Calling for public input on our approach to world leaders
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
I'm more interested in the approach of world leaders to twitter. As far as I'm concerned, people receiving salaries from the taxpayer shouldn't be spending their time writing free copy for twitter. They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites, or press conferences covered by multiple media organizations.
If the president feels a need to push out realtime text snippets, it can be done via an RSS feed on whitehouse.gov, and people can consume it via whatever app / client they want. If twitter wanted to scrape that and provide access to it, fine, but they shouldn't be given a free monopoly on that content.
If the president were to just pick one favorite channel and only ever be interviewed by them and have them as the only invitee for press conferences, then no.
There isn't any practical scarcity for text streams coming from the White House though, so I can't think of a reason why consuming them should be tied to a closed platform like Twitter, other than marginal costs of setting up and operating the infrastructure (perhaps not so marginal once we start talking about government contracts?).
However I would be fully on board with Twitter banning world leaders and IP blocking their capitals including the entire city of Washington. They won’t, that’s a value destroying proposition, but a man can dream.
Maybe if Twitter was brought in as a government contractor, including the inability to restrict people from interacting with government tweets and accounts (any non-government entities would fall under the private business side of things and not be included in this restriction) then I think it would be reasonable for the government to use Twitter.
For several decades, US Presidents have been able to avoid hard questions by cherry picking interviewers or networks in order to "massage their message". That isn't news and it shirks their responsibility to answer hard questions. Tweets are just the next step in the evolution of accountability avoidance.
We did away with royal proclamations long ago for damned good reason: you must answer to the people.
Leaders communicate wherever people are already reading and listening.
Today, Twitter is just as important of a conduit as newspapers or the evening news.
People already read Twitter and find it far more convenient to follow a world leader than to visit individual sites or set up an RSS reader.
Also you might be suffering from a legal misunderstanding -- Twitter doesn't get any kind of monopoly, free or otherwise, on someone's tweet. You keep the rights to your tweet.
There's zero difference between journalists reporting on a press conference and reporting on a tweet, except that tweets are instant while press conferences take time to set up.
And also that tweets are direct to the public, while when you read a journalist's article they might be omitting parts or spinning it.
I don't disagree with your post, but do general Government communiques not come in the form of press releases to all willing outlets?
Perhaps Twitter should at itself to the list, and press releases come with an abridged 280 character surmisal that they could then use.
Different government agencies and officials at different levels (city, state, national) use all sorts of different communication methods.
Governments have been heavily involved in media campaigns across all channels as long as there's been media.
Press releases are just one communications channel among many. Twitter is just the ~newest in a very long line.
The government has to fight the meme wars just like anyone else who wants to compete for attention.
Twitter is a terrible medium for discourse. You wouldn't suggest that world leaders communicate via TikTok, simply because it's popular.
If someone can use memes to communicate effectively, awesome. Most people suck at discourse in general, it's not limited to memes.
I also don't agree that the Gettysburg address is equivalent to speaking on Twitter.
If you think democracy is fundamentally flawed though, then I guess your point makes more sense.
I believe populism can be quite bad, which is part of why the founding fathers designed a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy. They were all well schooled in Greek and Roman history, and were afraid of the demagogues of Athens, and of other Greek city states. They believed that the will of the masses could be ignorant and capricious, and should be moderated by wiser more responsible representatives. Of course, they believed that the masses must have some say, (as do I) but that listening to every popular whim may not be the best thing for our country.
Having disdain for populism is well aligned with democracy. Shooting or torturing populists is not
See, politicians are for people, not the other way around. They follow people to whatever venue people flock to, in order to be heard better.
Since that won’t happen for most politicians, I’ll take a televised press conference with some back and forth between reporters and the politician over a tweet any day.
Trump in particular basing his presidency around twitter was super stupid. He could have and still can post anything he wants to trump.com, and it will be widely distributed on social media immediately
I'm always hesitant to base any major endeavor on a software platform that someone else owns. because...they own it. They can do whatever they want with their property
There is nothing that requires official communications on Twitter to be exclusive to that platform.
1. Doing the job
2. Maintaining power
The problem is, again, two-fold:
1. The things you need to do to serve the first goal are often different from the things you need to do to serve the second, and
2. You must achieve the second goal in order to even attempt to achieve the first.
That's the fundamental problem. It has nothing to do with Twitter per se. It's an inherent feature of all large-scale societal interactions.
'Just answer me, nor glamorized regent, whose freedom we the folk, are going to fight for?'
'For the freedom of foreigners? ...is this going to be a castrated migrationthespian?'
'Cos meet the Jones isn't radical enough anymore?'
(-;
[UPDATE] There's a book too:
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
And while press releases on whitehouse.gov are a step in the right direction, the fact that they are press releases usually makes them anodyne and uninteresting.
The best approach is the one we used to have: a non-partisan (or at least, bipartisan) press corps asking elected tough questions live on television. But that has been lost for some time now.
Live means politicians will mispeak and can be interrupted before getting their message across.
