Twitter Picked the Nazis
December 28, 2017 12:44 PM Subscribe
NYT Opinion: Confessions of Digital Nazi Hunter. In which the creator of a bot that succeeded at taking down Impersonation Accounts gets shut down by Twitter itself.
Twitter is the fucking worst.
posted by defenestration at 1:22 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
posted by defenestration at 1:22 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
Twitter made Ars Technica’s Death Watch List this year (again).
From their website to God's eyeballs.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:22 PM on December 28, 2017 [5 favorites]
From their website to God's eyeballs.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:22 PM on December 28, 2017 [5 favorites]
Jack “Stay Woke” Dorsey suffers from something like the Dunning-Kruger effect, but except he thinks he is more of a decent human being than he is.
The only reason I can think of why abusers are still allowed to exist is because it bolsters their MAU count. Nothing else matters.
posted by snortasprocket at 1:28 PM on December 28, 2017 [13 favorites]
The only reason I can think of why abusers are still allowed to exist is because it bolsters their MAU count. Nothing else matters.
posted by snortasprocket at 1:28 PM on December 28, 2017 [13 favorites]
I'm so mad at Twitter I rage quit a couple of months ago. That's a big deal for me; I'm a very early user, did some part time work for the company in the very early days, friends with all the founders. I still feel like I know Jack Dorsey and I know personally he's not a Nazi sympathizer. But the company has deeply failed its users.
The surface problem is bad policy. They're still trying to hew to some content-neutral free speech argument that has long since failed them, America, and the world. They're showing some signs of at least starting to take it seriously but it's not happening fast or thoroughly enough.
But I think Twitter's real problem is management. It's had problems for years including a revolving CEO post. I still think highly of Jack's abilities but he is literally only working there half time. He's also still the CEO of Square. That's crazy even in the best of circumstances but for a company that's failing in so many ways it's unacceptable.
posted by Nelson at 1:30 PM on December 28, 2017 [38 favorites]
The surface problem is bad policy. They're still trying to hew to some content-neutral free speech argument that has long since failed them, America, and the world. They're showing some signs of at least starting to take it seriously but it's not happening fast or thoroughly enough.
But I think Twitter's real problem is management. It's had problems for years including a revolving CEO post. I still think highly of Jack's abilities but he is literally only working there half time. He's also still the CEO of Square. That's crazy even in the best of circumstances but for a company that's failing in so many ways it's unacceptable.
posted by Nelson at 1:30 PM on December 28, 2017 [38 favorites]
Oh, and to this particular article, I could see how "bot that accuses people of being an impostor and spams Twitter with denunciations" could be problematic. Particularly if the bot ever makes a mistake. But OTOH Twitter has done so, so little effective to address its abuse problem. They should have been hiring the creators of this bot, not thwarting their efforts.
posted by Nelson at 1:31 PM on December 28, 2017 [26 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 1:31 PM on December 28, 2017 [26 favorites]
I quit Facebook eight years ago and Twitter last year and honestly, it feels great.
All of the news and politics updates I need, I get from just a few key websites, of which MeFi is one. And not being on Facebook has encouraged me to reach out and interact more proactively with the friends and family I care about.
I cannot for the life of me understand why either company would want to drag their feet on killing off imposter trolling. That they haven’t both come down fast and hard on scouring out this sort of thing is highly suspect.
I don’t know what it means, but there is an evil lurking there, in the unwillingness to burn out the problem, root and branch. Especially when it is fairly technically straightforward to shut down some of the worst types of abuse, as demonstrated by this post.
posted by darkstar at 1:42 PM on December 28, 2017 [26 favorites]
All of the news and politics updates I need, I get from just a few key websites, of which MeFi is one. And not being on Facebook has encouraged me to reach out and interact more proactively with the friends and family I care about.
I cannot for the life of me understand why either company would want to drag their feet on killing off imposter trolling. That they haven’t both come down fast and hard on scouring out this sort of thing is highly suspect.
I don’t know what it means, but there is an evil lurking there, in the unwillingness to burn out the problem, root and branch. Especially when it is fairly technically straightforward to shut down some of the worst types of abuse, as demonstrated by this post.
posted by darkstar at 1:42 PM on December 28, 2017 [26 favorites]
There was an incident awhile back where Jack was engaging with some Twitter users about racist harassment and telling people to just report it, and he seemed genuinely surprised when shown screenshots of reports of racial harassment being rejected. I think part of the issue is that they've built this technological solution that does not fucking work and they don't think it's important to understand whether it works or not or what its impact is. The current policy of banning for inciting racial violence seems to be at least getting some results- I know people who are seeing how many Nazis they can get banned for it as a hobby.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:44 PM on December 28, 2017 [34 favorites]
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:44 PM on December 28, 2017 [34 favorites]
They're still trying to hew to some content-neutral free speech argument
It's such a pervasive thing. I signed up for the family account thing from Spotify last year, because I wanted my young kids to be able to explore music in a way I never could have dreamed of at their age. When I asked Spotify if there was any way to limit exposure to 'explicit' material (a blunt instrument, I know), they gave me a canned response that was basically some free-speech bullshit implying that it was against their ethics to allow me to limit what my kids are exposed to.
Seems that nobody has engineer's disease worse than the tech bros.
posted by pipeski at 1:46 PM on December 28, 2017 [32 favorites]
It's such a pervasive thing. I signed up for the family account thing from Spotify last year, because I wanted my young kids to be able to explore music in a way I never could have dreamed of at their age. When I asked Spotify if there was any way to limit exposure to 'explicit' material (a blunt instrument, I know), they gave me a canned response that was basically some free-speech bullshit implying that it was against their ethics to allow me to limit what my kids are exposed to.
Seems that nobody has engineer's disease worse than the tech bros.
posted by pipeski at 1:46 PM on December 28, 2017 [32 favorites]
The only reason I can think of why abusers are still allowed to exist is because it bolsters their MAU count. Nothing else matters.
My operating theory is that at least some, if not all, of the support staff that deal with reports/abuse/ToS violations (and/or the people writing algorithms dealing with that) are dedicated white supremacists who are smart enough to disguise their ideology while at work, and that the rest of the leadership is so up its own ass about Both Sides and Open Discourse and whatever other arguments rich Silicon Valley idiots find compelling that they cannot see how damaging it is to be the premier online venue for Neo-Nazi organizing.
I have no doubt that when the real round of serious bannings come, it's going to happen to disproportionately few openly bigoted white men because of how badly their whole abuse prevention scheme has been perverted.
posted by Copronymus at 1:52 PM on December 28, 2017 [22 favorites]
My operating theory is that at least some, if not all, of the support staff that deal with reports/abuse/ToS violations (and/or the people writing algorithms dealing with that) are dedicated white supremacists who are smart enough to disguise their ideology while at work, and that the rest of the leadership is so up its own ass about Both Sides and Open Discourse and whatever other arguments rich Silicon Valley idiots find compelling that they cannot see how damaging it is to be the premier online venue for Neo-Nazi organizing.
