the sentiment i've gathered from people who use twitter professionally, namely journalists and the like, is that an algorithmic timeline would completely destroy the value proposition for them. twitter is such a nice little social media app that i find it disturbing to see it bullied by wall street. such is the fate of a publicly traded company. if it were a private company that could focus on being profitable without growing extravagantly and taking over the world like Facebook or Google, it could focus on providing its unique value to its most important users.
i think of all the social media platforms i use, twitter is the one that most tremendously contributes to society. twitter, far more than facebook in my opinion, democratizes the dissemination of ideas and information.
I think it's important to remember that twitter took more than $750 Million in funding prior to going public. Even if it was still a private company, those investors would expect a return on their investment, forcing twitter into a similar "growth or profitability" focus. It's really only possible for a company to focus on sustainable growth and small profits if it isn't beholden to anyone's expectations.
> twitter, far more than facebook in my opinion, democratizes the dissemination of ideas and information.
Not any more since the last wave of closing "alleged ISIS" accounts. I can't stand those religious retards either, but banning people just because they follow a religious cult of killers who spread hate and murder threats?
You could use the same argument to ban practically everything... including followers of Donald "Muslims out!!!" Trump, Frauke "Shoot refugees at the border" Petry, Recep Tayyip "Kurd Killer" Erdogan or whoever is the King of Saudi Arabia.
None of these groups are in any danger to be banned from popular social media sites despite their ideology being very similar (or, in case of Saudi Arabia, identically) to the IS and their followers equally murderish and morally depraved (Erdogan, Saudi Arabia, the neo-Nazis burning refugee camps down in Germany).
It's inconsequent and the mere possibility of banning someone over anything that members of another (whiter? religious-er?) group are allowed to do opens up highly complex moral issues.
No, it is perfectly acceptable to ban the most extreme members. Just because they don't ban everyone with extreme views doesn't mean they need to keep all of them.
I am tired of these all-or-nothing discussions that seem commonplace nowadays. The world is not as brightly defined as you think it is. We can make forward progress progressively.
It only opens up highly complex moral issues in the same sense that a principle of absolute freedom of speech closes these issues by refusing to engage with them at all. I'm not a principled person and my politics don't come from supporting one set of principles over another. I'm only troubled by twitter's conduct insofar as the network is controlled by a few private individuals who aren't accountable to their users. To me, it's the concentrated, unilateral power that is the issue. Because power gets abused. That's essentially what happens to concentrated power.
A federated, open twitter platform would be better. Ideal, in fact. If twitter the company were merely an operator in such a network, i would not take much issue with them banning people i personally would evict from my social spheres.
i mean, i agree with you in that the other examples you mentioned are all objectionable to me too and i think a moral justification for banning ISIS accounts can be extended to those cases. it doesn't matter what they say the reasoning is, the underlying mechanism is a power struggle between extremely large and grotesque power structures.
> A federated, open twitter platform would be better. Ideal, in fact.
Federated platforms don't work. We've seen them fail with OpenID, Persona, Usenet and email; I'm stretching the definition of failed a bit with the latter two but Usenet is a spam- and warez-filled shadow of what it once was and email, well, if you're not one of the bigger email service providers good luck ensuring reliable delivery of your messages due to spam, and that IS failure in my eyes.
At a certain scale all services, centralized or federated, require massive amounts of money simply to maintain the infrastructure and to prevent "account rot".
Without ads there is no monetizing in free federated services, that is why Persona and OpenID failed.
They've already slid half way down the slippery slope.
They're not actually banning those ISIS accounts, they're just banning people who "harass" (read: interact with) high profile accounts. This is hitting the national consciousness with the "BernieBro" narrative, where high profile journalists are finally being told their shit stinks and are trying to cast such disagreements as ban-worthy harassment.
A good example was a particular account (@swarthyvillian) was receiving literal death threats from a Syria Liberation Army account for, I kid you not, disagreements on MMA rankings. Several weeks later the same guy was banned after linking to tweets by Arthur Chu and Sady Doyle for "pile on harassment" because his followers said mean (and admittedly colorful) things in response.
I don't think Donald Trump ever advocated murder, unlike the rest of them. Advocating keeping a bunch of murderers out is not the same as advocating murder. You can argue about him tarring too many people with the same brush, but when entire nations (like Saudi Arabia) follow this murderous religion, and act this way, I don't see how it's really invalid to not group them together. It's not like murderous Muslims are some tiny little extremist cult; they're the norm in that whole region. And it's not just Saudi Arabia's government: when Egypt overthrew Mubarak and had elections, they elected an Islamist group.
i think of all the social media platforms i use, twitter is the one that most tremendously contributes to society. twitter, far more than facebook in my opinion, democratizes the dissemination of ideas and information.