I put around 15 minutes a day into Birdwatch for a couple of months before the purchase was finalized. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.
The requirement for agreement seemed to work well at preventing weird factchecks from anywhere on the political spectrum. I saw a fair number of people trying to use Birdwatch to argue with each other, bad faith factchecks, and so on. None of them made it to general visibility.
I wrote 45 notes. I tried very hard to keep them unbiased, but I'm human and I have strong political opinions. 5 of them wound up approved. I suspect the requirement for agreement tended to keep anything that's more than a little divisive from getting approved; no evidence for this, though. I'd be curious to know what the average percentage was for active users.
There are way more Birdwatch notes getting written right now. A lot of them are terrible quality. However, they mostly aren't getting approved, so I think the system is working as designed.
It's a really smart idea. Look for agreement between people who often disagree as a signal of truth. Like you point out, it's probably a stronger signal of less divisive, less polarizing info than truth. But still decentralized and not biased right or left (biased center, effectively.)
I think it will only work if they can keep the bots out. Otherwise it will be gamed like everything else.
This is my concern as well. The idea here seems to be that the thing that offends the least must be fact.
This behaves very differently for falsifiable vs. non-falsifiable information, but the end result is not something in which I'd place much stock either way.
Edit: to be clear, from Twitter's perspective, this is excellent, i.e. this is precisely what a revenue-motivated entity would want. It's the rest of the world that I'm concerned about.
What parent is suggesting is that only the subset of things which are agreed by two parties who, demonstrably, disagree on most things, are approved and noted.
You’re not going to get “a fetus becomes human life at 4.5 months” out of such a system
Interesting example. Because the hardcore on both sides have zero percent agreement on that. To some people a fetus isn’t a person until intended birth, so how would a birdwatch context work on something nonfalsifiable like this?
How then do you decide on the sets of things to allow it to moderate or not? That sounds like a bootstrapping problem since it is a question people will disagree on.
You're getting downvoted for the example, but this:
> Often times enemies agree on complete lies because it benefits them both.
is absolutely true.
At the risk of giving another controversial example: When one guy says "you're all a bunch of nazis!", and the self-identified nazi also says, with stars in their eyes, "yes! We are all nazis!" then it may perfectly well be that the persons so called are not all a bunch of nazis.
It's common for people on both sides of an issue to divide the world sharply into enemies and allies.
The Communist Party in the USSR was a party with communist ideology, aiming to achieve communism. They were communists, but they did not claim that USSR's system was communist at any point. The system was designed to industrialize the USSR, increase literacy and life standards and work towards achieving communism. It wasnt communism itself.
What I understand from extensive study of the period's history is that they became a war-time administration, and stayed as one. Its no surprise considering the constant push for world war 3 from the US side and economic warfare. In the period, the US almost caused a nuclear war with its hostility, most of which during the time of Reagan, who mounted an all-encompassing military 'exercise' that was identical to a nuclear first strike. And all that, without the constant economic warfare.
I disagree with such propositions. 'The elite's 'eliteness' in the USSR amounted to eating caviar, getting access to newest cars earlier, getting access to more desirable holiday locations. Otherwise all the citizens got access to everything - housing, free healthcare, education, higher education, childcare, paid maternity leave, paid vacations and all that.
Your premise is dubious. This is a definitional question, what’s the commonly accepted meaning of a word.
There’s no other way words are defined, widespread acceptance of the applicability of a term is self-proving.
The fact that the official government representatives of the whole world agree on the definition means that’s the definition.
It’s certainly possible there’s injustice embedded in word choice (consider what is and isn’t called terrorism, for example) but the system is providing a defensible result.
> The fact that the official government representatives of the whole world agree on the definition means that’s the definition.
It seems you misunderstood. That they did not agree on the definition is part of my point. They only agree on the word, to mean opposite things (the US meant dystopia, the USSR meant [on their way to] utopia.) In any case, it's just an example. See my other[1] comment for clarification of the general point.
Meaning is use. And people neither think in definitions nor learn language through definitions (there is a reason dictionaries usually provide examples and use cases), it is an entirely artificial construct with limited use.