Most everything a government official or board or committee does is on the public record. Saying they cannot use 3rd party tools to organize, document, and communicate their actions would be more expensive and time consuming for them, which ultimately takes them away from the business of actually governing.
Politicians who are on Twitter, whether they know it or not, start to drift towards the views of Twitter users. Dopamine, like that which you get from from a popular tweet, is a powerful drug, and will alter peoples behaviour.
Aside from that, though, it seems the medium of Twitter has a remarkable ability to bring out people’s most toxic sides... it’s really not healthy.
Note also that there are other, broader consequences: Twitter operates the public square restriction from free speech provisions like the US First Amendment—it can regulate access and manipulate the dialogue to suit its own purposes to the detriment of the broader society, which is the whole point of provisions like 1A. Some are content that this isn’t a de jure public square, as though that will prevent us from suffering the de facto consequences.
I think the answer is to start regulating Twitter so it doesn’t have control over so much national and international dialogue. We might say that social media giants must behave according to the first amendment such that it is a “safe” space for politicians to interact. If we’re worried about preserving some sense of moderation, we could require social media giants to implement some common protocol so that they don’t own the dialogue, but only a view (in the SQL sense) into the dialogue.
What you are asking is for people to shut down their own personal social media accounts when they win an elected position. That doesn't seem like good policy - users will continue to use the same communication channels to their elected representatives.
Can you imagine in the Cold War-era NBC being allowed to broadcast propaganda ads bought and paid for by the Soviet Union?
Maybe we can be a little more principled than "good guy nations" and "bad guy nations" if the goal is truth?
Fighting a multi-national ground war against ISIS is a bit different then genocide against your own citizens.
If you track down some of the claims you're making, you'll find that most of them originate with this guy Adrian Zenz who is literally a paid propagandist for his job at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation".
Not that anybody who claims to be 'liberating the muslims' is ever up to any good. But some more objective measures might be things like, what is the body count associated with either nation, or has the population been going up or down in a given region.
But that raises a good point: if the media outlets in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion (I won’t even mention the 2001 Afghanistan invasion as there just was not the same level of meaningful opposition) had stood up to Bush’s propaganda even with the limp-wristed[0] way Twitter stood up to Trump’s, perhaps we wouldn’t have been dragged so deep into Middle East interventionism to begin with.
[0]It really was.
I saw reports of posts from air force bases supporting our attempted coup in Bolivia, for example.
It’s not about Uyghur nationalism (although I suppose more Uyghurs may desire that if China keeps this up) but about human rights.
This eagerness to defend the CCP is not going to help anyone abused by Western nations. One genocide does not justify another.
If we don't correctly, accurately label who is the real target - our anger will be misplaced - and that is something the bad actors want to have happen, and will certainly perpetuate themselves. And we don't learn then. Quick soundbites spread easily but it's not the way.
I always take care to remove m. from a wiki link I'm sharing if I'm using a mobile device.
I think people that call it propaganda are judging it based on the Cold War era VOA.
[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/voice-america-bias-and-reliabi... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/
twitter is available freely on the Internet in any country that doesn't block it. with that in mind it's extremely difficult to remain "neutral" or be expected to be the arbiter of truth.
there are some obvious (easy) ways to implement constraints against state-affiliated propaganda outlets but with the above in mind what is "propaganda" to a European audience might just be news in a FVEY country. facebook has the same problem and I think it's not solvable in a "fair" way.
Say if they really went after anything that is "propaganda" should they also be pointing out that Bellingcat is having very strong ties with Atlantic Council (and collaborates with GCHQ), or should @NatSecGeek be called out for only doxing non-US organizations and individuals? There simply are too many small players that participate in InfoOps and their alignment isn't always as straight forward.
note: I personally think both bellingcat/NatSecGeek do excellent work but none of them are unbiased (or unaffiliated) which means they will at times end up as useful idiots (whether it suits them or not).
Almost like act first, ask permission later.
EDIT: The above are mostly something I try to keep in mind with government public consultations. I acknowledge that cynicism is a little more understandable for private industry, as they are not even in theory rooted in anything but shareholder value-maximization, but gov is at least ostensibly aspiring for public good.
Consider if Biden dropped a tweet saying "don't observe DST."
That could be dangerous, right? You've got two distinct groups of people that for some reason or another fail to coalesce, all "hell" breaks loose because some people are showing up to work at different times, logistical break down... Do you squelch him? And how does that compare to a non-violent break-in at the capitol to show congress that their representation of the general public is failing a given demographic?
Personally I think that the channel should be wide open to anything but the most unbearable aspects of communication, like child exploitation. You've got no chance of convincing a white supremacist that his worldview is askew without engaging in a conversation and logically defeating his assertions, not to mention the fact that publicly shaming the ideology (while jointly defeating it) in a widely available forum is certainly the best prophylactic. Instead the "acceptable" rhetoric is one-sided which alienates anybody that has the audacity to even ask the questions proposed, while destroying their ability to come about a rational conclusion through empirical observation. That channel should be equivalently wide for politicians which the people have elected to represent them up to the extent of tangible action to break the law up to the barrier of reason, e.g. meaningfully inciting violent actions against individuals or groups.