I have no doubt that when the real round of serious bannings come, it's going to happen to disproportionately few openly bigoted white men because of how badly their whole abuse prevention scheme has been perverted.
posted by Copronymus at 1:52 PM on December 28, 2017 [22 favorites]
I still feel like I know Jack Dorsey and I know personally he's not a Nazi sympathizer.
I don't give a shit about whether he is one in his heart of hearts, because he keeps acting like one in his management of Twitter. This cadence of bad press should have pushed him to actually clean things up, and yet it's one step forward, two back with him.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:00 PM on December 28, 2017 [63 favorites]
I don't give a shit about whether he is one in his heart of hearts, because he keeps acting like one in his management of Twitter. This cadence of bad press should have pushed him to actually clean things up, and yet it's one step forward, two back with him.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:00 PM on December 28, 2017 [63 favorites]
My operating theory is that at least some, if not all, of the support staff that deal with reports/abuse/ToS violations (and/or the people writing algorithms dealing with that) are dedicated white supremacists...
Yeah, generally I try to keep Hanlon's Razor in mind, especially when looking at the aggregate behaviour of a large organization, but at some point the less charitable explanations start to look like the only viable ones.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:12 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
Yeah, generally I try to keep Hanlon's Razor in mind, especially when looking at the aggregate behaviour of a large organization, but at some point the less charitable explanations start to look like the only viable ones.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:12 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
For me the last straw was November 8, when Twitter endorsed a Nazi. That was the day they gave the blue verified checkmark to Jason Kessler. The Nazi organizer of the Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the one that resulted in a woman being murdered by a Nazi. And months later, after all this "no we're really handling hate groups on Twitter we promise!" stuff someone in Twitter said "yes, yes. This Nazi is a person we want verified".
It was also about this time they dropped the nonsense pretending that blue checkmarks were just identity verification. I mean it's never been true: among other things verified status seems to be a signal of "rank these tweets higher". The communication from Twitter support about Kessler's verification is just terrible.
Anyway I wish I had some insight into how, weeks into Twitter's program of addressing hate groups on Twitter, someone presses the "yes endorse this Nazi" button on Twitter. At the time Jack said " our agents have been following our verification policy correctly, but we realized some time ago the system is broken..." To reiterate, the sequence was
(Just to highlight the link again: the Buzzfeed article Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled To Interpret Its Own Verification Rules While Hunting Trolls is really worth reading to get an idea how this kind of fuckup happens.)
posted by Nelson at 2:22 PM on December 28, 2017 [19 favorites]
It was also about this time they dropped the nonsense pretending that blue checkmarks were just identity verification. I mean it's never been true: among other things verified status seems to be a signal of "rank these tweets higher". The communication from Twitter support about Kessler's verification is just terrible.
Anyway I wish I had some insight into how, weeks into Twitter's program of addressing hate groups on Twitter, someone presses the "yes endorse this Nazi" button on Twitter. At the time Jack said " our agents have been following our verification policy correctly, but we realized some time ago the system is broken..." To reiterate, the sequence was
- Twitter endorsed a Nazi.
- Twitter Support says it's not an endorsement. Only it is.
- Half-time CEO says our policies are broken, but endorsing this Nazi was correctly implemented policy.
- Endorsement program is suspended.
- Days later, endorsements removed from many Nazi accounts.
(Just to highlight the link again: the Buzzfeed article Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled To Interpret Its Own Verification Rules While Hunting Trolls is really worth reading to get an idea how this kind of fuckup happens.)
posted by Nelson at 2:22 PM on December 28, 2017 [19 favorites]
A problem for them, among all of the actual bullshit of their tech-bro viewpoint, is that there is almost no way trump's account should not be banned under any abuse metric, and they are never going to do that. It's another trump success story, along with the looting of the treasury for his rich friends and the normalization of corruption.
posted by maxwelton at 2:37 PM on December 28, 2017 [28 favorites]
posted by maxwelton at 2:37 PM on December 28, 2017 [28 favorites]
Please everyone stop using Twitter now. Just don't use it again. You'll be fine.
posted by koavf at 2:44 PM on December 28, 2017 [25 favorites]
posted by koavf at 2:44 PM on December 28, 2017 [25 favorites]
I don't give a shit about whether he is one in his heart of hearts, because he keeps acting like one in his management of Twitter.
I’m not a Twitter user but I see it all the time here and in articles, and functionally I can’t see the difference between their ineptness and actual pro-nazi and pro-troll support. I guess they like the attention that the asswipes generate? It makes the world worse for the rest of us, though, and I wish they could get their house in order.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:47 PM on December 28, 2017 [5 favorites]
I’m not a Twitter user but I see it all the time here and in articles, and functionally I can’t see the difference between their ineptness and actual pro-nazi and pro-troll support. I guess they like the attention that the asswipes generate? It makes the world worse for the rest of us, though, and I wish they could get their house in order.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:47 PM on December 28, 2017 [5 favorites]
I still feel like I know Jack Dorsey and I know personally he's not a Nazi sympathizer.
So why then has he so consistently failed to wash this particular stink off his leadership?
And also, as a more structural issue: why haven't Twitter's board replaced him with someone better capable to provide clear leadership to address their endemic abuse issues?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:54 PM on December 28, 2017 [13 favorites]
So why then has he so consistently failed to wash this particular stink off his leadership?
And also, as a more structural issue: why haven't Twitter's board replaced him with someone better capable to provide clear leadership to address their endemic abuse issues?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:54 PM on December 28, 2017 [13 favorites]
Twitter sided with the Nazis.
Punching. Have we tried punching?
posted by chavenet at 3:02 PM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]
Punching. Have we tried punching?
posted by chavenet at 3:02 PM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]
Please everyone stop using Twitter now. Just don't use it again. You'll be fine.
"Hello, landlord? There are snakes in my toilet!"
"Hmm. Have you tried shitting in a pickle jar?"
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:30 PM on December 28, 2017 [23 favorites]
"Hello, landlord? There are snakes in my toilet!"
"Hmm. Have you tried shitting in a pickle jar?"
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:30 PM on December 28, 2017 [23 favorites]
"Hey, you look terrible. And you smell really bad."
"I travel through the sewers to and from work."
"You do know that you can walk on the sidewalk above the ground, right? Avoid the sewers completely?"
posted by Splunge at 3:54 PM on December 28, 2017 [21 favorites]
"I travel through the sewers to and from work."
"You do know that you can walk on the sidewalk above the ground, right? Avoid the sewers completely?"
posted by Splunge at 3:54 PM on December 28, 2017 [21 favorites]
Maybe the verification thing should stay, only instead of professional blue and white they should have something in a stylish red and black for certain... special users.
posted by klanawa at 4:11 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by klanawa at 4:11 PM on December 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
Just change the little checkmark inside the blue circle to an SS rune.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:42 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 4:42 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
That was the day they gave the blue verified checkmark to Jason Kessler.
