Modern social media does it faster but it's no different than the newspaper empires of yesteryear.
The report warns that social media “are now tilting dangerously toward illiberalism” as more governments and “unscrupulous partisan operatives” use social media for repressive purposes. These include not only malign propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, but also growing government use of social media for mass surveillance. “As a result of these trends,” Freedom House reports, “global internet freedom declined for the ninth consecutive year in 2019.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2019/11/07/evidence-...
It's the virality and the engagement algorithms that boost reactionary content.
They've weaponized dopamine.
The speed, algorithms, engagement, etc of modern social media is entirely unprecedented, and makes it an entirely new problem we have to deal with.
Or better yet, just set up your own blog on your own host and do whatever you want.
This is one conceivable kind of legislation that doesn't run afoul of the first amendment. Another approach might be to require social networks to interoperate so consumers can choose between different networks. I should be able to leave Twitter without leaving my network. In this way, Twitter (et al) loses a lot of its power and thus its ability to threaten democracy.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
The only way for the service to be a dumb pipe is to not involve any kind of promotion or ranking algorithms to it, other than spam filtering. In other words, you can't have a dynamic high quality forum that is open to the public, with focus on the best content displayed first, and also be a dumb pipe. To prevent all moderation and ranking based on quality and opinion would quickly turn most sites into pure trash.
It is unreasonable to apply such regulations to anything but the actual dumb pipe, the internet connection (net neutrality).
Federation is indeed a much better choice. Allows the host to still set a quality standard on their server, and is at the same time free from gatekeepers. See Mastodon, Matrix, etc. Go to whichever host will accept you, talk to anybody willing to talk to you, and bans only kick you off specific servers.
No regulation needed.
Pedantry. My point was that these online services enjoy protections ordinary citizens (and other institutions) don't enjoy: they can choose what information people see even if it is illegal or factually incorrect and they are protected from any consequences.
> The only way for the service to be a dumb pipe is to not involve any kind of promotion or ranking algorithms to it, other than spam filtering. In other words, you can't have a dynamic high quality forum that is open to the public, with focus on the best content displayed first, and also be a dumb pipe. To prevent all moderation and ranking based on quality and opinion would quickly turn most sites into pure trash.
Right, so if Twitter (or whomever) wants to remain relevant (not become "pure trash" as you artfully put it), they need to own the consequences of their content curation. For the purpose of public good, I don't care much whether Twitter becomes an irrelevant dumb pipe or a responsible--and thus valuable--public service. Note that we needn't accept the law as-is; we could also change the exception from "dumb pipe" to "transparency of curation" to introduce a third option: Twitter can curate content how it likes but it must divulge its process.
> Federation is indeed a much better choice. Allows the host to still set a quality standard on their server, and is at the same time free from gatekeepers. See Mastodon, Matrix, etc. Go to whichever host will accept you, talk to anybody willing to talk to you, and bans only kick you off specific servers. No regulation needed.
How do you get to a federated world without regulation? Do you think 2021 or 2022 is going to be The Year of Mastodon like every year hereto has been The Year of The Linux Desktop? I.e., the "Free Market" is going to pack up and leave their existing networks on Twitter et al and move to federated alternatives? Regulation is needed to ensure fair competition; to prevent social media companies from holding your social network hostage ("if you want to communicate with your friends, you must go through us and whatever shady agreements we require you to make, and we may not even hold up our end of those agreements").
To be clear, these solutions have various tradeoffs--my point isn't that any or all of these are the right solution, but merely that if I can think of half a dozen approaches that bypass free speech laws then we should be able to work something out.
I can think of union busting to protect national security / economy ... (air traffic controllers...) ... COVID shutdowns to protect health.
The number of voices on twitter is the rhyme: Hearst and a small number of people controlled the message back then. Twitter bears responsibility, but they are ultimately not editorializing everybody all the time.
> “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
The failure of Twitter isn't active editorializing or the lack thereof.
