I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about what Twitter does on their website. If it vanished tomorrow, I’d be fine. Most of us knew what was going in the 90’s just fine.
Is maximizing profit the only thing that social networks should care about? Or are there other obligations also?
There is a place for social media in our world, I just don’t want to hold it up to such lofty aspirations that it will never achieve.
There should not be a single, privately owned town square. There should be thousands of town squares where people can go and engage. Some should be public and some should be private. Placing all our free speech eggs in the Twitter basket will not end up well.
I’d say it’s just a reflection of us, not our compass.
Sometimes it seemed like most of the news coverage of Trump consisted of news anchors reading his tweets on air. His tweets got a lot of the people into DC on the 6th to hear his speech in the first place.
Twitter is not just a distraction, sometimes it is the news.
Either way from a moral perspective doesn't change the fact that a platform censoring viewpoints is a violation of the principal of free speech, and morally reprehensible in a free democratic society. Twitter tried to be the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, and I'm glad that Twitter's new management recognizes the error of their former ways and is committed to not repeating the same Orwellian mistakes.
By the way, all the newspapers and mainstream media that were displaced by social media are almost all ad-based, for-profit enterprises too.
The fact that people use these poorly vetted sites as their primary source of news is unsettling. There is a lot of quality content, but it’s surrounded by a lot of garbage (from both the left and the right).
The NYT and WSJ both operate by much higher standards than I’ve ever seen on FB or Twitter. The newspapers are far from perfect, but they do abide by ethical standards. And most importantly, they are liable for their content.
You are chasing after a distinction without a difference.
Newspapers and TV media also have always received a lot of government pressure trying to spin their coverage or convince them to downplay (or emphasize) certain stories. I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.
It's obviously bad in both cases, and it's clear that this kind of behavior has actually increased the attraction of misinformation and decreased trust in mainstream media -- which is the opposite of the intended result.