Don’t disagree with you on the epistemic point, but for that example, I don’t think anyone in the USSR was under the illusion that they had achieved communism. During the 60s the propaganda (originally for and then also used ironically) was that the USSR was “actually existing socialism”. It was of course run by the communist party, which I think is what people generally mean when they say it was communist.
It’s obvious in hindsight, but looking back there are plenty of thinkers that i look up to (e.g. Du Bois) that supported the regime far longer than is comfortable (so i’m hesitant to say i would have been any different at the time).
I agree with your point, just to add a little detail to your example- USSR & Co called themselves “socialist”. They considered socialism to be an imperfect intermediate state en route to communism.
The USSR never claimed to have “achieved communism”. I know there are Marxists who claim that the USSR wasn’t even properly socialist, but this sort of doctrinal bickering doesn’t make any historical difference until it reaches somewhere outside the realm of fringe radical movements and academic ivory towers. And even then, the power dynamics of the differing groups of adherents matter a lot more than the doctrinal nitpicking, just as with any other sectarian dispute.
Arguing about whether the Soviets were “true” Marxists is like arguing about whether the Roman Catholic Church is the “true” “catholic and apostolic church” of the Nicene Creed; at some point everyone who isn’t a theologian taking a break from the equally important “angels dancing on the head of a pin” problem just uses the word “Catholic” to refer to the biggest and most powerful institution that insists on calling itself that.
But, even setting all that aside, all you’ve proven is that finding common ground between two disagreeing viewpoints is insufficient. If you had to find a point of agreement between the US, USSR, and whatever disgruntled Trotskyites you could find, you’d address that point of disagreement as well.
> I know there are Marxists who claim that the USSR wasn’t even properly socialist,
You don't have to be a Marxist to claim that the USSR wasn't properly "socialist." You just have to read whoever you think lays out a clear definition of socialism, and compare it to the government of the USSR as observed.
When your analysis of the facts of the situation values the power dynamics of differing groups of adherents to fringe radical movements over simple observation and checking of requirements off of a list, you're caught up in political drama, not ideological drama.
It's a semantic argument and I'm not attached to any particular definition of socialism. Also, I find that most arguments that "the Soviet Union wasn't actually socialist" are disingenuous attempts by socialists to deflect from the fact that their ideas have never actually worked in practice, but that's beside the point somewhat.
You could have chosen an example that wouldn’t have led to a useless flamewar about the definition of the word “communism.” For example, the USSR agreed with Nazi Germany that Jews were a problem, Poland didn't deserve to exist, etc.
‘Horrible’ epistemology is a bit harsh (signal = approximate measure rather than direct), but this is indeed a valid loophole. Would be interesting to explore if third or fourth groups that do not benefit from the mutually agreed lie could feasibly counter this.
I don't think it's harsh at all. Such an epistemology contributes nothing but false positives because parties with conflicting interests agreeing has zero bearing on truth. It's not even a good rule of thumb; it's just completely useless and irrelevant to knowledge production. Most people believe in some kind of religion or other nonsense like astrology; that they disagree on other things yet agree on that has absolute no bearing on the truth of any of those things. Think about it.
It's not an epistemic problem. Twitter has to address their users' toxic behavior turning the whole place/world into a dump. Rather that the confrontation taking place in replies and quote tweets and spreading all over the network, it happens in birdwatch (in theory).
I agree that solid epistemology has better specificity and sensitivity for what's true, and that's the idea with independent fact-checker institutions, but it appears none have managed to gain or retain widespread trust.
An approximate correlation is progress here. If you know of a better heuristic I'd be very interested in hearing it.
Also, can we agree on what problem is most important to be solving right now? Is it 1) we haven't reached complete truth across all dimensions of knowledge or that 2) we need to build bridges crossing the massive societal trust schisms?
I would be worried about users falling off seeing their notes have ~10% approval rate, but it doesn't seem to bother you at all. I wish I had smarter question to ask about it, but... how come?