The failure of Twitter is to not provide the necessary affordances in its design, its functionality, its business model, its values, its policies, its mission and its vision that allows a userbase of over a billion people to self-govern itself in a way that helps prevent what happened yesterday.
... and that's absolutely, undeniably a failure to think about the consequences of the product that Twitter has pushed into the world for the past 15 years.
... and it's not only a failure. It's a failure lost in it's own pure and utter banality.
Twitter isn't free of from criticisms. It's not a force of nature or the universe that disrupted lives in unfortunate ways. It's a product designed with a clear intent by humans for other humans. And therein lies the responsibility of Twitter, and everyone who provides a soapbox for others, to which it should be held accountable.
History doesn't repeat itself unless we repeat - remember, reflect, rehash, re-tell - history. And we do that from a place of empathy and understanding. Everything else is inconsequential.
Assuming that line of thinking, where'e the root cause, and when should it have been identified?
I've been on twitter since literally day two (I'm user 1018 or something like that). It was a farce back in the day: people talking about cats is my clearest memory. Ev posted on the Odeo blog and I checked it out. I remember the fail whale days.
At that point, it was a struggling start up with a start up tech stack.
At what point specifically did Twitter jump the shark and should have reinvented itself? It's an honest question and not rhetorical. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback its entire existence and call for self governance for a corporate product. It's harder to point to where and when and how that should have happened.
If we can have _that_ discussion, we can inform future twitters, which I agree is a very worthwhile cause. Otherwise, your comments sound eloquent, but ultimately are devoid of any utility.
Edit: Also, just now noticed your username... the analogy was not intentional in that regard. :-P
I've been there since early 2007.
> Assuming that line of thinking, where'e the root cause, and when should it have been identified?
Strip away the trimmings and the technology of any platform - including Twitter - and what do you have?
One or several hosts organizing an event, opening the doors and inviting people to join.
It doesn't matter if there are 5, 500, 5 million or 500 million attendees. As soon as you open those doors, you bear a responsibility to ensure that the event doesn't devolve in abuse and violence.
In the digital world, that means you think about community governance, including moderation. It also means that, as more and more people join, you are aware of the diversity in opinions they bring. It means you delegate moderation, but - more importantly - you design, evolve and build your platform in a way that helps people.
It also - most importantly - means you actually listen and acknowledge the feedback people give.
Literally none of this was new. Digital forums, chatrooms, first gen social media like MySpace, newsgroups, mailing lists and comment sections already existed in 2005. The challenges and the expertise to manage an online discussions existed at the time.
Even before that, the challenges, pitfalls and dangers of providing a soapbox to an audience - any audience - were all too well known.
> It's harder to point to where and when and how that should have happened.
From day one.
I've read Nick Bilton's Hatching Twitter. The founders of Twitter had lofty ambitions about re-inventing the Web. But as soon as Twitter started gaining a bit of traction, they devolved in arguments, rows and petty politics.
I've seen how the platform re-invented itself a few times. I've been disillusioned with the subsequent redesigns. Most notably, how Twitter all but entirely closed it's API towards 3rd party developers, killing off a budding, vibrant ecosystem of enthusiasts that did build tools that filled in holes which Twitter didn't fill.
The reality of the matter is that few people - including Twitter - have been up front about what Twitter has always been: a plain business just like the next. With a clear profit motive. Never a community "for the people, by the people".
Twitter has been a business from the day it was conceived. It started off as a product within a business context (Odeo). It was conceived within a context where any idea that caught the slightest of attention immediately became shoe-horned in a business model from the get-go.
Never mind the consequences, the impact or long term strategies.
> If we can have _that_ discussion, we can inform future twitters, which I agree is a very worthwhile cause.
Oh, but we do inform "future twitters".
It's called education, schooling and upbringing. It's in passing on values and morals to future generations. It's instilling in younger generations basic notions about respect, empathy, learning to listen, restraint, civics and so on.
Twitter doesn't equate nor facilitate the public debate. It has commoditized the public debate and leveraged it to sell marketing and advertising services.
