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

If I wanted to see that content I would follow it, and if I wasn't and the content was good someone I follow might retweet it. And if I follow someone who retweets annoying things I can disable retweets on that person.

This is my recurring issue when I see most "changes we're making for the election" posts. Sure this seems like a good step for this election.

Fake news and the destabilization it can bring isn't just an American phenomenon though. Are they going to apply these precautions to elections in Brazil, or Myanmar?

"This makes us money but harms the world as a side effect, but if we harm it too much the retaliation will cost us money. As a result we're going to only use it as much as we think we can get away with."

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 spread like wildfire.

So it's not about whether the recommendation engine is good or bad -- it works. The point is that close to an election, bad actors weaponize it 1,000x more or more often than they do the rest of the time, so they're turning it off. When it's not being weaponized so much, they can keep it on.

It's like paying for a DDoS protection layer at times when you know your site is likely to be attacked, but not using it the rest of the time.

It’s not that clear to me that this is a net good move. Exposure to out-network content, depending on what is exposed, could be good for preventing echo chambers and confirmation bias too. Twitter likely went the other direction and promoted out-network tweets that only increased engagement, and blaming the feature itself for this is naive at best.

Second issue everyone seems to be missing is the potential partisan-ness of these feature changes. Do the usage of any individual feature distribute equally among all demographics? If not, feature-shaping a near election could be construed as an underhanded way to hamper the discourse of certain demographics. Of course this is very easy to dismiss as conspiratorial thinking, but I think ideally any intellectually honest discourse engine would have gone the extra mile to demonstrate the neutrality of their election specific changes.

I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes in my feed — and not having an option to turn it off in the official mobile app client — is one big reason I stopped consuming tweets.

It's a shame that the only way to opt out of seeing Likes is by using a third-party client.

I don't think its that illogical to argue there's a time sensitive component. False news is the price you pay for breaking news sometimes. Its fine in the long run, but the argument is during an election the risk is too great.

It's amusing that it took the election for them to finally admit this. I had thought much the same thing of Twitter's recommendations for a long time. People discussing divisive political issues shows up on my feed a lot, despite deliberate curation of who I follow, just because the people whose personal work I appreciate also happen to participate in political discussions in addition to posting their work, so the issues they "like" get posted on my feed. All of the posts they liked were from accounts I had no interest in following. Personally this change would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for me.

I am thinking they had to balance the improvement in their metrics for engagement they would gain by putting more novel out of network tweets in view, and the virtol and divisiveness the election-related media and misinformation propagating further would inevitably cause. Yes, there is not enough "sufficient, thoughtful consideration" put into the recommendations, but if they ultimately increase Twitter's user engagement and revenue then it takes a lot of effort to backtrack on them. It also makes me continue to believe that some kinds of information are detrimental in some ways, and Twitter is now controlling the flow of that information as to prevent public backlash or some other harm.

(European observer)

The ability of social media platforms to spread malicious propaganda intended to incite division is incredibly dangerous. The moment where a US president has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election is absolutely not the moment to test how well society can withstand the use of social media as a propaganda platform.

Society needs a long term solution for social media--my take is that it should be shut down completely--but this is a short-term emergency and now is not the time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Being cautious is not a virtue when erring on the side of caution may lead to tanks in the streets.

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, in which case, why limit these rules purely to one particular federal election? Or they're wrong, and this really is just some bizarre internal marketing effort.

That's all Twitter sells is ads. You can't purchase any other service from them. The only purpose of the social platform is for there to be people to serve ads to. That's not a product, that's a marketing strategy.

So why shouldn't they have a moral responsibility to curb the use of their platform to do societal harm through the dissemination of misinformation? They don't exist to provide an uncensored social platform, they exist to generate profit through advertising. If their practices do harm they should answer for it.

Has Twitter actually read Twitter?

What evidence do you have that the predominant source of trending information is motivated state-level actors? That is an incredibly bold statement, and the framing you chose is such that there needs to evidence to the contrary, rather than evidence to support such a claim.

