I like small, actively-moderated communities. You don't need to worry so much about free speech principles when you can easily pick up and move somewhere else.
The big challenge of moderation, I think, isn't misinformation but rather harassment and spam. Misinformation harms society, but can be to a great extent counteracted with accurate information and open discussion. Harassment and spam make your platform worse. However, defining the boundaries of harassment and spam is just as difficult and polarising as defining the boundaries of misinformation.
As a fellow Chicago alum, I chuckled at the Peloponnesian War reference. Your Common Core Humanities teacher (Herman Sinaiko perhaps? Or Marvin Mirsky?) is very pleased with you!
The secret to successfully navigating Twitter: don’t use Twitter. And Musk recently advantaged a slew of Chinese and Russian propaganda sites on Twitter too, so clearly he isn’t being influenced by his Tesla-China business (sarcasm).
"This raises the prospect of the Chinese government limiting American access to content they don’t like, and remember: The Chinese government are DICKS. "
The US government is already doing this, and I suspect a lot of people on the left admire the Chinese system of social credit and want to implement it here.
It's weird that Jeff still thinks that Twitter is about what Jeff wants. All social media "platforms" are predicated on the idea that they bring eyeballs to people buying ad space. That's it.
Twitter (and TikTok and Facebook and all the rest) are motivated to create a space that brings eyeballs, and keeps them around. That means community standards need to be enforced, because a place that is repellent with hatespeech drives most eyeballs away. This is a point even His Muskiness said he understood when he tweeted that Twitter would not become a free-for-all.
After which Twitter became a free-for-all.
The trouble with principles isn't not having any, or having someone else beat them out of you, but not understanding what your principles are. There are a lot of problems with Pragmatism, but the recognition that we can tell more about someone's beliefs by looking at how they act than what they say they believe, that definitely holds weight. By that understanding EM isn't a free speech absolutist. He's a narcissist, possibly pathologically so.
"This raises the prospect of the Chinese government limiting American access to content they don’t like"
Sure, it "raises the prospect" of it happening, and maybe more than the prospect. It would be likely to be censored in the case of a war over Taiwan, for example. And Chinese websites like Sina Weibo are in fact heavily censored.
But American websites like Twitter are now censored at the behest of noted democracy and member of the Quad India. Yes, some politicians PM Modi has accused of "defamation" have had their tweets deleted globally and been blocked.
What TikTok is accused of doing in the future, American companies are already doing now--and not testifying about it in Congress.
As to the argument that Twitter banning insurrectionist posts or misinformation during the pandemic, there could be good reason to ban it. Let's not pretend any regulation is all the same. Twitter started banning ISIS accounts much earlier, and there's not a significant argument that doing so was setting bad precedent.
I agree with most of what you said, as usual. However (and I am ready to be corrected), my opinion is that Dorsey did so much more damage with his gov't collusion to silence ordinary citizens (including subject-matter experts) who simply had different (and in many cases, correct) POVs. It seems to me that whenever Musk does something, the news a few days later is, "He has since reinstated the policy/the person." It seems that we didn't hear that much criticism of Dorsey—even now, with Taibbi et al's journalism, it's been pretty quiet. Yet every move by Musk makes the papers. If I had to guess, I think Musk is poking at all of us to highlight the fact that he could do all these things...but doesn't.
Beyond that, my opinion is that Musk, even if he believes in free speech, did not buy Twitter for that reason. I think he bought it because having all that language data will be invaluable to his new AI platform. I think all his projects point to his desire to go to Mars—Tesla self-driving cars, the Boring Company, Neuralink, Starlink, SpaceX, Twitter...in fact, I just went online to spellcheck some of his company names and there's brand-new news about Twitter and his new AI project. So yeah, I think Musk has plans that most people (not you, necessarily, but people in general) aren't really thinking about, so everyone frets about Twitter without thinking what Musk is actually working on. And so far, while I don't personally care about going to Mars, I admire the kind of work he's doing.
Excellent article. As for benign dictators, I can only think of three possibilities-Park Chung Hee-South Korea 60s-70s, Lee Kuan Yew-Singapore 60-80s, and Tito-Yugoslavia, whose country exploded within 10 years of him dying….
Twitter is a niche product. It is used by journalist, writters and wannabes, plus a community of trolls. If three things "trend" it's the same group making the subjects trend. I don't understand why people complain about speech rights on Twitter as if it was a government, its an app, you can uninstall it, trust me, it won't make a difference.
I want to exist in social media spaces that have moderators, because I don't want to visit a feed that's full of anarchic shit-flinging. But I recognize that moderation preferences are different than other people's moderation preferences. And I even recognize that their preferences are totally valid.
I want Twitter to be moderated like Reddit, where different parts of the site have wildly different norms, and individual users are entrusted by the community to enforce those norms. Only shut moderators down when they're extremely awful, like Reddit does.
Uh oh, it's the dreaded inaccurate "you can't say 'fire' in a crowded theater" analogy!