And this is all precipitated by the fact that Twitter and the like are commodifying speech, which is a genuine hazard as it creates a serious hurdle at the intersection of liberty and commercial interest. Commercial interests want inoffensive discussion which appeals to the widest possible band of individuals, meaning that the content and discussions are only allowed to span a narrow width, generally. It is not in any meaningful way acting in the public interest at that point, and only seeks to, through largely automatic processes, extend and crystallize the status quo which is genuinely harmful as we're doing little more than discussing how to spin in place at that point. This is driven even further through deplatforming (active or passive) extremist viewpoints, and exposing them disproportionately with algorithmic processes.
I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands.
All that make me think that even tough you're right that the end result will not be democratic, I wouldn't throw them the stone and accuse them of acting in bad faith.
Twitter can and do ask for user feedback all the time, without making a press release about it.
I don't find it cynical to ask why they are doing this in public - it seems likely that the parent has hit upon a good part of the reason.
If one company takes a more principled approach to moderation, and that more principled approach is harmful to revenue, that company will be outcompeted by companies with whatever moderation policies optimize for engagement / revenue / growth. As a result, in the absence of legislation, you get adverse selection i.e. the dominant platforms will be the ones that optimize for engagement/revenue/growth, rather than the ones with good moderation policies.
If you instead have legislation for what "good moderation" looks like, it applies equally to all companies and mitigates the adverse selection problem.
Of course, it is still entirely possible for bad legislation to introduce worse problems than the adverse selection problem. It depends on the object level of what exactly the legislation is, rather than being a blanket "legislation bad" or "legislation good" sort of thing.
They do have a rationale. The issue is that it's biased.
If an individual moves into the position of a world leader or equivalent, their account should be frozen until such time that the position ends. This is the only sane policy. Anything else is too dangerous for humanity. Twitter and similar forums have the potential to destabilize global peace in the long run.
Ex: A world leader should not be allowed to say "We are going to war" on Twitter, only to have the military turn around and say "We're doing what?!". Most governments have an official process for declaring war for this very reason, otherwise we are regressing back to medieval times.
Does anyone think Donald Trump ever actually read those one-line zingers random celebs would reply to his tweets with?
Do people think some dictator is going to ignore the people they're oppressing but listen to @xx69destroyerman calling them out?
But your comment also brings up a possible secondary benefit: the benefit of the people to see and possibly get in contact with other real people (real for the most part hopefully), as they criticize world figures. This is something that doesn't exist in other media outlets or exists only for people who can afford to take time out to go to a protest or in person official function.
And people can contact other people and criticize world leaders whether or not those leaders spend countless hours a day tweeting.
Twitter is quite possibly one of the worst places for that anyways for multiple reasons (established fake account infrastructure distorting conversations, poor layout for async discussion between many people, etc)
People can contact each other but having the leader somewhere available provides a focal point that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Twitter has problems - but it's not clear to me how a lot of the problem unique problems of twitter vs common problems of meeting and filtering out any anonymous mass of people at a party or conference.
Then say that? Because this:
> Not all opportunities are exercised - but especially on HN I would think we should realize that it's significant that they exist.
Sure doesn't mean that.
> People can contact each other but having the leader somewhere available provides a focal point that otherwise wouldn't exist.
What? No. The focal point is the person and their actions.
Donald Trump was also one of the most contentious topics on every other form of social media that doesn't have him posting. Just look at Reddit.
> Twitter has problems - but it's not clear to me how a lot of the problem unique problems of twitter vs common problems of meeting and filtering out any anonymous mass of people at a party or conference.
Then read my comment again.
All platforms have problems, Twitter is just even worse than par, and the format is especially bad.
I can't believe we're actually going to pretend the platform that started by limiting people to discourse based on 140 characters supposed to be some sort of rallying point against bad leaders rather than an echo chamber where everyone talks past everyone except those who agree with their views.
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Leaders should use their official platforms that aren't subject to the whims of a private company. If news companies or individuals or even the platforms themselves want to drop those official statements into their ecosystem that's on them.
It's one thing if a country just can't put together that infrastructure but the spark for this is literally the only country in the world with a tld for their government (.gov) there is no reason it should have ever come to this.
Whether a world leader can announce a war without consulting with the military first has nothing to do with Twitter. In the past (and present), they can still do that just as easily over live radio, live TV, or announced to journalists as breaking news.
It's up to a country to determine the official processes by which a leader can speak to any media outlet.
For most leaders, they use Twitter responsibly and blandly, not very different from other channels, and honestly their staffers manage it for them. If a leader is irresponsible, then it's up to the legislature to take action.
Who needs Twitter when you have TV?
How on earth is Twitter going to make a policy that pleases worldwide shareholders, governments (and their oppositions), and the general public?
Maybe I lack imagination, but it feels like Twitter is constantly trying to kick its inevitable fragmentation down the road.
Twitter only has the dark pattern engagement content and it makes people sick after too long. Maybe they should buy a Flicker type platform just to try and tone down the outrage a bit.