Edit: A bunch of responses are mistakenly thinking I am denying the presence of Twitter bots created and operated by state actors. I'm not. I'm arguing with the incredibly bold statement that they are the PREDOMINANT SOURCE of trending information.

The "slippery slope" should definitely be on everyone's mind as this enforcement is rolled out, but it should not stop the enforcement. Otherwise your statement becomes the "if we can't fix everything we should fix nothing" fallacy.

I agree that the enforcement needs to be monitored, and also that the enforcement needs to be done. Not mutually-exclusive. There are absolutely agreed-upon lies today: there isn't a deep state of vampire child rapists running the country. Fight me. ;-)

Indeed, that is the meaning of the word.

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 the Twitter case, it's even _more_ nonsensical to me - because the audience in a forum is general (and so, is likely to contain folks who are "on the fence" or who agree with the troll), but your Twitter followers are, by definition, those who hold similar opinions to you (and so, are likely to agree with your "takedown").

I'm not saying that you're wrong (I've seen enough apparently-smart people espousing this opinion to convince me that I'm the one missing something), I'm saying that I don't understand it. Can you help me understand what I'm missing?

I mean, it's definitely better than nothing, but it's not a "we're fixing our business model" moment.

(Facebook, not Twitter)

If you have evidence of the contrary please post it and I'll be happy to change my comment.

If US banks and credit card agencies can't do it properly, why can Twitter?

It's sort of like the Godel incompleteness theorem of social networking: you can either be incomplete or inconsistent; any system which tries to be perfectly consistent will find itself excluding massive amounts of potential dialogue. This in turn will result in a user exodus.

What is one to do in an environment where a ridiculous number of people believe that the president is fighting a secret pedophile sex ring? It certainly doesn't seem to be a problem the free market of ideas is addressing successfully.

After a short adjustment period, there would just be no non-verified accounts anymore and 5$/year would just be the regular price to use Twitter.

How can such a thing possibly exist? Speech is only harmful when people disagree about it, which makes it necessarily controversial.

Sure you can say they could have had similar measures before the Kyrgyzstan or the Belarus elections. But there bad actors were perfectly able to undermine the democracy without the aid of social media.

As social media gets larger and larger, these companies need to (1) at least pretend to be impartial and (2) show they are doing something about the "problem", or else the loser will blame big tech and slap them with regulation. Trump hasn't even lost and he's already talking about repealing Section 230, and Facebook (I think rightfully) is getting a lot of attention that could lead them to get broken up.

No one wants a target on their back when some research firm uncovers that "bad guy X" spent a couple million dollars astroturfing and/or abusing the platform or skirting election advertising regulation. It doesn't matter if that bad guy is Russia or some American Super PAC

Their response to climate science is stubborn ignorance. Their response to different cultures, races and religion is bigotry. Their response to democracy (when it doesn't suit them) is reactionary. Their response to education is closed mindedness. There's nothing to respect here.

Rural people are happy to have iPhones, as long as they don't need to understand the science behind the technology, understand the multicultural aspects of it's existence or respect the people who created it.

As Asimov said 40 years ago:

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

Making a business model like that illegal would force these services to go the paid route, or have less a subversive, and alas, less effective, advertising.

"People on Twitter, including candidates for office, may not claim an election win before it is authoritatively called"

b) When people spread false information at scale, it risks the very foundations of civilization.

Anyone with an actively managed platform has to try to ensure some kind of intelligent fealty - the trick is to do it without bias or and kind of ideological orientation.

If people can't see through the BS, then we get what we deserve. Every change like this is going to have unconscious bias and will likely be taken as proof of manipulation by people who don't share that bias. The only winning move is not to play.

I think a more nuanced and useful way to look at things is to think of Twitter as an amplification machine rather than a speech machine. I can say what I want out loud, I can write whatever letters I want, I can make my own website if I want, etc., but putting it on Twitter causes Twitter to amplify it. Many of these announced changes pertain to what Twitter chooses to amplify - and how - rather than what it permits people to say. (As far as I can tell, the only tweets they are actually removing are those that call for violence, a standard for censorship that seems quite reasonable.)