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/
I like small, actively-moderated communities. You don't need to worry so much about free speech principles when you can easily pick up and move somewhere else.
The big challenge of moderation, I think, isn't misinformation but rather harassment and spam. Misinformation harms society, but can be to a great extent counteracted with accurate information and open discussion. Harassment and spam make your platform worse. However, defining the boundaries of harassment and spam is just as difficult and polarising as defining the boundaries of misinformation.
As a fellow Chicago alum, I chuckled at the Peloponnesian War reference. Your Common Core Humanities teacher (Herman Sinaiko perhaps? Or Marvin Mirsky?) is very pleased with you!
The secret to successfully navigating Twitter: don’t use Twitter. And Musk recently advantaged a slew of Chinese and Russian propaganda sites on Twitter too, so clearly he isn’t being influenced by his Tesla-China business (sarcasm).
"This raises the prospect of the Chinese government limiting American access to content they don’t like, and remember: The Chinese government are DICKS. "
The US government is already doing this, and I suspect a lot of people on the left admire the Chinese system of social credit and want to implement it here.
Elon is not the threat.
It's weird that Jeff still thinks that Twitter is about what Jeff wants. All social media "platforms" are predicated on the idea that they bring eyeballs to people buying ad space. That's it.
Twitter (and TikTok and Facebook and all the rest) are motivated to create a space that brings eyeballs, and keeps them around. That means community standards need to be enforced, because a place that is repellent with hatespeech drives most eyeballs away. This is a point even His Muskiness said he understood when he tweeted that Twitter would not become a free-for-all.
After which Twitter became a free-for-all.
The trouble with principles isn't not having any, or having someone else beat them out of you, but not understanding what your principles are. There are a lot of problems with Pragmatism, but the recognition that we can tell more about someone's beliefs by looking at how they act than what they say they believe, that definitely holds weight. By that understanding EM isn't a free speech absolutist. He's a narcissist, possibly pathologically so.
maybe we'll get one of those big solar flares that will destroy the internet soon
"This raises the prospect of the Chinese government limiting American access to content they don’t like"
Sure, it "raises the prospect" of it happening, and maybe more than the prospect. It would be likely to be censored in the case of a war over Taiwan, for example. And Chinese websites like Sina Weibo are in fact heavily censored.
But American websites like Twitter are now censored at the behest of noted democracy and member of the Quad India. Yes, some politicians PM Modi has accused of "defamation" have had their tweets deleted globally and been blocked.
What TikTok is accused of doing in the future, American companies are already doing now--and not testifying about it in Congress.
As to the argument that Twitter banning insurrectionist posts or misinformation during the pandemic, there could be good reason to ban it. Let's not pretend any regulation is all the same. Twitter started banning ISIS accounts much earlier, and there's not a significant argument that doing so was setting bad precedent.
I agree with most of what you said, as usual. However (and I am ready to be corrected), my opinion is that Dorsey did so much more damage with his gov't collusion to silence ordinary citizens (including subject-matter experts) who simply had different (and in many cases, correct) POVs. It seems to me that whenever Musk does something, the news a few days later is, "He has since reinstated the policy/the person." It seems that we didn't hear that much criticism of Dorsey—even now, with Taibbi et al's journalism, it's been pretty quiet. Yet every move by Musk makes the papers. If I had to guess, I think Musk is poking at all of us to highlight the fact that he could do all these things...but doesn't.
Beyond that, my opinion is that Musk, even if he believes in free speech, did not buy Twitter for that reason. I think he bought it because having all that language data will be invaluable to his new AI platform. I think all his projects point to his desire to go to Mars—Tesla self-driving cars, the Boring Company, Neuralink, Starlink, SpaceX, Twitter...in fact, I just went online to spellcheck some of his company names and there's brand-new news about Twitter and his new AI project. So yeah, I think Musk has plans that most people (not you, necessarily, but people in general) aren't really thinking about, so everyone frets about Twitter without thinking what Musk is actually working on. And so far, while I don't personally care about going to Mars, I admire the kind of work he's doing.
Excellent article. As for benign dictators, I can only think of three possibilities-Park Chung Hee-South Korea 60s-70s, Lee Kuan Yew-Singapore 60-80s, and Tito-Yugoslavia, whose country exploded within 10 years of him dying….
Thank you for this. That was well-written and clarifies my thoughts.
Twitter is a niche product. It is used by journalist, writters and wannabes, plus a community of trolls. If three things "trend" it's the same group making the subjects trend. I don't understand why people complain about speech rights on Twitter as if it was a government, its an app, you can uninstall it, trust me, it won't make a difference.
I want to exist in social media spaces that have moderators, because I don't want to visit a feed that's full of anarchic shit-flinging. But I recognize that moderation preferences are different than other people's moderation preferences. And I even recognize that their preferences are totally valid.
I want Twitter to be moderated like Reddit, where different parts of the site have wildly different norms, and individual users are entrusted by the community to enforce those norms. Only shut moderators down when they're extremely awful, like Reddit does.
Your points are well-taken.