Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

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> It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections. I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.

And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.

> Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more. The volume of communication on social media dwarfs that of other channels.

And that's what's dangerous about them: the filter got removed from broadcasting. People like to talk about filters like they're bad things, but that's not true. They're in fact a vitally necessary function to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (for instance: what is peer review? Answer: a filter). when you don't have filters, ideas spread in proportion to how quickly they can multiply, which isn't a good thing, because a lot of fast-spreading ideas are akin to cancer, and do nothing except weaken or kill the host.

If Twitter's to avoid killing its host, it needs an immune system to filter out those cancerous ideas.

> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.

Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency.

> And that's what's dangerous about them: the filter got removed from broadcasting. People like to talk about filters like they're bad things, but that's not true. They're in fact a vitally necessary function to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (for instance: what is peer review? Answer: a filter). when you don't have filters, ideas spread in proportion to how quickly they can multiply, which isn't a good thing, because a lot of fast-spreading ideas are akin to cancer, and do nothing except weaken or kill the host.

I certainly don't dispute that filters can be good things. I have an issue with such an important filter being operated by a single entity (or a small handful of entities with aligned interests and who act in concert, for those inclined toward pedantry) who is not beholden to the public. Note that "peer review" isn't one guy determining what is going to be considered "science" this year; rather, it's distributed by its very nature. We should strive for social filters that are similarly robust, and distributing the curation among many smaller parties is the most obvious way to go.

> If Twitter's to avoid killing its host, it needs an immune system to filter out those cancerous ideas.

Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading.

>> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.

> Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency.

I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets.

> Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading.

I agree with this. Social media may be a technology that society should chose to abandon, Amish-style.

> I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets.

There's no reason to believe that this is going to do any good with respect to reducing far-right speech or preventing far-right violence; to the contrary it's going to push them out of public view into increasingly difficult-to-monitor places and fuel a persecution narrative. But much worse than that, we're embracing a precedent that it's okay for a corporation to hold dominion over a significant volume of our collective speech, unregulated. If you would have told me ten years ago that this would be a popular progressive opinion I would have laughed.

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