they can overwhelm normal discourse, and we have learnt that emotion over comes reason regularly. That's how the brain is designed.
ofc the limitations to free speech will define the boundaries such that they permit the above, provided the person doing it is making money from it. Any analysis that doesn't see the obvious way such limitations will backfire is naïve.
The venn diagram containing "mind poison" and "things we can no longer tolerate" have surprisingly little overlap. The most insidious mind poisons uses sensationalism, gamification, and outright psychological manipulation to influence the average Joe, while convincing Joe they are benign or even positive entities. The only things that will be targeted for banning are the ones the mind-poisoning forces have taught Joe to hate.
Joe doesn't need the things he hates banned, he knows how to identify them and he already has an opinion that will put him on guard against them. He has first-pass mental filters against them. If anything deserves to be banned for it's negative repercussions, the prime targets are those we can't/haven't built mental filters against. (Note: This is a very different category than the things we think out political opponents are too stupid to mentally filter). Filtering en mass without the societal standards shifting towards identifying and rejecting those that are actually bad for us will only serve to entrench the status quo.
Only in the past 6 months, have I clearly heard for calls fighting against games which have in built casino simulators. (aka gamefied games, or everything on Facebook)
And thats OBVIOUS stuff, designed to be that way, and openly discussed in pitch decks.
It's happening so fast there are no control rods. If MTV and Hollywood gave us celeb culture. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have taken mindless celeb worship to another level.
Obama is good example of the feel good pointlessness that social media can prop up.
If you value Liberalism, it's the actual ability to exchange information - independent of the ideas being shared - that makes the world a better place.
The problem is that this information may not be true, and even when it is true, people tend to dislike the 'exchange information and ideas' when they disagree with the information and ideas being exchanged. Williams says so himself:
> If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry
Sorry for what? Launching a platform where one can instantly read a wide variety of ideas and where narratives can be challenged as quickly as they're spun? It's like apologizing for creating the printing press because Martin Luther used it to kick off The Reformation.
Anyone who uses Twitter has witnessed legitimate - thus credible - reporters and news outlets spread incorrect stories, only for Twitter to quickly call them out.
So while much of Twitter may be poison, it beats relying solely on biased websites - such as the Washington Post - for information.
Anyone who has been a moderator on a public forum, let alone one as big as twitter, can quickly tell you that not all ideas are created equal.
I have said it before on this board of which is moderated, but if every single person spoke their mind the internet would be full of absolute garbage and hate, because those people tend to speak loudest and most often when given the chance.
To be clear I am not for censorship and I want to make sure there is a place for everyones legitimate views. But there is no sense in pretending free speech has to be a free for all. We can dismiss some things as objectively bad. Even a presidential debate has a moderator and there is an expected legitimacy to the discourse.
1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech
All of the platforms that have big problems support the later. Maybe the problem is anonymity rather than freedom of speech.
It is true that Facebook doesn't really support anonymous speech, but even there, most of the fake news spread was anonymously published.
I imagine that when you read this, a dystopia of national Internet ID cards pops into your mind. However, I don't think this necessarily needs to be. I've been working on a project called push to talk: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html and I hope that the existence of a real persons voice behind the scenes would help. I think that youtube also has an advantage, that the distinction between anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech is clear, and the voice synthesized videos are much less popular.
Would you prefer a situation in which secret police agents tracked down troll internet users, and if they found those users to be Russia agents, they would shoot them? I might prefer that actually ;) but I'm not in charge of the secret police and so therefore its not in my capabilities to make that happen.
Of course, it is possible that this conspiracy theory is false. That Czechs, or a large portion of them, actually are that hateful (also likely). If that is the case, than this country is on the edge of a genocide (against Muslims and Gypsies) far more brutal than Nazi germany. And in that case, anonymity would be a good thing for all the activists who try to fight against the hate.
So you're right, that it is a very difficult question.
Maybe it's possible to just ignore the anonymous vs. non-anonymous question and target the speech itself: if it's hate speech, you kill it. If it's lies and misinformation masquerading as the truth, you kill it. If the poster has their real name attached to it, then you may have a legal means to ensure they stop posting things like that. If they don't, obviously it's harder, and you have to keep chasing after them as they create new anonymous accounts.
I'm not trying to hate on google. But everyone says that it is impossible to compete with google, because their product is perfect, that it would be impossible to make a better search engine. I don't think that's true. I think there is a lot of inovation that still can happen when it comes to sorting through the internet.
Beyond a point, the scale and complexity of the information goes beyond what is required for a simple conversation.
Most people want the information spoon fed to them. The issue is that they may not even be framing the correct question.
To correct that they will always need to (at some point) engage with complexity.
And as long as someone can meme or use cheap arguments to dodge a difficult/complex point, theres no real advantage to that level of complexity.
So the only people who are digging that deep are people who want to figure something out. For them, google works just fine.
Those who make peaceful protests impossible make violence inevitable.
Trump used Twitter to do this, but he could have used other social media. Trump's tweets were not newsworthy because Twitter routed them to millions of people but because large media firms wanted to monetize the hysteria created by the tweets so they had their newsrooms run coverage of each and every tweet.
