Source: news.google.com
This post is primarily intended as a commentary on Jack Dorsey’s push for a native internet protocol for social media. The so-called “Twitter Files” are part of the story.
In general, I try to stay out of politics and report as neutrally as possible on the impact of technology on society, and vice versa. However, Twitter Files is a highly polarized topic. Here are some great articles addressing them from independent journalists across the political spectrum:
Mike Solana: The Fifth Estate
Abigail Shrier: Doxxing in real time and the smallest musk
Matt Binder: Twitter has a free speech problem and it’s Elon Musk
The Twitter Archives is a “Twitter🧵” series started by Elon Musk where three freelance journalists, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, report on internal documents from Twitter’s previous administration. In general, the Twitter archives provide evidence of how content was moderated, stories removed, and accounts banned and hidden in accordance with a left-wing political agenda or direct orders from the US government.
On the political side, Twitter Files confirms the accusations American conservatives have made against Twitter for years. Jack Dorsey even admitted in 2018 that Twitter employees share a largely left-wing bias, though they were not instructed to act on ideology or political views.
Critics might argue that Twitter under the new “Musk regime” is also biased. For example, the accounts of several prominent journalists were recently temporarily suspended without explanation. Matt Binder, one of the suspended journalists, wrote an article about the incident here. As was the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, who was suspended this weekend here. The suspensions appear arbitrary, targeting journalists who have spoken unfavorably against Musk. When faced with the fact, take a look at Musk’s backlash here.
It sets a dangerous precedent when free speech becomes politicized. Overall, I think “What Bitcoin Did” host Peter McCormack has a good point:
While in theory free speech should apply equally to everyone, content moderation is not completely neutral. Given a large enough sample size, there will always be borderline cases that could be determined in either direction, and biases will show up over time. In short, there is a political component to content moderation, while free speech should apply equally to everyone. And as long as there is a central point of control or “single point of failure”, government interference and lobbying is likely to be hard to avoid.
In the latest edition of the Twitter Archives, “Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY”, Matt Taibbi writes about how Twitter’s former head of trust and security routinely acted on FBI requests to remove content. This can hardly come as a surprise! For anyone remotely familiar with the Snowden disclosures or FISA Section 702, which authorizes extensive surveillance of foreign nationals, Taibbi’s post is a big nothing.
Last Tuesday, Jack Dorsey published a blog post on Twitter-affiliated newsletter platform Revue where he addresses the “Twitter Files” and suggests “how to fix identified issues.” Interestingly, Revue announced that they would be shutting down the platform just one day after Dorsey’s post. It seems like a strange coincidence.
Dorsey begins by listing three principles that he believes a social media platform should adhere to:
1. Social networks must be resistant to corporate and government control.
2. Only the original author can remove the content they produce
3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic election.
Twitter does not reflect these principles and Dorsey takes full responsibility for it:
This is just my fault as I stopped lobbying for them when an activist entered our actions in 2020.
Here, Dorsey is probably referring to the hedge fund Elliott Management Corp., which bought a majority stake in Twitter that year.
Regarding Dorsey’s first principle, which social networks must be resistant to corporate and government control — he writes:
Of course, governments want to shape and control the public conversation and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power wielded by a corporation to do the same is only growing. It is critical that people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path to centralized control.
Dorsey’s second principle: that only the original author can remove the content they produce — is controversial and probably difficult to implement. At least from a legal point of view. For example, Germany passed a law ordering Facebook, Google and Twitter to remove hate speech and “obviously illegal content” within 24 hours or face a fine of up to €50 million.
Dorsey’s third principle: that moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice — is about giving users more choice about what kind of content they see. Users could be allowed to customize the filters of their algorithmic feeds or alternatively choose between different “sorting providers”. For more information, check out Stephen Wolfram’s essay here.
Taken together, Dorsey’s principles allude to greater decentralization, resistance to censorship, transparency and control of users in social networks. These are all the key properties of Bitcoin. It is not a coincidence, since Dorsey is a big supporter of Bitcoin. The Web3 movement fights for the same values but, intentionally or not, Dorsey refrains from using ubiquitous marketing terms like Web3 or crypto.
Instead, Dorsey asks a free and open protocol for social media and points to projects like AT Protocol, Mastodon, and Matrix as candidates competing to become a standard like HTTP or SMTP.
The term “Web3” is often associated with new NFT collections and token sales discounts. Crypto opportunists and sellers want to shove it down our throats. However, in the wake of the Musk-induced existential crisis on Twitter, there seems to be an organic push for a more open internet. Which is in fact the underlying philosophy of Web3. But the idea of a more open internet extends well beyond blockchain and cryptocurrency, although blockchain technology is likely to be part of the solution. An open Internet gives the user the power to choose between many different platforms, instead of being completely dependent on a few and all-powerful.
Noah Smith writes on the Internet wants to be fragmented:
People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square,” but in the real world, there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can. exit — when you can move to a different city if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture.
It will be interesting to see to what extent Elon Musk’s God complex and the split on Twitter will draw users to other platforms. And whether there will be a strong mass exodus at once, or whether people will quietly leave through the back door over time like teenagers have done with Facebook. Either way, Twitter’s competitors are looking for an opportunity to capitalize on the chaos, and it looks like the thick chains around people’s attention and data are finally loosening.
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