That's a great question, actually. Factors which I think play a role:
1. I'm not that heavily driven by ego in this kind of context. I know that approval is largely a function of how many people bother to vote on my notes.
2. The satisfaction I got from getting a note approved on one of Elon Musk's tweets was sizable. It is literally one of the most-read pieces of text I've ever written, which is kind of wild.
3. I define success here as "good notes are approved," rather than "my notes are approved." I'm used to casting a wide net and being happy at a few successes. I'm a hiring manager, so I have to know how to be happy with a low success rate.
4. I also know that other Birdwatch contributors were reading my notes, and I tried to write them in such a way that people can easily research and draw conclusions. (Not always easy, since I'm opinionated.) So even a note that isn't approved might do some good.
Tweets are near real time so how do they keep up with them when it's a consensus system that could take a lot of back and forth? The period between when a tweet is sent and when its reviewed is posted could be enough time to indoctrinate a lot of people, no? I think the average tweet impression over time graph looks like a reverse exponential.
I didn't see anything right-wing about Radley's fact check other than his assertion that it must be so.
For those who haven't seen it, Radley tweeted[1] that of 760 million Subway riders, there were only 8 murders, so it is intrinsically safer than riding in a car.
The birdwatch message retorted that he was conflating 1 year of Subway death statistics against the lifetime vehicular fatality rate, and implied that his stats weren't an apples to apples comparison. Birdwatch recalibrated his statistic using (the generally more meaningful) "miles traveled" and determined that riding a mile on the New York Subway was ~1.8 times riskier than that same mile in a car, which is also probably wrong, but right if you use _the data he provided_ against "miles traveled" vs overall ridership.
The Birdwatch note also assumed he was using lifetime risk of dying in a car crash, which he wasn't (I double checked).
I am not 100% sure that miles traveled is the most meaningful statistic, FWIW. Wouldn't it make more sense to use hours spent on each form of transportation?
Appears that that Birdwatch was removed. I assume this was from people rating it after it appeared and the annual versus lifetime error was found.
Deaths per X miles traveled is the standard metric. Deaths per hour would be a very strange way to compare forms of transit given that the purpose is travel not wasting time.
A good habit for "fact checking" groups would be to NOT give the "right answer" in a case like this. Pointing out the error (yearly vs. lifetime) is good enough. No need to try to be an ad-hoc social scientist giving quick answers to questions that are probably not easy - or at least, if you want to do it, do it on a regular account.
It is vulnerable to numbers, I think, for the same reason people believe misinformation. If a check looks plausible, some number of people will say it's correct without double checking.
For important context, this isn't new (it started a couple of years ago I believe), and has not been introduced by the new owner. It is not related to outsourcing work to unpaid volunteers that was previously done by paid employees who have been made redundant during the layoffs over the last few days.
I didn't intend for my comment to be interpreted that way, I don't think most people are. But you are right, I could have phrased it better.
There has been a lot of rumour and speculation about the moderation teams being sacked. I don't know what's true, but it does sound like they may have had fewer redundancies than in other departments. But what we do know is this "birdwatch" initiative isn't related to it if it has happened.
The post has been made with an editorialised title implying that this is new. Nowhere on the linked page does it say it is new. In the context of this week, and the rumours, it would imply that they are connected. They are not.
The post smells a little like someone generating clickbait for karma.
>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
This is something Elon Musk tweeted out recently. He seems to think that agreement on topic B by people who previously disagreed on topic A means they must be right on topic B.
Would like to see some data on this, but it sounds like an effective rating system. I’d be concerned that getting statistical significance would be challenging without creating pseudo pairs of labelers likely to disagree on issues.
In Europe the political fringes, the far-left and far-right, disagree about almost everything. But they have also agreed on a lot of things like being anti-EU and pro-Russia. Elon Musk's system will consider their opinions about the EU and Russia to be more correct than that of other users.
They agree on few things and disagree on most. Horse shoe effect is just a way how to dismiss actual real politics and ideologies so one can wave hands.
They disagree on a lot of things, but they also disagree on a lot of things with moderate people, so that observation alone doesn't refute "far-left and far-right are closer to each other than they are to the center".
