A Fight For…💀

My latest: Since Musk took over Twitter, many have rightly condemned the rampant misinformation and bigotry on here. But Twitter's content policies haven't changed. People are just noticing how broken it already is. I know this from personal experience: https://t.co/jBUdlYQYe1

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) November 1, 2022

I'm gonna go on with this at some length because it's really kind of interesting:

Twitter’s problems run far deeper than a problematic owner. To begin with, it’s structurally designed to impede complex discussion by forcing users to reduce all topics to 240-character soundbites. This can be a fun way to react to Game of Thrones, but it is not a good way to litigate economic policy or geopolitical conflicts. The constricted format impedes free-flowing conversation while privileging performative sloganeering. This is why Donald Trump, who seemingly never had a complex thought in his life, loved Twitter. Why our intellectual elite has decided to yoke the public discourse to a site whose most successful users are people like Trump is less understandable.

First off, Twitter is not designed for "discussion."  Blogger is, but who uses that anymore?  And the most you can discuss on a blog is what the blogger wants to say and who she/he allows to comment back.  Some blogs (Eschaton, at least when I was there) were taken over by comments, and create (briefly) a lively community of like-minded persons.  But eventually the conversations lag (every salon in Paris had its day, and it was brief, indeed) and, not being a private salon but a public forum where anybody the blogger allows can comment, Gresham’s Law of bad money driving out good takes over.  Good commenters leave because the bad commenters are so fucking annoying.  Not feeding the trolls stops having any effect when the only people there are trolls.  The experience mirrors a church congregation, which is, after all, a volunteer organization.  You can leave if you want.  Large churches tend to enforce, sotto voce, a standard of behavior that is suitable to the majority, and the minority who don't like it and leave are never missed.  Small churches can easily be run by the minority, and then the majority leave them to it.  Life, as they say, is too short.  Blog commentary is the same:  the trolls drive off the serious people, and pretty soon what's the point?

It isn't character length that's the problem.  Twitter was touted as a "micro-blogging" site anyway.  Blogger drew people who hoped to draw an audience (I, as ever, went against the grain.  Very successfully, as it turns out.  I revel in my near anonymity.  I had people paying attention to what I said and did in the pulpit. It got old fast.).  Twitter works on the same principle.  Something like 25% (or is it 3%?) of the people on Twitter post 75% of the posts.  A distinct minority does all the talking; everything else is just commentary on what they said.  Blogger worked the same way when it was the "discussion" tool of choice.

So Twitter was never meant to be the place to "litigate economic policy or geopolitical constructs."  Hell, most people on Twitter can barely spell those words, much less understand the concepts behind them.  Have you read "Bad Legal Takes"?  There are a lot of people out there with no clue as to what "rule of law" means, or "free speech" for that matter.  But they are quite sure they do.  It's not that Twitter's design "impedes free-flowing conversation while privileging performative sloganeering."  That's just how the people who bother with it think!  Or don't.  Take it from a guy who spent 20 years trying to teach college freshman to write a five paragraph essay; even 240 characters is a stretch for these people. Ideas, concepts, "free-flowing conversation"?  Even the salons of Proust didn't meet that ideal.  I mean, imagine if Proust had gone to those salons and discussed his life as a gay man.

Yeah....

The platform’s structure also encourages fabrication. With so many voices talking at once, it’s hard for any individual to go viral. But there is one dependable way to cut through the noise: Say something no one else is saying. In theory, this should reward funny or novel thinking. But in practice, it rewards dishonesty, because it’s a lot easier to come up with something genuinely new if you just make it up. The internet prizes originality, but hoaxes are by definition “original” because the person spreading them simply invented them. Claiming that the communists cured the coronavirus is a big advantage in the social-media game. And because there are no social consequences for sharing concocted content on Twitter, such material proliferates. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

