[didibus]

The premise seems more about how easily Twitter can be used to support a coup, suppress journalistic voice, oppress people, and push propaganda.

I don't know if without Twitter all this would be just as easy, through state controlled media, but what I do know is that Twitter could actually be a tool against this, but is failing to be.

Having a popular media outlet that cannot be coopted for propaganda and used for oppression or harm would be a great thing. Twitter clearly failed to be this, and maybe fails really bad at it where it seems like it could easily be a bit better at it.

[fluoridation]

I dispute that Twitter could be a tool against those things, because that implies that it's within Twitter's capabilities to know everything that is going on in the world in order to distinguish between true and untrue tweets.

Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.

[didibus]

I don't think Twitter needs to assess what is true or not, but it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.

For example, OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.

It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. And it could also have detection and review processes for any kind of tweet that could be defaming. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.

Finally, this is the Web 3 era, who knows what mechanism it could find to innovate on that front.

The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others. It also gives very little recourse to people receiving the content to do their own due diligence, or to people who are targeted by the tweets to have a means to provide their counterpoint to the same audience, unless they themselves are just as powerful an actor.

You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically. Twitter wouldn't need to choose the truth, but it gives recourse and mechanisms for the process of truth seeking to take place and for the people being shown the tweet more context and therefore better means to make up their own mind.

[fluoridation]

>it can try to find ways to know the source and make sure they're not bad actors, paid agents, state sponsors, etc.

Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source.

>OP mentions how they never allowed him to have a verified badge even though he tried. This very much seems like something Twitter could have done. Now to anyone else, his account seems just as fake as any other impersonating him.

I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.

>It could also put more effort behind investigating reports like the OP did. Accusation of criminal acts, labeling of people, mention of violence, arrest, etc.

So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world.

>The issue I have with what you say is the ideal communication medium ignores the issues with Twitter, such that it doesn't just simply convey content without regard. It selectively prioritizes, automatically suggests, and promotes certain tweets over others.

I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth.

>You could imagine a relatively simple feature, any Tweet that mentions someone else by name or Twitter alias, that person should be able to attach a response to them that is shown under those tweets automatically.

I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.

[didibus]

> Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source

You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.

> I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.

I'm assuming OP feels that not owning the verified account for themselves hurts him in some way and makes it harder for him to defend themselves against the accusations and slandering. The issue I can see in general is that it means other accounts could pretend to be him, and if he tries and respond to some claims, people reading can assume it's not truly him responding.

> So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world

You can still have all these things, but simply increase your bar for them. Basically, if someone says something that could be defamation or slander, they should show due cause, if they don't, then it doesn't meet the quality bar for Twitter and Twitter doesn't have to accept hosting the content and promoting it to others. One can still self-publish if they want.

The bar for due cause doesn't have to be very high either, you could simply say that justification must be provided, and only minimal assessment of the justification needs to take place, basically just check that a logical reason was provided, not that the reason is good or undeniable, but simply relevant.

    This person is an Israeli agent

The above provides no justification, so it doesn't meet the bar.

    We think this person is an Israeli agent, because they've been spotted talking to Jewish people in New York.

The above is a very stupid cause, talking to Jewish people is such a small indication that one would be an Israeli agent, but already it can meet the bar, because due cause was provided and now the readers can apply their own judgement to it.

So hopefully I showed how such a process wouldn't impact free speech, nothing gets censored or blocked, but potentially harmful and damaging to other speech is asked to provide a small amount of additional justification for the claims.

> I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth

I'm not asking for censorship, I'm asking for mechanisms to increase the quality of the discussions and benefit the truth seeking process.

I literally spent like 10min thinking about this and already came up with three possible improvements. Imagine being Twitter and having employees that could have access to all their data and spend much more resources brainstorming on this problem, I'm sure they could come up with even more ideas.

    1. Provide more transparency on the source of the information.
    2. Provide a way for the targets of Tweets to provide their counterpoint.
    3. Increase the requirement for tweets that attack a target to provide justification.

> I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.

He's complaining that he can't keep up replying to them all. Ya he's also complaining they were posted in the first place, but that's to your point, we're not trying to prevent truth from coming out, but for claims made to have more legitimacy, and for targeted individuals and organizations to have more recourse to defend themselves. All things that actually help distinguish a truth from a lie.

