I think Ben Thompson described an interesting plan for addressing Twitter’s content moderation and financial model on Apr 18 in his article, “Back to the Future of Twitter”. [1] His basic idea is to separate Twitter into a backend service that hosts content and a front end client that provides moderation and algorithmic curation. Twitter would then open the backend up so that anyone can develop their own client by paying for access.
The backend would do the minimal amount of moderation necessary to conform with the law in each jurisdiction and then provide optional services to the clients for more sophisticated moderation and algorithmic filtering and ranking. Twitter would continue to host their existing front end and possibly create more over time.
The idea is that the plethora of clients would allow for experimentation and meeting the diverse user preferences. You could have heavily moderated clients as well as wild west anything goes. While all clients would reference the same social graph and tweets/replies, each client could use whatever methods they want for filtering and ranking.
Some possible clients I’ve considered.
1. A client geared towards journalists and other prominent people that provides them with a layer that filters out harassment. This could include manual curation of their DMs, replies and retweets. The service would also have a team of lawyers for reporting credible threats of violence to law enforcement and sending cease-and-desist letters for proper libel. (Note this works well with Elon’s plan to require human identity verification, even for anonymous accounts.) This service would be expensive and geared towards people that value this layer of protection for professional reasons.
2. A client geared towards techies like myself that want to experiment with their own algorithms. While we’re a niche group, many of us would gladly pay quite a bit of money to support such a nerdy hobby. There’d be sharing and critique of each other's work as we toil to optimize our own Twitter experience. Over time some of the ideas might filter into other mainstream clients.
3. Partisan clients. Fox news could provide a client as could CNN. Even the DNC, RNC, and other parties could provide their preferred view of the social graph. They’d be openly filtering and ranking the social feed in a way that corresponds to the user's political preference.
I think the "common backend" idea means that all tweets could potentially show up in any given client, which vary only based on filtering and prioritization. With Reddit, you'll only ever see cross-subreddit content if you're on the front page or it was manually x-posted to the subreddit you're viewing.
Sounds a bit like reddit's system? It's worked well in practice there, where toxic subreddit are kept isolated, or if they start to get out of control, shutdown entirely. Although this sounds even more disunified than that, which sort of kills the benefits of being on a single platform at all.
That's very similar to proposals I've seen for Google and other search engines. You want to split the mechanical and editorial. It could be part of an antitrust settlement if we ever enforced our antitrust laws.
This would undoubtedly be substantially better than the current situation, but it's an unstable situation that would probably trend toward greater censorship over time. Many of the people trying most to influence content moderation (e.g. much of Noah's "shouting class") doesn't just want to not see content they dislike, they don't want *anyone* to see it. (Think of social-conservative activists' attitude toward pornography or "grooming", or progressive activists' attitude toward "hate" or "misinformation".) So long as the backend is centralized, the company is *able* to censor whatever content they like by deleting it or blocking access to it, so any activist group that wants someone else censored will try to persuade or intimidate them into doing this, & unless the company is more dedicated to free speech than just about any major modern social media company today, the activist groups that are larger & more influential on them will have some degree of success. Once the backend has agreed to censorship of some things (or rather, some things other than commonly accepted exceptions like pornography & malicious harassment), they will no longer have a principle of free speech to follow, & so they will be more willing over time to agree to more censorship (e.g. Reddit's transition from the sort of backend moderation described in https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/reddit-general-manager-explains-why-he-wont-ban-c to that described in https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/reddit-ovarit-the-donald/617320/ ). Part of this issue is discussed further in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ .
I don't experience Twitter as a hellscape. I block trolls (roughly, anyone whose aim is to cause trouble) immediately, and converse only with people with whom I can engage productively. I mute conversations and people who go on too long. I don't interact racists, but I routinely report them when I happen to run across them. I can't see Musk improving this.
Twitter, by enabling everyone to hear everyone else, is our Babelfish, which Douglas Adams explained was the cause for more wars than anything else in the universe because of this very quality.
There aren't yet any internet trolls on the left who have achieved "been elected President of the United States" levels of prominence. Twitter is this jumper cable connecting the very-online to the very-mainstream, in that context Trump's relationship to Twitter really is unique. So while I basically agree that who Elon lets back shouldn't have any significant impact, I think it does have some significance whether Trump specifically is on Twitter specifically.
Based on what I've seen so far, Elon is committed to making all these problems worse. For example, he wants to make blue checks cost $20/month, heightening their significance as a status marker instead of a scam-prevention tool. And he wants to bring back some very toxic right-wing people who spread hate and misinformation, instead of also banning the hateful leftist accounts (which is what you'd do if you wanted to create a more civil discussion space).
Yeap, banning the hateful accounts, right AND left wing, would be a better solution. Yet it was clear that previous management lacked willingness to do that.
Twitter, for good or bad, had become the epicenter of political and social discourse, and IMO such an important platform shouldn´t allow hateful content... but it shouldn´t have a political bias either. Which Twitter had.
Plus who decides what is hateful? Because sometimes I get the impression that hate ends up meaning "whatever the left seriously objects to", and that good-faith opinions which question some leftist dogmas are automatically labelled as hateful speech in order to gain hegemony in the social discourse. Meghan Murphy and JK Rowling´s cases come to mind, for example.
It may be my strong religious upbringing, which I fully discarded later on in life; but I distrust bishop-like figures, religious or secular, deciding what I should read and what I shouldn´t. Unfortunately, Twitter has been staffed with and managed by such secular bishops for a while. Welcome, Elon Musk.
The proper question is "What decides what is hateful?"
Culture sets the boundaries on what is hateful. There isn't a Moldbuggian "Cathedral" of a papacy and clergy enforcing doctrine and dogma -- if there were, you could actually point to a person, location and realm of authority. These people would be open about wielding authority. Like there literally was a time in history where the papacy and clergy could kill or physically torture heretics and deviants.
There was a time, not even that long ago, when racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. was given a pass if it was done in the service of humor or perhaps even civil liberties. (See the case of the Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois. The ACLU took the side of the Nazis, and the Nazis' legal advocate was Jewish.)
We're in a different time and place in 2022. Why? The people who bore the brunt of humor and performances of civil liberties pushed back. Not only that, but they won by asserting in some fashion that "My identity is not your punchline". This is a demand for dignity by people who don't have the demographic numbers or economic or social power to impose their will.
The cultural boundaries have shifted, much as a river can change course or a once-fertile soil can turn to desert.
What's happening right now is that left intellectuals have won important cultural battles because they got really good at critical thinking and they got really good at the savvy. (Anything derided as critical X theory is, by definition, thinking about a subject really hard and examining and re-examining previous knowledge.) The savvy means, instead of just seeing any kind of scientific or scholarly endeavor as a quest for "pure uncut truth", we're seeing a lot of arguments that make context fair play. Context includes things like power relations. Until recently, power relationships were taboo.
This all happened while the First Amendment is still in force and unchanged.
Example: JK Rowling as a "case"? To be clear, we're talking about the incredibly famous and fabulously wealthy creator of the Harry Potter franchise who for reasons decided to make her brand TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminism). That JK Rowling, right? Not JK Rowling the Denny's waitress who was plucked from anonymity for writing an offensive tweet, right?
But I'll cop to being disingenuous. Of course we're talking about the Harry Potter creator. She didn't become a Main Character that The Algorithm decided to pluck from obscurity for her turn in the barrel. She's unquestionably anti-trans. There are also more copies of Harry Potter books, more Harry Potter memorabilia, and more annual visitors to Harry Potter theme parks than there are self-identified or questioning trans individuals.
She was clearly beloved by generations of children, and even adults like parents, educators and librarians for instilling a love of reading in children. JK Rowling chose to invest that social capital in vilifying a very small group of people who have nowhere close to the power and influence she accumulated, and life is vastly harder for this identity.
Free speech is a dead issue in JK Rowling's case. JK Rowling is vilifed for anti-trans statements she clearly holds sincere. It was not about the performance of free speech, it's about the substance of free speech. A good-faith debate has both sides making comparable like-like arguments. Rowling's detractors are arguing against her transphobia; Rowling's supporters must defend her transphobia. It was never about, and is not, about the performance of anti-trans ideas, so the issue was never really free speech to begin with (hence dead). Free speech is a bad-faith misdirection tactic, because it's moral hostage-taking. Rowling's supporters don't have an intellectually solid defense of transphobia and/or lack the courage to advance that argument.
In the case of J.K. Rowling (and I will be happy to be corrected on this point), I haven’t seen any tweets of her that are hateful to trans people. Feel free to provide any and I will change my mind. It’s been a while and I forget the details, but in big lines what I saw was: 1) a few tweets questioning some of the spoiled-child-of-the-left dogmas on trans issues, followed by 2) lots of secular priests being offended and preaching their interpretation of what she actually meant and why that was hateful, followed by 3) a pile-on of secular pious who never read the actual tweets, followed by 3) the regular person accepting the conclusion readily provided (OMG, Rowling hates trans people).
I aim to form my opinions on evidence, not ideology, so I’ll be happy to change my mind on J.K. Rowling… if tweets are provided which are genuinely hateful (rather than blasphemous to the new secular religion). Because my recall was that this was yet another case of a neo-puritanical leftist mob chasing a classical-leftist heretic for woke blasphemy. Evidence of hateful tweets (her tweets, not someone’s interpretation of them) could change my mind, though. Feel free to provide with those, anyone.
The first tweet, and Glamour has a shot of it, is Rowling making light of an op-ed that used the phrase "people who menstruate" instead of women. Twitter being what it is, Rowling ended up becoming a main character. This tweet was published June 6, 2020 and generated 80,700 hearts and 27,600 replies. (Since I may have to have evidence of the tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313 ).
The remaining Glamour article caps how the saga unfolds. Most of the "Harry Potter" film actors distanced themselves from Rowling, but Robbie Coltrane rallied to her side. As did comedian Eddie Izzard, who identifies as genderfluid and uses she/her pronouns.