I hate Nazis like it's my job, which it kind of is, in the sense that I think it's all of our jobs to fight these fuckers. But I think sometimes there's maybe an age gap in understanding all this stuff? Like, I've used twitter, but I don't /live/ in twitter. For me, a checkmark is just like "yes, this person is who they say they are". I don't understand why this is bad - like, I would think it's extra important to verify people who are terrible so you can hold them legally accountable for the shit they do? So they can't slither away and be like "no it wasn't me it was some other guy named the exact thing".
Is the problem actually the verification or the problem the latter thing isn't happening?
posted by corb at 5:18 PM on December 28, 2017 [7 favorites]
I hate Nazis like it's my job, which it kind of is, in the sense that I think it's all of our jobs to fight these fuckers. But I think sometimes there's maybe an age gap in understanding all this stuff? Like, I've used twitter, but I don't /live/ in twitter. For me, a checkmark is just like "yes, this person is who they say they are". I don't understand why this is bad - like, I would think it's extra important to verify people who are terrible so you can hold them legally accountable for the shit they do? So they can't slither away and be like "no it wasn't me it was some other guy named the exact thing".
Is the problem actually the verification or the problem the latter thing isn't happening?
posted by corb at 5:18 PM on December 28, 2017 [7 favorites]
Is the problem actually the verification or the problem the latter thing isn't happening?
Well, part of it is that the checkmark started as just what you describe, basically helping celebrities avoid being successfully impersonated. But verification now comes with some extra tools for the person who is verified.
I think in the case of Kessler, the only thing he is known for is inciting fatal violence in Charlottesville. Does that make him a celebrity/public figure?
Twitter itself acknowledged that the checkmark had come to be seen as a sign of endorsement, which is why they said they were going to rethink the whole system.
And as with all twitter criticism, every time they monkey around with stuff rather than getting rid of Nazis (which we know they can do), they prove once again that their priorities are entirely wrong.
posted by Emmy Rae at 5:29 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
Well, part of it is that the checkmark started as just what you describe, basically helping celebrities avoid being successfully impersonated. But verification now comes with some extra tools for the person who is verified.
I think in the case of Kessler, the only thing he is known for is inciting fatal violence in Charlottesville. Does that make him a celebrity/public figure?
Twitter itself acknowledged that the checkmark had come to be seen as a sign of endorsement, which is why they said they were going to rethink the whole system.
And as with all twitter criticism, every time they monkey around with stuff rather than getting rid of Nazis (which we know they can do), they prove once again that their priorities are entirely wrong.
posted by Emmy Rae at 5:29 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
a checkmark is just like "yes, this person is who they say they are". I don't understand why this is bad
Hey, I put a lot of time making links in my comments. There are several articles that explain why that is not what the little checkmark means, and how Twitter itself was confused on that point. If you're going to post here, could you be respectful enough to read those for me first? This article is a good place to start. Also this post from Twitter support.
posted by Nelson at 5:54 PM on December 28, 2017 [10 favorites]
Hey, I put a lot of time making links in my comments. There are several articles that explain why that is not what the little checkmark means, and how Twitter itself was confused on that point. If you're going to post here, could you be respectful enough to read those for me first? This article is a good place to start. Also this post from Twitter support.
posted by Nelson at 5:54 PM on December 28, 2017 [10 favorites]
Yep. It really cannot be stated enough: when forced to do so in order to remain in an important market (Germany), Twitter had no problem identifying the vast majority of Nazis and blocking them (within that region). Nazis are still on Twitter outside of Germany because at a minimum it's profitable, and potentially also because the people who run Twitter want them there due to shared outlooks on such topics as the value of non-white non-christian non-straight lives.
posted by tocts at 5:56 PM on December 28, 2017 [29 favorites]
posted by tocts at 5:56 PM on December 28, 2017 [29 favorites]
"Hello, landlord? There are snakes in my toilet!"
"Hmm. Have you tried shitting in a pickle jar?"
Neither the first nor the last time Twitter is compared to a toilet. Of course, the big difference is that toilets are a modern necessity, replacing and mostly eliminating what came before. In bathroom equipment, Twitter is more like the hot-air hand-dryers in some public washrooms, which can be reasonably avoided if they become infested with snakes.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:59 PM on December 28, 2017 [9 favorites]
"Hmm. Have you tried shitting in a pickle jar?"
Neither the first nor the last time Twitter is compared to a toilet. Of course, the big difference is that toilets are a modern necessity, replacing and mostly eliminating what came before. In bathroom equipment, Twitter is more like the hot-air hand-dryers in some public washrooms, which can be reasonably avoided if they become infested with snakes.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:59 PM on December 28, 2017 [9 favorites]
Please everyone stop using Twitter now. Just don't use it again. You'll be fine.
I use Twitter because it's the best way I've found (for me) to hear from underrepresented and marginalized groups. I get that Twitter is terrible (it is, it is fucking TERRIBLE) but there are reasons beyond "lulz" that some of us keep using it. For me it's one of the best ways to listen to a variety of minority and/or female voices. I also think, in difficult times, sharing things that make you smile is worth doing; I think it's genuinely important to keep our spirits up. There are also people (not me) who use it for work, especially early-career artists and stuff, again often women or minorities, who can use platforms like Twitter to publicize their work without dealing with the usual gatekeepers. Twitter is incredibly problematic but there actually is value to the service; it might not outweigh the harm and that's a reasonable position to hold but for those of us still using it it's not just because we're dumb or lazy and "You'll be fine" feels pretty glib when this is actually an important communication resource for a lot of people.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:51 PM on December 28, 2017 [35 favorites]
I use Twitter because it's the best way I've found (for me) to hear from underrepresented and marginalized groups. I get that Twitter is terrible (it is, it is fucking TERRIBLE) but there are reasons beyond "lulz" that some of us keep using it. For me it's one of the best ways to listen to a variety of minority and/or female voices. I also think, in difficult times, sharing things that make you smile is worth doing; I think it's genuinely important to keep our spirits up. There are also people (not me) who use it for work, especially early-career artists and stuff, again often women or minorities, who can use platforms like Twitter to publicize their work without dealing with the usual gatekeepers. Twitter is incredibly problematic but there actually is value to the service; it might not outweigh the harm and that's a reasonable position to hold but for those of us still using it it's not just because we're dumb or lazy and "You'll be fine" feels pretty glib when this is actually an important communication resource for a lot of people.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:51 PM on December 28, 2017 [35 favorites]
My operating theory is that at least some, if not all, of the support staff that deal with reports/abuse/ToS violations (and/or the people writing algorithms dealing with that) are dedicated white supremacists who are smart enough to disguise their ideology while at work, and that the rest of the leadership is so up its own ass about Both Sides and Open Discourse and whatever other arguments rich Silicon Valley idiots find compelling that they cannot see how damaging it is to be the premier online venue for Neo-Nazi organizing.
