Many commentators seem to think this is a sudden, recent backpedaling from a previous absolutist view on free speech. However, Musk has been promoting the "freedom of speech" vs "freedom of reach" distinction for a while, at least months before his takeover, including describing how such a policy should be implemented at Twitter.
Here's one example quote from June, 2022:
“I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble.
“So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...”
That analogy doesn’t really fit with the model of Twitter. If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them.
A message spreads on Twitter because individuals on Twitter amplify it (with engagement, retweets etc.) which is itself a form of speech: if you say something bad, and I retweet it, I am engaging in speech. Imagine a piece of land with 500 million people on it: a person 500 million people away from you cannot hear you, but if you say something and people choose to repeat it until it reaches that person… that’s Twitter. To prevent that is, in any framing, limiting free speech.
Twitter has some magical engagement-driving algorithms (for example, the homepage) but these are not the primary driver of engagement/reach on Twitter, so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain.
So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.
I like the idea of having personal filters on the receiving end, sort of like how I can decide to search Google using "Safe search: Moderate" or no safe search filtering.
And I guess it makes sense to de-promote poisonous speech, since our primal brains have a tendency to naturally amplify and accord outsized importance to hate, outrage and other strong negative emotions, although those are mostly hugely detrimental to civil society.
Social harmony is underrated in the West. We're all willing to sacrifice our social fabric - and thus ultimately our averaged personal happiness - in favor of individualism. A social system like Twitter should have systems and patterns that correct for our flaws here.
Confusingly, that's what all the free speech absolutists spend their time yelling about. The right to not speak in the public square but have a megaphone.
This might be what Elon is thinking, but some of his fans will be bitterly disappointed if he executes on it and no one sees their tweets any more because they are hateful. How can they own the libs if the libs don't see their attacks (likewise for the reverse direction)?
I don't think this fully captures his prior sentiments. This was all packaged with the idea that the algorithm should be made public, possibly literally even posted to github. Without that, he's just doing same kind of unaccountable tweaks as the previous operators, and there will still be sizable cohorts of users that feel "persecuted" and others who feel like their feed remains full of "negative/hate" content.
I don't think it's fair to expect the algorithm to be open-source so soon, but I also don't think this represents anything like the meaningful changes he promised, so it's relatively insignificant.
This seems like an arbitrary distinction; in the end, there's not much difference between having a tweet be removed and having it be "deboosted" until nobody sees it.
I think that Musk has realized that his free speech absolutism conflicts with his goal of increasing profits. So now he's trying very hard to find a compromise.
There's also the possibility that once he got inside and saw some of the truly incredibly toxic shit that exists in the twitterspace he realized that he can't own the pipeline that spews that garbage all over the world completely unmolested.
I don't like platforms deciding what I see. I connect with people to get their posts. Period. I want them all, or let me control my filters if there are any.
I'm certainly not a fan of how Musk has handled the Twitter takeover, but this sentiment, "New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach", seems highly reasonable to me, no?
That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than what people actually post.
That said, I think that, realistically, being at the bottom of the heap won't actually be much different from being banned - which I actually think is a good thing.
So free speech absolutist is starting to adapt rules which are roughly similar to Twitter's current rules. And those rules are existing for a reason, rules don't popup from a thin air. What a surprise...
Now he will figure out that the bloat of microservices and employees was there also for a reason.
Note that this is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning, which is the primary thing the free speech advocates on Twitter were hoping Elon would stop Twitter from doing.
I thought the point of shadowbanning was to trick the poster into thinking their posts were visible while they were hidden from everyone else.
Here it seems like the poster and anyone else can directly search for the poster's account or the "filtered" post and still see it. But I guess the tags won't work. Kind of a middle ground. Perhaps they will explicitly remove/block the tags so the poster knows this is happening, which at least isn't tricking them.
I'm a Free Speech advocate. What I hoped Elon would do is stop the permanent banning of people from the platform and the removal of tweets. He appears to be at least somewhat delivering on that hope. Having a tweet 'deboosted' rather than completely removed and the tweeter also permanently removed is a substantial improvement.
That's a good point. But I think also what mattered are how the content policies are enforced. I think Musk misread the situation. I do believe Twitter was biased about bans previously but that is because its user base wanted those bans. Social media apps tend to have a specific target demographic. In that sense, Twitter was not really in the "public town square" business but the memes and speech business of a specific demographic. It's not surprising there is an exodus from Twitter now that Musk has shown no loyalty to that base. Yes, it's petty but I've seen far worse on the internet. If Musk wanted something different he should have spent less money making a new app.
I am not trying to provoke a flame war here either actually if it comes off that way. I think the business of social apps is trendy and you have to know your audience.