Again, that's the problem of human discourse; not of modern technology.  I've told the story before, about LBJ telling a campaign aide to spread a scurrilous rumour about an opponent.  "But sir!," the aide protests.  "That's not true!"  "I know it's not true," LBJ replied.  "I wanna see him deny it!"  Public discourse has always rewarded dishonesty.  Consider the political career of Dick Nixon.  Twitter didn't invent that, or even cause it.  Human beings will use any method of communication at hand, from the back fence to the U.S. Mail to telephones to Twitter, to spread gossip for their own ends.  And frankly, there have seldom been consequences for spreading nonsense.  When I was a child it was flouride in the water, just then being championed for public water systems.  But that was communism, or the corruption of our Preciously Bodily Fluids, Mandrake!  To tell you the truth, if it wasn't for flouride in the water I'd probably have no teeth in my head that weren't man made, whereas I'm on track, in my late 60's, to finally get my first one.  And the anti-flouride crazies are back!  Or rather, still with us.  Was Twitter to blame for that in the '50's?  Is it to blame now?

Or is it the people using Twitter?  I heard today, again, that the "algorithm" used by social media promotes insane ideas that keep people coming back to the platform to read more insane ideas.  That same algorithm (we don't know what it is, but it sounds like something a computer would do!) tells Netflix what I'd like to watch next (it's usually wrong), and wants to keep me watching Netflix 24/7 (because if I don't I'll cancel my subscription?).  Or on Google it produces news stories I presumably want to read (but seldom do).  Am I a helpless thrall to the algorithm, but the people on TeeVee warning me about it are not?  Why is that, pray tell?

Is it more likely people who like insane ideas look for more insane ideas, and that pattern can be picked up by a simple computer program to feed the chicken more food as a reward everytime it pecks at the lever?  But isn't that what TV executives have been doing for over three-quarters of a century, in trying to program shows mass audiences will return to week after week?  Are they the source of evil?  Or is it the people who so willingly surrender their time and their eyeballs?

David DePape reportedly went from Green party fanatic to MAGA fanatic, by consuming social media.  We've had politically motivated crazies before social media.  How did they become dangerously violent without Twitter or Facebook?  Maybe the problem is how they used what tools they had (libraries, before Google and databases), which makes the problem the individual, not the technology.

And then he acknowledges that:

More recently, Twitter has attempted to address its misinformation miasma with Birdwatch. It’s a noble endeavor staffed by well-meaning volunteer fact-checkers. But trying to market facts to partisan Twitter users and clout-chasing content mills is like trying to sell Yankees hats at a Red Sox game: It fundamentally misunderstands what the audience is looking for. Most political users don’t utilize Twitter to form opinions and find information; they use it to advertise their opinions and get validation for them. Similarly, most accounts churning out crowd-pleasing content prize virality over veracity. That’s why no matter how many times Twitter labels content as misleading, it continues to be posted and shared with enthusiasm, like all the hoaxes at the top of this piece.

But he can't let it get in the way of his argument.  The first question is: who reads the fact-checking pieces, and who watches Tucker Carlson instead?  What's the old saw:  A lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?  Again, how were these truths possible before an internet existed?

Taken together, the entire edifice of Twitter regularly privileges inflammatory interaction at the expense of thoughtful discussion. This doesn’t mean that the site cannot be used for positive purposes; it is every day! Rather, it means that using Twitter constructively rather than destructively often requires fighting the nature of the platform itself.

Nope.  The problem is not the technology.  It is closer to home and deeper toward the bone.  The problem is people and how they use, or misuse (depending on your point of view) anything they get their hands on.  TV was supposed to be an educational tool.  It became, instead, a vast wasteland.  The freedom of the marketplace was supposed to produce the best outcomes.  But in England, the land of "Aunty Beeb" almost exclusively for decades, FoxNews couldn't get a foothold because, despite a more open TV market, not enough people were buying the drivel FoxNews sells.  Not enough people except in America.  And is that the fault of cable technology?  In an age where almost no one needs cable to make their TV function (where I grew up it was cable, to get channels from the big city of Dallas, or it was broadcast, which was the one-horse local channel.  The local channels out of Dallas were better.  Everyone I knew had cable just to get network shows.)  Only in my 20's did cable become "57 channels and nothing on."  Oh, and Skinemax and HBHo's and all the other "premium services," where "premium" meant "nekkid ladies!"  And now that's pretty much over.

But the Brits are still better off than we are.  Freedom comes with responsibility, and we've never been any good at mass marketing responsibility.  Imagining Twitter was supposed to do that for us, is just shirking responsiblity again.  

It's still the same old story.