Yeah I agree with this. I think there are VERY probably a set of basically embedded Nazi moderators empowered by the fact that everyone else is too busy handwringing about "but should we be stifling free expression?" to realize that this is what's happening. I have no idea whether the leadership are personally pro-Nazi in their hearts or whatever but I'm pretty sure someone there is and the leadership is definitely not doing enough to stop it which like not to be melodramatic but history has demonstrated that if you don't work actively to stop Nazis it is extremely, EXTREMELY bad.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:57 PM on December 28, 2017 [15 favorites]
Yeah I agree with this. I think there are VERY probably a set of basically embedded Nazi moderators empowered by the fact that everyone else is too busy handwringing about "but should we be stifling free expression?" to realize that this is what's happening. I have no idea whether the leadership are personally pro-Nazi in their hearts or whatever but I'm pretty sure someone there is and the leadership is definitely not doing enough to stop it which like not to be melodramatic but history has demonstrated that if you don't work actively to stop Nazis it is extremely, EXTREMELY bad.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 6:57 PM on December 28, 2017 [15 favorites]
I still feel like I know Jack Dorsey and I know personally he's not a Nazi sympathizer.
If it quacks like a fucking duck.....
posted by tclark at 6:59 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
If it quacks like a fucking duck.....
posted by tclark at 6:59 PM on December 28, 2017 [11 favorites]
> For me it's one of the best ways to listen to a variety of minority and/or female voices.
Same. I'm a white person in a white family living in a mostly-white area. Twitter is a great place for me to find people of color (mostly journalists and comedians) who are willing to spend time doing Awareness 101 for people like me, or let me eavesdrop and learn a bit.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:07 PM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]
Same. I'm a white person in a white family living in a mostly-white area. Twitter is a great place for me to find people of color (mostly journalists and comedians) who are willing to spend time doing Awareness 101 for people like me, or let me eavesdrop and learn a bit.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:07 PM on December 28, 2017 [8 favorites]
There are also people (not me) who use it for work, especially early-career artists and stuff
Twitter is the bread and butter for most of my artist friends. They get some free time, they open up a client slot or three, put out the call and get paid. Or they post some art and link their Patreon or their ko-fi and get some new pledges that way, or new fans who will spread their stuff further afield where it might reach somebody who will pay.
What's their alternative? Make their own website and hope that people find them on page 26 of google? Go back to sites like Deviantart where their luck seems a whole lot more chancy and there are also problems with abusive, shitty people? Mastodon is currently kind of an echo chamber, I have great hopes that it will take off (and many people are already cross-posting between the two services) but it isn't there just yet. The network effect is a thing, and if you can make a sale because somebody's scrolling through their feed on their lunch break, that's a sale that you wouldn't get if you weren't on Twitter. There are 330 million active users, even if some of those are bots it's still a pretty big pond.
It'd be a great playground if it weren't for those bullies that like to hang out and beat up some of the kids for looking funny. I don't think that chiding people for wanting to stick around is as productive as maintaining pressure on those in charge to send the bullies packing.
posted by Feyala at 7:19 PM on December 28, 2017 [15 favorites]
Twitter is the bread and butter for most of my artist friends. They get some free time, they open up a client slot or three, put out the call and get paid. Or they post some art and link their Patreon or their ko-fi and get some new pledges that way, or new fans who will spread their stuff further afield where it might reach somebody who will pay.
What's their alternative? Make their own website and hope that people find them on page 26 of google? Go back to sites like Deviantart where their luck seems a whole lot more chancy and there are also problems with abusive, shitty people? Mastodon is currently kind of an echo chamber, I have great hopes that it will take off (and many people are already cross-posting between the two services) but it isn't there just yet. The network effect is a thing, and if you can make a sale because somebody's scrolling through their feed on their lunch break, that's a sale that you wouldn't get if you weren't on Twitter. There are 330 million active users, even if some of those are bots it's still a pretty big pond.
It'd be a great playground if it weren't for those bullies that like to hang out and beat up some of the kids for looking funny. I don't think that chiding people for wanting to stick around is as productive as maintaining pressure on those in charge to send the bullies packing.
posted by Feyala at 7:19 PM on December 28, 2017 [15 favorites]
Occasionally I click through links to early posts on Metafilter. It's hard to overstate how much things have changed: this place used to tolerate a lot of things which are now recognised as racist or misogynist. The change certainly didn't happen overnight, or easily, and it took a lot of work by the moderators, but it happened. I think the business model has a lot to do with it: the mods aren't scared to give someone their $5 back and tell them to scram. Compare that to Twitter's handwringing over Milo; I bet it's because Twitter doesn't really have a business model other than "have many many users". They don't want to fire the trolls, because they think contentious users drive engagement and therefore will eventually make Twitter valuable. It's never going to get better, because goid moderation is expensive and it's actually the opposite of what they think they need.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:44 PM on December 28, 2017 [15 favorites]
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:44 PM on December 28, 2017 [15 favorites]
Here's an example of the sort of trolling described in the FPP. As the redoubtable David Schraub says:
This thread has it all:posted by Joe in Australia at 8:28 PM on December 28, 2017 [5 favorites]
• Alt-right troll: "Let me list all the Jews who run the media!"
• Jew: " You're antisemitic trash. Also, that list isn't even accurate, so you're not even good at making lists of Jews."
• Far-left Corbynista: "Well they are all 'Zionists', so stop your nitpicking and show some solidarity with our allies in the struggle."
Twitter is also a place where Picard LGBTQ people can bring up issues of discrimination, language, and behavior.
Where are they supposed to go to publicly air these issues? Here?
posted by happyroach at 8:39 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
Where are they supposed to go to publicly air these issues? Here?
posted by happyroach at 8:39 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
additionally: twitter even used trump as a marketing tool in japan. they make money off this guy.
posted by raihan_ at 9:50 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by raihan_ at 9:50 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
I'm with Mrs. Pterodactyl and The corpse in the library -- Twitter has been a great way to connect to women, POC, and transgender voices. At the same time I try to take my allyship role seriously and fortunately since I'm not that creative or funny I limit how much I try to get in mentions and so forth. (As someone pointed out this week it's usually men repeating the top joke in a different way....) I don't feel strongly that I have any sort of value there beyond retweeting and favoriting what I can, which is a bit unfortunate as it feels a lot more passive. At least on Facebook I sometimes get responses to my posts. At the same time as my carefully curated Twitter experience has been of value to me, given that the majority of my IRL friends and even many blog and MeFi connections are on FB, I try to recognize that it's a horrible hellscape for many of the voices I actually follow, made only slightly tolerable by the availability of third-party services like blocklists and the bot in the FPP.