Of course the horseshoe effect is not some objective truth that's true in every country, that would be silly. I think the interesting part of it is that extreme ends of any political spectrum experience a similar environment: they are often shunned, distrust the mainstream media, attract social outcasts, etc. Just the shared experience of being on the edge of the spectrum often leads to similarities between them.
But (as stated) they disagree on most things. Because they are both usually in the opposition to the governing parties, they do opposition work and present dissenting opinions on vaccine efficacy, war support etc.
Often these few common topics overlap with the libertarian viewpoint.
I don't understand that argument. If the government supports a war, doesn't that make any opposition parties more likely to agree with each other that the war is bad? Of course they can disagree with the war for different reason, but both parties being in opposition and dissenting still makes them more likely to have common ground.
Edit: unless we are talking about one or two party systems, there the dynamics are stranger
Does anyone here know how it works and thinks it can be
easily abused? The paper is here[0], but I would be satisfied with an
explanation from anyone who just generally knows what
"bridge-based ranking"[1] is. I'm pretty excited about the idea
and I wonder if people mostly just don't know or if I am being
too optimistic.
The greatest weakness in the scoring system [0] that I can see is age. There is a requirement for valid scoring to occur within 48 hours.
> Made within the first 48 hours of the note’s creation (because we publicly release all rating data after 48 hours) [1]
However, in the real world, our understanding of a message's context may actually take much longer than that. Especially when more information can come to light, that changes the landscape.
The second greatest weakness I see is that rater's with a lower mean are automatically filtered. Whilst you can discuss using APIs to do it, if you have large groups of individuals dedicated to promoting specific viewpoints, you can utilise that manpower to de-rate anyone promoting an opposing view by ruining their helpfulness average.
That makes the system easily abused by highly motivated political factions, especially foreign ones that admit to employing large groups of people for such a purpose.
> Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1]
> Their rater helpfulness score must be at least 0.66 [1]
This is a good thing. The rater helpfulness score is how similar you rate a note as helpful/not helpful to how that note eventually is labeled. Because this determination is made based on how well it's rated among those with differing opinions, being accurate means your ratings tend to be less biased. Other accounts aren't voting on your "rater helpfulness score," so it's not subject to brigades.
The 48 hour thing is only for valid ratings, and that's only for the rating helpfulness score, so it's not to do with note ratings. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they were careful about the nuances that you've mentioned.
I think this problem is similar to fighting spam, or ranking webpages for search queries: you don't want to be too public with your methods, because any metric can be gamed.
I actually suspect "bridge-based ranking" has already been deployed on a large scale, and the group that did so has not publicly disclosed this -- likely for good reason. (There is a big social media site that used to be famous for having terrible comments. You fill in the rest...)
In any case, yes it is very exciting. Including from an epistemological point of view -- the idea of promoting arguments that actually change someone's mind is pretty cool (assuming the argument is sound and truthful).
While I agree with most of the comments that it can be easily abused, if the bots can be kicked out, this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better way for all social media to work than what we have now.
In the current situation (showing most liked posts) the only common ground is good looking people (TikTok/Instagram/Youtube shorts) and most outraging posts with lies to get more likes (Twitter/Youtube)
> this (trying to get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints recognized by the algorithm) would be a better
But people _want_ echo chambers. No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike. It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
> No one wants to be in a group where people share opinions that they dislike.
The relevance of this is way overstated. Most people haven't formed opinions on most topics and just want to hear different viewpoints so they can form an opinion.
> It’s just human nature. Why do you think private Facebook groups are so popular?
Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap. Might as well ask why subreddits are popular.