Rowling has received harassment and threats, too.
The controversy didn't end there, as she published a book in 2020 whose villain is a man who dresses as a woman to kill women. This year, she wrote a book (under a man's pen name) about a YouTuber hunted and killed by militant SJWs. She claims it's not a roman a clef.
This Vox article by Aja Romano, who identifies as nonbinary, is told from the POV of a Rowling fan who feels betrayed. https://www.vox.com/culture/21285396/jk-rowling-transphobic-backlash-harry-potter . Romano: "Rowling’s comment deeply hurt many of her millions of fans — including me. More importantly, it perpetuated the type of pernicious hate and misinformation that leads to trans women, especially teens and black trans women, becoming victims of sexual assault, violence, and hate crimes at an appallingly frequent rate."
That's just one person, you may say, but if her sentiment is shared by many in the trans community, then it's transphobic.
This is coming from a variety of sources, across times, across nations, across perspectives, across intentions. This is not a coordinated effort, in your imagination of a church of scoldful children. If it were children, that would be shockingly precocious of them to have such fully formed ideas. And the transphobes are losing to children! Major lol there.
What you are seeing here is free speech and its consequences in action. JK Rowling's free-speech rights are not in question. She makes her stance known. She's perfectly happy with the company she keeps (i.e., the same people who denounced her in her Harry Potter days as promoting satanism and witchcraft now lift her above their heads over a shared prejudice) and her comments are keeping her culturally relevant. So she does have an incentive, material or psychological, to bait her opponents.
JK Rowling isn't the only one who has rights. Once her ideas leave her mind and spread through the world, the free speech rights of the audience entitles them to think and feel about her message any way they wish -- as well as the right to counter.
Wow, this has been… enlightening. As I told you, I base my opinions on evidence. So here’s my most honest guess based on the (limited) available evidence:
You share, in good faith, an ideology which construes hate as any disagreement with woke dogmas, not unlike my childhood’s priests (also in good faith) construed blasphemy as disagreement with Christian dogmas. Tweets that question this woke secular religion are provided as evidence of hate, when they’re just a different view on the topic or plain disagreement.
And, based on this new evidence, I'm afraid I must tell you that my previous assessment of the J.K. Rowling issue remains:
1) a few tweets questioning some of the woke dogmas on trans issues, followed by 2) lots of secular priests being offended and preaching their interpretation of what she actually meant and why that was hateful, followed by 3) a pile-on of secular pious who never read the actual tweets, followed by 4) the regular person accepting the conclusion readily provided (“OMG, Rowling hates trans people”).
I refer you here to my early posts, where my message was: “provide clear evidence [of hate], and I will change my mind based on evidence [...], provide evidence of disagreement which you [construe] as hate, and I will [only] concede disagreement”... so I definitely concede disagreement: between you and me, and between JKR vs the woke.
It's been a pleasure. If you want to continue this, please provide ACTUAL hateful stuff written by JKR; or explain why any of these 5-6 tweets are actually hateful.
If I’ve missed any tweet you think important, please bring it to my attention. I’m happy to discuss any of them, but please be strategic in your choices. In these comments I’m giving you my view of 5-6 tweets. If there’s more that you find hateful, send me your, I dunno, top 3.
Regarding the links of people interpreting what Rowling actually meant: I’ll go with what JK Rowling actually wrote, not with the secular theologians’ analysis. These links provide an external narrative with the case pre-interpreted for me, even though I had mentioned being only interested in Rowling’s actual tweets. Not even your own interpretations (which I would be interested in) – other people’s interpretations. I can make my own mind, thank you very much, I don’t need the congregation’ support nor the priests’ analysis to interpret some tweets.
The twist (not tweet, twist) at the end of your comment is fascinating, by the way. You know, when the argument suddenly shifts to a defense of free speech. Now Rowling has the right to say what she thinks, her critics have the right to push back… Free speech for everyone. Truly fascinating change of gears.
TWEET 1: “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: How is this tweet inaccurate? People who menstruate have always been called women. So how is this hateful, other than by disagreeing with the new revealed religion of woke? Her point: why the need to avoid the word woman at all costs in the article? My answer: because the woke dogmas can’t be questioned.
TWEET 2: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth”.
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in disagreeing with the woke dogmas, how is this hateful? It’s not a rhetorical question, so feel free to answer: How is this hateful? Incidentally, what do we do with “I know and love trans people”? Conveniently ignore it?
TWEET 3: “The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women - i.e., to male violence - ‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences - is a nonsense”
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in disagreeing with the woke dogmas, how is this hateful? Again, it’s not a rhetorical question. And what do we do with “have been empathetic to trans people for decades”? Conveniently ignore it?
TWEET 4: “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so”.
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in disagreeing with the woke dogmas, how is this hateful? And what do we do with, errrr, HER WHOLE TWEET?
TWEET 5: "I've never felt as shouted down, ignored, and targeted as a lesbian *within* our supposed GLBT community as I have over the past couple of years."
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in her pointing out the bullying that she’s been the target of, where is the hate here, exactly?
These 5 are the ones written by her which appeared in the first article you linked. The rest in that article is what other people wrote. Then, below in that article, there’s another section which talks about a series of tweets she wrote in 2020. I’ve gone through it and – other than disagreement with the unquestionable dogmas of the secular woke religion – I didn’t find anything hateful. If you still think that something there is a clear example of hate, bring it up and I’ll be happy to discuss it.
Regarding the tweets which you specifically included with their direct link:
TWEET 1: I already handle that one with the analysis of 5 tweets (see other comment).
TWEET 2: "TERF wars". You have to help me out here. The link you added leads to a tweet which includes yet another link. That link leads to a location on her website. Which part of that link do you find hateful, exactly? All that I see in this tweet is irony, but feel free to point me to the hateful part.
I'm going to zero in on this second sentence. I've also screenshotted your whole comment in this Substack as well as the email. You know ... receipts.
"Feel free to provide any and I will change my mind."
I'm going to engage in a bit of lawyering here. I'm going to use the logic that got Elon in trouble by making him pay $44 billion for Twitter here.
What we have here is implied contract.
You've proposed that I have to find ("feel free") at least one ("any") tweet of author JK Rowling that are hateful to trans people.
I don't know who I am dealing with, and vice versa. I don't know if I go through the effort of finding a JK Rowling tweet, and you go back on your promise of delivering me a changed mind.
Linda, you *did* say "will". That's the action verb in your statement. As commonly understood in plain English, will expresses both a future tense and a declaration of definitiveness.
By your use of the word "will", you've effectively conceded your argument once I have produced evidence of at least one hateful-to-trans-people tweet by JK Rowling. I will go ahead and take possession now of your concession.
Funny, I just posted a reply which doesn't appear anywhere. Anyway, here's the gist of it:
Yes, I do change my mind based on empirical evidence. Provide evidence of hate and I will concede hate. Provide evidence of disagreement which you interpret as hate, and I will concede disagreement. Try to argue your interpretation of hate, and we'll discuss about it. Try to impose your interpretation of hate, and I will point out the authoritarian/totalitarian mindset implicit in it.
But provide clear evidence, and I will change my mind based on evidence. I'm a classical leftist, not a woke leftist. I operate from evidence and reason, not from ideology.
Plus I find hilarious that you felt the need to screenshot the comment. I do argue in good faith, why do you assume bad faith to begin with? Is it based on previous bad experiences? Are your perhaps projecting? I'd really like to know.
Speaking about basic critical thinking… "My identity is not your punchline" is a slogan which doesn’t hold very well under critical-thinking-scrutiny. Because the answer to that slogan is quite clear: “whether your identity is a punchline or not will really depend on what your identity is and on people’s sense of humor”.
There is a big difference between having “lesbian” as sexual identity and having “flying bicycle” as sexual identity. One of those will drive punchlines, and everyone knows which. The classical left would look at it critically, then would accept lesbian as normal and would question flying bicycle as either a joke, a metaphor, a narcissistic play, or a psychological delusion, depending on the case. The spoiled-child-of-the-left left will look at it dogmatically… and then try to suppress any view which dares to question that there’s a difference between lesbian and flying bicycle when it comes to sexual identity.
(Of course, if someone labels herself as dyke-on-a-bike, the jury is still out. I guess that it would be a silly joke for the classical left, or a PhD thesis in Gender Studies for the spoiled-child-of-the-left).
The classical left may have won important cultural battles, but the new left is like the spoiled child of the great warrior: because of his lineage, the spoiled child demands respect and obedience. And feels entitled to impose himself on others because he grew up seeing everyone saying ‘yes’ to his father. But when the spoiled child’s whims start getting really weird, many who may have respected his father’s conquests (such as myself) will strongly oppose the spoiled child’s capricious ideas. The classical left built its reputation on critical thinking and savvy, true. But the spoiled child of the left considers himself royalty and builds his reputation through the Royal Censor, exerting power and fear on those who dare to disagree.
Examples? Many. Substack is full with those. But I’ll give another one: Meghan Murphy being kicked out of Twitter for relying on basic Biology science to ask critical questions which the secular Twitter bishops deemed unacceptable.
The spoiled-child-left has become like the old-father-of-the-right: the same censorious attitude, the same authoritarian pulsion, the same labelling of disagreeing views as “dangerous”, the same drive to suppress them. That’s why it needs secular bishops to control the narrative – because it can’t accept any other critical thinking that the officially sanctioned. Discourse must be curated. People can’t be trusted. WE must decide what can be said and what can’t.
I don't know what Elon Musk will do or whether he'll succeed. But a platform like Twitter should not have a political bias.
Except the analogy doesn't work. You can name a bishop and the territory he oversees.
You can't name a single authoritative figure who caused culture to be what we are going through right now, just like you can't pinpoint the molecule of water that caused the river to change course.
All analogies break at some point, and the bishop one is not an exception to that. The water molecules vs river analogy, for example, also breaks when it conveniently ignores that culture is mediated through Key Opinion Leaders which DO change the river's course.