E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow.
Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
"No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
Any time I see people make sweeping claims about what the content on some social media site/app "is", I feel compelled to point out that your Twitter and my Twitter are likely much more different than you realize. Because the UI looks the same, people naturally assume the content is similar, but your experience is highly dependent on who you follow.
My Twitter feed is 50% pixel artists sharing beautiful content, 30% programming language people having interesting discussions on language nerd stuff, 10% authors talking about fiction, and 10% politics and other stuff. I get a lot of feel good content.
But that's because I chose to make my Twitter feed be that by who I follow. Reddit and YouTube are likewise highly nourishing to me. I do wish social media sites made it easier to curate like this, but I disagree with the notion that there is any singular view of what content on these sites is like.
I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.
Following only people you want to chat with doesn't necessarily mean talking about nice things.
They won't. The final policy will please twitter shareholders. That means they will not do anything that might give rise to a competitor service. They aren't going to kick out the alt-right. They aren't going to kick out Trump 2.0. If Putin wants a Twitter account he is going to get it. If Trump wins office again he too will get one too. Twitter is not in the business of angering people in power, people who could put barriers between twitter and profits.
Twitter has long lost credible neutrality as a platform which is why it's ultimately going to die.
The goal of credible neutrality is to convince people that you have acted fairly and gain political acceptance [Vitalik does this by appealing to the standards for property ownership under capitalism]; the goal is not to act fairly [as Vitalik softly admits, the true goal is to do whatever is necessary to support (his) wealth accumulation].
I would much rather credible neutrality did not exist as a justification for particular actions, and that it faced automatic criticism.
Give Bob 1000 coins and admit that you did so, rather than set up a system of rules which is designed for Bob to receive 1000 coins. The use of passive voice is an indicator that someone has disguised their responsibility.
Twitter is both a public forum and a private enterprise. The decisions it makes—not just in terms of moderation, but in terms of structure and incentive—substantially affect the spread of mis/disinformation. Is it the responsibility of the platform to prevent its abuse to that end? Or is it essential for it to remain entirely neutral? How does that work across different legal, social, and political environments? How does that apply differently to democratically-elected leaders? What constitutes harassment or targeted abuse? What counts as impersonation or parody?
It feels like it's going to be a fairly unpleasant period while we figure that all out.
If we can't trust individuals to digest information themselves, what are we doing?
I find the premise troubling. People can disagree and interpret events differently. Without that, there's very little to discuss.
We're realizing that it's no longer as simple as "people should just know better", because the forces they're up against are armed with all the latest psychological tricks to induce belief even in people who /do/ know better.
This reads as "this time is different", an appeal to special circumstances without addressing the crux of the issue, subjectivity & diversity of opinion.
In practical terms this requires "fact checkers" supposedly impartial arbiters of objective truth. We can disagree on philosophy and the nature of man, but this premise is a non-starter for me.
In addition to the bad actors (these are the same throughout time) themselves, they now have capabilities that _are_ different:
- They can be heard at will be heard by millions to billions of people
- They can track in real time whether their messaging is working, and adjust it for maximum effect using everything we've learned about human psychology in the last century
- They can target their messaging at scale, varying it to match what will work best for a given narrowly-defined demographic
- They can do all of this with an iteration cycle of hours, instead of days or weeks
Where is the historical parallel that invalidates the premise?
Narrowly focusing on technological minutiae deliberately misses the point.
I remember when the rallying cry of opensrc and hacker culture was: "information wants to be free". Shameless political FUD is the same parlor trick played again and again. Disappointing to see it getting so much play here.
If you're opening the door for invites to prove a negative, then perhaps you can prove that your rationale isn't misinformation? In terms of real politik, it buttresses authoritarian "fact check" narratives.
We disagree and that's not only healthy and normal, but the entire point. We should be able to disagree without characterizing arguments or subjective observations as misinformation deviating from an authority's concept of "objective truth".
We don't equip people to do it through our education systems in America. What we're doing is sending millions of people out into the world, wholly unprepared to navigate it successfully, which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.
I don't personally blame Twitter. This is such a gigantic problem, that pinning it to a single source is just understating what's happening. If America wants to survive another 100 years, it will have to find a way to fix its "lack of critical thinking skills" problem in a way that flips the statistics, which is more or less impossible, without swift and decisive action to make large changes to how we educate our children.
Does the largely state run education system have an incentive to create critical thinkers?
Institutions trend towards group think. Credentials are granted by authorities. I'm not sure we can get there using the tools at hand.
You could intuit this sort of outcome, perhaps, from a reading of "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Humans don't really do well with probability, we want definitive binary outcomes that aren't reliant on probability. We want a quiet, well defined day to day. Politicians want the same thing (alongside a disproportionately large allotment of control and wealth in return). Want though, is the difficulty, because the reality is that the underpinnings of practically all human functions and the world in itself are fairly chaotic.
I think you're under the impression it's a noble goal in the name of progress, but [genuine] progress is disruptive in every field. That disruption breaks the equilibrium, and makes the quiet day a rather loud lifetime.