> Because people have specific interests they want to pursue and engage with other enthusiasts, without being inundated with other crap.
i suspect this is exactly what the comment you're replying to means.
i too have a problem with how many times i read people crying out "echo chamber" repeatedly as if this is always a bad thing.
i mean, when i have a party, i don't invite assholes.
when we go to bars, we don't invite spazzy people.
i don't invite people who think its oppressive if they're asked to have common courtesy.
i dont invite abusive people who have the social skills of a tantrum throwing 3 year old.
they just ruin the time for everyone. by many of these people's definitions, this is an echo-chamber.
we exist in the real world. i can have parties with friends and discussions with friends, this doesn't mean im somehow _never_ exposed to different ideas--no one ever shuts up about their ideas. not wanting to be around people we find weird is absolutely normal.
at the end of the day, if a website or party or bar is full of shitty behaving people, ill just go to a different space where people behave with basic social skills. thats not weird. thats not an echo chamber.
every bar or club in the world has different expectations of behaviors, its not evil of them, its not nefarious, its not scandalous of them. its just the culture the owners are curating. that isn't some scary echo-chamber. its a completely normal thing that happens _all_over_the_place_ in the real world.
but oddly theres a weird segment of people who are trying to convince me if someone is just constantly rude or spazzy, and im like "yo, this dudes kinda weird" that everyone should always have to be around them. thats just strange and not the norm in the physical real world. its really odd from the foundations.
edit to add: a perfect example of curation is this site that we all spend a decent amount of time on. dang curates the discussion. its not an echo chamber by any rational definition of the term. the site owners and mods have curated the patrons, the environment, the overall tone of the site--and from an end-users perspective, it works very well. its fun. its an enjoyable experience.
i think you’d find that the vast majority of the time people are removed from spaces due to behavior, not beliefs, despite their personal conspiracy delusions that it’s belief.
as i mentioned above, people who think it’s oppressive when they’re asked to have common courtesy. for example many people have been banned because they can’t stop insulting people of different races—they’re being banned for behaviors, they refuse to have common courtesy. they cry loudly when asked not to be abusive. that’s a behavior. and most of the time these weirdos are banned, it’s because they’re too socially inept to understand basic social skills.
The other day I saw "Trending in Sports: The Jews" on the Twitter trending topics page. I do not want to see that. Maybe we need the "echo chambers are better than gas chambers" slogan.
The reason echo chambers are dangerous is precisely because of the lack of dissent. Imagine politics is little more than a math problem. The actual answer is 0, but one group insists the answer can't be any smaller than 43, and another group insists there's no way it can be large than -51.
Split these two groups off on their own, and they're just going to diverge more and more. Those in the bigger group will flaunt their in-group virtue by insisting on ever large numbers, and vice versa for those in the other group. They will diverge further and further from reality, but bring them together and the two sides help keep other in check.
Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]. They managed to get an enabling act passed by political maneuvering, not genuine popularity. At that point they created an artificial echo chamber, and the rest is history.
So does that mean it's "dangerous" for Jews not to have someone following them around debating their right to exist? After all, their continued existence might be a mistake, and their erroneous insistence on survival merely in-group virtue.
No, but it is _very_ dangerous to Jews for those people to be isolated, never have their ideas challenged, and miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints
It’s also dangerous if those ideas are widely circulated to people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.
What this comes down to is the level of good faith at play: hearing dissenting ideas is good if you’re in a place to take them seriously and the dissenter is being genuine and willing to discuss them in good faith. If those aren’t true, it’s not a win: nobody benefits from giving a liar or propagandist a podium and someone who can’t agree on some kind of objective baseline won’t be able or willing to adjust their beliefs.
> people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.
You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?
I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.
Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.
It’s more the people who might get pushed to the next level as they get positive reinforcement and, especially, as more moderate people leave because they’re tired of dealing with the zealots.
Extremists don’t care about disagreement – they’re there to talk, not listen – and if they see a few fellow travelers they’ll start to tell themselves their position is mainstream.
> Getting back to real history, the Nazis were never notably popular. Their best result in anything like a fair election was in 1932 where they took 37% of the vote [1]
This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.
If they formed a normal coalition government, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But they did not, and could not. They couldn't get 13% of the other 63% of people to side with them, even in exchange for shared political control!
And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.
37% is quite a lot of support tho. It is not majority, but it is a lot in multi party parlament system. Second most popular part got 21%.
Yes, those elections were violent and also final step to power was under threat of violence. At this point, nazi were already clearly violent. Their first steps after getting power were creation of concentration camps for opposition.
