Comment by tomp
5 years ago
This is amazing news, and I hope Twitter adopts this policy for all rules violations. Much better than deleting tweet or banning accounts, this lets people decide what they want to see. (Except for obvious spammers etc. which should probably be banned.)
Even better would be if there were user-configurable "lists", whereby you could decide upfront what you want / don't want to see (like many sites do right now with NSFW content) - the default filter would be very "protective" (no porn, no violence, no gore, no hate speech) but users could turn off any or all of these "filters". The next step is the addition of user-curated "lists" / "filters" (e.g. "no democrats", "no republicans", "no vegans", "no dog lovers", ...).
If we're being honest, Twitter is basically a machine that glorifies violence. It rewards it at the platform and algorithmic level.
An endless volume of tweets under every charged trending topic violates these rules, which are being surfaced and promoted by the platform. And it enables mob mentality like nothing we've seen before.
Moderation is mostly just theater, especially as long as the platform itself is quite literally encouraging the core behavior.
Twitter's design is fundamentally broken beyond repair.
Your Twitter feed is yours. It's like your home territory. People feel like they're entitled to defend this territory. Twitter assists inflammatory media as it attempts to invade this territory, originally with retweets, but more recently with algorithmically selected tweets coming from people who you didn't follow, selected for "engagement". But it does more than that. When you defend your territory, your defense ends up on someone else's feed as a provocation.
The original model worked, with tweets from your followers only, and no retweet support except copy and paste and the letters RT. The current model is cursed.
What Twitter needs is algorithmically enforced moderation. So when a twitter reply calls for extremism, the user will then be prone to see more calls for peace in reply to that comment. Or when somebody asks for dox on a subject, the user then sees tweets mentioning all the previous times doxxing went wrong and innocent people were hurt. The user would not know this was taking place, but they would avoid radicalization and echo chambers currently happening on Twitter. Also instead of showing the opposition to break their thought bubble, which probably wouldn’t be helpful, the user sees their own side, just more moderate and centrist. If no tweets showing moderation exist, twitter could use a bot that appears to be a real human to make these moderating tweets. Most of these twitter conversations are bots anyways.
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I'd be curious to know a little bit more about what exactly you're referencing here. This does not in any way describe my experience with Twitter, though I understand that's a single anecdote.
I'd recommend the book Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, read it a while ago, but still relevant, perhaps even more now...
It is not so much the platform as the general internet medium. It lends itself to narcissism. Humans are more gratuitous when speaking to another in person. More attentive to inflections, reactions, emotions, etc.
They made clear when they introduced this that the “view tweet anyways” approach applies only when the public interest for an account of a public official outweighs the significant harm they consider to be done by allowing what you describe for all users in general. I don’t expect they intend to change their mind on that.
Most websites hide NSFW content behind a click. That's good manners. Why shouldn't Twitter?
Twitter already does hide NSFW ("objectionable") content behind a click, removing it only when it violates the platform rules of conduct.
They evaluated and rejected hiding "violates Twitter policies" content except in the rare cases where they deem it necessary for the public interest to retain that violating content behind a click barrier.
https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/offensive-tw... has more details about the current policy, and you can read their blog posts from the past couple years about these policies to gain more context and background.
I'm not actually against the idea, but arbitrary blocklists would accelerate bubbling people away from anyone who could possibly think differently from them, which has its own issues.
Radicalism and inciting to violence should be bubbled not amplified.
Unfortunately, you're bubbling away people who believe in free speech and free thought as well, and there are probably a lot more of those.
edit: Adding a bit more, the people being bubbled away will likely tend to just isolate. You might think you like that idea, but having spent some time in isolation, I will attest that it kind of messes with your head. You lose your "phase lock" with society on a lot of different norms, small and large. The stereotype of the "dangerous loner", though not always fair, attests to this reality.
If you want to keep someone as a useful member of society and not a tragedy-of-the-day, you have to keep talking to them.
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But then the people who are open to such things stay exposed, while detaching from anyone else, thus ensuring that they spiral ever further into their own viewpoint. That's how you create radicals.
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Can't challenge ideas if you are so afraid that you hide them.
The only way to actually change someone is conversation.
Only those who don't want honest change fight to prevent actual conversation from happening.
bubbling is radicalism
You can globally mute individual words: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21144097/twitter-mute-twe...
All tweets containing muted words will be omitted from your timeline, or if they show up in a thread you're viewing, hidden in-place with a button to reveal. I use this feature liberally. Twitter would be unbearable without it.
Youre right. Before twitter took this step I was unable to decide whether to read the president's tweets. Every morning I am forced by twitter to read trumps tweets. Thank goodness this is no longer the case. /s
This is the bit I don't get. I regularly ignore the utterances of all sorts of people I'm not interested in hearing from. Is it really that hard?