All the lofty talk from @Jack about nothing intruding into the public debate simply doesn't do away with the fact that actively investing in a platform that allows healthy community growth has always been seen for what it was: a cost that was perceived to outweigh the benefits.
That's the banality of evil at it's heart. Simply not recognizing that your own actions have very real consequences in the real world. Even when it's pointed out plainly to you.
You could, however, try to develop a legal and moral framework for acceptable social media behavior (meaning the way the network itself works, not users' behavior). The particularities that make extreme content rise to the top should be banned/discouraged, rather than embraced in the race for engagement.
Also making some of the support the social media platform clearly have for some candidates as "in kind" political contributions.
This is even better, how do we do that instead?
They both cause more problems than they solve.
Most large companies (especially in regulated industries) have strict social media policies, e.g. preventing employees from performing company business via their personal social media accounts, with penalties for serious breaches being disciplinary action up to and including dismissal, i.e. it is possible to separate company business from non-company business. Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
Businesses fear liability. Governments should be built on it.
Taking twitter away from congressmen won't stop superpatriotsforbaldeagles.ru from distributing political propaganda, or random people being fed extreme media each inside their bubble.
The issue is inflammatory content spreading like wildfire, and direct intervention from politicians themselves is just tiny drop in the ocean.
What does this actually mean? Are you trying to ask politicians not to engage in politics? News organisations? Billionaires? Foreign intelligence services? Asking for legal restrictions on who's allowed to speak about what?
And to clarify, this is actually a really important question because it predicates the entire discourse of separating social media and networks from politics.
If there is someone wanting to believe the earth is flat and triangular you will find him fast now. What could take months with massive people gatherings and paper press 100 years ago it can be done within minutes now.
Instead of banning maybe educating people on how to consume information could be a way to start. I guess it is almost impossible to educate everybody but it has empirically worked for me and my close environment, after years of educating some of my older relatives I have been able to at least make them read the links before sharing them.
Newspapers has this power before. Arguablying more so as there are Twitter alternatives and people can move platforms quickly as we saw with reddit and thedonald.win
I guessing it was easier to control before as there were narrow corridors of power to owners/govt.
Give enough people you agree with a platform, demote the ones you don't, and boom you've created a narrative without your hand putting pen to paper.
What's more, media can then report "John Doe is allegedly a domestic abuser," citing the tweets as evidence that there are allegations that John Doe is a domestic abuser. You see this pattern with pizza gate (some dumb social media posts getting picked up by Republican news), and with Kyle Rittenhouse (dumb, false twitter posts picked up by left-leaning news). In the latter case, the news outlets have been getting sued for defamation because the reporting was damaging and so demonstrably false.
Section 230 protection for these platforms erodes all standards of truth for news.
You can of course sue for any reason but winning is another matter.
(It's easier if the defendant is not a public figure, but still, in general, it's relatively hard to win libel suits in the US.)
In fact IMO it's even worse - unlike newspapers which would at least be embarrassed by blatant mis-reporting, sensationalist and fantastical stories are a major source of profits for social media, and they've got incentives to encourage and promote them.
Yes, most mainstream publications do strive for truthfulness (fortunately) but it's not really a requirement for 1st amendment protection and I'm sure we can think of fairly mainstream news outlets that don't let the truthfulness responsibility cramp their style too much.
Ironically, given all his complaining, if Section 230 didn't exist, Twitter would have no choice but to ban Trump. He'd be an absolute nightmare in terms of liability.
Striking the right balance could easily take 20+ years, but social media is here to stay.
The only way to avoid this is to permit ALL content (which we have decided is untenable), or somehow precisely censor as much on one side as the other (which is impossible).
If one "side" is breaking rules about promoting violence, and the other is not, they are not being censored or repressed- they are just breaking rules and their content will be removed.
In the US we seem to feel its ingrained that there has to be two (and only two) binary "sides" in opposition to one another. This is the minority case around the world. Things get a lot thornier when you have a whole bunch of different sides that tend to be focused around a narrow view of issues.