Within the limitations inherent to analogies… I can name a bishop (Vijaya Gadde) and the territory she oversaw (Twitter).
The fact that this (arch)bishop was removed has made many people very, very uncomfortable. Why? Because the archbishopric is now vacant and the forces of evil may take over her domains and jeopardize the prevalence of good Christian values. Well, it’s not Christian values anymore, it’s the new secular religion’s values. Different content, same religious structure. But, at that level, the analogy holds.
The whole problem is rooted in the ideology of absolute free speech. It's still very soi-disant, as there isn't even a definition of what constitutes a meaning of the term. It's content-free, so we have to project our perceptions onto "absolute free speech" in order to give it meaning.
I'll posit this definition of absolute free speech: No one or nothing shall impede information from reaching its maximum potential audience.
Agree or disagree?
Think of the implications of this definition. You can counterpose a definition of censorship to be any idea or action that impedes the flow of information. (Censorship, as practiced in society, has been to impede the flow of information both pre-emptively -- remove information before reaching its audience -- and after the fact by punishing creators, transmitters and recipients of information alike. Often with the force of law.)
Then you have the issue of moderation. Should moderation be conflated with censorship (i.e., is moderation merely the democratization of censorship)?
What if you consider moderation as the audience's and the transmitter's bill of rights? Absolute free speech would then revoke the audience's and transmitter's rights.
As an audience member or a media organization (transmitter), each person has two rights: 1) a right to receive information or to publicize it, and the negative 2) the right to refuse to receive or publicize information.
If you are a transmitter or recipient, both of your rights are lost and replaced with the obligation to listen and the obligation to publish.
This is the conundrum that Texas' HB 20 puts us in. State lawmakers in their desire to posture against censorship, went in the extreme opposite direction and created compelled speech and compelled exposure -- a mirror image of censorship.
Absolute free speech can go so many ways than just spam, which it's fair to say that we can all agree is loathsome.
The question "Is [X] free speech?" can serve as a fairly good firebreak for determining just how absolute free speech is. Just keep inserting some form of loathsome, dark, or violent conduct into the X.
Some off the top of my head:
* Is doxxing free speech?
* Is threatening violence free speech?
* Is publishing a manifesto in advance of an attack free speech?
* Is releasing nude photos of someone else free speech?
* Is encouraging people to commit suicide free speech?
* Is a Daesh beheading video free speech?
* Is livestreaming a mass shooting free speech?
Any and all of these is constitutionally protected speech, though in the case of suicide the advocate can be charged criminally. So what's the issue?
Ethically, by answering yes to any one of these questions, you're not only affirming the rights of the speech but also effectively endorsing the consequences of the speech.
In each of these behaviors, everyone from the doxxer to the nude photo leaker to the Daesh jihadi is looking for some form of validation or justification for a course of action they are determined to take.
Scary times we are in.
Now I'll pre-emptively say that censorship is wrong. I'm not calling on censorship to be a remedy, and absolute free speech and censorship is a false dichotomy; those extremes are not the only two possibilities we have.
Think about this: Without changing a single law or requiring any lawmaker or court to be involved, we should acknowledge the free speech rights of creators, media and audiences. As it stands, each of us as creator, publisher or audience member have both positive and negative rights of free speech.
We have the right to speak or to act as creators. We have the right to disseminate information as publishers. We have the right to receive information as an audience. We also have the right to not create or withhold information. We have the right to refuse to give others a platform. We also have the right to refuse to listen, as well as the right to take action against speech that may harm us.
We think that only the government is the one coming after our rights. When the government does it, the assault on our rights will be obvious. Free speech absolutism, though, is pernicious because it's a stealth attack to concede our negative rights. Once those are gone, rights get transformed into duties to publish and listen.
I have a theory that Twitter's toxic culture is really just a reflection of US political culture.
I'm a Canadian and spend a lot of time on Canadian political twitter -- and it just seems so much less toxic than US political twitter. From what I've seen, the same is true of political twitter in other countries, as well as the non-political parts of Twitter that I frequent.
But the main scene on Twitter is US politics -- US journalists, politicians, activists, pundits, etc. talking / yelling at each other. And this part of twitter is incredibly toxic *because US political culture is toxic*.
Do you think that this diffcompared to Americans is because Canadians are just "nicer" or because the range of allowable discourse is so much narrower there and Canadians are just more likely to stay within the boundaries of the CBC consensus?
I actually think the range of allowable discourse is much wider in Canada than in the United States. US media is very partisan. And US partisanship is very aggressive.
Consider Quebec's Bill 21 -- which bans turbans and hijabs in many settings. I don't think its unfair to imagine that if this was the US, Democrats would attack this bill as irredeemably racist, and the only proponents of the bill you'd see on CNN or MSNBC would be subject to verbal harassment by show hosts and other guests. But in Canada, the discussion is much more civil. There is little appetite to see pundits or politicians yell at each other and call each other racist. (That isn't necessarily a good think -- I mean, it is a racist law.)
Or consider the Emergencies Act Inquiry -- currently the big news story in Canada. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act -- which allows for a temporary suspension of civil liberties -- during the Trucker protests. Parliament is now investigating whether the law was justified. But unlike US media outlets reporting on the Jan 6 commission, the CBC and other mainstream Canadian media do not have obvious biases in their reporting.
I don't disagree on the discourse being more polite, on the Quebec law being racist and much else. It is more that personal freedom is more constrained there and the various human rights tribunals, etc. , limit what and how things can be discussed while the constained political discourse takes some topics like residential schools off the table for any perspective outside the received narative.
I don't agree that personal freedom is more constrained. There are some areas where that is definitely true (such as gun rights), but many others where the opposite is true (such as drugs, assisted dying, securities laws, government surveillance). In both countries, there are huge differences between different provinces/states.
Also, human rights tribunals typically work to increase personal freedom. Sometimes that comes at the cost of someone else's personal freedom, but I would argue that that is really more of a choice of how to balance competing demands for freedom, not restricting freedom.
Regarding residential schools: "residential schools were a good thing" is certainly not a take that gets a lot of coverage, but neither does the "slavery was a good thing" take in the US -- they just aren't popular opinions.
It goes back before Twitter was even born. The term "eternal September" was coined for the deluge of AOL users during the first dot-com era. When the internet was the province of college students, September was a time when new users would misbehave and then settle down and learn the mores of Usenet newsgroups, listservs, etc.
AOL and its free disks brought a torrent of boorish users who overwhelmed Usenet and discussion norms collapsed.
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a more Calvinistic interpretation of GIFT: We are all abject f---wads and our personalities were predestined to live on the internet. See https://www.escapistmagazine.com/on-multiplayer/ ; scroll to No. 5.
My hypothesis is that online discussions (on Twitter and elsewhere) that don't attract the interest of the US punditry tend to be much more civil, and that this is because the US chattering classes have a uniquely toxic culture.
It's like this everywhere, and not just because of American influence. It'll happen on ostensibly nonpolitical forums like sports and hobbies as well.
The problem is inherent in the nature of online discussions regardless of topic. I think of it as a community collapse theory. The more general the discussion, and the larger the audience, the worse the quality of comments get.
When you ask people where are the worst commenters, you usually get this list: YouTube, any newspaper, Yahoo News, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter. What they all have in common is platforms for a broad range of interests and large user networks.
Each of these has a tipping point where the commenter base grows too large to be able to carry on a conversation without inviting trolls, shitposters and other antisocial personalities into the fray. Also, once a conversation grows large, the most insightful or original ideas have already been stated and the conversation erodes into "uh huh" vs. "nuh uh."
It's really unavoidable, but digital technology incentivizes us to reach the largest audience possible while comment quality goes up within a narrow band of themes and a just-right pool of commenters who can have interesting disagreements but at the same time have a shared set of values.
My theory on this is that Twitter attracted journalists because it is great at disseminating breaking news. A single tweet by a journalist on the ground acts more like a bullhorn given its audience. All those journalists attracted the attention of people in communications, particularly in the world of business and politics. And that cosy elite naturally came to believe that their little society represented society at large. Eventually the day arrived when an even smaller society of trolls, SJWs, and tiny "mobs" realized that they could grab the bullhorn and send the elites running in fear.
It's like when Themistocles claimed that his little boy ruled the world, reasoning that the Athenians ruled the world, he ruled the Athenians, his wife ruled him, and his boy ruled his mother.
I hit 'post' too early. I wish to add that because this small elite mistook themselves as representative of society, when the trolls arrived, the elite assumed that the trolls, too, represented a significant portion of society. And so the journals propagated each kerfuffle, and businesses, politicians, and educational establishments all bowed to Lilliputian mobs.
All of this has had real-world effects. I don't think, for example, all the changes made to various forms and documents in order to cater to the sensibilities of the transgender could have happened without a tiny minority having wielded an outsized influence on the elites of Twitter. And this in turn indirectly drives the Right. Hardly any of us are 'on' Twitter apart from following the odd link, but it affects us all.
I have no idea of how changes to Twitter might effect any of this. But I don't foresee the elite leaving their little club, and I can't imagine how they can insulate themselves from the toxic parts of the platform.
There might also be something to Elon’s desire to crack down on bots. Not just their spam, but how they can like/retweet to boost content.
Who knows how much of Twitter’s viral behavior is being shaped by bad actors using bots to inflate likes and retweets. We already know that Russia has used social media to amplify extreme voices across the US political spectrum, particularly the far right, to heighten social division and animosity. Who knows what they’re currently doing. And there could be numerous other bad actors using bots to manipulate the Twitter experience. A bot crackdown could lead to less bile and vitriol, giving a more pleasant user experience.
Further, this is the type of change that would be difficult, if not impossible, to do as a public corporation. Such a crackdown on bots would significantly decrease Twitter's monthly active users (MAUs), a key metric by which social networks are judged. If a public corporation’s quarterly report announced a massive drop in MAUs then they’d be crucified in the market. This would likely also include a large drop in ad revenue since in pretending to be humans many bots will load the full webpage, including ads.