I haven't found anything that gives me real-time news reax in the way that I'm wired for (and is the major failing of FB in my opinion, where I'm usually presented with two-to-three-day-old content on login). I don't have the time to try every new service that comes along, so if you want to invite me to one you find value in, feel free to MeMail or whatever works. MeFi is the only other alternative and obviously I'm still here after umpty years (breaks included). But I do feel Twitter is at some sort of breaking point.
posted by dhartung at 12:09 AM on December 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
I haven't found anything that gives me real-time news reax in the way that I'm wired for (and is the major failing of FB in my opinion, where I'm usually presented with two-to-three-day-old content on login). I don't have the time to try every new service that comes along, so if you want to invite me to one you find value in, feel free to MeMail or whatever works. MeFi is the only other alternative and obviously I'm still here after umpty years (breaks included). But I do feel Twitter is at some sort of breaking point.
posted by dhartung at 12:09 AM on December 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
Does a Russian oligarch own a big piece of Twitter? In one of the megathreads someone linked to an article on that topic and now I can't find the comment or article to verify. If true, follow the money would explain Twitter's pro-Nazi, pro-racist and anti-Semitic business practices.
posted by jointhedance at 6:26 AM on December 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by jointhedance at 6:26 AM on December 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
I still feel like I know Jack Dorsey and I know personally he's not a Nazi sympathizer.
I've mentioned this before but I'll mention it again.
The Northwestern prof who is accused of murder got over 30 written character references from colleagues after he was on the lamb and pretty clearly guilty but before the full details of the crime were known.
These were smart people who felt they knew the character of a man they worked closely with. A man who is accused of sawing a man's head off as part of a internet chatroom conceived murder-suicide plot with an Oxford staffer whom he paid to fly over for the crime.
posted by srboisvert at 8:05 AM on December 29, 2017 [17 favorites]
I've mentioned this before but I'll mention it again.
The Northwestern prof who is accused of murder got over 30 written character references from colleagues after he was on the lamb and pretty clearly guilty but before the full details of the crime were known.
These were smart people who felt they knew the character of a man they worked closely with. A man who is accused of sawing a man's head off as part of a internet chatroom conceived murder-suicide plot with an Oxford staffer whom he paid to fly over for the crime.
posted by srboisvert at 8:05 AM on December 29, 2017 [17 favorites]
The Russian oligarch you're thinking of is Yuri Milner. Who invested in a lot of tech companies at that time via DST Global: Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, AirBnB, ... There's some discussion now about how involved the Kremlin was with DST Global; the Paradise Papers have evidence of shared financing. DST has long since sold that stock; Twitter in 2014. I don't have any links to document that Milner didn't have any direct influence over Twitter policy, but the idea seems preposterous to me. FWIW he did not take a board seat.
I get that Twitter's actions have made the company an effective Nazi tool. I still stick to my personal understanding that Jack is not himself a Nazi sympathizer. Mostly based on my personally knowing him, so that won't convince you. But one public act he made I always thought was remarkable was his going to Ferguson that first weekend of protest. That turned into a relationship with DeRay Mckesson, as seen in this 2016 report. (Hilariously, Breitbart hated that.) I don't know what Mckesson thinks now, if anyone has a good link I'd love to read it.
The reason I care that Twitter's (half-time) CEO is not a Nazi is it's important for understanding the problem at the company. The guy in charge does not like Nazis but he and his company are allowing Nazis to thrive anyway. It's a deeper, more pernicious problem than just "those guys at Twitter are Nazis". Personally I think the problem is 80% the vestiges of a free speech policy that has proven to be a failure in the era of Internet trolls, online Nazis, and Donald Trump. That's a policy I believed in myself, so I've been taking a good long hard look at how it's failed. The other 20% is that the technical and policy challenges of moderating a platform like Twitter are difficult and the company failed to invest enough early enough into making the platform safe for users.
I agree with folks above who say Twitter is still a useful tool, particularly for connecting to a diverse group of interesting people. I've been trying hard to make Mastodon work for me these last two months and it's not going very well. The tech is OK but the community just isn't there. There is some community, mind you: a bunch of Mefites and a really active queer community, particularly transgender people. But I miss Twitter. I keep thinking about going back to it only to have one more Nazi outrage show up, like this most recent one linked here.
posted by Nelson at 8:47 AM on December 29, 2017 [7 favorites]
I get that Twitter's actions have made the company an effective Nazi tool. I still stick to my personal understanding that Jack is not himself a Nazi sympathizer. Mostly based on my personally knowing him, so that won't convince you. But one public act he made I always thought was remarkable was his going to Ferguson that first weekend of protest. That turned into a relationship with DeRay Mckesson, as seen in this 2016 report. (Hilariously, Breitbart hated that.) I don't know what Mckesson thinks now, if anyone has a good link I'd love to read it.
The reason I care that Twitter's (half-time) CEO is not a Nazi is it's important for understanding the problem at the company. The guy in charge does not like Nazis but he and his company are allowing Nazis to thrive anyway. It's a deeper, more pernicious problem than just "those guys at Twitter are Nazis". Personally I think the problem is 80% the vestiges of a free speech policy that has proven to be a failure in the era of Internet trolls, online Nazis, and Donald Trump. That's a policy I believed in myself, so I've been taking a good long hard look at how it's failed. The other 20% is that the technical and policy challenges of moderating a platform like Twitter are difficult and the company failed to invest enough early enough into making the platform safe for users.
I agree with folks above who say Twitter is still a useful tool, particularly for connecting to a diverse group of interesting people. I've been trying hard to make Mastodon work for me these last two months and it's not going very well. The tech is OK but the community just isn't there. There is some community, mind you: a bunch of Mefites and a really active queer community, particularly transgender people. But I miss Twitter. I keep thinking about going back to it only to have one more Nazi outrage show up, like this most recent one linked here.
posted by Nelson at 8:47 AM on December 29, 2017 [7 favorites]
I still feel like I know Jack Dorsey and I know personally he's not a Nazi sympathizer.
He just follows Mike Cernovich, Gavin McInnes, and Stefan Molyneux for the articles i swear
posted by beerperson at 8:55 AM on December 29, 2017 [17 favorites]
He just follows Mike Cernovich, Gavin McInnes, and Stefan Molyneux for the articles i swear
posted by beerperson at 8:55 AM on December 29, 2017 [17 favorites]
Personally I think the problem is 80% the vestiges of a free speech policy that has proven to be a failure in the era of Internet trolls, online Nazis, and Donald Trump. That's a policy I believed in myself, so I've been taking a good long hard look at how it's failed.
The failure is easy to understand - there's more to freedom of speech than just letting anyone say what they want, because it turns out when you do that, the bigots and the privleged drive out the marginalized. This is not something that is new - the idea of the heckler's veto and what it means for free speech has been around for a very long time. Regardless, the fact is that the system failed, it was doomed to fail as anyone who has an understanding of free speech beyond the hagiographic fellation of the First Amendment we too often see could have told you, and yet the leadership of Twitter continues to cling to it instead of doing the mature thing of acknowledging they were wrong and moving to change things.
I don't care what Jack's personal beliefs are, because his actions are enabling bigots, bullies, and Nazis. Which is why the only way to save Twitter is to give Jack, Biz, etc the boot and bring in someone who understands that you don't get true freedom of speech by giving Nazis a voice to purge the disenfranchised with.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:42 AM on December 29, 2017 [11 favorites]
The failure is easy to understand - there's more to freedom of speech than just letting anyone say what they want, because it turns out when you do that, the bigots and the privleged drive out the marginalized. This is not something that is new - the idea of the heckler's veto and what it means for free speech has been around for a very long time. Regardless, the fact is that the system failed, it was doomed to fail as anyone who has an understanding of free speech beyond the hagiographic fellation of the First Amendment we too often see could have told you, and yet the leadership of Twitter continues to cling to it instead of doing the mature thing of acknowledging they were wrong and moving to change things.
