Twitter seeking input as it explores Filter and Limit controls on tweets
theverge.com
theverge.com
The current filtering is crude enough. There is no common agreement on who should be filtered and in what way, but everyone using the site is subject to one undifferentiated unremovable filter, whether they're in the naughty box or just trying to read some tweets. So now you'll get to invoke The Filter yourself at will. Big deal.
I don't rate the chances that Twitter will stop making more of this lazy dumb-AI, and put the effort into filter options that treat users as responsible enough actually to control their own feed. I do hope that people developing alternative microblogging tools can learn from Twitter's example.
The issue is that when people reply to my tweets, they are trying to use my audience to push their message. If they have their own followers, OK: that's them talking to their people. But they want to talk to my audience. And they might have something shitty or spammy to say, and their coming back to my threads to say it hurts my ability to communicate with my audience.
So, Twitter finally gave us a feature to hide these replies, which was almost great... except somehow it does the opposite?! It takes the message, which might have, in practice, been semi-buried in a pile of a hundred replies, and elevates it by giving the hidden replies a special icon and their own panel. I wanted to hide the hate speech, not feature it!
To make it even more ridiculous, users often get a pop-up a box to remind then "hey you can find the hidden replies here"... it frankly totally undermines the point of the feature. If I hid it, it should be hidden... at least from people who started from my tweets, and at least if they don't follow the person who posted the message (I don't want to limit the ability for people to communicate with their own followers).
(FWIW, I hopefully-clearly totally feel for the premise that Twitter should be something of a utility and that people should get to communicate with people who opted-in to what they had to say, but this ability to reply to someone else's message isn't that. If you have further consistency issues with my premise, I will note that in a system I would personally design, all replies would be hidden by default and users would have to manually mark them as visible to their audience, at which point they would take on the moral responsibility for the content, at which point I believe you could have truly uncensored follower-to-user and user-to-follower interaction, which I think should be a goal. I only really say any of this, though, to make my complaint consistent with my past complaints: I currently consider the premise of this complaint to stand-alone and be consistent with itself given the reason this feature theoretically exists, which it seems to not satisfy... it was like a half-assed mistake of a mitigation, and now we are seeing them start to play whack-a-mole.)
If you have something worthy of being said, you should use that to build an audience of people who bother to follow you, so when you say something controversial you have people who will hear it... and we should be building a system that ensures that that can happen without interference. You shouldn't just get to reply to someone else and shove stuff at their audience, if nothing else because that doesn't scale.
In my case, and to show that I have some "skin in the game" here: I happen to have a rather large following of people who listen to my let's-call-them-"rants" about Apple (and sometimes Google and Facebook, but my audience mostly cares about Apple), a company with much larger resources than I do... because I have something valuable to say on the subject and have built my audience up by being a trustworthy and even unique source of information.
But, I shouldn't get to force my rants about Apple onto Apple's audience of people who don't know I exist and who only wanted to sign up to listen to Tim Cook or talk to Apple's corporate support or communication lines... that's just me clogging up their communication channels. People should get to opt-in to my content no matter what I want to say, but that doesn't mean I should get to force what I say on anyone.
Put another way: the problem with not doing this is that you get what I guess Twitter kind of is (and it sucks): a place where the people who shout the loudest and post the most message volume--almost certainly because they have too much time on their hands from having nothing else valuable to do with their lives--manage to get the most "space" on the platform by just going around replying to people who are trying to provide high-value content.
This current situation, I will then also argue, is much worse for the goal of the little guy/gal with the niche opinion: it implies that the platform and the zeitgeist get to co-determine what is shit/spam via some horrible combination of a centralized (and clearly biased) overseer reacting to a "tyranny of the majority" (or sometimes an authoritarian government), which results in a world where you don't even get to talk to your own followers, much less mine.