Having spent most of my adult life in or near Nuremberg, I am dreading this upcoming election back home, in large part because the various possibly-armed, self-appointed ballot drop box/poll watchers who have been marinating in conspiracy theories for the last several years is just a little too reminiscent of one of the displays at the Dokumentationszentrum in the 1918-1933 section.
For me, the "trending topics" show me plenty of people screaming at each other from diverse (and often vile and insane) viewpoints. Maybe I've brought that on myself though.
I'm in favor of letting people pursue their preferences, but echo chambers are antithetical to civil society - much more dangerous than so-called misinformation (indeed, they are environments in which errors and lies are more likely to flourish), so counteracting then is a valuable goal, in my book.
I think you are diametrically mistaken and echo chambers are actually good for civil society because they allow the illusion that people outside your ingroup are basically good. I think what happened is our echo chambers got punctured and so we suddenly got the realization that other people lived in echo chambers, which is why it seems like those suddenly popped up. But well-insulated echo chambers (ie. not what controversy-driven twitter gives you) are good for mental health and society as a whole.
This has some internal logic, but every experience I've had contradicts your proposition.
For example, I'm in my late forties. When I was growing up, it was rare to encounter (out) gay people outside of major cities, and people would believe practically any negative statement about them, not so much anymore. Conversely, in my college town today, most of my accquaintences have never met a Republican, and they predictably believe in a stupid cartoon caricature of red staters. I'm definitely not buying it.
Maybe if you have safe spaces (echo chambers) and overlapping meeting places, but also a strong standard of not policitizing the meeting places, you can get the best of both worlds?
The problem is that people disagree about the term bot.
It should mean an account whose content is controlled exclusively by an algorithm.
But instead it has come to mean anything they consider low-quality which often includes a lot of real people who are either paid to do so by state actors, have been radicalised or are just looking to troll. And it's very hard if not impossible to detect and ban those people.
Not to mention most studies on Twitter bots define one as "fifty interactions per day". If you define "heavy Twitter users" and "bots" to be the same thing, of course Twitter is going to be full of 'bots'.
I have a prior, validated by experience, that anyone spending that much time of their day on Twitter likely has nothing of value to contribute.
It would imply they work in PR, marketing, propaganda, or failing all of those, have little life outside the internet. Either way their content is likely to be of extremely low quality.
> get rid of echo chambers and highlighting posts from people with different viewpoints
Sounds good in an internet comment, but in practice that means I end up reading racist propaganda, which is not something that improves my life. So then you eliminate the crap, and boom, you have an echo chamber.
People are capable of deciding content is crap on their own, without an echo chamber leading them to that belief. I’ve looked at the facts, analyzed a lot of situations, and have come to the independent conclusion that bigotry is pretty unhelpful so I don’t want to see it (online or anywhere). I don’t have a responsibility to engage with it online, so I frequent online spaces that have a minimum of it.
Sorry, but no. I tried following people with different political perspectives than mine, and it was a total shit show. These people don't have incentives to post well-thought-out arguments. They have incentives to bander to the base, telling them how smart they are and how bad the people who disagree with them are.
And I purposefully chose a person who had other qualities outside of the political opinions that I very much admired. If the Twitter algorithm were to just show me things outside of my buble, it would be even worse.
I’m of two minds with opposing viewpoint presentation, one of them being I respect giving a reader the opportunity to consider multiple viewpoints for themselves. The other I worry about giving false equivalency to flat earthers or something like that. I don’t know if I want holocaust denial presented as an equal opposing viewpoint to holocaust remembrance, for example.
They don't have to be given equal treatmet, the idea is only that we should not normalize suppressing things that are "distasteful", because that is easily abused by people with power to oppress those without. Speaking truth to power is not possible if arbitrary and capricious rules prevent you from speaking.
Totally agree, but how would you go about categorizing ideas into those that are worthy of equivalency and those that aren’t? Seems easy enough for fringe conspiracy theories but harder as you get into the realm of well sourced but bad ideas.