This hits the nail on the head. Late stage capitalism has completely fused media, news, and entertainment. This means that any person or organization who manages to "hack" the news cycle (i.e. finds a way to be in the spotlight on a very regular basis) can reap great profits. Like a presidency.
I don't agree that he could have used any other social media to the same effect. Information propagates and decays on Twitter much, much faster than on other mainstream platforms: if I post something, everyone who follows me sees it right away, and very few tweets are seen a few days after they have been posted. No other mainstream social network is like this. These properties have led to Twitter becoming the new AP stream for journalists, aka the entry point to the news cycle. If you want to dominate the news cycle, dominate Twitter - be it with racist tweets or asking for free chicken nuggets.
Twitter as a media apparatus has naturally played a great part in electing Trump. The Twitter leadership isn't composed of economists or political scientists or sociologists, so of course this kind of stuff lies completely outside of their concern (unless it brings good PR, like it does now). Same goes for Facebook, although the role it plays in the equation is different.
I certainly agree that Twitter's characteristics are unique, but I think there was also a lot of awareness of Trump going into the election and so I wonder if he could have done the same thing with a simple blog.
My biggest curiosity is that now that he's shown that the attack can work, how many candidates will enter the next election doing it and how unusual will they be...
2020 is still a while away, but a few leads:
Kanye West:
“Rappers are philosophers of our now, celebrities are the influencers of our now, just look at the president. [Trump] wasn’t in politics and won.”
Mark Zuckerberg:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/zucke...
I agree with claims that Postman predicted Trump's rise back in 1985:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
The book is written about television, but the main ideas are still applicable to online newsfeeds and social media.
The book unpacks the phrase: "the ideas that are convenient to express become the content of a culture". If the most convenient form of communication is long-form writing in newspapers or pamphlets, people will get their information from (long-form writing in) newspapers or pamphlets. If it's television, they will get information from (visual, snappy, "entertaining") video. If it's Twitter, people will end up talking about ideas that can be conveniently expressed in 140 characters or less.
- Ev Williams
"Really don't want to get in politics. I just want to help invent and develop technologies that improve lives. Feels so bizarre."
- Elon Musk
"For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens."
- HN Moderation team
It's okay, maybe some day Silicon Valley will realize that technology and politics aren't two concepts that you can neatly disentangle from one another, and that building tech never "automatically" makes the world a better place on its own. If you are touching human lives, you are "in politics".
> “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Williams told the Times. “I was wrong about that.”
I'd like to see a more detailed look at why Twitter might not have been a good idea. I don't think that free, easy communication is a bad thing and I think it's powered an enormous change for good. The sentiment expressed in the quotes sounds worryingly similar to proponents of censorship.
I just think that Twitter is a bad way of communicating anything vaguely complex.
It is neither good nor bad, just an amplifying medium for whatever someone chooses to use it for.
You've got the answer right in your post:
> I just think that Twitter is a bad way of communicating anything vaguely complex.
The medium is the message. Build a social network where the main mode of communication encouraged is short, eminently shareable quips, and the voices that dominate will be the ones like Donald Trump's.
Twitter just brought up to the surface what was already there but hidden. I am sorry that everyone now has to go through a lot of pain with the current presidency. But I think getting there is the only effective way for society to realize that your (US) political, social and educational system (just to name a few) are completely broken. And you have got to fix it. Most people didn't know how bad it is fucked up, now it becomes obvious. You got the president you earned.
Twitter so just made it possible, that you are able to face your true challenges.
Don't blame the messenger...
We "know" through pop science that Facebook makes you miserable:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-mentally-strong-pe...
On some level that's a mechanism that's "already there" in everyone, but Facebook is clearly more than a messenger if it influences how we feel. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that Twitter has a negative impact on us as well.
But I agree that there are many systemic problems that Twitter has nothing to do with.
A large part of why people lashed out and voted Trump was their impression places like Twitter censored their point of view.
Hillary got more support on Twitter than Trump. The reason places like Twitter helped Trump in any signifficant fashion was that they let Trump reach people directly, and not through the media which are still lying, and slandering the president, and trying to paint a false picture of what's going on in the country.
> Twitter co-founder: I'm sorry we didn't use our platform to silence an opposing view point.
Shame. Silencing someone else because you disagree makes you many, many times worse than them. Sunlight and exposure is the best disinfectant, not this play.
Some argue that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 already did that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
But, aside from certain forms of speech (hate speech, illegal speech, etc.), Twitter is pretty hands-off with what it allows. So it has given "sunlight and exposure" to people like Trump, and what has it gotten us...? Trump. A man who has used racism, sexism, xenophobia, lies, and false promises to win the US Presidency, and who used Twitter as a major platform for spreading such. How has sunlight and exposure disinfected his toxicity?
Now, sure, doing otherwise would definitely be silencing an opposing view point. But... when that view point is so toxic, why is that necessarily bad? This might be a controversial opinion for me to hold, but I don't believe all view points are created equal, and I don't believe all view points deserve to be heard, or, more to the point, deserve a platform to be heard. I'm not saying choosing is easy, and not fraught with moral peril, but I think the idea of this big free-flow of ideas being the ideal, given the constraints and issues with our society, is... frankly, a little naive.