Yet as a private company Twitter could better weather the storm. There wouldn’t be public investors dumping the stock or demanding a change in management. While ad revenue would initially decrease, marketers would reevaluate the value of an ad impression with the knowledge that fewer ads are being shown to bots. We’d expect their ad analytics to show higher ROI on ad impressions since fewer are wasted on bots that will never buy a product. Over time, marketers would likely be willing to pay more for each impression and revenue would recover.
A practical question: how do you identify the bots? Can doing this be automated so that it takes Twitter less work and time to kill the bots than the bott parents to generate new ones?
How do you also identify bad actor bots from nonhuman scripts that provide useful information? There are some self-identified bots that compile Twitter threads; the USGS and some universities have bots that tweet out earthquake magnitudes; weather forecast bots; corporations will sometimes deploy bots as a customer service mechanism so that the complainer will get a canned response and instructions on next steps while on the company's end a complaint ticket is generated to be resolved.
These are all compliant with Twitter's TOS, generally self-identify as nonhuman, and would be costly to replace with a human just to be compliant. The job would be boring, too. Imagine the USGS having to hire three FTEs a day to watch seismographs and type in real-time quake/eruption/tsunami data.
I don't know; I've never used Twitter. But requiring all bots to pay $240 per year is either a revenue stream or an effective means of improving discourse.
In other words, turn Twitter into the post office.
The USPS literally depends on junk mail for its survival. It provides a plurality of its revenue and the vast majority of its volume (direct mail helps keeps the machines running and workers busy).
This account seems a little ahistorical to me. If I recall correctly, the retweet button wasn't invented out of thin air. It evolved from informal use of the "RT: <quote>" convention. People were already used to being able to reply/comment/etc from other medium like reddit/chats/etc so they just wanted to do that on Twitter. Twitter's original concept was kind of to not be that, but the public had other plans. Twitter reader / front-end software was already eliminating need to copy/paste and allowed one to use the retweet link structure to browse through connected tweets. Twitter adding the retweet button was yielding to popular/consumer demand, and we all knew that at the time. After a lot of forgetting, it seems there is this odd new narrative that it was some kind of game-changing yet irresponsible breakthrough (and Noah even knew the guy!). Feels like hubris.
I get that there's some difference between copy/paste vs retweet button, even if you could use a front-end/reader (not everyone will). Still, the reality would be Twitter pushing against the common-sense accommodation of this organic usage of their app. It's not a feature that they just "gave" or can just "take away" the way the blog seems to suggest.
"This includes trolls and sadists, divisive ideological agitators, foreign government operatives, and people with emotional problems who use Twitter battles as a substitute for therapy." this part. I have been talking about this for years. I have found on twitter so many young kids with problems and instead of asking for help in the real world they come to twitter and complain all the time about how the world is unfair, how their life is unfair, how they were X o Y, every single week there's someone who wants to kill himself/herself but never wants to talk or says she/he's going to deactivate for the only reason she/he wants to see if they miss him/her. It's really sad that as society we are seeking for people who we barely know's acceptance.
I tell some friends that they should block and mute the accounts they dont like but instead they reply to them and keep doing it for hours, they get angry and have headaches but they acts as if it's the end of the world if they dont reply back.
One thing I dislike the most about social networks and twitter mainly is the cancel culture, it's like you have bee a better person now than the old you from 10 years ago, people stalk all your tweets to see one simple mistake and cancel you. There's no longer improvement.
I admit, I...myself Im adicted to twitter, I have been for 13 years but I have been here because it's the only place where I can talk to others without worrying about not talking to them for years. I tend to ignore or not miss people in my real life (I have asperger which makes me less interested in meeting my friends in real life) and twitter is the only way for me to not get tired of talking to them or say "wait...going to take a break" but I can fix that .
Sorry if my english is not that well, im a spanish speaker and lately my english has been going downhill
Sorry Noah, that your timing was so bad -- this came out just as Elon retweeted a disgusting conspiracy theory story about Paul Pelosi, and the guy you praise for bringing reform to Twitter turns out to be a crypto person (not exactly a recommendation, especially if crypto turns out to be a ponzi , as I think it is).
There's a high probability that Musk makes things far worse. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, so let's look at Musk's past behavior on Twitter:
1.. He promoted medical misinformation about Covid-19.
2. He promoted vaccine disinformation.
3. He libeled a British cave diver who saved 13 kids trapped in a flooded cave by calling that heroic diver a "pedo" repeatedly because the diver correctly pointed out that Musk's suggestion to send a submarine was ludicrous and useless (that cave had passes barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through, zero visibility, strong currents, etc.
4. He helped spread disinformation about the attack on Paul Pelosi that was instantly adopted as cannon by Trump Republicans and Qanon idiots.
Prognosis: Twitter was in poor health before the introduction of this malignancy, and this will cripple it if not kill it.
Classic case of confirmation bias. The best predictor of future behaviour may be past behaviour, but you present a biased picture of his past behaviour, because you only look at the failures and not at the successes. Whenever anyone uses Paypal or charges their electric car, that´s all those tens of millions of people confirming Elon´s successes. Following your own hypothesis of past dictating the future, perhaps we should consider the possibility that Musk is correct in the big, long-term stuff (not my words - your own logic coupled with less biased evidence) and therefore his takeover of Twitter is a good development. Too early to know as a success, IMO, but also too early to know as a failure.
Plus please let´s not forget that, focusing on some of the failures you bring up, he´s up there in good company. Because public officials and mainstream media also promoted medical misinformation about covid-19 (yes, we were told first by the CDC and all mainstream media that masks did NOT work when a simple search on PubMed showed that they were lying; and I know that because I did that search AT THE TIME and I could see that they were lying to our faces, as proven when later they "changed their mind" without any change in the scientific evidence). And those official sources equally promoted vaccine disinformation when we were told that vaccines would prevent getting or transmitting covid, which according to a Pfizer´s official questioned by the EU hadn´t been tested clinically.
So, in the area of covid and vaccines misinformation, Elon Musk in good company up there with all the official and mainstream sources which we are asked to trust blindly. I, for one, will rather forgive Elon Musk for getting covid wrong - which he did - than public officials and mainstream media for lying about covid - which they also did.
Greg, in the case of No. 3, Musk won the defamation case. He insulted the guy, but a libel or defamation charge must be proved and the plaintiff failed.
2. Ian Danskin put together a series on YouTube under Innuendo Studios called "The Alt-Right Playbook." Each of the videos should be watched because the behaviors described aren't just the dark fringe of the alt-right. This has become the official comms strategy of Republicans, and most online interactions with mainstream rightwingers unfold in this way. These behaviors have sadly trickled up: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ
Let's cut to the chase and say it: Elon Musk is alt-right.
This is in the spirit of John Ganz's great "Enigma of Peter Thiel" Substack post: https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-enigma-of-peter-thiel . It's in the subhed: There Is No Enigma — He's a Fascist. Even his lede opens with "Peter Thiel is a fascist."
This is refreshing, because he was taking down a biographer who wanted to criticize Thiel without incurring his wrath by describing Thiel's politics in the most garden-pathy way possible.
The alt-right harbors a noxious ideology, but its more tech-savvy members hit upon that ironic and absurdist behavior is the best delivery mechanism for their worldview.
Musk, and Ye with his recent anti-semitism, are fully self-aware of these values. Musk and Ye also read the room, so their outbursts are timed and calculated. Musk and Ye also engage in behaviors that force media to look upon them and talk about them, thereby turning editorial and social media into pollinators.
I’m pretty much ready to give up on Twitter now. Elon can do what he wants with it. I really like what is going on with Substack. It helps me focus on stuff I really care about because I pay for it. Hopefully, in a couple years the rest of the good columnists I like will have moved over and they will improve the app. I like a Reddit a lot, too, for the same reasons. Regular social media is mostly a bunch of noise. Everyone I know who has given it up is glad they did.
I think Ben Thompson described an interesting plan for addressing Twitter’s content moderation and financial model on Apr 18 in his article, “Back to the Future of Twitter”. [1] His basic idea is to separate Twitter into a backend service that hosts content and a front end client that provides moderation and algorithmic curation. Twitter would then open the backend up so that anyone can develop their own client by paying for access.
The backend would do the minimal amount of moderation necessary to conform with the law in each jurisdiction and then provide optional services to the clients for more sophisticated moderation and algorithmic filtering and ranking. Twitter would continue to host their existing front end and possibly create more over time.
The idea is that the plethora of clients would allow for experimentation and meeting the diverse user preferences. You could have heavily moderated clients as well as wild west anything goes. While all clients would reference the same social graph and tweets/replies, each client could use whatever methods they want for filtering and ranking.
Some possible clients I’ve considered.
1. A client geared towards journalists and other prominent people that provides them with a layer that filters out harassment. This could include manual curation of their DMs, replies and retweets. The service would also have a team of lawyers for reporting credible threats of violence to law enforcement and sending cease-and-desist letters for proper libel. (Note this works well with Elon’s plan to require human identity verification, even for anonymous accounts.) This service would be expensive and geared towards people that value this layer of protection for professional reasons.
2. A client geared towards techies like myself that want to experiment with their own algorithms. While we’re a niche group, many of us would gladly pay quite a bit of money to support such a nerdy hobby. There’d be sharing and critique of each other's work as we toil to optimize our own Twitter experience. Over time some of the ideas might filter into other mainstream clients.
3. Partisan clients. Fox news could provide a client as could CNN. Even the DNC, RNC, and other parties could provide their preferred view of the social graph. They’d be openly filtering and ranking the social feed in a way that corresponds to the user's political preference.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2022/back-to-the-future-of-twitter/
That is interesting!!
Isn’t this basically just Reddit but with Twitter’s UI?