The difference between hiding a particular problematic tweet and all tweets of an account is important though. It seems Elon refers to the former, while shadow banning refers to the latter. Let's hope it is so.
Is there clear evidence that shadowbanning existed on Twitter? Misunderstanding eventual consistency doesn’t count. I’m not going to be surprised if there is real evidence, I’ve just never seen any.
It also virtually requires human content moderation who, as we've seen time and time again, will classify more and more conservative opinions as "negative/hate" and fewer and fewer liberal opinions. So in other words, Jack Dorsey's Twitter all over again.
Further in the thread he names some banned accounts that will be reinstated.
A couple weeks ago, Elon said that Twitter’s content policy (and account reinstatement) would be decided by a moderation council composed of people with diverse views. There have been no reports of this council being formed yet.
Oh great, more unaccountable black-box "algorithms" that invisibly classify your tweets. Machines can't detect satire, they don't understand nuance or context, they don't understand tone. This will affect platform speech in strange ways as people naturally attempt to evade the algorithm.
Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it.
Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.
The worst aspect of twitter is the anti-fans who follow people just to disrupt any conversations that they're having, and the organized trolling groups. You could interpret this is saying that those people are going to be pushed out of threads, but you could interpret it in any way. He's really not saying anything.
The organized groups and the anti-fans would be easy to automate discovery of. Just flag people who reply in a similar manner no matter what they're replying to, and cross them with voting rings. Declaring war on negativity and hate is pretty silly, though.
There's still a question of how "negative/hate" is defined and whether this will be transparent. I'm skeptical, but the general principle of discouraging and not profiting from negativity is, uh, positive.
I’m confused about what’s actually being suggested here, if anything. Regardless of whether stuff is “boosted” and “monetized” or not, people can still retweet stuff, right?
If they’re going to restrict the ability to retweet, that sounds a lot like shadow-banning, which is exactly what many people complain about, the people Musk seems to be listening to.
I guess it makes sense if people are really using the “home timeline” rather than chronological. That just seems bizarre to me as it misses the whole essence of Twitter. How is it a real-time news source if the newest stuff isn’t always front and centre? How is it a crowd-sourced “public square” if a black box algorithm decides what you read, rather than your own hand-curated list of followed accounts?
This whole debate would make sense if it were about YouTube, but Twitter?
I've discovered that if you tweet the name "Michael Griffin" + "Elon" (or "Musk"), nobody will see your tweet organically unless they search for it directly.
Michael Griffin is an important person in Elon's real (non-mythical) history that he'd probably rather you not know about,
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the sort of damage control id expect to see from someone only peripherally aware of or involved in their businesses accountability or strategic operations. This concern from advertisers has existed far too long for an executive action to have any meaning. the marketing conference call on november 3rd was your red flag where advertisers voiced their displeasure with firing large swaths of the content moderation team. The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday of active trading left a pretty sore spot with them as well that you never seemed to completely address. To corporations looking at this release today youre just some guy dragging a plumbing fixture through the lobby of your new office demanding hardcore work and cutting staff and --lets be honest-- at least Chainsaw Al Dunlap made stockholders rich in the process of scorching earth. So far youve just made the entire platform look like the bombing of dresden.
by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely.
but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
Musk's vision for Twitter has finally been realized: if you want to whistleblow or say not nice things about Tesla, SpaceX, or Musk himself, no one will see it. Nothing bad about him or his companies will trend on Twitter ever again.
Sounds like a complicated moderation position to take. "Negative" and "hate" are a matter of perspective and Twitter is a global product. What meets a legal definition of "hate" in one nation is state-sponsored "religious belief" in another. Do you weigh the tweets differently based on who's looking at it?
I'm by no means a proponent of the fediverse but this is one arena it has a leg up in. Federators are free to draw their own cultural borders online rather than relying on a centralized for-profit company to draw them. (Or leave them undrawn, which has been Twitter's stance so far.)
The main reason some of us go on Twitter is it is where the politicians and other leaders tweet. It is the only place where we can talk back to them. This talking back is probably considered negative. If our voices will be silenced, I will just subscribe to a few of the people still there using RSS feeds. All real discussion will move elsewhere.
Pretty much going according to plan. Next step will be tweets from the political left being downranked by the algorithm/shadowbanned because Elon considers them “hate speech”.
[+] [-] boole1854|3 years ago|reply
Here's one example quote from June, 2022:
“I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble.
“So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...”
Source: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter...
