Comment by nyxxie
8 years ago
It's vaguely disturbing to read the CEO of a company that hosts one of the world's largest communications platforms talk about "measuring the health" of conversations and his company's goal to get rid of conversations they deem unhealthy.
The problems Jack talks about (echo chambers, political bias, misinformation campaigns) are serious problems that our society faces as a small group of voices increasingly have the ability to reach millions of real people. However, I think it's unethical to solve it by eliminating speech based on an arbitrary group of people's notion of what is "healthy speech".
I think that Jack forgets that he's talking about real people expressing real thoughts and opinions. Of course he is well within his rights to do whatever he wants with his platforms, but if we want to view this as a problem of ethics, Twitter is directly infringing on private individuals' rights to autonomy of expression and manipulating their view of the world by deciding what they should and should not see. I don't think that is a solution which produces the greatest net good.
I think what's troubling is that this conflates really problematic, damaging speech with what is merely controversial.
Dismissing "healthy speech" as a category is one thing, but let's not have any illusions about some of what falls outside of that category. Twitter has a problem with anonymous users sending mass quantities of death threats, racial slurs, and other horrible invective at anyone who says something controversial. Twitter has a problem with bot accounts that deliberately disrupt and overwhelm healthy conversations. Twitter has a problem with literal Nazis being all over its service.
So far Twitter has been pretty much unable to fix these issues. Now it's broadening what "healthy speech" means, looking at the problem differently, in other words flailing around and trying yet another strategy for fixing its mostly-toxic platform. I doubt it'll work, but I think it represents less Twitter trying to become Big Brother and more Twitter trying whatever it possibly can to fix these glaring problems in its service.
The problem is Twitter as a company, not as a concept. Twitter as company has destroyed the third party ecosystem that could have been INVALUABLE here.
Twitter the company wants to be all things to all people. But the ruler of the kingdom shouldn't also be the judge, and Twitter's taking on of all the technical tasks leaves it both vulnerable to criticism, and the only solution, where every solution must be a twitter engineered solution, which means one shot, no variety, no multiple-bets, no creative destruction.
Examples:
A third party ecosystem designed around tasks like blocking content would also preserve free speech. A twitter run system never could.
A third party system around bot detection, tied in to paying for tweets from "influencers" (god I hate that term), would work well where twitter can't do that.
Twitter should abdicate from the multiple roles of sole judge, executioner and tech provider, and start to let others take up some slack. That provides a buffer, preserves all the rights people could want or have, and allows more tools that empower people while twitter focuses on the technical challenge of keeping the thing up, and being profitable.
It's remarkable how quickly the west has embraced a culture of censorship.
Serious question: If people want to post hateful content, what is preventing them from doing so on either their own website, or to one of the many existing websites which are friendly to that sort of content?
I honesrly don’t understand why mainstream social media websites should be allowing that sort of thing. There are plenty of other places they can freely post, so they really are not being censored.
Nothing is; that's great. (Let's see how long it lasts!)
But we've seen a huge embrace of censorship on our dominant communication platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
There was a time when Twitter prided itself on its commitment to free speech. They patted themselves on the back and chuckled as Twitter helped foment revolutions in other countries.
Now its caused a fair bit of political upheaval back in the good ol' USA, and the official line has become "we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences" of "public conversation."
Censorship culture.
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It's very hard, if not impossible, for someone to have a "their own website" that doesn't have someone in the loop that can kick them off: hosting company, domain registrar, ISP, etc. See what happens regularly with piracy sites, for example.
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People need to stop using the word "hate" and start calling people out whenever they use it. "Hate" just means "blasphemy". Once you make this substitution, discussions like this start to make a lot more sense.
Serious question: If people want to post blasphemy, what's preventing them from doing so? [...] I honestly don’t understand why mainstream social media websites should be allowing that sort of thing.
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> what is preventing them from doing so on either their own website
Hosting companies that decide what is and isn't acceptable speech just like Twitter and Google are doing right now.
Twitter is under no obligation to distribute your content for you for free.
In China, when you post a politically unacceptable idea on a social media site, it is removed by a state censor. In the US, when you post a politically unacceptable idea on a social media site, it is removed by corporate censors or allied groups like the SPLC.
I'm not sure I see a huge difference, in practice.
"But if you don't like Twitter's policies, you can just make your own app." Sure, like Gab, which was subsequently banned from both the Google and Apple app stores for not itself censoring. Not a lot of breathing room when the modern communication mediums are dominated by a duopoly.
But that's all tangential to my point, which was referring to the cultural appreciation of free speech.
It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when site's like Twitter claimed to be strong supporters of speech as both a principle and a practical reality to strive for.
Nowadays, the more common attitude is, "if we allow people to speak freely, they will spread conspiracy theories, fake news, and hateful thoughts harmful to society, so these ideas must be suppressed."
In just a few years, the zeitgeist has gone from valuing free speech as one of our most cherished ideals to valuing social cohesion as the most important good.
Pretty crazy.
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under no obligation to distribute your content for you
Then it’s not a “common carrier”, can’t have it both ways.
True, but it's sad to see people continue to use Twitter even when they're aware of it's active censorship. Twitter isn't doing anything 'wrong' technically, since it's well within their rights as a private company, but it's still sad to see a society accept and embrace the practices instead of shunning them.
By "the west" I presume you mean the corporatocacy/security state running the vast majority of the US and Western Europe?
Truly free speech doesn't exist; there are always limits based on societal norms and convention.
Should've said 'the USA' & 'the internet subcultures I have sampled'. Regret the error.
You would quickly change your mind about that, while you read death treats sent to your daughter by trolls.