I think the "common backend" idea means that all tweets could potentially show up in any given client, which vary only based on filtering and prioritization. With Reddit, you'll only ever see cross-subreddit content if you're on the front page or it was manually x-posted to the subreddit you're viewing.
Sounds a bit like reddit's system? It's worked well in practice there, where toxic subreddit are kept isolated, or if they start to get out of control, shutdown entirely. Although this sounds even more disunified than that, which sort of kills the benefits of being on a single platform at all.
That's very similar to proposals I've seen for Google and other search engines. You want to split the mechanical and editorial. It could be part of an antitrust settlement if we ever enforced our antitrust laws.
This would undoubtedly be substantially better than the current situation, but it's an unstable situation that would probably trend toward greater censorship over time. Many of the people trying most to influence content moderation (e.g. much of Noah's "shouting class") doesn't just want to not see content they dislike, they don't want *anyone* to see it. (Think of social-conservative activists' attitude toward pornography or "grooming", or progressive activists' attitude toward "hate" or "misinformation".) So long as the backend is centralized, the company is *able* to censor whatever content they like by deleting it or blocking access to it, so any activist group that wants someone else censored will try to persuade or intimidate them into doing this, & unless the company is more dedicated to free speech than just about any major modern social media company today, the activist groups that are larger & more influential on them will have some degree of success. Once the backend has agreed to censorship of some things (or rather, some things other than commonly accepted exceptions like pornography & malicious harassment), they will no longer have a principle of free speech to follow, & so they will be more willing over time to agree to more censorship (e.g. Reddit's transition from the sort of backend moderation described in https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/reddit-general-manager-explains-why-he-wont-ban-c to that described in https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/reddit-ovarit-the-donald/617320/ ). Part of this issue is discussed further in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/ .
Interesting, but I don’t think Twitter’s back-end provides all that much value.
There are three possible outcomes
1) Elon makes Twitter better -> a win for society
2) Elon destroys Twitter -> a win for society
3) Elon somehow makes Twitter worse (probably impossible), thus making Twitter users suffer more -> a win for society
You forgot one:
4) Elon damages/destroys Twitter and the fiasco is so bad and controversial that it also discredits Elon Musk himself.
This is IMO the most likely outcome and also the outcome I'm personally rooting for.
(Did I sound like a toxic Twitter user there? My bad. I just really hate Elon Musk)
Eh, I don’t really think Musk can be discredited so long as either Tesla or SpaceX are so successful.
I don't experience Twitter as a hellscape. I block trolls (roughly, anyone whose aim is to cause trouble) immediately, and converse only with people with whom I can engage productively. I mute conversations and people who go on too long. I don't interact racists, but I routinely report them when I happen to run across them. I can't see Musk improving this.
I have done the same over the years. The result is that I don’t see the current reported uptick in the kinds of tweets that make it a hell scape.
Twitter, by enabling everyone to hear everyone else, is our Babelfish, which Douglas Adams explained was the cause for more wars than anything else in the universe because of this very quality.
It feels to me like the risk of allowing a bunch of terrible people back on the platform should have been mentioned here?
That’s not gonna have any significant impact. It just restores the left:right ratio of terrible people on there
There aren't yet any internet trolls on the left who have achieved "been elected President of the United States" levels of prominence. Twitter is this jumper cable connecting the very-online to the very-mainstream, in that context Trump's relationship to Twitter really is unique. So while I basically agree that who Elon lets back shouldn't have any significant impact, I think it does have some significance whether Trump specifically is on Twitter specifically.
Do I infer correctly that the argument is that yes, it´s okay if Twitter is biased politically towards the left?
Based on what I've seen so far, Elon is committed to making all these problems worse. For example, he wants to make blue checks cost $20/month, heightening their significance as a status marker instead of a scam-prevention tool. And he wants to bring back some very toxic right-wing people who spread hate and misinformation, instead of also banning the hateful leftist accounts (which is what you'd do if you wanted to create a more civil discussion space).
Yeap, banning the hateful accounts, right AND left wing, would be a better solution. Yet it was clear that previous management lacked willingness to do that.
Twitter, for good or bad, had become the epicenter of political and social discourse, and IMO such an important platform shouldn´t allow hateful content... but it shouldn´t have a political bias either. Which Twitter had.
Plus who decides what is hateful? Because sometimes I get the impression that hate ends up meaning "whatever the left seriously objects to", and that good-faith opinions which question some leftist dogmas are automatically labelled as hateful speech in order to gain hegemony in the social discourse. Meghan Murphy and JK Rowling´s cases come to mind, for example.
It may be my strong religious upbringing, which I fully discarded later on in life; but I distrust bishop-like figures, religious or secular, deciding what I should read and what I shouldn´t. Unfortunately, Twitter has been staffed with and managed by such secular bishops for a while. Welcome, Elon Musk.
The proper question is "What decides what is hateful?"
Culture sets the boundaries on what is hateful. There isn't a Moldbuggian "Cathedral" of a papacy and clergy enforcing doctrine and dogma -- if there were, you could actually point to a person, location and realm of authority. These people would be open about wielding authority. Like there literally was a time in history where the papacy and clergy could kill or physically torture heretics and deviants.
There was a time, not even that long ago, when racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. was given a pass if it was done in the service of humor or perhaps even civil liberties. (See the case of the Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois. The ACLU took the side of the Nazis, and the Nazis' legal advocate was Jewish.)
We're in a different time and place in 2022. Why? The people who bore the brunt of humor and performances of civil liberties pushed back. Not only that, but they won by asserting in some fashion that "My identity is not your punchline". This is a demand for dignity by people who don't have the demographic numbers or economic or social power to impose their will.
The cultural boundaries have shifted, much as a river can change course or a once-fertile soil can turn to desert.
What's happening right now is that left intellectuals have won important cultural battles because they got really good at critical thinking and they got really good at the savvy. (Anything derided as critical X theory is, by definition, thinking about a subject really hard and examining and re-examining previous knowledge.) The savvy means, instead of just seeing any kind of scientific or scholarly endeavor as a quest for "pure uncut truth", we're seeing a lot of arguments that make context fair play. Context includes things like power relations. Until recently, power relationships were taboo.
This all happened while the First Amendment is still in force and unchanged.
Example: JK Rowling as a "case"? To be clear, we're talking about the incredibly famous and fabulously wealthy creator of the Harry Potter franchise who for reasons decided to make her brand TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminism). That JK Rowling, right? Not JK Rowling the Denny's waitress who was plucked from anonymity for writing an offensive tweet, right?
But I'll cop to being disingenuous. Of course we're talking about the Harry Potter creator. She didn't become a Main Character that The Algorithm decided to pluck from obscurity for her turn in the barrel. She's unquestionably anti-trans. There are also more copies of Harry Potter books, more Harry Potter memorabilia, and more annual visitors to Harry Potter theme parks than there are self-identified or questioning trans individuals.
She was clearly beloved by generations of children, and even adults like parents, educators and librarians for instilling a love of reading in children. JK Rowling chose to invest that social capital in vilifying a very small group of people who have nowhere close to the power and influence she accumulated, and life is vastly harder for this identity.
Free speech is a dead issue in JK Rowling's case. JK Rowling is vilifed for anti-trans statements she clearly holds sincere. It was not about the performance of free speech, it's about the substance of free speech. A good-faith debate has both sides making comparable like-like arguments. Rowling's detractors are arguing against her transphobia; Rowling's supporters must defend her transphobia. It was never about, and is not, about the performance of anti-trans ideas, so the issue was never really free speech to begin with (hence dead). Free speech is a bad-faith misdirection tactic, because it's moral hostage-taking. Rowling's supporters don't have an intellectually solid defense of transphobia and/or lack the courage to advance that argument.
In the case of J.K. Rowling (and I will be happy to be corrected on this point), I haven’t seen any tweets of her that are hateful to trans people. Feel free to provide any and I will change my mind. It’s been a while and I forget the details, but in big lines what I saw was: 1) a few tweets questioning some of the spoiled-child-of-the-left dogmas on trans issues, followed by 2) lots of secular priests being offended and preaching their interpretation of what she actually meant and why that was hateful, followed by 3) a pile-on of secular pious who never read the actual tweets, followed by 3) the regular person accepting the conclusion readily provided (OMG, Rowling hates trans people).
I aim to form my opinions on evidence, not ideology, so I’ll be happy to change my mind on J.K. Rowling… if tweets are provided which are genuinely hateful (rather than blasphemous to the new secular religion). Because my recall was that this was yet another case of a neo-puritanical leftist mob chasing a classical-leftist heretic for woke blasphemy. Evidence of hateful tweets (her tweets, not someone’s interpretation of them) could change my mind, though. Feel free to provide with those, anyone.
And now, the receipts.
I only had to produce any, which could be just one, tweet and Linda by implication conceded the argument ("will change my mind").
I'm going to do the extra credit and not only show a tweet, but also provide context by news coverage of JK Rowling's transphobic comments.
We can start with Glamour Magazine's Oct. 14, 2022 post, https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy . This is one that provides the chronology of how JK Rowling ended up in this controversy and how over time she came to lean in to her beliefs. This is a good place to start.
The first tweet, and Glamour has a shot of it, is Rowling making light of an op-ed that used the phrase "people who menstruate" instead of women. Twitter being what it is, Rowling ended up becoming a main character. This tweet was published June 6, 2020 and generated 80,700 hearts and 27,600 replies. (Since I may have to have evidence of the tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313 ).
Then there are more, but perhaps Rowling's crossing-the-Rubicon tweet was her "TERF wars" article on her personal website on June 10, 2020 with 55,500 likes ( https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1270749170215903232?s=20 ).
The remaining Glamour article caps how the saga unfolds. Most of the "Harry Potter" film actors distanced themselves from Rowling, but Robbie Coltrane rallied to her side. As did comedian Eddie Izzard, who identifies as genderfluid and uses she/her pronouns.
Rowling has received harassment and threats, too.
