DHS Disinformation Chief: “Verified users should be able to edit other’s Tweets”
nypost.com
nypost.com
They’re also proposing limiting this to verified users, which is also something that also exists, facebooks “real name” policy has been around for 2 decades, and Musk is already independently proposing to ramp up verification.
I don’t know why anybody would think sitting around forming a committee is going to produce any meaningful change. Social media is the result of decades of Darwinian iterative evolution, it’s not something one is likely to improve on sitting around a table for a few weeks. The only meaningful thing this committee could do to affect online discourse for better or for worse is recommend going after section 230 and unleashing the nuclear bomb of making platforms accountable for their users posts effectively making the vast majority of social media unlawful. Cute ideas to tweak the status quo aren’t going to do anything.
And she wants those editors to have some establishment pedigree
Allowing them to edit is misrepresenting other people's speech.
Allowing them to delete is censorship.
Allowing them to label is discriminatory.
We already have the more sensible options and those are:
Reply: The answer to free speech you don't like is more free speech
Link and or quote: Again the answer to free speech you don't like is more free speech
And this highlights the real goal, and that is to force others to pay attention to speakers she prefers they pay attention to.
In other words, she wants to get in the way.
She wants to get in the way because an awful lot of the speech she would prefer will not compete well with the speech she does not like and that is happening because those speakers have lied, omitted and manipulated, and those basic abuses cost them the public trust. [As it should, mind you.] That body of speakers also does not, in general, come from a point of view a very large portion of the population can identify with.
Easy examples?
Poor people
Labor
The sick and needy
Etc...
And like it or not, current economic policy has left us with a likely majority of the population who actually are poor, working labor, sick, needy.
And flat out? The powers that be would just rather not talk about that, which lies at the root of this whole discussion.
Clearly this is my take, but I find it very compelling, due to every one of these efforts to combat "misinformation" tends to take out speech aimed right at that which the powers that be would rather not be talked about.
He says a bunch of BS about elections being stolen.
The easy thing to do is publish the facts and rebut him.
Why does this not work?
Decades of lies, manipulations basically acting as State Media has rendered the people who would publish facts not trusted anymore than Donald Trump is!
OF FUCKING COURSE he gets traction!
Nobody should be surprised!
What this woman should be doing is forcing media to not lie, not manipulate and not be State Media to gain the trust and have the interests of the public properly discussed and represented in the dialog and in our body politic.
But that would mean a lot of people having to own an awful lot they don't feel good about and that the public would hold them accountable for.
So, we are gonna see these clowns censor, suppress and double down on avoiding issues while highlighting every war, boogie man, and shiny distraction there ever was so the games can continue.
Pardon me for not being impressed and on board with any of this crap at all.
The concept is not dystopian because she's just proposing community moderation, like any message board has. She is not proposing government control.
It's a bad idea that makes no sense, but it is far from "Orwellian".
Generally speaking, you'll get an upvote/downvote/color mechanic, and a bunch of other people's responses, perhaps with some admin or moderator actions/annotations.
“Verified people [could be allowed to] essentially start to ‘edit’ Twitter [in] the same sort of way that Wikipedia is so they can add context to certain tweets.”
So she is not saying that content should be swapped without warning. She's describing essentially annotating tweets with community-edited Wikipedia articles.
Again, not a feasible idea, but she is at least correct that Wikipedia is both community-moderated and also remarkably low in bad information.
The article deviates from the establishment’s position. We don’t want you reading this.
The Totally not dystopian thing being proposed is definitely not dystopian.
Move along.
But it's currently unclear what this new appointment will actually do, and that's a problem.
Your facile sarcasm isn't making your point. It just makes it seem like you don't have any point other than, "Everything is wrong when the mainstream believes it!" ...which is obviously ridiculous.
The NY Post is not a neutral or factual reporter of this argument, and they have editorialized in a way that is politically-motivated and also plainly false.
Nobody should be editing other people's posts. Should that somehow make sense, and let me be clear that it doesn't, there needs to be a log of who touched it, and ideally what they did.
Making edits to ones own post does make sense, but only in tandem with a robust log that itself never, ever sees an edit. Again, who, when, where, what, why.
Original Tweet by user A:
ALL 'YA ALL SUCK
User A is hammered and edits:
ALL 'YA ALL SUCK HARD 'MURIKA !!1!!
User A reconsiders in the morning:
Friends don't let friends drunk Tweet
User A gets banned, tweet removed by admin or admin bot
log:
[User] [time stamp] [address] [content guid] [action: user reason given]
[User A] [timestamp] [IP] [Tweet guid = 1] [New Tweet: null]
[User A] [timestamp] [IP] [Tweet guid = 1.1] [Edit: null]
[User A] [timestamp] [IP] [Tweet guid = 1.2] [Edit: Sorry everyone]
[Admin Bot] [timestamp] [IP] [Tweet guid = 1.3] [Delete: User Banned]
And that content is in there to look back on. Incoming URL points to root id and readers are shown the latest.
A look at the log shows what transpired and when.
Frankly, most publishers who want to be taken seriously would do themselves and their readers a great service by adding that feature immediately. I am not saying everything needs these features, but the major media entities, Twitter, others that have such a huge influence would really benefit.
News organizations need this big time. How many times have you screen captured a story only to find it is very different a while later?
I have seen this often. Should be logged. People should know. And the publisher, news entity should damn well be motivated to get stuff right.
Editor makes edits, the log is there, reporter can point right to it and direct complaints to the right person and keep their integrity intact.
How much you want to bet they will make sure that some shity annotation label or misdirection of people's words will be well implemented, but an actual log that shows what really happened will never get done. They won't want to take away stealth edits and misdirection, they just want to use those same tools against voices they don't like somehow.
All of which just turns me off makes me trust it all the whole lot less and continue to seek real conversation with real people that I can understand is real.