If we think in terms of how and when to amplify speech, rather than trying to figure out what kind of speech to censor, we can hit upon more workable improvements. Twitter's proposals here, under that framing, are a mixed bag.

Twitter provides several ways to amplify posts - some of which are intentional on the part of users, some not. For example, if I follow a person, I'm telling Twitter to show all that person's posts in my feed. If I reply to a tweet, I'm telling Twitter to show my post to that person in their notifications, and also show it to other people who engage with it. If I quote-rt a tweet, I'm telling Twitter to show it to everyone who follows me, alongside my commentary. Etc.

On the other hand, if I like a post, or engage with it in any way, I'm not telling Twitter to show it to anyone - but my Like may cause it to recommend the post to others, sort it upward in the algorithmic timeline, etc. This unintentional amplification can have unintended consequences, because the system cannot tell when engagement metrics are due to positive or negative characteristics of the post.

Quote-retweets are also rife with unintended consequences. If someone "dunks" on a post by quote-retweeting it with criticism or mockery, they're betting that their comment is going to lower the status of the person they are quoting or persuade people the post is false. But the folks reading their post may not agree - and the original post might have been an bad faith attempt at distraction, which a dunk then amplifies. Alternatively, if a popular account dunks on a much less popular account, it can (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) trigger a wave of hostility and harassment.

So I like parts of Twitter's changes here - they have the right to try and amplify true information more than false information, and removing flagged posts from recommendations will do that. Additionally, removing recommended content from non-followed accounts from the algorithmic timeline is positive as well - it reduces unintentional amplification and puts more control in the hands of users. But their encouragement of the quote-retweet is concerning. They don't seem to realize how effective a weapon it can be.

I would argue that any automated recommendation of user-generated content needs to be carefully controlled, if not abolished altogether. Recommendation systems cannot distinguish between content with high engagement due to quality, and high engagement due to emotionally manipulative dishonesty or other negative factors. And specially interested (or bigoted) political actors, who are simply interested in "the most effective way to attack / promote X" rather than arriving at the most truthful position, can test and manipulate those recommendation systems far more effectively than folks trying to engage with nuance and good faith.

This "situation where lies so easily go viral" seems to me to have intensified starting in around 2014 to 2015 - when Twitter introduced the quote-retweet, and Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline. I don't think "free speech" is the right framing for thinking about it. The recent phenomenon is not the existence of extremist political movements or medical misinformation, but rather, their amplification.

They understand that "free speech" is one of many principles we value, that these principles can clash, and we inevitably have to choose between them in cases. Even if those choices make some people uncomfortable. Before today, speech was neither offline nor online so free as to permit fraud. It's a terrible civic abdication to write off criminal behavior because it's so easy to get away with online and because it looks so much on the surface level like "free speech."

Or because we live with too much fear and paranoia to accept even a discussion of establishing standards. Twitter making any judgment that some content is fraudulent is not the same as becoming the editorial boogeyman from the extremist side of whatever political party is opposite to yours. That's fear. That's an appeal to the slippery slope fallacy.

My trip to the store is better off for knowing that if someone was shouting about about Jesus or conspiracies, they'd be asked to leave. We don't question that limit on speech. There's a reason you see people doing that on street corners. If there was never any deplatforming, all platforms would inevitably suck.

Is it ideal that Twitter and Facebook have so much power? Maybe not, but that's just the reality we're in. We can't be paralyzed into inaction. There's no perfect body that everyone would trust to do the job and someone has to keep Twitter and Facebook from sucking too hard. Don't let your paranoia make you overlook that they'd lose half their audience/business if they ever strayed too far from the middle.

The challenge is combining the aforementioned technology into an accepted standard and intuitive user experience. The business model would be straightforward hosting. A major barrier is the lack of funding to get it off the ground.

It's also worth thinking about which is more likely to happen: Twitter suppressing a true claim about election integrity being violated, or Twitter suppressing a false claim. Bear in mind that anyone can make a false claim.