Comment by Reedx
5 years ago
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.
I think the best solution is not algorithmic enforcement, but algorithmic augmentation of group ban-lists.
So like having hashtags in your profile, you could include ban-lists there, and your preferences would be calculated (and people could see what your filters were).
Yes, this wouldn't solve the issue of filter bubbles but the Twitter's algorithms could augment how to weight people's ban-lists with actual mentions/RTs - so I would see someone on only one of my ban-lists but got a lot of RTs/mentions I'd see it. If I find I'm not seeing stuff I should, I could alter my lists
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.