"May you live in interesting times."
The state wants compliance as much as the people want compliance, which is certainly one incentive, but it exists in parallel with other, competing incentives.
"The state" doesn't exist as an independent thinking body. I don't think it's healthy to treat it like it does.
I do agree though, the incentives are hidden, non-obvious. Progress is incentivized because it helps the state, and it helps the state because it helps the people.
That being said I prefer twitter to be as hands off as possible when dealing with this.
They've proven to be incapable and overwhelmed about making legitimate decisions.
They should get regulated and they should stop regulating.
I think this is just a PR stunt, nothing will change that isn’t already planned before this public input session. Move along, status quo.
Keep the ability to retweet world leaders' tweets, but prevent retweets to be added more from the retweeters.
In terms of how people can get the world leader's news (tweets). Maybe something like news feed on their twitter feed, like Youtube has some local news on my feed even though I don't subscribe to anything.
The practical effect would be that only people who are very interested in a world leader (and bots) would retweet them. This would make the Twitter experience even more insular.
Essentially their accounts should serve strictly as a broadcast of info, and nothing more.
Their tweets should be strictly treated like a one-way broadcast for them to convey info to their constituents.
Of course, this would be against Twitter's interests. They’d rather fit authorities’ stereotypes as to how a public communication channel should behave, and be normalized that way. Safer, more shareholder value.
I struggle to see a problem with this. A political personality making political statements should do so from an account representing the office, for instance, @POTUS. That account should belong to the office, not the individual. Maybe state and corporate accounts should be treated differently than personal accounts.
It's a pretty far cry from having any sort of additional power.
Furthermore, acknowledging status where it exists is not the same as creating a distinct group of people with special status. What about "Dr." for people with doctorate degrees? Doctors don't have any more rights than anyone else, and having the title exist certainly doesn't create some part of society that is inaccessible to others.
Holding political leaders to a different standard on social media doesn't mean they are royalty, it's just an acknowledgement that they do hold power, elected, inherited, or otherwise. Furthermore, if Twitter's history is a sign of what any new policy would look like, world leaders would be held to a more restrictive standard than others, on Twitter.
You're right that acknowledging status exists is not the same as creating it. But does one not go hand in hand with the other in this case, where you are selectively picking who to acknowledge?
Now, I don't know the specifics, but from what I understand, there is an overwhelming disparity between journalists/politicians getting blue checkmarks compared to others who may have more followers. Of course, that would also be fine, assuming there was a rigorous definition of what a "journalist" was. Keep in mind, this is not evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni8CpIJpmqw
I want to be clear, I was not implying political leaders royalty. But when you hold some group to a different standard than others or have rules for them that differ (whether more restrictive or lax), you have basically reinvented legal inequality.
What the fuck? In what universe are the political hot takes, memes, and sniping on Twitter considered "discourse"? And in what universe is this considered healthy public conversation? Do people actually think Twitter is in any way a good medium for this?
Pretty simple IMO.
Are we agreeing that there are in fact limits on Freedom of Speech?
I'm trying to understand what people mean when they say "free speech platform".
It seems to be a get out of jail free card of sorts.
"Free speech" without any limits obviously doesn't work. Where are the limits of the parent comment? The devil is in the details.
Communication platforms in the US should adhere to the US constitution.
Isn't this where the entire problem is coming from? If this were a state run service, we know the answer and can apply it easily.
The confusion is coming entirely from it being something other than the state.
Or just on the basis of the one or more places the company itself is are incorporated? Will they shop around for communication laws the same way they do for taxes?
Facebook and Twitter run websites.
Web and email hosting companies don't have an issue figuring it out. Twitter shouldn't either.
I'd like a platform that removes illegal speech, nothing else. Such a platform should be legal.
> platform that removes illegal speech
What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not.
EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence?
There are no clear answers.
Sounds conceptually great to me.
How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.
Part of the value proposition of their competitors is that they do moderate their content, to some extent.
I don't see why we should force all platforms to operate essentially without moderation.
There exist other options.
Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement.
Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it.
Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient.
These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.
Social media companies like Twitter realize that this is the most reasonable approach, but it effectively removes their ability to manipulate... so of course they continue to censor and moderate in a biased fashion.
I think the election fraud nonsense suggests it might not be that simple. Bad actors in positions of power are abusing these services to the point where we have real conflict occurring.
How do we account for these edge cases?
Can we agree that calls for violence is a limit of speech that is good?
[0] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
Did twitter contribute to the events on the 6th? Do they have any role to play?
Do you have to use the words "go and kill them" in order for it to be violence?
I'm trying to be genuine here, because I don't know. I will say it certainly feels like we saw the violence being induced for months ahead of time on twitter without explicit calls for violence.
Should we just allow this?
It's happening still. We have members of congress calling the election stolen. This is how more violence happens. It's a slow burn, but it's a burn.
Hackernews famously moderates their comment section, to the benefit of all.
Why can't this happen on Twitter?
I agree, they have created a really unfortunate situation for us and for them.