Pretty sure death threats aren't protected speech unlike other hate crimes like intentionally misgendering him.
No, I would still think it was remarkable.
I'm not sure if I should read your comment as some sort of meta-threat...?
Back in the 90's, we used to scoff at the idea that the internet would be subject to widespread censorship - "the internet detects censorship as damage and routes around it" was what we used to say. It's starting to look like not only were we wrong, but that the internet is shaping up to be the ultimate censorship tool.
Twitter is not the Internet. The Internet is not Twitter. Platforms come and go. My computer will always be able to be connected to yours, though.
If you're worried about communications going through a third-party, privately owned service getting censored, then you're communicating wrong.
The web isn't even the internet.
It's more like "the internet detects censorship as desirable and strives toward it" now.
Twitter is a reflection of society. Twitter can't fix society, only censor its speech, which never works.
Congress needs to look at extending First Amendment protections for users of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
I very strongly disagree with applying the First Amendment protections to data hosted on private infrastructure. 4chan more or less takes the "free speech" approach and it's a goddamned disaster.
People honestly can't even handle free speech in real-life, let alone anonymously on the internet. We literally have to create barriers around Planned Parenthood because people use free speech to berate women who are already suffering.
Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.
First amendment jurisprudence, thankfully, disagrees with you. But first, some history.
For most of modern history, speech has been censored in some form or another by governments. Naturally so, as any kind of divergent thinking can be dangerous to power structures (this hasn't gone away). In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people. The Sedition Act of 1798 was passed by the American Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. Namely, it prescribed fines and imprisonment for those who "write, print, utter, or publish... any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government. This was used to jail several members of Congress, among others.
Modern free speech jurisprudent didn't start to develop until as late as 1917. The Espionage Act of 1917 was enacted at the start of World War I to prevent actions that were seen as unfavorable to the war. The Supreme Court upheld the law as not violating freedom of speech in Schenck v. United States. I believe there was a subsequent 1917 or 1918 case that began to turn the tide (the reference escapes me at the moment and I'm at work), but it wasn't until 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the Supreme Court ruled that inflammatory speech is protected as long as it satisfies a two-prong test:
1. The speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action," AND 2. The speech is "likely to incite or produce such action."
The case concerned an Ohio Ku Klux Klan member who was recorded saying particularly horrid and denigrating things about African Americans, but, notably, nothing specifically threatening. The Supreme Court upheld your right to say things like "I think we should kill all Jews" because, although a terrible thing to say, statements like that aren't imminently encouraging lawless action and not likely to do so.
Past that point, the Supreme Court has regularly upheld this interpretation of the first amendment. The best argument against a more European, say, interpretation of the first amendment is that, simply: governments only ever censor speech that they don't like. That's why the Espionage Act was used to incarcerate the likes of Emma Goldman and not, say, the people who were helping organize lynchings. If you were to enact hate speech legislation, and history bears this out, the people most affected are the minorities: black people, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ people, pacifists, communists, anarchists, socialists, etc. Think about all of the police that shoot unarmed black men. Can you seriously imagine police forces across America protecting the speech of someone that calls for the abolition of the institution that person belongs to?
So that's a brief history and law lesson (caveat: I am neither a lawyer nor a historian). This is certainly a larger discussion to have, and I very much enjoy debating things like hate speech legislation and speech restriction in general, but I'll leave you with this for now.
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Absolutely! Just like how private malls have been ruled in some jurisdictions to be a sort of public space despite being privately-owned, I think it's important to recognize that the sheer size of some social media sites, combined with the dominant network effects, makes them something like virtual public spaces.
The alternative is that we end up with a future where more and more of life becomes privately owned and we end up either in online 'company towns' for our social interactions, or else we end up exiled to virtual ghettos where we are unable to interact with others if we go against whatever the dominant ideology happens to be.
Especially given how much these private companies act as the public commons nowadays. Between network effects and wide proliferation, the "just go elsewhere" defense doesn't work too well anymore.
I think it's workable. Once you both market yourself as an open platform for discussion (as Twitter and many other social sites have done) and reach a certain level of use (which I think we can debate on, but certainly Twitter who has world leaders making official pronouncements on it would clear that bar), some kind of oversight should kick in to prevent abuses.
I don't like the idea of letting a government body regulate how a communications company how to run their business.
Ignoring the moral implications of holding a gun to a business owner's head and forcing them to run their business the way you want, are we not opening up the doors for legitimate censorship down the line?
If we're concerned about world leaders making official pronouncements on Twitter, why not just dictate that they don't do that and instead utilize a different platform? Something decentralized preferably.
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If Twitter can't figure out a way to build a platform that does not damage society without violating First Amendment protections, then perhaps Twitter should cede its responsibility to the platform but opening the social graph up to let anyone build any version of it on top.
Congress needs to follow through I removing content liability immunity to sites that thought police. The method is already there is law, as usual it is a lack of enforcement.
I read it less as an indictment of any real person expressing a real thought or opinion and more as a constructive criticism of a system that can be gamed to destructively exacerbate tensions between different thoughts and opinions, rather than constructively negotiating them.
I don't see it as eliminating speech; I see it as first getting metrics into how much of Twitter's usage is positive - because it's human (and the media's) nature to focus on the negative - and second to promote and encourage the "good" kind of communication, instead of trying to censor and stifle the "bad" kind. Carrot vs stick.
Would you not say that rewarding "good" communication through better exposure is effectively censoring "not good" communication by prioritizing it less than the "good"? Twitter isn't banning anyone, but it's relegating an arbitrary set of speech to a position where people will receive less exposure to it. If we normalize the level of exposure the net result would still be censorship.