This has to happen in a way that avoids the reader trap. That is, most readers won't go out of their way to fairly evaluate the claims and search for counterpoints or research the bias and conflict of interests, etc.

Take me, I see a tweet, if a reply is posted to it a week later, very likely I don't see that reply. The original tweets message is all I saw and now lives in my subconscious as a data point.

It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.

[fluoridation]

>You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.

If you're saying that Twitter could attach that information to tweets so readers can judge for themselves, then I have no problem with that. I thought you meant that Twitter should use it to decide whether to remove tweets.

It still seems beyond the capabilities of Twitter, though. It's like asking the telephone company to have journalistic duties over everything that's said on the network. And I suppose the cynical point is, why would Twitter implement any of the changes you propose? Would it improve the site? Sure, but would it translate to any advantages for the shareholders? Is Twitter responsible for quality of the tweets in the platform?

>It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.

It sounds like an inherent problem, though. If you're up against someone who can tweet 100 times faster than you because they have more resources, I don't think there's anything Twitter can do against that.

[hackerlight]

> I dispute that Twitter could be a tool against those things, because that implies that it's within Twitter's capabilities to know everything that is going on in the world in order to distinguish between true and untrue tweets.

You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad? This is a non-sequitur.

> Given that limitation, I would argue that the ideal communication medium simply conveys the messages it's given without regard for their contents. What people do with those messages is something that the medium has no power over.

I would argue that this is ignorant of social psychology. Sunlight isn't the best disinfectant, and people aren't rational non-tribal agents who will all hold hands and sing Kumbaya only if they could have totally unmoderated discourse. Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.

[fluoridation]

>You're saying that omniscience is a necessary condition before Twitter can start doing good in the world, instead of bad?

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.

>Twitter will become an 8chan sewer if your ideology is adopted by them.

The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion. I personally think the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.

[hackerlight]

> perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize.

That only makes sense if you think that an unmoderated Twitter can't also be used to oppress and propagandize, which is naive.

Revenge porn and harassment has oppressive outcomes. A foreign intelligence agency flooding the zone with misinformation, has the effect of propagandizing.

> the optimal level of moderation in any discussion forum is that which only prevents disruption of the forum's functioning.

There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.

> The way you're saying it assumes that this is obviously a bad thing, while in fact it's a matter of opinion.

Of course it's my opinion, what other opinion would I be sharing? I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.

[fluoridation]

>That only makes sense if you think that an unmoderated Twitter can't also be used to oppress and propagandize

So let me get this straight. The only way that the statement "perfect knowledge and perfect filtering are necessary for Twitter to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize" can be true is if "zero filtering would prevent Twitter being used to oppress and propagandize". If you could, please explain how that makes sense.

>There is a theme here of you liking hard categories and arbitrary cutoffs. It suggests to me a rigidity of thought.

OK.

>I don't want to live in a world where ISIS propaganda is radicalizing millions of people because of free speech purism being applied to a social media company.

I think if Western culture offers such a weak argument that it can't compete with such a backwards ideology in a free marketplace of ideas, that it deserves to be trampled by it and forgotten. The worst thing that could be done for ISIS is to give them a megaphone that's as loud as everyone else's.

[hackerlight]

Well you told me my initial interpretation of what you said was wrong, so I tried to find an alternative meaning behind what you were saying. But now I see my initial interpretation was accurate. You are indeed saying that, if Twitter isn't omniscient, then it won't be able to avoid being used to oppress and propagandize because it's not possible moderate perfectly. This is the just the perfect solution fallacy.

  "free marketplace of ideas"

This is a culture war talking point that is ignorant of the reality of social psychology and the social contagion of bad memes. Suicide contagion, stochastic terrorism from ISIS supporters in Europe and white nationalists in the US who were mostly radicalized online, the rise of populism in the US since 2015, wokeness ideology spreading to all institutions in a few years. You think you can just shine a light on bad ideas and they'll go away, but the exact opposite is true if they play to people's tribal instincts and resentments. Heck the rise of fascism last century was partly memetic propagation due to the mass production of culture. If you want to form a worldview based on social psychology, then it should actually be based on social psychology.