I don't care what Jack's personal beliefs are, because his actions are enabling bigots, bullies, and Nazis. Which is why the only way to save Twitter is to give Jack, Biz, etc the boot and bring in someone who understands that you don't get true freedom of speech by giving Nazis a voice to purge the disenfranchised with.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:42 AM on December 29, 2017 [11 favorites]
I had missed this earlier:
But one public act he made I always thought was remarkable was his going to Ferguson that first weekend of protest.
This isn't remarkable, it's emblematic of the whole problem. Dorsey goes to Ferguson in a high profile yet ultimately low impact act, and yet seems completely flummoxed at reining in bigots on Twitter - an act that would have benefits several magnitudes of order greater than that single trip. You know what would benefit BLM more than his relationship with Delray? Not letting Nazis attack BLM through Twitter.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:46 PM on December 29, 2017 [18 favorites]
But one public act he made I always thought was remarkable was his going to Ferguson that first weekend of protest.
This isn't remarkable, it's emblematic of the whole problem. Dorsey goes to Ferguson in a high profile yet ultimately low impact act, and yet seems completely flummoxed at reining in bigots on Twitter - an act that would have benefits several magnitudes of order greater than that single trip. You know what would benefit BLM more than his relationship with Delray? Not letting Nazis attack BLM through Twitter.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:46 PM on December 29, 2017 [18 favorites]
I recently signed up for Mastodon (via the SDF, but a lot of MeFites seem to like Octodon.social and wandering.shop, they all interconnect so it's more about picking one that you like the rules of) and it absolutely scratches the Twitter itch.
To be honest, I hadn't realized how much Twitter sucked until I started using Mastodon and realized how much fun it was; that reminded me that "oh yeah... Twitter used to be fun, too. Remember, that's why you started using it? Back in, like, 2006?" It did the frog-boiling thing so well that I didn't consciously register it becoming not fun, it just was one of those things that seemed to fade into the background shittiness of the last few years, until everything was suddenly on fire.
Anyway, if you haven't quit Twitter, you might want to see if Mastodon is the methadone that lets you finally get it out of your life, or at least your daily routine.
I see no real reason why everyone shouldn't just collectively leave Twitter to the alt-right trolls, Nazis, and other deplorables, and let Dorsey et al (including, most importantly, their investors) clean up the mess. It's not worth fighting for the soul of a platform that doesn't give a shit about you as a user, and that you have no control over anyway, and fundamentally exists only to make a few rich people richer. Let the motherfucker burn.
There are certainly Mastodon instances that may not be to your liking (I don't know offhand if there's an established alt-right/NN instance, but if not there will be soon; that's how the Internet works) but the nice thing about the way the system is designed is that servers can just stop receiving messages from servers that allow behavior they don't like. They'll have their little echo chambers, because there's no way to stop that, but they won't have the entire platform as a bully pulpit. This seems sustainable, long-term, in a way that Twitter and other centralized, for-profit social networks never will be: they're not equipped to make the hard calls and to "do the right thing" in any situation where that happens to not also be the profitable thing. Expecting them to do so is to be the frog carrying the scorpion -- how many times do we have to get stung before realizing that the corporation, as a structure, is going to do the same thing every time?
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:13 PM on December 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
To be honest, I hadn't realized how much Twitter sucked until I started using Mastodon and realized how much fun it was; that reminded me that "oh yeah... Twitter used to be fun, too. Remember, that's why you started using it? Back in, like, 2006?" It did the frog-boiling thing so well that I didn't consciously register it becoming not fun, it just was one of those things that seemed to fade into the background shittiness of the last few years, until everything was suddenly on fire.
Anyway, if you haven't quit Twitter, you might want to see if Mastodon is the methadone that lets you finally get it out of your life, or at least your daily routine.
I see no real reason why everyone shouldn't just collectively leave Twitter to the alt-right trolls, Nazis, and other deplorables, and let Dorsey et al (including, most importantly, their investors) clean up the mess. It's not worth fighting for the soul of a platform that doesn't give a shit about you as a user, and that you have no control over anyway, and fundamentally exists only to make a few rich people richer. Let the motherfucker burn.
There are certainly Mastodon instances that may not be to your liking (I don't know offhand if there's an established alt-right/NN instance, but if not there will be soon; that's how the Internet works) but the nice thing about the way the system is designed is that servers can just stop receiving messages from servers that allow behavior they don't like. They'll have their little echo chambers, because there's no way to stop that, but they won't have the entire platform as a bully pulpit. This seems sustainable, long-term, in a way that Twitter and other centralized, for-profit social networks never will be: they're not equipped to make the hard calls and to "do the right thing" in any situation where that happens to not also be the profitable thing. Expecting them to do so is to be the frog carrying the scorpion -- how many times do we have to get stung before realizing that the corporation, as a structure, is going to do the same thing every time?
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:13 PM on December 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
get that Twitter's actions have made the company an effective Nazi tool. I still stick to my personal understanding that Jack is not himself a Nazi sympathizer.
Without disagreeing with you at all (since you know him and I don't), is this a distinction that matters? (As in, is the hope that because he is not himself a Nazi, that he might have a sudden come-to-Jesus moment and decide to make things better?)
Because from what it looks like from the outside, the company appears to have made a completely cynical decision that controversial people and controversial speech bring the eyeballs, and that there is a competitive advantage in failing to rein in those behaviors.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:22 PM on December 29, 2017 [10 favorites]
Without disagreeing with you at all (since you know him and I don't), is this a distinction that matters? (As in, is the hope that because he is not himself a Nazi, that he might have a sudden come-to-Jesus moment and decide to make things better?)
Because from what it looks like from the outside, the company appears to have made a completely cynical decision that controversial people and controversial speech bring the eyeballs, and that there is a competitive advantage in failing to rein in those behaviors.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:22 PM on December 29, 2017 [10 favorites]
If it quacks like a fucking duck
Or indeed, if it steps like a goose...
posted by Zonker at 2:53 PM on December 29, 2017 [10 favorites]
Or indeed, if it steps like a goose...
posted by Zonker at 2:53 PM on December 29, 2017 [10 favorites]
Yes Dip Flash, I think it's a distinction that matters. As I say in my next paragraph, it's important for understanding the problem at the company. I think Twitter is salvageable because I do believe the people in charge mostly mean well. They are not Nazis. It'd be one thing if Steve Bannon ran Twitter, it'd be hopeless. But that's not the problem. The problem is Twitter is fucking it up. They have some of the wrong principles. And they have done a very poor job of implementing safety for their users.