[+] [-] phphphphp|3 years ago|reply
A message spreads on Twitter because individuals on Twitter amplify it (with engagement, retweets etc.) which is itself a form of speech: if you say something bad, and I retweet it, I am engaging in speech. Imagine a piece of land with 500 million people on it: a person 500 million people away from you cannot hear you, but if you say something and people choose to repeat it until it reaches that person… that’s Twitter. To prevent that is, in any framing, limiting free speech.
Twitter has some magical engagement-driving algorithms (for example, the homepage) but these are not the primary driver of engagement/reach on Twitter, so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain.
So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|3 years ago|reply
Go back to what twitter was in the beginning: you see the tweets of people you follow. That's it.
[+] [-] AYBABTME|3 years ago|reply
And I guess it makes sense to de-promote poisonous speech, since our primal brains have a tendency to naturally amplify and accord outsized importance to hate, outrage and other strong negative emotions, although those are mostly hugely detrimental to civil society.
Social harmony is underrated in the West. We're all willing to sacrifice our social fabric - and thus ultimately our averaged personal happiness - in favor of individualism. A social system like Twitter should have systems and patterns that correct for our flaws here.
[+] [-] hooverd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dundarious|3 years ago|reply
I don't think it's fair to expect the algorithm to be open-source so soon, but I also don't think this represents anything like the meaningful changes he promised, so it's relatively insignificant.
[+] [-] yodsanklai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaomidi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonhansel|3 years ago|reply
I think that Musk has realized that his free speech absolutism conflicts with his goal of increasing profits. So now he's trying very hard to find a compromise.
[+] [-] bane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than what people actually post.
That said, I think that, realistically, being at the bottom of the heap won't actually be much different from being banned - which I actually think is a good thing.
[+] [-] TheLoafOfBread|3 years ago|reply
Now he will figure out that the bloat of microservices and employees was there also for a reason.
[+] [-] minimaxir|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesianP|3 years ago|reply
Here it seems like the poster and anyone else can directly search for the poster's account or the "filtered" post and still see it. But I guess the tags won't work. Kind of a middle ground. Perhaps they will explicitly remove/block the tags so the poster knows this is happening, which at least isn't tricking them.
[+] [-] oska|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leereeves|3 years ago|reply
Shadowbanning applies to accounts.
Also, nowhere in that thread does it say that the user won't be told the Tweet was demonetized, which is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning.
[+] [-] onetimeusename|3 years ago|reply
I am not trying to provoke a flame war here either actually if it comes off that way. I think the business of social apps is trendy and you have to know your audience.
[+] [-] datastack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BryantD|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReptileMan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kweingar|3 years ago|reply
A couple weeks ago, Elon said that Twitter’s content policy (and account reinstatement) would be decided by a moderation council composed of people with diverse views. There have been no reports of this council being formed yet.
Edit: why was this post flagged?
[+] [-] cguess|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixcraft|3 years ago|reply
Kathie Griffin, Jorden Peterson & Babylon Bee have been reinstated.
Trump decision has not yet been made.
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
https://www.insidehook.com/article/tech/elon-musk-worst-twee...
[+] [-] Ptchd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phailhaus|3 years ago|reply
Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it.
Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.
[+] [-] mhh__|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 35amxn35|3 years ago|reply
4chan does this and it works surprisingly well.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|3 years ago|reply
This IS twitters dislike button.
[+] [-] Ztynovovk|3 years ago|reply
>Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized.
Guess this guy finally realized that a free for all model is not feasible.
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
The organized groups and the anti-fans would be easy to automate discovery of. Just flag people who reply in a similar manner no matter what they're replying to, and cross them with voting rings. Declaring war on negativity and hate is pretty silly, though.
[+] [-] memish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
• down with people who believe X!
• long live people who believe not-X!
The line between negativity and positivity is just a matter of framing.
[+] [-] iainmerrick|3 years ago|reply
If they’re going to restrict the ability to retweet, that sounds a lot like shadow-banning, which is exactly what many people complain about, the people Musk seems to be listening to.
I guess it makes sense if people are really using the “home timeline” rather than chronological. That just seems bizarre to me as it misses the whole essence of Twitter. How is it a real-time news source if the newest stuff isn’t always front and centre? How is it a crowd-sourced “public square” if a black box algorithm decides what you read, rather than your own hand-curated list of followed accounts?
This whole debate would make sense if it were about YouTube, but Twitter?
[+] [-] kidme5|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
[+] [-] Imnimo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimbius|3 years ago|reply
by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely.
but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anhncommenter25|3 years ago|reply
I'm by no means a proponent of the fediverse but this is one arena it has a leg up in. Federators are free to draw their own cultural borders online rather than relying on a centralized for-profit company to draw them. (Or leave them undrawn, which has been Twitter's stance so far.)
[+] [-] kornhole|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boringg|3 years ago|reply