Well the bad guys have shown that they can make as many fake accounts as they want on facebook/twitter. If anything, they're encouraged to do so. I don't see how a decentralized network would be any worse in that regard at least.
Twitter and Facebook, without government intervention have naturally become the influencing platforms of choice for those with the most lucre. Having enemies banned is such an opaque process that nobody can tell if there was a payoff for a ban or not. Changes are never well explained. If either was a government system, complete suspension would be required to take place with a forensic analysis showing inadequacies, vulnerabilities, and hacks. Then after those were addressed the systems would be restored with documented and known procedures and processes for these things.
But for Twitter and Facebook, it's all business as usual. Everyone knows they are both corrupt to the core.
I wonder if it's possible to avoid that, once it gets going. Twitter already seems like it's in the "garbage site" category, and they won't be able to fix that without throwing away the network effect that they depend on.
Anybody can post anything they want on their own sites, or a number of other completely unmoderated sites. People don't go there because their friends are already on Twitter. The conspiracy theorists follow because that's where the target is. They don't want to just post on their own site, or on sites where only other conspiracy theorists will read it. Even if those sites weren't perceived as garbage, people wouldn't go there simply because they don't know anybody.
It feels like Twitter and FB have the tiger by the ears and can neither let go nor continue to ride.
Well, Facebook and Twitter are currently used in cyberwarfare to destabilise western democracies and the result is pretty impressive, because it works.
Give people their Facebook but remove the algorithms from the timeline and close all groups to make it harder for people to spread misinformation and group together to celebrate it. Or close it all together, social media doesn't have that many upsides. My observation from more than ten years with those tools.
No idea where the problem lies in Twitter but marking tweets with lies and conspiracy stuff is a step in a good direction.
Think about it though, you can build a network with fake accounts or even just through a concerted effort to to do and spread disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate, polarise a nation and influence elections.
It’s social networks weaponised and it’s absolutely beautiful by design, convenient, free and here is the real kicker? It’s completely legal and largely unregulated !!!
By the way, I’m not on either political side here but are you trying to say I’m sticking up for republicans ?
This guilt by association is really scary (and a trial by mob). And it doesn't seem to even matter if the accusor is telling the truth - as long as they have enough Twitter followers, they can wreck someone's life.
How do we get out of this though? It seems a big return to anonymity will happen, along with decentralization.
I agree with dannyw. Also, Twitter influencing requires scale. You can fake some but patterns will emerge that make it harder and harder.
Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.
I do not deny your experience and I saw many useful community notes before. It took me seeing this case to understand that it is actually a bad idea, for the reasons I mentioned (illusion of absolute truth while being open to manipulation & showing no history of controversy).
Also, it is not technically decentralized, it is Twitter (a centralized platform)… If it were truly fully decentralized, it would be vulnerable to such attacks even more, right? If you are up against a totalitarian government controlling the 2nd most populous country, there can always be more people who claim the false correction. There was a minority of people who got the correction fixed, and if it was actually decentralized then how would they be able to?
Using twitter, a proprietary, non e2e encrypted, for profit platform with an history of political meddling and censorship to organize social change seems a dangerous bet to me.
This is basically hoping that:
- they are willing to play nice with you
- they won't get pressured into not playing nice with you
- nobody will use technical means to extract things from them
Meanwhile, while taking this bet, those people are creating a gigantic data graph of persons, backed by detailed twitter tracking, all enriched by tons of evidences of their action, thinking and desired in the form of messages.
So if the big guys want to hit them after that, they can grab this juicy data set and have a blast.
Eh, hard to grok why you think Twitter is not evil like Facebook. Have we learned nothing about the public/private partnership between the social media companies and the surveillance state? Twitter management is littered with "former" government officials. For all we know, Mudge himself and his whistle are moves in an ongoing internecine fight over who calls the shots at a valuable tool of social control. We were recently treated to a completely astroturfed whistleblower at Facebook. Fool me once...
Do you ever think that maybe it's GOOD of Twitter and Facebook to deactivate these accounts?
The information needs to be disseminated, but companies as large as the two mentioned may have enough conflicting interests that to allow a wanted person to interact with them would be a betrayal in itself.
Kicking dissidents off Twitter and Facebook might be like forbidding children from playing in the street. "This system is not set up in your interests, pursue them elsewhere."
People are incredibly creative and we should consider that there are any number of incentive ways such as access could be used for attacks.
Nevertheless, Twitter is a blip within the vast organizational structures that the world functions on. There is a huge amount of inertia there as well.
Throwing around words like thermo-nuclear war is more than a bit shrill.
There is another factor here as well - it's the same mistake you and many others make with the idea that Facebook was used to "hack an election". There is no evidence at all that opinion forming through Facebook is of any significant importance relative to Fox News, media making a big deal out of a private email servers, SuperPACs (those used to be big election influence scare of the olden days - now they are irrelevant and dwarved by Facebook). Also, people have agency and they share their believes with each other.
Which is all the say - when parent says "we'd have other problems if a Twitter hack brings down world government" then that is exactly that. If a 1000 other things must go wrong to cause a war with a false tweet, don't blame Twitter for that war.
It seems they both denied and admitted to it at the same time, with twisted wording.
Has anyone come up with a decentralized social media platform yet? I wonder if it's even possible without it devolving in to a complete cesspool even worse than the centralized cesspools.
So in other words, if you're willing to pay enough for enough accounts, or organise groups, you'll be able to heavily suppress your political opponents or competitors tweets.
Face it - there is no reason to believe anything on Twitter/X or any other social media source. Because they are Free - people with malicious intend or an agenda are constantly abusing them, effectively reducing their usefulness to zero. This would include political candidates that are sociopaths. IMHO
This is a good start, but there are well coordinated manipulation networks for conflicts around the world, that seem to run with impunity, sometimes inciting violence and fomenting hate. Then there are verified account of journalists/commentators and public figures who seem to be paid to Tweet particular narratives. There are other verified accounts that serve as a nexus of hate on Twitter, whose large follower counts give them a patina of invincibility. It’s interesting that Twitter has the will to enforce its rules in some situations, but not in others.
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