In principal, forgetting the practicalities, would you support HN style moderation on Twitter/FB?
My gut reaction is yes. It seems to be a good balance of gut check and "we don't have time for this".
o/t
5 star online conversation dude.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/30/twitter-execs-refused-request-...
It must be moderated.
I find corporate-speak as dreadful, artificial and insincere as the next guy, but this bit was unintentionally funny. At least I wonder now how a constantly evolving government official would look.
This: “Generally, we want to hear from the public on whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter. And, should a world leader violate a rule, what type of enforcement action is appropriate.” is interesting.
The trouble is that, from Twitters perspective, they are the arbiter of how these interactions happen. Same for other major platforms.
It fails to address the question of whether private for profit corporations should be sole arbiters of the very substrate upon which we live and its rules.
Once the public and world governments think this through and fully game it out, I don’t think they’ll settle for the current status quo.
We’re already seeing internet shutdowns during elections in certain countries as a course and crude enforcement or regulatory action. I’d expect this to become more granular over time and to expand.
-Marshall Mcluhan, 1966
Nothing to see here, move along.
Do you like this? Not like it? Why?
I feel like this is exactly the type of feedback they're asking for.
What do you think?
Why did you offer this data?
1) Twitter calls for public input on their approach to their handling of accounts of government officials. This individual is a government official and this is an instance of handling their account.
2) Well-timed. They called for this input on March 18th. This instance of account handling is from March 19th, approximately one day later. This makes it "more relevant," given that it was not, say, six years ago.
So, I offered this data because it was topical and timely to the discussion at hand. Rather than a hypothetical, it exists as a real instance of how Twitter as a corporation handles the Twitter accounts of government leaders. If I were to discuss the price of tea in China back in 1887, that would not be topical or timely.
[1] Though there's activity on her account from 15 hours ago. In addition if someone is banned from Twitter, doesn't Twitter take their tweets offline/hide them?
I don't know what Twitter does with people's tweets. Frankly, I find the platform almost too chaotic to look at for more than a few seconds. It feels like a roomful of ping-pong balls with text on them, whizzing at your head, only loosely clustered.
Okay she made one silly facebook post that doesn't really quite say that. If we're gonna popularize the absurd things said by every freshman congressperson on social media, well we've got a long book to write.
Opposition parties should _never_ have the power to just expel people they don't like from the opposing side.
I'm sure it's purely coincidence she is locked from her twitter account on the same day that congress will be voting on a resolution on whether or not to expel her.
If it’s in the constitution, especially if the founding fathers put it in, it can become popular with Americans.
You can't just silence everyone you disagree with.
They have their right for 'spewing' their 'bs' just like you have for 'spewing' yours.
And it's not up to you, me or Twitter to decide which opinions are right or wrong.
Any person has the right to dictate a mode of conduct on their platform and penalize individuals who do not follow said code. Why should I be paying for bandwidth and host the content of any individual who does not follow my rules in my platform? I provide a service and I have the right to dictate who gets to use it.
The senator can go spew her homophobia, conspiracy theories and racism in a public space, nobody prevents her, but I certainly wouldn't provide a platform for her and her ilk.
Sorry, but that's plainly false. No legal scholar will agree with you.
Surely you could see that correlation as a pattern of questionable behavior finally biting her and not some conspiracy between the liberal elite and Twitter.
The way Twitter is framing this is really interesting, they're evidently operating under the assumption that they are in the position of power.
Without metrics there is less incentive to game the system and less feedback when attempting to game it.
If someone is accused of being a world leader, and you have adequate identification, it's fairly easy to confirm or deny. In the case of a disputed election, maybe both candidates could be considered leaders until the dispute is resolved.
Unfiltered access to their hyperbole seems to be a net-negative.
So they need those "exciting" world leaders. Telling Twitter to ban all world leaders is the opposite of what they want.
They want to be able to have all those people on there, while not being blamed for leaving "bad" content up.
This is unusual territory, since it's not all that common for one company to be so closely involved with what could literally have been violent insurrection, even leading to outright war. It didn't, but it came far closer than the leadership of Twitter liked. They want to be ubiquitous, but not so pervasive as to be existential.
Twitter has an inflated sense of its own importance.
Twitter was without a doubt important. It wasn't the sole player, to be sure, but they were a direct intermediary between a prominent leader and his followers, bypassing all other gatekeepers.
Perhaps he'd have switched to an email newsletter or Facebook or another social medium, but in the days leading up to January 6, it was very much about Twitter.
> "whether or not they believe world leaders should be subject to the same rules as others on Twitter".
E.g. Twitter in 2020 was rife with "inciting violence" but largely depending on your point of view/politics, and if it was "justified". Etc.
Its the same reason for Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post.... having a media outlet gives you political power.
- Unlike traditional media where you have several competing outlets to disseminate your message, everything you put out on that platform is subject to the censorship whims of a single corporation.
- It doesn't feel very presidential. 140 or 280 or whatever characters seems like an artificial cap on what is presumably very important messaging for the country. (You may argue people don't have an appetite for more - I guarantee when politics comes up in conversation over a backyard BBQ most people have a lot more to say than that).