This much-more-serious censorship--with people losing their accounts or their tweets getting filtered by centralized moderation based on keywords in an attempt to scale this process across all accounts at once--is a downstream effect of attempting to almost provide a "right to be heard", because we do generally want--nay: need--the ability to filter shit/spam from the platform: but to scale and be fair it needs to be done at the level of individual users and their own audiences, not with centralized filters for the entire community.
Your premise here is "I should be able to completely control the conversation that reaches my audience from my tweets".
I personally can't agree with this premise at all - and my suspicion is that a lot of issues with Twitter arise because the service itself is still figuring out whether or not it should adopt this as a goal or a non-goal.
The problem I see with the premise is that it leads to echo-chambers in which only the arguments permitted initial author are visible.
I don't mean we should permit abuse or brigarding, but basic criticism or counter-arguments to a tweet must be permitted. This is especially important for me as a follower, because it allows me to put a tweet into proper context.
I fear that full curation of replies could be abused by all parts of the political spectrum and also by completely unpolitical scammers: Political pundits could limit replies to enthusiastic agreement, MLM scammers to gleaming success stories, promoters of questionable cryptocurrencies could hide uncomfortable questions, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661600
We need to stop building centralized filters and instead push all of the moderation to the edges--even when I admit it maybe feels awkward at first glance--as it is what eventually ensures that we all have a right to communicate. You get to decide what is talked about in your Telegram channel, WhatsApp group, or (yes) Twitter sub-thread so that I have the right to decide what is talked about in mine... lest we both lose the ability to decide such after passing it off to some centralized "offensive speech" filter that ends up deciding all photos of nipples, talk of non-normative sexuality, discussion of COVID-19, or information about the latest Russian election are off-limits, because you simply can't build a centralized system for moderation without marching straight into a dystopia.
That sounds horrible… the opposite of “social”.
I follow a bunch of people on Twitter, and they talk to each other: I find that social! (And, if someone new joins the conversation, and the people I follow want to introduce me to them by marking their content as kosher, well that's a "network"! <- In parentheses as you didn't care about "network".)
(FWIW, the reason why that parenthetical you are responding to mattered was if you follow my other complaints about how this all ties into Section 230 and how and when platforms should be held legally--or merely morally--culpable for content and why, and you tried to square that with the idea that by letting users moderate threads you shift, in my framework, the culpability around. I do happily admit that there are some use cases for existing social networks--and Twitter likely in particular!--that I don't really support... but I don't even think they should be legal more than I simply think that some UI or another is better for them. But this is a wholly different conversation that isn't really really relevant on this post and involves a ton of content I have written before: I mentioned it only so people could see that I am not being inconsistent in my beliefs set, whereas I do feel like this complaint "stands alone".)
I personally disagree, as this is not the way i use social media.
I fear the result of your suggested method would be that ALL people who don’t have friends/a network, would be severely limited in their freedom of speech. They deserve to be heard too, and not just when they say “something nice” and you/others allow them to be heard. Ciriticism should not be muted. I feel isolating them from the rest/majority will only cause more problems.
> “platforms should be held legally--or merely morally--culpable for content“
I agree with that, and obviously something needs to change quickly. The current situation is a thread to our democracy.
Literally everyone--even people you think are spammers, or people who are spewing "hate speech", inciting treasonous, telling lies, or exposing "inconvenient truths"--should get to have a Twitter account and should get to post as much stuff as they want... to their followers. As someone who tells inconvenient truths, I am telling you (through my extended example elsewhere in this thread involving Apple) that this is important: this is what let's you build an audience, and it is what prevents people in power from taking away your audience!
But it isn't possible to have freedom of speech with "a right to be heard", in no small part because "a right to be heard" is impossible to implement without utterly draconian control and rate limits on speech to prevent you from just dominating anyone's discussions by shouting louder. Seriously: people who think like you do are the reason why freedom of speech is so hard to come by in this day and age, as this mental model of "a right to be heard" fails to incorporate the ramifications of the very thing if asks for :/.