> but how would you go about categorizing ideas into those that are worthy of equivalency and those that aren’t?
obviously this is one of the most complicated questions that would require actual libraries full of books and experienced actual experts to properly come to any solid conclusions, but my suspicions are that some of the pieces that would be important would circle around:
- we start by recognizing that most of us are dumb in most areas. if we're lucky, we have expertise in one or two areas. if we're really lucky, peers in our field will publicly recognize our expertise. outside of our areas of expertise, compared to the experts in those fields, we're dumb. and thats ok. comparatively im an idiot in fluid dynamics, soil sciences, and millions and millions of other areas. i might have some hobby level interests, but compared to recognized experts in those fields, im an idiot. collectively we seem to have forgotten our limitations. i mean, the old phrase is there for a reason: the smartest person is the one who recognizes what they don't know.
- i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.
- often, more speech is not necessarily better. if the more speech is all nonsense babble, the conversation is just DDOSed and the situation is absolutely worse. as yishan said in that incredible HN post the other day [1], its about managing signal-noise. if its just simply "more" speech, we end up with noise.
- if we've already collectively decided that 2+2=4, yet someone keeps screaming they're not convinced, maybe its ok to ignore them. i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.
- this is gonna be a hard pill to swallow for many but, when we're building something with social as the primary, we _need_ to have _more_ people deeply involved in the building process who have expertise in humans. people who understand the human condition. some of us don't understand people very well and its absurd how many of us (myself included) turn our noses up when our projects involve human complexities. could you imagine a party planner building a bridge without heavily including engineers?
this is a hard problem, but the very first place id start is, no, not all of our opinions have equal weight in all topics. i know how difficult that is for some people to take. but its just true.
> i dont know shit about anesthesiology, if an algorithm weights my comment discussing anesthesiology with the same weight as an actual widely peer-respected anesthesiologist, something is _severely_ broken. this type of thing is happening across the board.
Facts are one type of content, but what about these types of prompts?
* An an anesthesiologist walks into a bar…
* I’d rather be an anesthesiologist than a …
* My recent experience with an anesthesiologist was …
* Can someone please explain why an anesthesiologist …
Also, the problem with a peer-reviewed domain expert approach is that if we took a collection of randomly sampled domain experts from 100 years ago, many might have opinions and theories about their own area of expertise that we consider abhorrent or factually wrong today. It’s only through loudly questioning those enshrined, institutional beliefs that we make progress.
And often times those questions are raised by those folks that experience the outcome of those theories. It’s one thing to be a peer reviewed domain expert operating in the realm of controlled studies and intellectual thought. It’s another to be a human being with one life to live, who’s on the receiving / implementation end of these theories.
> i can't tell you how many times ive seen people's arguments get thoroughly dismantled, then we'll see them screaming the exact same arguments an hour later pretending the dismantling didn't happen.
There's no modern cannon to these arguments and their discussion, so the dismantling basically didn't happen. Only the readers of that dismantling know about it
> Interesting, I remember someone on /r/slatestarcodex having the idea to rate/sort reddit comments by that metric, which I dub "sort by should-be-uncontroversial" (because normally-disagreeing people all think it's correct).
Honestly, that sorting mechanism sounds sane to me? It certainly sounds a lot saner than optimizing for engaging content (which seems to result in arguments), but I would guess is a lot less profitable (and so likely won't happen).
But like, in a world where informative comments actually were sorted highly, wouldn't that mostly obviate the need for this notes / fact checking system in the first place?
Put differently, isn't the very existence of and interest in this second system for voting on content attached to a tweet a demonstration that the primary system (for sorting replies, which are merely content attached to a tweet) sucks?
Such a scoring mechanism sounds useful at first but on websites like Reddit it would likely cause puns, cultural references and such to be even more dominant than they already are, as those are most likely to be similarly appreciated by "normally-disagreeing people".
I could only see it add much value on heavily moderated/high-effort sites like HN, where there's much less need for it in the first place.
I don't like this at all. The thing that bothers me is the UI appearance of authority. If they found a good algorithmic way to add context, apply it to twits themselves.
