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.
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?
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.
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.
Interesting seeing this response from both Facebook and Twitter on the exact same day.
Guessing from this:
> Based on a tip shared by Twitter about activity they found on their platform, we conducted an internal investigation into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior in the region and identified this activity. We will continue monitoring and will take action if we find additional violations. We’ve shared our analysis with law enforcement and industry partners.
that the simultaneous response was coordinated by both platforms... I'd go so far as to say that it was coordinated in order to demonstrate the capability to self-moderate ahead of the 2020 US elections.
1) It's a little more complicated than just pointing out that it's a private company. They enjoy protection from liability under Section 230 of the CDA as a platform, but in many ways are acting as publishers. Are they a publisher or platform, or both or neither depending on the circumstance? I'm not completely sure, but I do know they want to simultaneously have their cake and eat it too.
2) On the surface, it sounds great. But one problem with social media doing something like blocking/banning paid disinformation campaigns is you just have to take their word that this is what happened. Twitter or Facebook can go and ban 25 million accounts in the run-up to a future heated election. They can claim that they're deleting organized paid influencers or deleting Russian bots that are trying to subvert the election and the media will publish that explanation without a hint of proof. The reality is that there's no public proof of who has been deleted, what the evidence is against them, what algorithm or review process was used to label them a bot or paid influencer, what IP addresses were involved, and if there's any false positives. This gives them the power to just label any political opponent they want a Russian bot or organized disinformation and silence them without any pushback from media.
This is moving the discussion into "whataboutism" territory. It's certainly true that there are problems with other social media platforms, but that doesn't really detract from GP's point.
So they were so harmed by the newly censored and under-friendly-control-for-$44b Twitter that they decided to spike it altogether and presume no similar social network would ever pop up again?
Problem is who determines if it’s a smear campaign? The author claims it was, and I tend to believe him but I haven’t investigated. Have you? And then, how determines if it’s extreme enough to warrant some action? In the ideal world sure there would be an army of people investigating every case in detail. But then 1) Twitter becomes the arbiter of truth and 2) definitely can’t scale.
Sure, in addition to all of their organs of dissemination, of which they have plenty of options, they can also have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts.
What they can’t do is ring up Twitter and Facebook and say, hey, that’s misinformation, do something about it. Or have government embeds giving guidance.
Just imagine trading secrets to foreign actors, or selling misinformation. Can you even think of the covert operations that could have taken place to slowly poison streams of people in the twitter-sphere? This is a big yikes on a platform that "poses" as a platform of democracy and free speech.
I have followed this building up on Twitter and as someone not intimately familiar with this.
> The ruling party released a fake document
It very well might be(not that I know about this), but how did Twitter figure this out? As far as I understand, there has been accusations from both sides without proof.
I will be really scared if Twitter is taking a stand based on their judgement of what might have happened.
Already, censorship and control by social media platforms is on a slippery slope. We can't let them become the arbiters of truth. It might suit one side today but might not suit the same tomorrow when decision comes from a black box.
Also, yes these platforms are private spaces but they hold too much power in shaping the public discourse.
Oh, that's backwards from what I thought the situation was. Thanks!
Apparently such information has to be released in a way that all the public, generally, can see it at once and twitter with it's faked high user numbers and famous people fulfills this. Releasing it on a small local poster board would be illegal because it is limited, where twitter is legal because everyone theoretically has access to twitter.
This bodes well for autocracies and would-be autocrats. It's the logical extreme of what they've been trying to do on social media over the last decade or so.
We are arguing that government is lying as it has done over and over and 1000 * over and that it did freeze accounts of random donors. Maybe they call them influencers lol because they have a IM account and 100 followers
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.
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