#UntrendOctober
September 3, 2020 8:57 AM   Subscribe

A call to suspend Twitter’s trending topics for a month before the election.

The campaign started with a tweet from NBC reporter Ben Collins and is endorsed by Sacha Baron Cohen, who calls Twitter “a super-spreader of lies and hate” (Cohen has notably been critical of tech giants in the past, calling social media “the greatest propaganda machine in history” – see previously on Metafilter), and by Sleeping Giants. There’s also a related petition asking Twitter “to commit to pausing Trending Topics in October to avoid unintentionally amplifying disinformation leading up the US election”.

In The Verge, Casey Newton makes the case for ending “Trending” on Twitter altogether, not just for elections.

This comes after Twitter announced a new policy (NYT) by which curated tweets would be shown with trending topics to show why something was trending, which presents a few problems when dealing with trends based on disinformation and hate - “how do you give context to hateful or racist trending topics?”.

Meanwhile, Facebook announced it will block new political advertising the week before Election Day (CNN) although with “no indication that Facebook would change its policy of allowing politicians to lie in targeted ads, meaning political candidates will be able to run false ads on the platform up until election day.”
posted by bitteschoen (13 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
In The Verge, Casey Newton makes the case for ending “Trending” on Twitter altogether, not just for elections.

so basically, we should wait a while, maybe run a few toxicity tests before we release new candy to the public? I could get behind that.
posted by philip-random at 9:11 AM on September 3, 2020


That's a great idea. The trending topics is so heavily manipulated right now it's already pretty stupid. About half the topics are genuinely what people are talking about, the other half are what Russian bots or K-Pop fans want you to be talking about.
posted by Nelson at 9:15 AM on September 3, 2020 [3 favorites]


In The Verge, Casey Newton makes the case for ending “Trending” on Twitter altogether, not just for elections.

On MetaFilter, atrazine makes the case for ending Twitter altogether.
posted by atrazine at 9:22 AM on September 3, 2020 [24 favorites]


That is a very achievable and smart intervention
posted by latkes at 9:23 AM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


at least it's possible, when using a 3rd party client, to view twitter in reverse chronological order with no ads or injected "you might like" garbage, so i'm not yet in favour of burning it to the ground but i swear if they disable the api completely i'll join the chorus for certain
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:24 AM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


For the last few days, the #1 "top growing community" on Reddit has been r/ActualPublicFreakouts, which is essentially a sub dedicated to fascist propaganda videos, mostly context-free videos of purported "BLM protesters" attacking people. (Subreddits starting with "Actual" or "True" or "Real" are often far-right spinoffs of existing subs after a moderation crackdown.) It's pretty clear that these trending leaderboards are being very successfully gamed by bad actors and they need to go away, permanently.
posted by theodolite at 9:30 AM on September 3, 2020 [11 favorites]


It's pretty clear that these trending leaderboards are being very successfully gamed by bad actors and they need to go away, permanently.

In their zeal to automate damned near everything under the hood that, in a normal organization, might require human input, interaction, or moderation, it's become stunningly easy to game pretty much any of the larger social media outlets.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:42 AM on September 3, 2020 [8 favorites]


This is a good idea, so I expect it will not happen.

Limiting it to sports and entertainment topics seems like a good compromise, but it would be too easily gamed.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:48 AM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


France and other European countries are smart, locking down the media before an election. The United States needs to do that, as well, except that the Constitution provides a loophole for the flood of garbage that we get, instead.

Few seem interested in regulating Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other ad companies like the media outlets that they are. Maybe electoral fraud needs to be made a serious criminal offense for CEOs, with sentences up to life or even capital punishment for those who direct the company to make money off of the worst offenses (such as making money off promoting dictatorships or the election of a foreign agent to the office of president).

Leaving it up to these ad companies to voluntarily regulate themselves is not working. There's too much money in disinformation to leave on the table.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:50 AM on September 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


This is a very good idea. Twitter should probably just be ended in itself, though. The platform itself sieves out nuance and critical thought by design - so naturally it's a hotbed of hate and propaganda.

At this point, going full clean slate on social media across the board and thinking through the consequences of a lot of the frankly willfully dangerous design decisions the current iteration have made would be a good thing. Building systems that "engage" people through anger or bigotry, that compound "engagement" with more extreme "content," that are intentionally designed in every way to be highly addictive and generally have no meaningful moderation or moderation skewed to favor hate groups and propagandists... has been a disaster and is an actual threat to the survival of democratic systems of governance throughout the world.

Not holding my breath, though. These platforms are all invested in what they've built; anything that would disengage users - even from hate groups - will be viewed as an existential threat. Perhaps rightly so, but I'd rather have functioning societies than Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Insta.
posted by Lonnrot at 9:53 AM on September 3, 2020 [5 favorites]


Facebook announced it will block new political advertising the week before Election Day

They're also building a hotplate with a safety cut-off which engages as soon as your child has put both hands and one foot on it.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 10:17 AM on September 3, 2020 [19 favorites]


The Mozilla Foundation has also joined in with a petition to #UnTrendTwitter:
Twitter’s ‘trends’ feature has caught the attention of misinformation experts as one mechanism by which misinformation can gain virality, before the fact checkers even notice. Addressing all aspects of how disinformation (intentional manipulation of the truth with the intent to deceive) and misinformation (inaccurate information that is unintentionally spread) are shared and amplified on Twitter will take time, but inaction isn’t an option in the meantime.

Now is the time to be bold, and that’s why we’re asking Twitter to take immediate action and pause its ‘trending topics’ feature at least until election results are certified in January 2021.
posted by bitteschoen at 1:41 AM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


If a celebrity dies and twitter has suspended trending topics will they really be dead?
posted by srboisvert at 11:14 AM on September 4, 2020


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