Correct, and it was recognized how important their role was, there were/are laws specifically covering what they could say about political subjects, whether they had to grant opposing views a platform, etc.
None of that exists for the newer platforms today.
No.
> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries.
Yeah, that's really not true, even if you specifically limit it to media firms (e.g., Hearst at its height), and ignore, e.g., extractive/colonial firms like oil companies, United Fruit Company, and the various East India Companies, and also ignore much of history before the modern period, when there was no real public/private distinction, and the things we now think of as public functions were overtly private property rights exercised, quite often, for personal profit.
> Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
They aren't the arbiters of democracy, only of their own platforms. Just like other media companies.
Newspapers have always had this power, the difference now is it's on the internet instead of print. Once TV's became common place the evening news also had this power. This has always been how things worked the difference now is the reach is larger and the turnaround time is faster.
It’s like saying we should not have let news to be carried over the internet.
In this case I am purely talking about the latter - the fact that to keep up with what the president says I have to agree to a private company's terms of service, privacy policy (which is against my interest) and have to put up with my personal data being exploited for advertising, the advertising itself and various dark patterns.
Point being is that the social media experiment and the wild west days of the internet writ large has run its course. We’ve had our fun and money has been made and lost and made again and again and again and the writing is on the wall I’m afraid.
If history is any evidence the gravy train is about to come to a glaring and disastrous end. Legislation will be passed, examples will be made by the powers at be and society will look back through the lens of history at these past 30-40 years as a cautionary tale.
To your point: There is already a huge body of law that exists that would not take much retooling to apply. Held back by the voluminous pedantic arguments entertained ad nauseam. However the blood is there in droves and now the powers at be have had the chaos special delivered on a silver platter. Its one thing for us to comment and argue in the safe confines of our little luxury bubbles the internet provides, its another thing to watch in casual horror when the death toll numbers get so large as to be incomprehensible to many and then continue those same arguments to no effect. But make no mistake reality is what refuses to go away when you choose to stop believing in it and the reality is that for the first time as of yesterday the powers at be have had their bubbles burst as a result of their collective negligence and blood has been delivered as a direct result to their door.
As if 350k people dead isn't enough, theres a tyrannical despot once again guilty of treason on national tv for all to see that this time has literally instigated a coup with blood on congress floors as a result. Fueled specifically by social media and the internet. Sure things may have seemed ephemeral and hard to legislate before because hey its the internet and its on a cute little screen, but no more.
I expect the laws to be written, applied and enforced the same way they always have been. And I expect the piles of anti- trust cases to encounter not much friction now and as for social media... i expect that it will be fine as long as it doesn't get too big and crosses that pernicious threshold where it ever again is able to be a real threat to the powers at be.
I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them.
Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.
Yes and no and but...
Yes - Broadly speaking most new cars are more powerful than they were in the late 70s and early 80s
No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines.
But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.
You hit on some of the complexity here. Cars are actually much quicker now. In the 1950s, a V8 police car made 85-150 horsepower. So, the bigger engines prior to the 70s were quite slow compared to cars today. As you note, the speed gains must be partially offset (fully?) by the advances in safety: tires, anti-lock brakes, pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and more.
[0] As someone who loves smaller hatchbacks, this really grinds my gears.
It's possible, though, that the larger vehicles represent a greater danger due to poorer visibility. I don't have enough experience driving a contemporary truck or SUV to know the driver's experience, but I do know that, when parked along the street, they present a serious visibility problem for pedestrians compared to coupes and sedans.
since the 1970s, the number of cars per person in the USA has increased by ~50%, the number of people has increased by ~60%, and, vehicle miles traveled per capita had (previous to 2020) nearly doubled.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-962-january-30-201...
Well, I'm not defending that position so much as I am parroting that crowd's idea that unsupervised childhoods were better.
I think in both cases there's an element of prescribing the loss of options in favor of some notion of greater good. Whether it is a warranted trade-off or not, I don't know, but the Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.
the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...
Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.
They are simply a middle man between foreign agencies and domestic users. Foreign countries really do exploit all those platforms for their own interests.