In my mind a lot hinges on their Safety Work plan, due to be completed any week now. That was the result of Twitter in October realizing how terrible their problem is and maybe, finally, taking it seriously this time. It's hard for me to tell if it's working yet. It sure failed on November 8 when they endorsed Kessler. But they since took the endorsement checkmark away from him and other known American Nazis. So that's progress. They've also defined a bunch of new anti-hate group policies that seem reasonable.
I fear the new policies haven't gone far enough. I mean, Kessler still has an account on Twitter at all so they're still playing a losing game of "he's a Nazi but he hasn't tweeted X and Y so he gets to stay". And as the original linked article notes, the Impostor Buster was blocked this very month. That seems a step backwards to me.
Somewhat off topic, but if you want a fine anti-Twitter rant Mike Monteiro's Merry Last Christmas, Jack Dorsey is pretty intense.
posted by Nelson at 5:14 PM on December 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
In my mind a lot hinges on their Safety Work plan, due to be completed any week now. That was the result of Twitter in October realizing how terrible their problem is and maybe, finally, taking it seriously this time. It's hard for me to tell if it's working yet. It sure failed on November 8 when they endorsed Kessler. But they since took the endorsement checkmark away from him and other known American Nazis. So that's progress. They've also defined a bunch of new anti-hate group policies that seem reasonable.
I fear the new policies haven't gone far enough. I mean, Kessler still has an account on Twitter at all so they're still playing a losing game of "he's a Nazi but he hasn't tweeted X and Y so he gets to stay". And as the original linked article notes, the Impostor Buster was blocked this very month. That seems a step backwards to me.
Somewhat off topic, but if you want a fine anti-Twitter rant Mike Monteiro's Merry Last Christmas, Jack Dorsey is pretty intense.
posted by Nelson at 5:14 PM on December 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
But they since took the endorsement checkmark away from him and other known American Nazis. So that's progress.
No, that's too little too late.
You keep on thinking that our issue is that we think that Jack is a bad guy, and thus if we'd just realize how good a guy he is, we'll understand.
Our issue, however, is that Jack is incapable of doing his job as the head of Twitter. It doesn't matter if he's a "good guy" or not - indeed, history is rife with organizations run into the ground by "good guys" who found themselves in over their head. If all Jack can provide are half-measures while bigots abuse people on the service he heads, then Jack doesn't need understanding, he needs the humility and temerity to accept that he cannot be the leader Twitter needs, and hand the reins to someone who can.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:46 PM on December 29, 2017 [17 favorites]
No, that's too little too late.
You keep on thinking that our issue is that we think that Jack is a bad guy, and thus if we'd just realize how good a guy he is, we'll understand.
Our issue, however, is that Jack is incapable of doing his job as the head of Twitter. It doesn't matter if he's a "good guy" or not - indeed, history is rife with organizations run into the ground by "good guys" who found themselves in over their head. If all Jack can provide are half-measures while bigots abuse people on the service he heads, then Jack doesn't need understanding, he needs the humility and temerity to accept that he cannot be the leader Twitter needs, and hand the reins to someone who can.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:46 PM on December 29, 2017 [17 favorites]
There was a #TwitterEvacuationDay hashtag going around this week, the day itself was yesterday, 12/31. I have no idea how popular it was but I thought it was remarkable that Tim Heidecker, the TV comedy guy, "abandoned this garbage site". He also put his name on a proposal to have UNESCO buy Twitter.
posted by Nelson at 2:00 PM on January 1, 2018
posted by Nelson at 2:00 PM on January 1, 2018
Nelson: I think it's a distinction that matters. As I say in my next paragraph, it's important for understanding the problem at the company. I think Twitter is salvageable because I do believe the people in charge mostly mean well. They are not Nazis.
However, "actual Nazi" and "good dude" are not the only two choices. What if Jack (or, perhaps more consequentially, many other senior executives and managers) were definitely not Nazi but also believed that ensuring that Nazis had a prominent voice on the platform was of paramount importance and that any serious attempt to limit the promotion of Nazi ideals on Twitter would make them worse than the actual Nazis? I mean, that is basically where the "free speech wing of the free speech party"-type of thinking leads. And, while it does seem like they're trying to unwind this kind of thing lately, it also seems deeply baked into the company's DNA.
posted by mhum at 3:05 PM on January 2, 2018 [5 favorites]
However, "actual Nazi" and "good dude" are not the only two choices. What if Jack (or, perhaps more consequentially, many other senior executives and managers) were definitely not Nazi but also believed that ensuring that Nazis had a prominent voice on the platform was of paramount importance and that any serious attempt to limit the promotion of Nazi ideals on Twitter would make them worse than the actual Nazis? I mean, that is basically where the "free speech wing of the free speech party"-type of thinking leads. And, while it does seem like they're trying to unwind this kind of thing lately, it also seems deeply baked into the company's DNA.
posted by mhum at 3:05 PM on January 2, 2018 [5 favorites]
Well, longtime webcartoonist R. Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) got temporarily suspended today, for "violating the rules against abusive behavior" in a tweet he made in November 2016, where he joked "surely it is not too late to kill all men".
THAT is the behavior Twitter management is protecting us from. The platform has been dead to me for years, now it has gone Full Zombie.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:33 PM on January 2, 2018 [10 favorites]
THAT is the behavior Twitter management is protecting us from. The platform has been dead to me for years, now it has gone Full Zombie.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:33 PM on January 2, 2018 [10 favorites]
But the president* can threaten nuclear war and @jack is totally fine with it.
posted by octothorpe at 3:42 AM on January 3, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 3:42 AM on January 3, 2018 [9 favorites]
I don't think the Twitter dudes hang back from implementing moderation because of a commitment to free speech; I think they do it because it's difficult and expensive.
Identifying abusive behaviour is a genuinely hard problem, even for humans. If we use Metafilter as an example of good moderation, the mods here don't have (just) a set of rules: they have an institutional memory of things that are bad or likely to go bad; they are in tune with evolving cultural norms both on-site and generally. And even so, they don't always get things right, but there's a public and a private appeal process which is also a difficult thing to do well.
Twitter and most other "social" apps run on the complete opposite of this: they work on the assumption that everything can be done algorithmically, which has mostly worked pretty well for them except for the abusive user problem. The trouble is that unless you can computerise moderation – and I don't believe you can computerise the sort of moderation we have here – implementing moderation means destroying your business model. So to explain their actions cognitive dissonance forces Twitter to say that they're free-speech absolutists, and if they're ultimately forced to discipline a user they all tied up in definitions because they're still trying to cast their actions in terms of an explicit and coherent algorithm rather than a personal, partially intuitive decision.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:57 PM on January 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
Identifying abusive behaviour is a genuinely hard problem, even for humans. If we use Metafilter as an example of good moderation, the mods here don't have (just) a set of rules: they have an institutional memory of things that are bad or likely to go bad; they are in tune with evolving cultural norms both on-site and generally. And even so, they don't always get things right, but there's a public and a private appeal process which is also a difficult thing to do well.