The controversy didn't end there, as she published a book in 2020 whose villain is a man who dresses as a woman to kill women. This year, she wrote a book (under a man's pen name) about a YouTuber hunted and killed by militant SJWs. She claims it's not a roman a clef.
This Vox article by Aja Romano, who identifies as nonbinary, is told from the POV of a Rowling fan who feels betrayed. https://www.vox.com/culture/21285396/jk-rowling-transphobic-backlash-harry-potter . Romano: "Rowling’s comment deeply hurt many of her millions of fans — including me. More importantly, it perpetuated the type of pernicious hate and misinformation that leads to trans women, especially teens and black trans women, becoming victims of sexual assault, violence, and hate crimes at an appallingly frequent rate."
That's just one person, you may say, but if her sentiment is shared by many in the trans community, then it's transphobic.
LGBT newsmagazine the Advocate reports on Rowling's controversy, but the headline uses "transphobic", implicating guilt. Lots of tweets within! https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2021/12/13/jk-rowling-casts-transphobic-tweets-again
More tweets from Scottish newspaper the Scotsman in a Nov. 16, 2020 article. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/jk-rowling-on-twitter-why-the-harry-potter-author-has-been-accused-of-transphobia-on-social-media-platforms-2877977 . There's a subheadline of why Rowling's tweets were called transphobic, over the people who menstruate comment. (Turns out, there are exceptions to the rule of menses being essentially women-only.)
Fashion magazine Allure: "7 Tweets That Perfectly Sum Up What JK Rowling Gets Wrong About Trans People" https://www.allure.com/story/jk-rowling-transphobic-tweets .
This is coming from a variety of sources, across times, across nations, across perspectives, across intentions. This is not a coordinated effort, in your imagination of a church of scoldful children. If it were children, that would be shockingly precocious of them to have such fully formed ideas. And the transphobes are losing to children! Major lol there.
What you are seeing here is free speech and its consequences in action. JK Rowling's free-speech rights are not in question. She makes her stance known. She's perfectly happy with the company she keeps (i.e., the same people who denounced her in her Harry Potter days as promoting satanism and witchcraft now lift her above their heads over a shared prejudice) and her comments are keeping her culturally relevant. So she does have an incentive, material or psychological, to bait her opponents.
JK Rowling isn't the only one who has rights. Once her ideas leave her mind and spread through the world, the free speech rights of the audience entitles them to think and feel about her message any way they wish -- as well as the right to counter.
Wow, this has been… enlightening. As I told you, I base my opinions on evidence. So here’s my most honest guess based on the (limited) available evidence:
You share, in good faith, an ideology which construes hate as any disagreement with woke dogmas, not unlike my childhood’s priests (also in good faith) construed blasphemy as disagreement with Christian dogmas. Tweets that question this woke secular religion are provided as evidence of hate, when they’re just a different view on the topic or plain disagreement.
And, based on this new evidence, I'm afraid I must tell you that my previous assessment of the J.K. Rowling issue remains:
1) a few tweets questioning some of the woke dogmas on trans issues, followed by 2) lots of secular priests being offended and preaching their interpretation of what she actually meant and why that was hateful, followed by 3) a pile-on of secular pious who never read the actual tweets, followed by 4) the regular person accepting the conclusion readily provided (“OMG, Rowling hates trans people”).
I refer you here to my early posts, where my message was: “provide clear evidence [of hate], and I will change my mind based on evidence [...], provide evidence of disagreement which you [construe] as hate, and I will [only] concede disagreement”... so I definitely concede disagreement: between you and me, and between JKR vs the woke.
It's been a pleasure. If you want to continue this, please provide ACTUAL hateful stuff written by JKR; or explain why any of these 5-6 tweets are actually hateful.
If I’ve missed any tweet you think important, please bring it to my attention. I’m happy to discuss any of them, but please be strategic in your choices. In these comments I’m giving you my view of 5-6 tweets. If there’s more that you find hateful, send me your, I dunno, top 3.
Regarding the links of people interpreting what Rowling actually meant: I’ll go with what JK Rowling actually wrote, not with the secular theologians’ analysis. These links provide an external narrative with the case pre-interpreted for me, even though I had mentioned being only interested in Rowling’s actual tweets. Not even your own interpretations (which I would be interested in) – other people’s interpretations. I can make my own mind, thank you very much, I don’t need the congregation’ support nor the priests’ analysis to interpret some tweets.
The twist (not tweet, twist) at the end of your comment is fascinating, by the way. You know, when the argument suddenly shifts to a defense of free speech. Now Rowling has the right to say what she thinks, her critics have the right to push back… Free speech for everyone. Truly fascinating change of gears.
From the first article you linked to:
TWEET 1: “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: How is this tweet inaccurate? People who menstruate have always been called women. So how is this hateful, other than by disagreeing with the new revealed religion of woke? Her point: why the need to avoid the word woman at all costs in the article? My answer: because the woke dogmas can’t be questioned.
TWEET 2: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth”.
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in disagreeing with the woke dogmas, how is this hateful? It’s not a rhetorical question, so feel free to answer: How is this hateful? Incidentally, what do we do with “I know and love trans people”? Conveniently ignore it?
TWEET 3: “The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women - i.e., to male violence - ‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences - is a nonsense”
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in disagreeing with the woke dogmas, how is this hateful? Again, it’s not a rhetorical question. And what do we do with “have been empathetic to trans people for decades”? Conveniently ignore it?
TWEET 4: “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so”.
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in disagreeing with the woke dogmas, how is this hateful? And what do we do with, errrr, HER WHOLE TWEET?
TWEET 5: "I've never felt as shouted down, ignored, and targeted as a lesbian *within* our supposed GLBT community as I have over the past couple of years."
ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE: Other than in her pointing out the bullying that she’s been the target of, where is the hate here, exactly?
These 5 are the ones written by her which appeared in the first article you linked. The rest in that article is what other people wrote. Then, below in that article, there’s another section which talks about a series of tweets she wrote in 2020. I’ve gone through it and – other than disagreement with the unquestionable dogmas of the secular woke religion – I didn’t find anything hateful. If you still think that something there is a clear example of hate, bring it up and I’ll be happy to discuss it.
Regarding the tweets which you specifically included with their direct link:
TWEET 1: I already handle that one with the analysis of 5 tweets (see other comment).
TWEET 2: "TERF wars". You have to help me out here. The link you added leads to a tweet which includes yet another link. That link leads to a location on her website. Which part of that link do you find hateful, exactly? All that I see in this tweet is irony, but feel free to point me to the hateful part.
I'm going to zero in on this second sentence. I've also screenshotted your whole comment in this Substack as well as the email. You know ... receipts.
"Feel free to provide any and I will change my mind."
I'm going to engage in a bit of lawyering here. I'm going to use the logic that got Elon in trouble by making him pay $44 billion for Twitter here.
What we have here is implied contract.
You've proposed that I have to find ("feel free") at least one ("any") tweet of author JK Rowling that are hateful to trans people.
I don't know who I am dealing with, and vice versa. I don't know if I go through the effort of finding a JK Rowling tweet, and you go back on your promise of delivering me a changed mind.
Linda, you *did* say "will". That's the action verb in your statement. As commonly understood in plain English, will expresses both a future tense and a declaration of definitiveness.
By your use of the word "will", you've effectively conceded your argument once I have produced evidence of at least one hateful-to-trans-people tweet by JK Rowling. I will go ahead and take possession now of your concession.
Stay tuned. [*fiendishly twirling moustache*]
Funny, I just posted a reply which doesn't appear anywhere. Anyway, here's the gist of it:
Yes, I do change my mind based on empirical evidence. Provide evidence of hate and I will concede hate. Provide evidence of disagreement which you interpret as hate, and I will concede disagreement. Try to argue your interpretation of hate, and we'll discuss about it. Try to impose your interpretation of hate, and I will point out the authoritarian/totalitarian mindset implicit in it.
But provide clear evidence, and I will change my mind based on evidence. I'm a classical leftist, not a woke leftist. I operate from evidence and reason, not from ideology.
Plus I find hilarious that you felt the need to screenshot the comment. I do argue in good faith, why do you assume bad faith to begin with? Is it based on previous bad experiences? Are your perhaps projecting? I'd really like to know.
Speaking about basic critical thinking… "My identity is not your punchline" is a slogan which doesn’t hold very well under critical-thinking-scrutiny. Because the answer to that slogan is quite clear: “whether your identity is a punchline or not will really depend on what your identity is and on people’s sense of humor”.
There is a big difference between having “lesbian” as sexual identity and having “flying bicycle” as sexual identity. One of those will drive punchlines, and everyone knows which. The classical left would look at it critically, then would accept lesbian as normal and would question flying bicycle as either a joke, a metaphor, a narcissistic play, or a psychological delusion, depending on the case. The spoiled-child-of-the-left left will look at it dogmatically… and then try to suppress any view which dares to question that there’s a difference between lesbian and flying bicycle when it comes to sexual identity.
(Of course, if someone labels herself as dyke-on-a-bike, the jury is still out. I guess that it would be a silly joke for the classical left, or a PhD thesis in Gender Studies for the spoiled-child-of-the-left).
The classical left may have won important cultural battles, but the new left is like the spoiled child of the great warrior: because of his lineage, the spoiled child demands respect and obedience. And feels entitled to impose himself on others because he grew up seeing everyone saying ‘yes’ to his father. But when the spoiled child’s whims start getting really weird, many who may have respected his father’s conquests (such as myself) will strongly oppose the spoiled child’s capricious ideas. The classical left built its reputation on critical thinking and savvy, true. But the spoiled child of the left considers himself royalty and builds his reputation through the Royal Censor, exerting power and fear on those who dare to disagree.
Examples? Many. Substack is full with those. But I’ll give another one: Meghan Murphy being kicked out of Twitter for relying on basic Biology science to ask critical questions which the secular Twitter bishops deemed unacceptable.
