[noego]

This is a conflict of interest, which should erode the trust that anyone would have on twitter. The man is simultaneously responsible for editorial decisions, while also serving in a brigade that "uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ... to wage what the head of the UK military describes as “information warfare”.

Imagine finding out that the executive in charge of editorial decisions for Twitter in Hong Kong, is also serving in the Chinese military's department of "information warfare". As a Hong Konger, you'd have to be an idiot to continue trusting twitter at that point. The fact that Twitter is well aware of this, and didn't see a conflict of interest, makes me question their neutrality and effectiveness as a platform for online discussion.

[notlukesky]

There are many examples of media outlets working for governments as weaponized tools all over the globe and as mouthpieces or instruments of foreign policy or even warfare.

Twitter is just another broadcast tool like most media outlets.

Examples of Twitter being used for US foreign policy goals are legion. Here are some from the Obama era on “regime change“ attempts in Iran with personal involvement and approval of Jack Dorsey:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media....?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/17/obama-iran-twi...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-election-twitter-usa...

[thrower123]

Who has any trust in Twitter?

[pembrook]

Exactly.

Twitter is not an open protocol for sharing information. Thats what the internet is for. Twitter is just an advertising company that allows you to post content in exchange for hosting ads on that content.

Who they hire, is their business. If you don't agree with their (inconsistent and haphazard) editorial policies, just host your content elsewhere.

I think we need to stop giving Twitter so much power over the world by talking about it so much and start creating and using other platforms. Twitter has only 20% market penetration in the US.

[joe_the_user]

Whether people trust Twitter overtly is not a decisive question. Twitter exists and has an impact. Information on what influences this impact is useful and important.

[fjp]

Twitter's moderation is all over the place, and it really seems like half a step from pure anarchy. I can see people equating that with it being a relatively free platform.

From an American Twitter user's perspective, it seems like you can pretty much advocate all forms of violence and fascism as long as you maintain even the thinnest veil of acting like it's a political discussion.

[StanislavPetrov]

Unfortunately far too many people have blind trust in a wide swath of institutions, both in big tech and government.

[rjf72]

Do you think that governments want and work to try to influence public opinion? I mean you don't need to rely on intuition here. As one fun example the current state of modern art is largely because the CIA used it as a propaganda weapon. [1] As the article mentions it was pushed heavily by their "Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations."

And governments in general seem more obsessed with information manipulation than ever before. Consequently, I find it only logical to assume that all social media is currently being heavily utilized by government level actors to push their various propaganda and agendas. If one is optimistic it even goes some way towards explaining the stupidity of social media -- propaganda is often quite ham fisted.

Now pair this with AI. OpenAI recently demonstrated an AI capable of producing at least semi-workable longer form articles. This [2] is a toy version of that running on an intentionally crippled network. You give it the start of a writing prompt, and it completes the rest. I decided to give it part of what you wrote. In particular I gave it everything up until "Imagine founding out that". This is what was produced:

"This is a conflict of interest, which should erode the trust that anyone would have on twitter. The man is simultaneously responsible for editorial decisions, while also serving in a brigade that "uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ... to wage what the head of the UK military describes as “information warfare”. Imagine finding out that the man responsible for the military's response had once been paid an anonymous $300,000 fee to write an op-ed. How can you trust him to do his job without that knowing? Is there anything else that we can do? What can we do? We need a real-time response to any tweets or stories that are inaccurate or in breach of policy, where the facts are being misrepresented. I'm not an information manager but something needs to be done to stop this from happening, or at least give people an opportunity to understand what the fuck they are doing in their tweets."

That paragraph has several glaring errors, but the produced speech is intentionally designed to be such. It's a toy model on a public site. Imagine the current state of the art. You could even create a neural network that is trained to detect human-like writing to automatically validate or reject the blurbs. This all becomes much easier if you restrict its training down to a specific agenda, and even easier still on a platform like Twitter where Tweets continued to be heavily restricted in character count. Emulating a human is much easier in shorter posts.

I don't think we should ever start declaring one another to be bots, since that leads nowhere, but at the same time I would consider that things such as trying to get a feel for a consensus online may already be impossible. If it's not yet impossible, it will be soon enough. Yet another reason people must always remember to think for themselves, and only themselves... not that adopting a view because of its popularity would be logical, even if it was genuinely popular. Also a major reason to check any emotion at the door. I find it interesting that that random AI generated blurb was aiming to emotionally incite.

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...

