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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

The core problem is that verification comes with perks. If veryifing someone just meant "Yep, it's that person alright" I don't think there would be all these issues with twitter saying "Yep, this is really the spokesperson of the KKK" or something similar. But because there are perks it comes off more as Twitter endorsing the person as someone who has interesting things to say.

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On the other hand, I liked this argument that checkmarks should verify facts about people, not just their names:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/the-hard-lessons-of-blue-c...

...Because that’s how Twitter used it. They didn’t offer verification to any verifiable person, it was a “big thing” with benefits. By design I would guess.

Yeah. If it was simple user verification, they would have long time ago verified the likes of Assange. Obviously they use it as a political tool, because they do verify other activists they are more in line with.

Yeah, I'm no Assange fan, but his situation exposed clear issues with the capricious way verification was (or wasn't) handed out.

Even more blatant was un-verifying Milo Yiannopolous.

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."

The fun thing to do here is hold them to this - consider any reprehensible statement by a bluecheck to be Twitter-approved.

Pretty much. If the checkmark didn’t have benefits then it becomes gray. The only way it becomes neutral is if they genuinely mean it as a validation. Ie even the most dispicable person gets one if they are validated.

This is a symptom of the times. Even mentioning an idea is seen by many to be endorsement.

In the age of publicity it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with an idea, it matters that you helped it spread.

I don't know that there's a fix for that.

The very assertion that you must protect people from exposure to various ideas is deeply problematic and against everything the Enlightenment taught us.

The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts. The Enlightenment imagined rhetoric and persuasion as something like single combat: one man’s reason pitted against another. It didn’t imagine massively resources organizations throwing millions of dollars at studying quirks of human cognition so as to optimize the short-circuiting of reason itself.

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.

You’re not wrong, but it’s also true that at various times the written word and advances in its production and distribution were seen much the same way. Any new technology which represents a massive improvement in communication is going to radically change society in unpredictable ways. Needless to say, rapid and irreversible change is monstrous to live through especially if you’ve historically enjoyed the advantages of a previous system.

>The Enlightenment didn’t envision ML-assisted data-guided state-actor-resourced propaganda efforts.

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.

I didn't say you have to protect them. I did say you might want to not spread ideas you disagree with.

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.

The sad thing is that this strategy doesn't even work. It's analogous to trying to fix prices in an economy. All that does is create black markets. You end up with bubbles, preference falsification and preference cascades of increasing severity due to the illiquidity.

>I did say you might want to not spread ideas you disagree with.

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?

The fix is not to take this “dangerous meme” stance.

I don't twitter. What are the perks?

In the article it lists a few, such as better SEO, spam white listing etc

Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green check for "Valued Community Member". Give your racists, weirdos, trolls, etc the blue check and no perks if you can identify them, and reporters, politicians, whatever the green check and the perks.

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.

> Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green check for "Valued Community Member".

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.

But that's exactly the problem. Twitter started the blue check as verification and then it slowly transitioned to mean "valuable member", through, I imagine, employees taking small steps at a time ("hey, we only blue check famous people, so we might as well report that on the shareholder meetings").

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.

I agree with you, though I think the "green check" should be an internal status. They even already have a designation for them - "Very Important Tweeters", but they conflated that with verification status.

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.

You can ignore notifications from people you dont follow and some more manageability UI elements apparently.

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