The spoiled-child-left has become like the old-father-of-the-right: the same censorious attitude, the same authoritarian pulsion, the same labelling of disagreeing views as “dangerous”, the same drive to suppress them. That’s why it needs secular bishops to control the narrative – because it can’t accept any other critical thinking that the officially sanctioned. Discourse must be curated. People can’t be trusted. WE must decide what can be said and what can’t.
I don't know what Elon Musk will do or whether he'll succeed. But a platform like Twitter should not have a political bias.
The "secular bishop", I like that. Maybe that's my Catholic upbringing that I left behind very early creeping in.
Except the analogy doesn't work. You can name a bishop and the territory he oversees.
You can't name a single authoritative figure who caused culture to be what we are going through right now, just like you can't pinpoint the molecule of water that caused the river to change course.
All analogies break at some point, and the bishop one is not an exception to that. The water molecules vs river analogy, for example, also breaks when it conveniently ignores that culture is mediated through Key Opinion Leaders which DO change the river's course.
Within the limitations inherent to analogies… I can name a bishop (Vijaya Gadde) and the territory she oversaw (Twitter).
The fact that this (arch)bishop was removed has made many people very, very uncomfortable. Why? Because the archbishopric is now vacant and the forces of evil may take over her domains and jeopardize the prevalence of good Christian values. Well, it’s not Christian values anymore, it’s the new secular religion’s values. Different content, same religious structure. But, at that level, the analogy holds.
The whole problem is rooted in the ideology of absolute free speech. It's still very soi-disant, as there isn't even a definition of what constitutes a meaning of the term. It's content-free, so we have to project our perceptions onto "absolute free speech" in order to give it meaning.
I'll posit this definition of absolute free speech: No one or nothing shall impede information from reaching its maximum potential audience.
Agree or disagree?
Think of the implications of this definition. You can counterpose a definition of censorship to be any idea or action that impedes the flow of information. (Censorship, as practiced in society, has been to impede the flow of information both pre-emptively -- remove information before reaching its audience -- and after the fact by punishing creators, transmitters and recipients of information alike. Often with the force of law.)
Then you have the issue of moderation. Should moderation be conflated with censorship (i.e., is moderation merely the democratization of censorship)?
What if you consider moderation as the audience's and the transmitter's bill of rights? Absolute free speech would then revoke the audience's and transmitter's rights.
As an audience member or a media organization (transmitter), each person has two rights: 1) a right to receive information or to publicize it, and the negative 2) the right to refuse to receive or publicize information.
If you are a transmitter or recipient, both of your rights are lost and replaced with the obligation to listen and the obligation to publish.
This is the conundrum that Texas' HB 20 puts us in. State lawmakers in their desire to posture against censorship, went in the extreme opposite direction and created compelled speech and compelled exposure -- a mirror image of censorship.
The reductio ad absurdum of "absolute free speech" is spam. No moderation or filtering means the only participants you get are spambots.
Absolute free speech can go so many ways than just spam, which it's fair to say that we can all agree is loathsome.
The question "Is [X] free speech?" can serve as a fairly good firebreak for determining just how absolute free speech is. Just keep inserting some form of loathsome, dark, or violent conduct into the X.
Some off the top of my head:
* Is doxxing free speech?
* Is threatening violence free speech?
* Is publishing a manifesto in advance of an attack free speech?
* Is releasing nude photos of someone else free speech?
* Is encouraging people to commit suicide free speech?
* Is a Daesh beheading video free speech?
* Is livestreaming a mass shooting free speech?
Any and all of these is constitutionally protected speech, though in the case of suicide the advocate can be charged criminally. So what's the issue?
Ethically, by answering yes to any one of these questions, you're not only affirming the rights of the speech but also effectively endorsing the consequences of the speech.
In each of these behaviors, everyone from the doxxer to the nude photo leaker to the Daesh jihadi is looking for some form of validation or justification for a course of action they are determined to take.
Scary times we are in.
Now I'll pre-emptively say that censorship is wrong. I'm not calling on censorship to be a remedy, and absolute free speech and censorship is a false dichotomy; those extremes are not the only two possibilities we have.
Think about this: Without changing a single law or requiring any lawmaker or court to be involved, we should acknowledge the free speech rights of creators, media and audiences. As it stands, each of us as creator, publisher or audience member have both positive and negative rights of free speech.
We have the right to speak or to act as creators. We have the right to disseminate information as publishers. We have the right to receive information as an audience. We also have the right to not create or withhold information. We have the right to refuse to give others a platform. We also have the right to refuse to listen, as well as the right to take action against speech that may harm us.
We think that only the government is the one coming after our rights. When the government does it, the assault on our rights will be obvious. Free speech absolutism, though, is pernicious because it's a stealth attack to concede our negative rights. Once those are gone, rights get transformed into duties to publish and listen.
At one point, I was planning to die without owning a cell phone. That didn't work out.
But, I'm still planning to die without having sent a single tweet. My chances of achieving this goal look better every day.
I have a theory that Twitter's toxic culture is really just a reflection of US political culture.
I'm a Canadian and spend a lot of time on Canadian political twitter -- and it just seems so much less toxic than US political twitter. From what I've seen, the same is true of political twitter in other countries, as well as the non-political parts of Twitter that I frequent.
But the main scene on Twitter is US politics -- US journalists, politicians, activists, pundits, etc. talking / yelling at each other. And this part of twitter is incredibly toxic *because US political culture is toxic*.
Do you think that this diffcompared to Americans is because Canadians are just "nicer" or because the range of allowable discourse is so much narrower there and Canadians are just more likely to stay within the boundaries of the CBC consensus?
I actually think the range of allowable discourse is much wider in Canada than in the United States. US media is very partisan. And US partisanship is very aggressive.
Consider Quebec's Bill 21 -- which bans turbans and hijabs in many settings. I don't think its unfair to imagine that if this was the US, Democrats would attack this bill as irredeemably racist, and the only proponents of the bill you'd see on CNN or MSNBC would be subject to verbal harassment by show hosts and other guests. But in Canada, the discussion is much more civil. There is little appetite to see pundits or politicians yell at each other and call each other racist. (That isn't necessarily a good think -- I mean, it is a racist law.)
Or consider the Emergencies Act Inquiry -- currently the big news story in Canada. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act -- which allows for a temporary suspension of civil liberties -- during the Trucker protests. Parliament is now investigating whether the law was justified. But unlike US media outlets reporting on the Jan 6 commission, the CBC and other mainstream Canadian media do not have obvious biases in their reporting.
I don't disagree on the discourse being more polite, on the Quebec law being racist and much else. It is more that personal freedom is more constrained there and the various human rights tribunals, etc. , limit what and how things can be discussed while the constained political discourse takes some topics like residential schools off the table for any perspective outside the received narative.
I don't agree that personal freedom is more constrained. There are some areas where that is definitely true (such as gun rights), but many others where the opposite is true (such as drugs, assisted dying, securities laws, government surveillance). In both countries, there are huge differences between different provinces/states.
Also, human rights tribunals typically work to increase personal freedom. Sometimes that comes at the cost of someone else's personal freedom, but I would argue that that is really more of a choice of how to balance competing demands for freedom, not restricting freedom.
Regarding residential schools: "residential schools were a good thing" is certainly not a take that gets a lot of coverage, but neither does the "slavery was a good thing" take in the US -- they just aren't popular opinions.
Canadians can own guns and have diversity. They also don't shoot each other in the street.
Well not handguns anymore...
Diversity is similar in both countries. The bigger difference is in the cities you compare.
It goes back before Twitter was even born. The term "eternal September" was coined for the deluge of AOL users during the first dot-com era. When the internet was the province of college students, September was a time when new users would misbehave and then settle down and learn the mores of Usenet newsgroups, listservs, etc.
AOL and its free disks brought a torrent of boorish users who overwhelmed Usenet and discussion norms collapsed.
A decade later John Gabriel coined GIFT (the Greater Internet F---wad Theory) in a Penny Arcade web comic. Behold the comic in all its glory: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a more Calvinistic interpretation of GIFT: We are all abject f---wads and our personalities were predestined to live on the internet. See https://www.escapistmagazine.com/on-multiplayer/ ; scroll to No. 5.
My hypothesis is that online discussions (on Twitter and elsewhere) that don't attract the interest of the US punditry tend to be much more civil, and that this is because the US chattering classes have a uniquely toxic culture.
It's like this everywhere, and not just because of American influence. It'll happen on ostensibly nonpolitical forums like sports and hobbies as well.
The problem is inherent in the nature of online discussions regardless of topic. I think of it as a community collapse theory. The more general the discussion, and the larger the audience, the worse the quality of comments get.
When you ask people where are the worst commenters, you usually get this list: YouTube, any newspaper, Yahoo News, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter. What they all have in common is platforms for a broad range of interests and large user networks.
Each of these has a tipping point where the commenter base grows too large to be able to carry on a conversation without inviting trolls, shitposters and other antisocial personalities into the fray. Also, once a conversation grows large, the most insightful or original ideas have already been stated and the conversation erodes into "uh huh" vs. "nuh uh."
It's really unavoidable, but digital technology incentivizes us to reach the largest audience possible while comment quality goes up within a narrow band of themes and a just-right pool of commenters who can have interesting disagreements but at the same time have a shared set of values.
My theory on this is that Twitter attracted journalists because it is great at disseminating breaking news. A single tweet by a journalist on the ground acts more like a bullhorn given its audience. All those journalists attracted the attention of people in communications, particularly in the world of business and politics. And that cosy elite naturally came to believe that their little society represented society at large. Eventually the day arrived when an even smaller society of trolls, SJWs, and tiny "mobs" realized that they could grab the bullhorn and send the elites running in fear.
It's like when Themistocles claimed that his little boy ruled the world, reasoning that the Athenians ruled the world, he ruled the Athenians, his wife ruled him, and his boy ruled his mother.
I hit 'post' too early. I wish to add that because this small elite mistook themselves as representative of society, when the trolls arrived, the elite assumed that the trolls, too, represented a significant portion of society. And so the journals propagated each kerfuffle, and businesses, politicians, and educational establishments all bowed to Lilliputian mobs.