And no special moderation either. If it violates what Bay Area Americans consider ok, ban the account.
After all, these foreign world leaders have decided to use a private American company as a platform. If they don't like it they should simply build their own.
Please don't nationalize/regulate us.
It's one thing to say "I believe the election was rigged based on facts X,Y,Z" and quite another thing to say (real tweet): " “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
Maybe world leaders need two accounts/streams, one for 'official' government business and one for political rhetoric which has some sort of limitations (can't be RT'd, etc.)
The most visible accounts should be the ones subject to the highest level of scrutiny and moderation. Doing it the other way round is bizarre, IMO.
We’re living in a time where most people on Earth have an unprecedented ability to broadcast their opinions to the world, effectively free of editorial oversight, and I think a lot of people forget that. Especially given how quickly this change has happened, it’s kind of nuts to see so much hand-wringing over media platforms exercising a bare minimum editorial oversight to prevent incoherent toxic bullshit from dominating the information landscape they host.
They aren't the same thing. Twitter is a for-profit company and has a legal obligation to not build in revenue footguns, even if it would be better for society and the world for them to stop censoring people. :(
Similarly, if you would ban someone for repeatedly spreading misinformation, you should ban world leaders. They should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. Stop creating platforms for despots.
I think Twitter should allow trusted/editorial account that shows prominently (even part of the tweet itself) on world leaders tweets.
This will be NYTs, Washington Post, etc... of the world.
The big plus here is we return the editorial part of these institutions. Imo, these used to be net positive on the society (see Watergate during Nixon)
Twitter will pick the list of editors (kind of what they currently do with the verified account) The bar to be an editor needs to be high and a trusted source of news.
If the Tweet violates guidelines then remove it from any kind of public listing of Tweets, but leave it for people who specifically follow that person.
Perhaps mark it with a special "click here to open" kind of thing.
But don't ban/block anyone for something that is not illegal. It's as simple as that: follow local law, and block only what's actually illegal.
It is rather pathetic that the citizens of the US, which is supposed to be a democracy run by its citizens are too scared to communicate directly with foreign leaders but are begging the government to create a smoke screen of propaganda so that their fragile minds can be protected from direct statements of foreign leaders.
We are supposed to be adults and we are supposed to be making the major decisions for our the direction of our nation and forcing our politicians to execute our will. We are not supposed to be scared children begging an expensive army of government officials, journalists, and shady "analysts" to protect us from the reality of the world.
If you let someone else shape your world view for you, they will do it to their advantage, and in the US this usually means more war, more tax payer dollars spend on the military, more death. Most of the more recent wars the US got into have been aided by carefully manufacturing powerful supervillian images of foreign leaders who were usually just garden variety low level a-holes that were completely harmless to the US.
So man up, or woman up, read what the other people have to say directly from the source and try to make the best decision for the nation and yourself.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-nikole-hannah-j...
They have official means of communicating with the public. Leave Twitter for people without a voice, posting memes, and general bullshitting.
World leaders don’t need to get caught up in quippy bickering.
1. Are you an infrastructure? In that case you censor nothing but probably give users tools to manage their own censorship (like "remove suspected bot content" "remove tagged hate speech" options)
2. Are you a media? And in that case you have an editorial line, that you apply TO EVERYBODY. Or you state that world leader (or which world leaders) get a free pass. You make it explicit.
You can't be the first one for leaders and the second one for random individuals. Be coherent.
Let's be real, we are mostly talking about Trump here. To this day, I am not sure if it was just simple selfish greed or higher twitter instances aligning with his opinions, but there was an anomaly, an incoherence in your stance.
If you want to fix the cynical image you are trying to get, choose a coherent stance and stick to it, EVEN IF THAT MAKES YOU LOSE MONEY. Or accept that you are a cynical entity.
Twitter should not be filtering and censoring public discourse, debate, and information, acting as the arbiter of what ideas and information can influence politics.
Communications platforms in the United States should adhere to the United States constitution.
There is no good reason why the President of the United States cannot publish his (in the case of Trump, ill-formed) thoughts directly to whitehouse.gov.
We should demand and expect that governments publish directly to the web in an immutable way that is archived to satisfy our duty to history.
Twitter made things worse by hiding Trump’s previous tweets. Every voter should be required to read every damn one of them.
Twitter and Trump danced this together and now Twitter wants to be the good guy?
What could be the outcome? Will a cohort of COVID-deniers convince Twitter that everyone is entitled to an opinion, leading to the great unbanning of Donald Trump?
Ex president. Trump has to live by the same rules as the rest of the hoi polloi.
For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.
In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
That would be nice, but all they'll do is push their own agenda. They've already proven that.
No politicians on Twitter.
Personally I have no trust that Twitter is doing any of this in good faith. For example take this bit from their blog post:
> We’re also in the process of consulting with a range of human rights experts, civil society organizations, and academics worldwide whose feedback will be reflected in forthcoming revisions to the policy framework.
