Twitter keeps running themselves into a trap, and it is unbelievable to me that they don't see it: they cannot be the arbiters of truth. It will not work, because inevitably they'll miss something, and then people will assume that that missed thing is true.
The solution is NOT to do censorship based on truth. The entire system needs to be unreliable, because it is unreliable. People need to read things on twitter (and elsewhere on the internet) with skepticism, and they need to evaluate wether those things are true or false individually.
This is a good take. Skepticism is one of the most important aspects of thinking critically, and building a library of skeptical techniques so as to be able to sniff out things that aren't true is crucial to being able to navigate through a sea of information.
It's sort of like the Godel incompleteness theorem of social networking: you can either be incomplete or inconsistent; any system which tries to be perfectly consistent will find itself excluding massive amounts of potential dialogue. This in turn will result in a user exodus.
Sorry, let me be clear, it's absolutely a good thing, and I exodized (if that's a word) quite some time ago. It doesn't seem to be happening fast enough, which I will attribute to a lack of a clear, decentralized but dead simple alternative.
Look at how quickly something like BitTorrent was adopted back in the day.... it's an esoteric and difficult to understand thing under the surface, until clients and sites came along that made it super simple.
Maybe Urbit will evolve into this, maybe Mastodon, we'll see.
But there's no way to improve human behavior on BS detection. Certainly not this close to an election.
What is one to do in an environment where a ridiculous number of people believe that the president is fighting a secret pedophile sex ring? It certainly doesn't seem to be a problem the free market of ideas is addressing successfully.
I present you the differential truth timeline: After informing users, randomly inject tweets that state plausible factoids that may be true or false, then have a button on all tweets that you press to know whether twitter the believes the tweet to be true, false, or unknown.
If this doesn't work, they can remove the button entirely during sensitive times (like elections).
The principle of using skepticism is a sound one, but what do you do when the majority of your users don't employ that practice? Just let misinformation spread and just be okay with the ramifications on society because "it's not my problem my users are gullible"?
A meta comment: I've noticed this is a variation of another argument I hear from the national security side, usually from the Kissinger-Brzezinski-ites in particular who argue that their anti-democratic actions are because the people are too dumb to govern themselves (The so called "Crisis of Democracy") and therefore in some machiaviellian realpolitik way, their unconstitutional actions are justified. (One of Kissinger's famous quotes being something to the effect of the "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer".)
I keep thinking back to the freedom of speech circuit Christopher Hitchens did and some of the great speeches on the topic he gave, some of which are him broadly denouncing the ability, want or acceptance of any person or group of persons to be the one who decides what you can and cannot read and/or say. I wonder where the voices of whoever holds those intellectual reins these days is, because I'm not hearing it.
Ideally twitter shouldn't really be able to spread "misinformation" because people shouldn't be using it as a source of information to begin with. These moves they have been making around fact checking, censoring things etc, make this problem worse. They're trying to increase people's trust in twitter, which they shouldn't be doing, they should be actively trying to do the opposite, and they will fail to remove all of the misinformation.
So the result will be that people will still see misinformation, but they'll trust it more. It's the exact opposite.
This was my take as well. I get that they want to “clean up” some of the most egregious tweets but that’s a game you can’t win. It’s just a rabbit hole where everyone will accuse you of being biased.
This is like saying "our system isn't broken, users just need to be smarter." Sure it would be great but I don't see it happening and in the mean time real harm happens.
Why doesn't that cause Wikipedia to completely break down then? Wikipedia tries to be in some sense an arbiter of truth, they do get it wrong frequently, and yet it still holds together.
Wikipedia requires sources for its information, especially anything contentious. If Twitter somehow obtained the manpower and speed to do that, then it might be OK but there's no hope of that ever being possible. The rate of content generation is too high, the demand for immediate publication is too high, and the effect of removing something a few days after it's posted is too little too late because it will have already had its effect. Nobody would use such a slow and boring service where almost every post gets automatically put on hold until someone can find a source. Users obviously won't do their own research - that's like schoolwork!
Wish somebody a happy birthday. Wait till tomorrow for Twitter's employees or crowdsourcing to verify it. And it only gets verified if that information is actually available to them.
Wikipedia has a community system and process to delete and revert statements, and contributors can mostly only evolve a collection of documents that do not draw attention to the contributor. Individual contributions mostly do not go viral. And for whatever reason, enough members prefer this system to keep it.
The solution is NOT to do censorship based on truth. The entire system needs to be unreliable, because it is unreliable. People need to read things on twitter (and elsewhere on the internet) with skepticism, and they need to evaluate wether those things are true or false individually.