Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled to Interpret Its Rules Unverifying Trolls
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I don't know that there's a fix for that.
I’m a proponent of Enlightenment values, but the bottom line lessons that we derive from those values were derived in a wildly different context. An Enlightenment for the modern day may very well look different than “old school” Enlightenment. It may very well one day shape up to being open-minded about what socioeconomic datasets you let your pet AI graze on, rather than being foolish enough to ingest slogans from all comers.
So the solution is to fight those things (with e.g. laws and education), not bring back taboos. How many times must we re-learn the lessons of the past? Censorship is not the path forward and even if you disagree, surely you can understand that, at an absolute minimum, we can't let random noisy members of the internet, or certain specific monopolies make the descision on what ideas can't be thought or expressed.
It's one thing to debate with friends at a bar. It's another to retweet something to your 6,000 followers and adding "lol dumb". At least some of those followers will disregard your comment and just absorb the message.
Just like my maths professor in high school would say. I'd show you how most of you do this wrong, but then you're just going to remember the wrong way. Let me just show you how to do it right.
Then there's the argument that any signal of approval (share, comment, retweet, engage) tells algorithmic timelines that this message gets much engagement and sharing it to a broader audience.
A key tenet of human cognition is that we agree more with things we hear more often. You can convince people of pretty much anything through sheer bruteforce of Being Everywhere. Doesn't matter if those who share agree or disagree, just that they shared.
Well, I can imagine one would do this in abscence of any proper argument against said ideas. Maybe you should revisit whether these ideas have some merit to them or not?
How can a person become not-themselves when they've been verified to be themselves already?
It made it incredibly obvious that "Verified" actually means "Morally approved by Twitter Inc."
I really hate how big companies get paralyzed over problems like this. A small group would have solved this the same day the realized it was an issue.
Because then we will be having this same conversation about Twitter mismanagement of green checks. Identity is not the problem. What bigots, racist, nazis and political actors are demanding is status, not recognition. Milo followers know he is who he say he is.
Thus, the blue check slowly became something different than intended, and realizing this and having a second check for that ("blue is only for verification!") would have solved the problem.
Keep the Verified checkmark, but have a separate internal flag that designates a user as a VIT. Most of the time someone will be both. But in cases like Milo, you can take away the VIT, but keep the Verified checkmark.
Problem solved.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/the-hard-lessons-of-blue-c...
Using it as a stamp of approval is an absolute minefield for a public company. So far the competition is, well, incompetent, but eventually somebody's going to come along and take advantage of these kinds of mistakes.
My personal observation is that these random blue check people skew very heavy to the left of the political spectrum, but I have no data to back that up. Certainly the people I’ve seen are much less notable than Milo though.
That naturally puts them in the position of having to prioritized verification, but based on what?
If it's only meant to prove identity then they should follow the lead of Keybase and verify yourself by proving control over other accounts.
They also do not contradict Twitter's public statements. Quote: “verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice, but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance.”
Is that not exactly what happened?
everything twitter management does is just complete selfish bullshit. they should be a 50 people operation and do one thing: publish 140 char messages and show ads. problems solved.
It's an American mental gymnastics thing. When we're not inventing euphemisms to obscure our purpose we use straightforward words like "ban".
"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
[1] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit