[barber5]

Users should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter.

Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.

[kelnos]

Do you really think the average non-technical user will have a clue as to what to do about this hypothetical problem? I don't think that's a credible take.

Consider that this situation isn't like email spam filtering. I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone. And if Twitter is not allowed to filter spam, that's it: no spam filtering for Twitter users.

[idle_zealot]

> I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone

That's nothing fundamentally preventing this. It's Twitter themselves who've decided not to allow you to do this. Were their app more open to extension you would be able to download and configure a spam filter of your choosing.

[joshuamorton]

Are they allowed to provide a default filter?

[coredog64]

This is it exactly: Apply the same rules that they have today for content moderation, but allow users to opt in to that filtering. Even if they apply it by default, that’s probably enough of an fig lead to get by this ruling.

[idle_zealot]

They can provide a first-party/recommended filter, but like with default browsers, search engines, or other preferences, the app should present the user with the choice in clear terms rather than silently applying the default. Defaults are powerful, so having the app apply its default first-party filter and hide away the option to change it in some menu would be approximately equivalent to changing nothing but forcing Twitter to act as a datastore/api for competing microblogging platforms.

[Firmwarrior]

You'll be able to go to a different platform that does allow decentralized spam filtering then