Bollocks. Look up Hearst, or "yellow journalism" or the Spanish-American War.
Modern social media does it faster but it's no different than the newspaper empires of yesteryear.
Modern social media does it faster but it's no different than the newspaper empires of yesteryear.
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.
I can think of union busting to protect national security / economy ... (air traffic controllers...) ... COVID shutdowns to protect health.
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.
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 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.