This sounds like they will solicit opinions that agree with their planned policy updates, and will increase the amount of censorship they perform, informed by their progressive politics. This blog post just seems like a notice that this is coming, rather than an honest attempt to collect user input. They're also not clear what organizations they are consulting but I am guessing it does not include any moderate or conservative voices. The blog post does not mention "speech", "free speech", "censorship", "neutral", etc. It does however mention things like "fundamental human rights" and frustratingly vague wording like "health of the public conversation". This blog post is a fluffy PR piece that is starting the work of previewing and justifying whatever they're about to do to double down on their current heavy handed control of speech.
Another curious part of this post:
> This is to ensure a global perspective is reflected in the feedback
It's interesting that the blog post mentions seeking a "global perspective", so maybe this is PR for other nations more so than a US audience. Twitter doesn't do a good job of reflecting varying perspectives even domestically in the US., since they regularly disallow centrist or conservative posts on a variety of controversial topics. When they take this mode of operation internationally, it is even more unacceptable since Twitter (and Facebook) are essentially propagandizing other nations and engaging in a slow-moving cultural shaping mission when they censor speech from those nations according to their own political or cultural opinions. I am expecting that the "global perspective" they seek is one that agrees with their way of doing things, not an honest readiness to accept ideological/cultural diversity. If they at all cared about this, they would first start by correcting their mistakes within the US.
Other countries are aware of these issues, and the risk that Twitter and other big tech companies bring to their societies. We've seen leaders like Angela Merkel (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/germanys-merkel-hits-out-at-...) and Emmanuel Macron (https://www.axios.com/macron-social-media-bans-trump-twitter...) point out the obvious issues with Twitter banning Trump, and it was a wake up call to those leaders. With leftist activists now calling for other countries' leaders to be banned (https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-trump-banned-bolsona...), I would say those nations have every right to be alarmed.
It's ironic that we place such a focus on foreign actors influencing our society in America. We often hear about Russian interference or other such scary activity, but the same scrutiny is never given to domestic actors who are waging an all out war on diversity of thought. Twitter is one of those bad actors, and cannot be trusted to uphold free speech principles. We need alternatives to them, and the other companies complicit in propagandizing our society - regular censors/deplatformers like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.
I just wonder what kind of alternatives we have that could be effective. Something government sponsored but administered by a third party with a strict constitution regarding moderating only the extremest content? A system of self-moderation in place that isn't destructive, but rather hides content to prevent congestion? I feel like voluntary identification is also a must.
I don't know, it's hard to say.
Here's an idea. How about not betraying the people paying for your bailouts. You could at least hire more people.
Isn't Karl Marx the one European who has enslaved more people than anyone? Wealth doesn't accumulate. What once was novel, like electricity, becomes ubiquitous. And you can't "rich" yourself out of society. If you are moral and behave, you accumulate wealth, and often give it away before your lazy spoiled children ruin you.
And the dialectical materialism, didn't Marx misread Hegel? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegel never said that. What Hegel said is if you choose an "-ism", the very real world proves it wrong, and that's how you get ideals.
The communist plague the world. OK. We'll just advance medicine. The communist bribe and loan our leaders? OK. We'll just take the money from them, and throw them in the ocean when the loan comes due.
Anything else?
It's very likely that whatever new policy comes out of this will involve restrictions on other nation's presidents.
Now that's just not true. What trump did was a relatively minor infraction compared to what is happening in some countries around the world. Like it just doesn't come close on any scale.
The realization here is that people at twitter have an opinion on US politics, and are generally oblivious to the rest of the world.
The waters they're in would've been way less hot if they just did nothing and claimed neutrality. In that light shedding their neutrality was a very conscious decision by Twitter.
Which messages do you allow? Which do you censor? And which world leaders do you ban?
They are going to do whatever they want at the end of the day, they've given me absoloutely no confidence to believe that they want to do whats right.
What do you mean by this? Surely Twitter is capable of making judgments and enforcing its rules accordingly, just like Burger King can require the president to pay for his meals. Are you saying Twitter should decline to enforce any rules against world leaders?
people complain about fake news and rightly so but the cycle of hatred that results from these purity tests applied to anyone because of past tweets is worse
Logistically it’s infeasible. Someone will create a database of archived tweets, or screenshots will circle the web. Etc.
Is snoop dogg on twitter?
If yes, then your policy is already transparent to me, why can't twitter see it for themselves?
If indeed snoop has been banned for promoting violence, then okay - go all the way - anyone who has ever talked about violent things block them.
I myself might enjoy a portal that has no death, killing, boxing, hockey, fighting... all those things.
Just as I got excited when I saw that fbook was deranking all politics and then in Australia blocked all news - I was like - wow, what a utopia social network - friends and family can see and be seen without all that other stuff!
I have chuckled many times over the years watching twitter dodge and weave as policies shift this way and that - some things that I've already dealt with with open public forums.
I'd say I'm very interested in this one - but the whole phone number for your account thing has basically censored my use of it so I already go elsewhere.
fine to disagree, just not sure if others know enough about the comment to not disagree ignorantly.