All of this has had real-world effects. I don't think, for example, all the changes made to various forms and documents in order to cater to the sensibilities of the transgender could have happened without a tiny minority having wielded an outsized influence on the elites of Twitter. And this in turn indirectly drives the Right. Hardly any of us are 'on' Twitter apart from following the odd link, but it affects us all.
I have no idea of how changes to Twitter might effect any of this. But I don't foresee the elite leaving their little club, and I can't imagine how they can insulate themselves from the toxic parts of the platform.
There might also be something to Elon’s desire to crack down on bots. Not just their spam, but how they can like/retweet to boost content.
Who knows how much of Twitter’s viral behavior is being shaped by bad actors using bots to inflate likes and retweets. We already know that Russia has used social media to amplify extreme voices across the US political spectrum, particularly the far right, to heighten social division and animosity. Who knows what they’re currently doing. And there could be numerous other bad actors using bots to manipulate the Twitter experience. A bot crackdown could lead to less bile and vitriol, giving a more pleasant user experience.
Further, this is the type of change that would be difficult, if not impossible, to do as a public corporation. Such a crackdown on bots would significantly decrease Twitter's monthly active users (MAUs), a key metric by which social networks are judged. If a public corporation’s quarterly report announced a massive drop in MAUs then they’d be crucified in the market. This would likely also include a large drop in ad revenue since in pretending to be humans many bots will load the full webpage, including ads.
Yet as a private company Twitter could better weather the storm. There wouldn’t be public investors dumping the stock or demanding a change in management. While ad revenue would initially decrease, marketers would reevaluate the value of an ad impression with the knowledge that fewer ads are being shown to bots. We’d expect their ad analytics to show higher ROI on ad impressions since fewer are wasted on bots that will never buy a product. Over time, marketers would likely be willing to pay more for each impression and revenue would recover.
A practical question: how do you identify the bots? Can doing this be automated so that it takes Twitter less work and time to kill the bots than the bott parents to generate new ones?
How do you also identify bad actor bots from nonhuman scripts that provide useful information? There are some self-identified bots that compile Twitter threads; the USGS and some universities have bots that tweet out earthquake magnitudes; weather forecast bots; corporations will sometimes deploy bots as a customer service mechanism so that the complainer will get a canned response and instructions on next steps while on the company's end a complaint ticket is generated to be resolved.
These are all compliant with Twitter's TOS, generally self-identify as nonhuman, and would be costly to replace with a human just to be compliant. The job would be boring, too. Imagine the USGS having to hire three FTEs a day to watch seismographs and type in real-time quake/eruption/tsunami data.
"Block unblued by default" might help?
I don't know; I've never used Twitter. But requiring all bots to pay $240 per year is either a revenue stream or an effective means of improving discourse.
It probably won't happen, though.
In other words, turn Twitter into the post office.
The USPS literally depends on junk mail for its survival. It provides a plurality of its revenue and the vast majority of its volume (direct mail helps keeps the machines running and workers busy).
"...the inventor of the retweet button."
This account seems a little ahistorical to me. If I recall correctly, the retweet button wasn't invented out of thin air. It evolved from informal use of the "RT: <quote>" convention. People were already used to being able to reply/comment/etc from other medium like reddit/chats/etc so they just wanted to do that on Twitter. Twitter's original concept was kind of to not be that, but the public had other plans. Twitter reader / front-end software was already eliminating need to copy/paste and allowed one to use the retweet link structure to browse through connected tweets. Twitter adding the retweet button was yielding to popular/consumer demand, and we all knew that at the time. After a lot of forgetting, it seems there is this odd new narrative that it was some kind of game-changing yet irresponsible breakthrough (and Noah even knew the guy!). Feels like hubris.
I get that there's some difference between copy/paste vs retweet button, even if you could use a front-end/reader (not everyone will). Still, the reality would be Twitter pushing against the common-sense accommodation of this organic usage of their app. It's not a feature that they just "gave" or can just "take away" the way the blog seems to suggest.
Noah: How familiar are you with Mastodon? It actually does have T&Cs it sticks to where Twitter doesn't.
"This includes trolls and sadists, divisive ideological agitators, foreign government operatives, and people with emotional problems who use Twitter battles as a substitute for therapy." this part. I have been talking about this for years. I have found on twitter so many young kids with problems and instead of asking for help in the real world they come to twitter and complain all the time about how the world is unfair, how their life is unfair, how they were X o Y, every single week there's someone who wants to kill himself/herself but never wants to talk or says she/he's going to deactivate for the only reason she/he wants to see if they miss him/her. It's really sad that as society we are seeking for people who we barely know's acceptance.
I tell some friends that they should block and mute the accounts they dont like but instead they reply to them and keep doing it for hours, they get angry and have headaches but they acts as if it's the end of the world if they dont reply back.
One thing I dislike the most about social networks and twitter mainly is the cancel culture, it's like you have bee a better person now than the old you from 10 years ago, people stalk all your tweets to see one simple mistake and cancel you. There's no longer improvement.
I admit, I...myself Im adicted to twitter, I have been for 13 years but I have been here because it's the only place where I can talk to others without worrying about not talking to them for years. I tend to ignore or not miss people in my real life (I have asperger which makes me less interested in meeting my friends in real life) and twitter is the only way for me to not get tired of talking to them or say "wait...going to take a break" but I can fix that .
Sorry if my english is not that well, im a spanish speaker and lately my english has been going downhill
Don't feel too bad. For most English speakers in the English speaking world, their English has been going downhill too. :)
Sorry Noah, that your timing was so bad -- this came out just as Elon retweeted a disgusting conspiracy theory story about Paul Pelosi, and the guy you praise for bringing reform to Twitter turns out to be a crypto person (not exactly a recommendation, especially if crypto turns out to be a ponzi , as I think it is).
There's a high probability that Musk makes things far worse. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, so let's look at Musk's past behavior on Twitter:
1.. He promoted medical misinformation about Covid-19.
2. He promoted vaccine disinformation.
3. He libeled a British cave diver who saved 13 kids trapped in a flooded cave by calling that heroic diver a "pedo" repeatedly because the diver correctly pointed out that Musk's suggestion to send a submarine was ludicrous and useless (that cave had passes barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through, zero visibility, strong currents, etc.
4. He helped spread disinformation about the attack on Paul Pelosi that was instantly adopted as cannon by Trump Republicans and Qanon idiots.
Prognosis: Twitter was in poor health before the introduction of this malignancy, and this will cripple it if not kill it.
Classic case of confirmation bias. The best predictor of future behaviour may be past behaviour, but you present a biased picture of his past behaviour, because you only look at the failures and not at the successes. Whenever anyone uses Paypal or charges their electric car, that´s all those tens of millions of people confirming Elon´s successes. Following your own hypothesis of past dictating the future, perhaps we should consider the possibility that Musk is correct in the big, long-term stuff (not my words - your own logic coupled with less biased evidence) and therefore his takeover of Twitter is a good development. Too early to know as a success, IMO, but also too early to know as a failure.
Plus please let´s not forget that, focusing on some of the failures you bring up, he´s up there in good company. Because public officials and mainstream media also promoted medical misinformation about covid-19 (yes, we were told first by the CDC and all mainstream media that masks did NOT work when a simple search on PubMed showed that they were lying; and I know that because I did that search AT THE TIME and I could see that they were lying to our faces, as proven when later they "changed their mind" without any change in the scientific evidence). And those official sources equally promoted vaccine disinformation when we were told that vaccines would prevent getting or transmitting covid, which according to a Pfizer´s official questioned by the EU hadn´t been tested clinically.
So, in the area of covid and vaccines misinformation, Elon Musk in good company up there with all the official and mainstream sources which we are asked to trust blindly. I, for one, will rather forgive Elon Musk for getting covid wrong - which he did - than public officials and mainstream media for lying about covid - which they also did.
Greg, in the case of No. 3, Musk won the defamation case. He insulted the guy, but a libel or defamation charge must be proved and the plaintiff failed.
He had better lawyers, but he most certainly did libel the guy.
Further, these behaviors fall into particular alt-right communications patterns and methods. Two valuable sources:
1. Data & Society published "The Oxygen of Amplification" as a field guide and warning manual for journalists. https://datasociety.net/library/oxygen-of-amplification/
2. Ian Danskin put together a series on YouTube under Innuendo Studios called "The Alt-Right Playbook." Each of the videos should be watched because the behaviors described aren't just the dark fringe of the alt-right. This has become the official comms strategy of Republicans, and most online interactions with mainstream rightwingers unfold in this way. These behaviors have sadly trickled up: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ
Let's cut to the chase and say it: Elon Musk is alt-right.
This is in the spirit of John Ganz's great "Enigma of Peter Thiel" Substack post: https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-enigma-of-peter-thiel . It's in the subhed: There Is No Enigma — He's a Fascist. Even his lede opens with "Peter Thiel is a fascist."
This is refreshing, because he was taking down a biographer who wanted to criticize Thiel without incurring his wrath by describing Thiel's politics in the most garden-pathy way possible.
The alt-right harbors a noxious ideology, but its more tech-savvy members hit upon that ironic and absurdist behavior is the best delivery mechanism for their worldview.
Musk, and Ye with his recent anti-semitism, are fully self-aware of these values. Musk and Ye also read the room, so their outbursts are timed and calculated. Musk and Ye also engage in behaviors that force media to look upon them and talk about them, thereby turning editorial and social media into pollinators.
I’m pretty much ready to give up on Twitter now. Elon can do what he wants with it. I really like what is going on with Substack. It helps me focus on stuff I really care about because I pay for it. Hopefully, in a couple years the rest of the good columnists I like will have moved over and they will improve the app. I like a Reddit a lot, too, for the same reasons. Regular social media is mostly a bunch of noise. Everyone I know who has given it up is glad they did.