[2] - https://talktotransformer.com/

[cwkoss]

> And governments in general seem more obsessed with information manipulation than ever before. Consequently, I find it only logical to assume that all social media is currently being heavily utilized by government level actors to push their various propaganda and agendas.

There is so much Twitter bot activity around politics. It is deeply troubling to consider that the intelligence agencies could be actively involved in manipulating political discourse with the goal of influencing US elections.

EDIT: Surprising that a reply to this comment mentioning the JIDF was flagged to dead within 5 minutes of being posted. I don't think I've ever seen an HN comment go dead that fast. Poster seems to have a history of being flagged (maybe only took one report?), but in this context is a bit unnerving.

[colpabar]

Nothing gets taken down faster than criticism of ANYTHING Israeli.

[joe_the_user]

I have to object here to your long, vaguely plausible stream of semi-coherent accusations. It adds nothing to the discussion, derails the thread and pollutes the discussion. What is your point?

I mean, states and manipulators like to use Twitter bots but Twitter bots and Twitter editorial decisions are rather distinct. Just as much, the GP doesn't seem confused about whether states use manipulation and your insinuation that they are seems disingenuous.

[bigYahnz]

Don't pretty much all these companies have some pretty questionable ties to governments? Faceberg had CIA funding(Q-Tel), right around the time they shut down a software project which had similar goals, no?

[captainredbeard]

In-Q-Tel is the name you’re looking for, methinks.

[cwkoss]

I believe their auto-tagging feature (which was too good and creeped people out, so they reverted) occurred soon after this investment.

[Gibbon1]

Good question why did the completely unknown but sociopathic Zuckerberg get enough funding to squash everyone else?

[cwkoss]

I believe Facebook already had social media market dominance before CIA invested.

[skinnymuch]

If Zuckerberg is so evidently a sociopath. What does that make people like Larry Ellison from a far? Or other individual tech giants who backstabbed other founders or early employees to their faces (Twitter founders, mainly Ev and Jack or Snap founders as examples)

[bitL]

Look up Martin Eberhard, then look up the name of the most famous company he founded, then look up the end of life of the person the company was named after and weep ;-)

[skinnymuch]

I’m not sure about what happened to Eberhard and his co-founder, and other early employee stakes in Tesla. I find this situation to not be the same as the examples I brought up. Elon and the two co-founders he brought in did not already know the two original co-founders on a personal level. Tesla was behind on their tech and production when the recession was beginning and Elon took over.

Elon plowed all of his liquid assets into Tesla [and SpaceX]. I don’t think he had much money around the late 00s until Tesla was able to get out of its financial woes. I don’t know if the original co-founders would’ve been able to find someone else to pump the money Elon did himself and fundraised from car companies while still maintaining control of the company. Same way, I don’t know if they would’ve been able to get enough money raised from auto companies like Elon and the Tesla team did without them in the late 00s.

For all of that and the fact that the Tesla co-founders were worth tens of millions a piece from a prior startup sale, I’ve never put the Tesla co-founders in the same basket as what the Snap founders did. Or much worse, what the Twitter founders, Ev and Jack, did. Or people like Steve Jobs and Ellison firing early or important employees before stock vested or not giving stock to early employees. For companies that are financially solvent and growing. That’s despicable.

Similarly, I don’t put what Zuckerberg and Facebook did to Eduardo and the Winklevoss on remotely the same level as any of these examples. On the flip side, the twins and especially Eduardo lucked out completely that FB became so successful and they were able to reap enormous financial benefits that they otherwise wouldn’t have done on their own.

The actual Nikola Tesla though. Yes I weep for sure!

[krona]

As far as I'm aware, nobody is using Twitter as a reputable source of information.

[cameronbrown]

Except almost every mainstream news source.. ever? Have you seen the amount of wrong information be blamed on Tweets?

[stronglikedan]

Perhaps this is why the mainstream news sources are considered by many (most?) to be disreputable now.

[altendo]

This completely disregards the number of politicians and newsmakers using Twitter as a platform to share information. The US President has been the first president to announce major policy changes over Twitter without any consultation with his own administration.

News outlets cover Twitter precisely because people are making news on the platform. There is a lot of misinformation out there (especially from the President), and major news outlets make bad calls when running stories (affecting their reputation), but their insistence on using Twitter for news isn't a part of that.

[Mikeb85]

Which is why mainstream news is viewed as untrustworthy by most people.

[skinnymuch]

Yet that’s what most people still go by.

[onion2k]

Millions of people believe they are.