Twitter and most other "social" apps run on the complete opposite of this: they work on the assumption that everything can be done algorithmically, which has mostly worked pretty well for them except for the abusive user problem. The trouble is that unless you can computerise moderation – and I don't believe you can computerise the sort of moderation we have here – implementing moderation means destroying your business model. So to explain their actions cognitive dissonance forces Twitter to say that they're free-speech absolutists, and if they're ultimately forced to discipline a user they all tied up in definitions because they're still trying to cast their actions in terms of an explicit and coherent algorithm rather than a personal, partially intuitive decision.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:57 PM on January 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don't think the Twitter dudes hang back from implementing moderation because of a commitment to free speech; I think they do it because it's difficult and expensive.
Por que no los dos?
I think that their belief in free speech absolutism is real, in the way that only a libertarian techie can believe that you can let everyone say what they want with no negative repercussions. The fact that it also gives them an excuse to not spend money on administration is just a bonus.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:29 PM on January 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
Por que no los dos?
I think that their belief in free speech absolutism is real, in the way that only a libertarian techie can believe that you can let everyone say what they want with no negative repercussions. The fact that it also gives them an excuse to not spend money on administration is just a bonus.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:29 PM on January 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
It certainly might be both, but the economics are the endgame. It's the economics—moderation is expensive, allowing a free-for-all is not—that facilitates, perhaps almost requires social media businesses that succeed in the market to be built on absolutist principles. They're cheaper, which means they have a better cost structure.
I mean, it's not like Twitter succeeded because of some technological secret sauce. They sucked as a platform for years. The "failwhale" was a joke as they started to scale up; their uptime made Metafilter look like something you could use to run the safety systems in a nuclear plant by comparison. But they were able to get capital and allow unlimited user signups and generally scale the thing the way they did because so little human intervention was necessary.
Their success was built on the ideology in a way that's difficult to untangle; but I think it's safe to say that if they'd had a different ideology that emphasized high-touch moderation from the beginning, they probably wouldn't have been able to do the moonshot/hockey-stick-curve growth that their investors demanded, and they would have been "pivoted" or broken up and sold for parts to a competitor long ago.
Unfortunately the market seems to favor platforms with low moderation (meaning, low costs) even if it comes with a toxic culture. As long as companies can externalize the costs of that toxic culture in a way that doesn't land on their 10-Q, they're going to do it every time, just like a chemical company that can dump waste in a river for free is going to do it every time.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:48 PM on January 4, 2018 [3 favorites]
I mean, it's not like Twitter succeeded because of some technological secret sauce. They sucked as a platform for years. The "failwhale" was a joke as they started to scale up; their uptime made Metafilter look like something you could use to run the safety systems in a nuclear plant by comparison. But they were able to get capital and allow unlimited user signups and generally scale the thing the way they did because so little human intervention was necessary.
Their success was built on the ideology in a way that's difficult to untangle; but I think it's safe to say that if they'd had a different ideology that emphasized high-touch moderation from the beginning, they probably wouldn't have been able to do the moonshot/hockey-stick-curve growth that their investors demanded, and they would have been "pivoted" or broken up and sold for parts to a competitor long ago.
Unfortunately the market seems to favor platforms with low moderation (meaning, low costs) even if it comes with a toxic culture. As long as companies can externalize the costs of that toxic culture in a way that doesn't land on their 10-Q, they're going to do it every time, just like a chemical company that can dump waste in a river for free is going to do it every time.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:48 PM on January 4, 2018 [3 favorites]
I agree with Kadin2048; moreover, if these guys actually cared about freedom of speech they'd have defended the many victims who have been forced off Twitter specifically because of the way it's been weaponised by trolls.
When I hear the "free speech" argument it brings to mind the similar arguments used to defend student rights and academic freedom in the decades before the Holocaust. Back then, students in Poland (and probably other places) physically prevented Jewish students from entering university lectures. When the registrars made some effort to guarantee the Jewish students' ability to get their degrees, the professors connived with these student groups to make the guarantee a nullity. The registrars could do no more without treading on student rights and academic freedom, so Jews were effectively locked out of these courses and the professions they led to.
That's how I see the "free speech" argument: it sounds good, because who doesn't like free speech? But they're not actually interested in defending free speech any more than those Polish authorities were interested in defending academic freedom. It's just a fig leaf to disguise their unwillingness to help the people whose rights are genuinely at risk.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:25 PM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
When I hear the "free speech" argument it brings to mind the similar arguments used to defend student rights and academic freedom in the decades before the Holocaust. Back then, students in Poland (and probably other places) physically prevented Jewish students from entering university lectures. When the registrars made some effort to guarantee the Jewish students' ability to get their degrees, the professors connived with these student groups to make the guarantee a nullity. The registrars could do no more without treading on student rights and academic freedom, so Jews were effectively locked out of these courses and the professions they led to.
That's how I see the "free speech" argument: it sounds good, because who doesn't like free speech? But they're not actually interested in defending free speech any more than those Polish authorities were interested in defending academic freedom. It's just a fig leaf to disguise their unwillingness to help the people whose rights are genuinely at risk.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:25 PM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
That's how I see the "free speech" argument: it sounds good, because who doesn't like free speech? But they're not actually interested in defending free speech any more than those Polish authorities were interested in defending academic freedom. It's just a fig leaf to disguise their unwillingness to help the people whose rights are genuinely at risk.
They tend to have a (very shitty) answer to this - that the abused chose to leave and as such it's not really speech being chilled, because if they really wanted to speak, they'd have stayed.
Again, it's a really shitty excuse, but sadly it's become one echoed in the culture, because in the US, we have an overly hagiographic view of free speech, where opposition to hate speech is routinely reframed as disagreement or disgust. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking these guys aren't true believers, because their reaction to everyone looking to buy Twitter running away as if they were a plague victim shows that they really are.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:47 PM on January 4, 2018
They tend to have a (very shitty) answer to this - that the abused chose to leave and as such it's not really speech being chilled, because if they really wanted to speak, they'd have stayed.
Again, it's a really shitty excuse, but sadly it's become one echoed in the culture, because in the US, we have an overly hagiographic view of free speech, where opposition to hate speech is routinely reframed as disagreement or disgust. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking these guys aren't true believers, because their reaction to everyone looking to buy Twitter running away as if they were a plague victim shows that they really are.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:47 PM on January 4, 2018
And Twitter attempts to use free speech absolutism to justify not banning "world leaders" over hate speech.
You know, "controversial" is not a fucking synonym for "hate-filled". It would be nice if people stopped treating them as such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:29 PM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]
You know, "controversial" is not a fucking synonym for "hate-filled". It would be nice if people stopped treating them as such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:29 PM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]
Well that's an awfully mealy-mouthed statement. But mostly I'm just embarrassed for the company that no one remaining there knows how to use commas.
posted by Nelson at 2:49 PM on January 5, 2018
posted by Nelson at 2:49 PM on January 5, 2018
« Older "Aaand... commercials! Two minutes to Forrest... | Why We Fell For Clean Eating Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by bouvin at 12:59 PM on December 28, 2017 [2 favorites]