Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

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Is the problem Twitter, or the people that use Twitter?

What honestly do you think Twitter's hand in this is? Even with a purely chronological feed, people with "selective" critical thinking skills, inconsistent value systems, and a disrespect of personal liberty will still surround themselves with other such people.

Twitter's only option would be to take a "paradox of intolerance" approach and start banning such activity, but then you are trusting a corporation to make such judgments fairly, rather than just expediently.

And if Twitter disappeared tomorrow, what then? Old-school student protests, picketing, signs/posters/pamphlets, letters in the school newspaper, and "cancel-prof-foo.net" getting thousands of views per day.

Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile. Twitter doesn't cancel people; people cancel people.

Edit:

I also want to be very clear that Professor Katz, who accused a radical student group of being a "terrorist organization" was absolutely in the wrong for doing so and in my opinion does deserve to be censured for that statement. And making public statements about "black privilege" is even worse, which frankly leads me to question Professor Negy's moral compass and fitness to be an educator. I fully agree with the assessment that they used their rights to free speech irresponsibly, at best.

But I also think it's completely wrong to dig up an old incident for which they had already been judged and punished. I'm sure that the members of the Black Justice League are strongly opposed to policies that take away the rights of convicted felons, and I'm sure that they all have the critical thinking skills to recognize the parallel here, and I'm also sure that none of them would be interested in admitting such. In my opinion the only correct move by the University here is to dole out wrist slaps on both sides and tell all parties involved to drop it or face further consequences.

> Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile.

The problem is that the effort required to join the dogpile is miniscule and continuing to decrease, but the net effect of many joining is not.

This was, pre-internet, kept in balance by requiring people to do something uncomfortable to protest (e.g. leaving the house, marching all day on the street).

The quip used to be that Internet anonymity turns everyone into an asshole, but that doesn't ring true these days.

Now, the decreased minimum effort required means that 10,000 people can take 5 minutes each to be an asshole, and Facegramchattertok will happily amplify and distribute the result to increase ad revenue.

The problem is also the media. Twitter outrage mobs aren’t so effective on their own because average people don’t read twitter. But news sites often pick up these outrage mobs and shun a light on them. Which amplifies the outrage and puts it in places regular people read.

And then companies have to act on it because the media sites are reposting tweets claiming the cloudflare CEO wants to see trans people die or whatever the thing of the day is.

Absolutely. I'm sure media was always a retread of an official / inside feed from somewhere, but it feels so much more automatic now.

24/7 to fill with content = {scrape social media trends} -> {generate story} -> {repeat}

Every single day I see "reputable" news sites put out headlines like "Twitter outrage over [X]" and I think this is why journalism is dying. The "man on the street" piece has a time-honored place in journalism, but previous generations understood that the opinions of random strangers are not, in and of themselves, NEWS. They were fluff pieces and human interest bits, not headlines. They constitute opinion at best, and usually closer to gossip most of the time. I don't blame Twitter itself, per se. But it is easier for journalists to find opinions than to find facts, and that has certainly led to a degradation in quality of news stories and a near total loss of understanding of what constitutes bias in journalism.

This is the central flaw of social media itself.

As engineer by training this is positive feedback with a wide bandwidth loop gain which is ALWAYS a recipe of unstable system behavior. Things that could "fix" social media:

1. Slow down the speed of replies - e.g. 24 hours instead of seconds

2. Reduce the gain - limit how many people can see your reply or post to a narrower range of people you know instead of broadcasting to the universe.

This is exactly what you do with feedback systems like amplifiers or analog circuits to control their stability and prevent unstable behavior. :-)

I don't think it has much to do with social media, other than if you were in the same physical space as many online influencers and trying to have a mundane conversation with them, there would be so many behavioral red flags that you would never follow them anywhere.

Instead, it's the same effect as "nobody gets fired for buying IBM." If you follow the crowd, you won't get punished even if what you're doing turns out to have horrific consequences. At best, one could argue that echo chambers fool mob participants into overestimating the size of the crowd, but people on twitter are fully aware that there are people who hate them, and that they hate, and the most unhinged of them spend all day following those enemies around lobbing insults at them, and trying to get them fired or hurt.

There's a significant and illustrative overlap between public opinion-havers and tv/press pundits: pundits got fired for being right about Iraq, CIA black sites, etc. Everybody who was wrong about those things is still being trotted around as if they were an expert on something. Because this is a game of playing it safe, not a game of truth. If something is dangerous, like deviating from the crowd or the boss, do the other thing.

If you see a crowd of wolves surrounding a sheep, be a wolf, not a sheep.

The problem is people in positions of authority listening to Twitter mobs.

That stops and the mobs lose all their power. It will probably take some lawsuits to set the standard too.

This is what I was getting at when I was talking about "standing against the dogpile".

I agree with what you said, but things get hairy when other people in positions of authority agree with, or are part of, the mob.

There already have been lawsuits (e.g. a recent HN thread about a shop getting "canceled" by Oberlin students, leading to a large award in favor of the shop), but I don't think anything is going to change until the general society pendulum swings the other way. And then we have to worry about what's on the other side of the pendulum...

It's not Twitter.

The problem is vindictive people in positions of authority, with no constraints, and heavy ideology aka Universities.

Most American corporations are not ideological, the public sector is a highly constrained place.

Universities allow profs to have their petty adult beefs with each other, veiled in intellectual language or moralisms etc..

I bet twitter could have (and maybe still could) cut down toxicity massively by only showing tweets in an algorithmic feed that are not replies to an existing tweet.

I think the big problem with twitter is that people are often only exposed to the "other side" of an argument by first seeing a reply to that tweet from someone they are following (and probably agree with). That's a recipe for starting mob flame wars.

Yes. It's 100% BOTH.

Twitter is going to have some major, major legal problems with the current Missouri lawsuit - acting as a direct agent of the US Government puts Twitter 100% under the jurisdiction and requirements of the 1st Amendment. "The government shall not infringe" now includes Twitter censorship!

Social media as also enabled mentally ill and fringe lunatics to have a voice that is nominally equal to people who are rational and law-and-order based. In so far as individuals should show "reasonable restraint" in anything they do or say (to avoid 1st Amendment, discrimination, slander, libel or other ILLEGAL speech acts), that is partially and centrally an individual's fault as well.

Both feed on each other. Both are evil in any sense of what civilization and civil society are. The pendulum will swing back and in many ways already is.

When a group of people act like terrorists, it's absolutely wrong or illegal. It's not polite but politeness is not the measure. The definition of terrorism lately is (per the FBI):

Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.

Committing slander or libel or violating the 1st Amendment (if government OR GOVERNMENT AGENT) is precisely terrorism by the above legal definition given by the government itself.

I appreciate your thoughts and mostly agree with this sentiment. But "slander or libel", while bad, is not the same as "violent, criminal acts". Our legal system currently and rightly distinguishes on severity, and I don't think we should abandon that distinction. Libel is bad, but literal terrorist violence is worse and different.

Twitter is not an 'agent' of the US Government, that's completely ridiculous, as is the lawsuit alleging that somehow the government (really political entity) somehow 'forced' Twitter to do something political. There's nothing there.

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