Given that the president is invested with enormous power and has proved both able and willing to upend others' lives for political ends, pretending that he's just another random e-celeb seems kind of disingenuous.
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Dorsey has explicitly stated that because user-defined filters will lead people to remain blissfully unaware of ideas that challenge their own, he does not want Twitter to follow that path.
It's a tough call. In some sense, for any global website that doesn't want to impose its own moral code upon the world, it makes the most sense to be hands-off and let users judge for themselves what to see and what not to. On the other hand, doing so would amplify the echochamber effect that's already strongly present on Twitter.
We can hope Twitter adopts and enforces policies equally across the board, but they won't and I don't think they can either.
As an example of how they won't do so, consider that there are people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now, and they have not been banned or had their tweets/accounts hidden. Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself, amplifying rioting supported by Antifa and DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), as documented in https://thepostmillennial.com/ilhan-omars-daughter-shows-sup.... While hundreds of people are inciting violence and using Twitter to organize violence in Minneapolis, the company has done nothing to stop it, and yet they're willing to block Trump's tweet on the theoretical enforcement of laws against criminal rioting? Clearly this is a discriminatory bias in action.
As for how they can't do so: Twitter is a Silicon Valley company. It mostly employs young, far left liberals. Its internal culture is heavily influenced by where it is located and the people it employs. Their Hateful Conduct Policy (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...) is also subject to that cultural/political influence. For instance, this policy notes that "misgendering" is not allowed. But if you're on the other side of the transgender debate, and feel that pronouns should be based on biology-derived gender, and don't think trans women and biological women should be lumped into a group, then you might be banned. Put another way, Twitter has encoded political stances into their operating procedures, and there's no escaping that even if they expressed a wish to treat their customers equally across the board.
There are only two ways out. One option is that Twitter admits it is biased, that they do discriminate against certain viewpoints, and that they do exert editorial control over their platform. The other option is that they return to viewpoint neutrality, avoid censorship/blocking, and only do so to the minimal extent explicitly required by law.
>people literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property on Twitter right now
>Ilhan Omar's daughter was caught doing so herself
Apparently, retweeting a list of supplies to help protect yourself from bodily harm from violent police is "literally organizing violent riots and destruction of property"
I get what you're saying, but the flip side of it is that such actions are aiding, enabling, and abetting a crime (in this case, a large number of crimes). The "protect yourself from bodily harm" bit is what enables these rioters to avoid dispersing and ceasing violent destruction of property. And it is obvious from numerous tweets from various DSA and antifa handles that these two groups are very much amplifying and glorifying destructive rioting. This is real material violence, not theoretical violence, and therefore Twitter needs to shut it down if they have a problem with theoretical violence that they think Trump's tweet glorifies.
Calling police "violent" for wanting to stop blatant opportunistic theft and terrorist behavior (e.g. deliberately cutting gas lines to create big explosions) is a stretch. I would call the initial policing incident that tipped off the protests violent, and I would call the destructive rioting violent (as opposed to the initial peaceful protesting). Both acts deserve condemnation and consequences in my view.
Rioting, looting, and even torching buildings is not the close to the same level of violence as police killings, driving down protestors, or threatening people with guns. Tweets endorsing or even glorifying the former don’t come close to be as dangerous as tweets excusing the latter. Don’t pretend like these two are equivalent.
It’s possible to have bias without editorialising, as far as I know Twitter only hides, deletes or bans. It doesn’t edit, the fact checking is appending.
How is appending not editing. If I append a statement to the end of your comment that contradicts your earlier point without your permission, how is that not editorial?
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> But if you're on the other side of the transgender debate
Then you follow twitter's rules on its platform. You're free to misgender people elsewhere.
Moderation, even moderation and policies you personally disagree with does not rise to the level of "editorial control" under the law.
> While hundreds of people are inciting violence and using Twitter to organize violence in Minneapolis, the company has done nothing to stop it, and yet they're willing to block Trump's tweet on the theoretical enforcement of laws against criminal rioting?
Are you certain that no tweets from protestors glorifying violence have been removed? Notably, none of the tweets you mention are condoning violence, so you're actually insisting that twitter hold $random_internet_people_on_the_whole to a higher standard than the president.
You want twitter to take "Bring milk to a protest" more seriously than "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". That's not Twitter's bias showing, that's yours. Under this interpretation, I believe twitter would also have needed to remove tweets organizing the recent Hong Kong protests. Is that what you want?
Twitter don't ban for mere misgendering; anti trans Twitter has been left alone to harass for years, although I believe Glinner finally got banned.
Earlier this year, the rapper Zuby was suspended for tweeting "Ok dude" to a trans person:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ok-dude-twitter-susp...
I believe twitter already does this through shared block lists
Still waiting for them to tackle the Ayatollah: https://twitter.com/Khamenei_tv/status/1264541220006739968.
Mythic Quest showed us a solution :)