Opaque assertions of authority are a dark pattern. Getting someone's "context" stuck on your words when it's just another person's opinion, but your voice has an origin and their voice is given an authoritative appearance without origin feels bad. It tricks people into being more trusting than they should.
No, the alterative is that the opinion is voiced by someone specific, anonymous or not, with everyone's intuition about people saying things coming into account.
The way it's implemented, the opinion is practically anonymous, with no one accountable for it, but given a false cover of authority.
If the context is an article by someone, I don't mind if the algorithm somehow finds the relevant twit by the relevant journalist who authored that article, and tends to show them together, as equals. That's fine by me.
I disagree with the UI choice of giving visual significance to a specific opinion.
Assuming we’re in a world where fact checking by the platform in some capacity makes sense then this then this feels like the right way to do it.
Another way would letting fact checking by an extension of the report feature where you can say, “woah this needs some context” and write a reply or link to your article discussing the issue. And the Twitter moderators just decide whether to show it in the privileged spot with attribution. Bonus if the moderators can highlight a person’s credentials if they happen to be an expert in the topic or directly related to the events.
This seems practically useless for high-profile issues where people will make the effort to manipulate the system.
As it states, it's not direct majority rules, but it requires the bulk of the raters to be people acting like people. Bots and brigades won't have a problem adding their desired notes.
> Twitter doesn’t choose what shows up, the people do
>
> Twitter doesn’t write, rate or moderate notes (unless they break the Twitter rules.) We believe giving people a voice to make these choices together is a fair and effective way to add information that helps people stay better informed.
Well, this isn’t true anymore. There was a birdwatch note on one of Elons tweets that got removed. And it wasn’t removed by the people, because in the Birdwatch UI it still said “this note was voted helpful and is showing on the tweet”.
I couldn’t find the picture of the Birdwatch UI showing it’s still helpful and showing on the tweet when it wasn’t :( If anyone really wants it, reply and I’ll look more, I probably have it in my likes
There was like a few hours where it showed up as Helpful and showing on the tweet on Birdwatch (I saw like two or three separate screenshots of it) but not showing on the actual tweet, so I’m not entirely convinced
Birdwatch is a collaborative way to add helpful context to Tweets and keep people better informed
Birdwatch is a pilot program that aims to create a better-informed world. It empowers people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.
>Birdwatch doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, Birdwatch ratings requires agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
This means the political fringes get to decide what is truth. The far-left and far-right disagree on many things but also agree on many things that are bad for the rest of society. Until very recently the anti-EU sentiment in many European countries was high among both the far-left and far-right.
I mean... they don't pay anybody for it, or actually have any sort of fact-checking right now... and they're still one of the most dominant cessp... err, social media sites.
This particular technology initiative does appear to be an effort to build a system that harnesses unpaid volunteers as fact-checkers.
However, according to today's front-page Washington Post[1] article, they are also still paying people in the "Trust & Safety" department, to do jobs including fact-checking (and presumably acting on fact-checking done by other humans, and possibly trained-model automated fact-checkers as well).
From what I can understand, the company was recently purchased by an oligarch, who then implemented massive staff cuts of around 50% generally across the board, but the "Trust & Safety" department had a lower level of layoffs, at around 15%. So human staff is apparently still involved in fact-checking, aside from the system described here.
It seems likely that fact-checking on a global "social media" network would necessarily involve various approaches and multiple layers to be effective, so the core idea of this system seems worth trying.
However, it is a difficult problem, with powerful financial and political incentives for various parties to game such a system, it will be interesting to see if this ever yields results, and if so, what those results are.
Elon is not an Oligarch, unless the US is an Oligarchy (it's not).
> An oligarch is one of the select few people who rule or influence leaders in an oligarchy—a government in which power is held by a select few individuals or a small class of powerful people.
There is considerable debate[1] about whether or not the US is, in its contemporary form, an oligarchy (including, I suppose, your (parenthetical) refutation of that notion above).
Personally, I'm persuaded by the argument that it is an oligarchy, or at least, it is more one than it is not.
Unlike some (most?) others, where the government is the seat of ultimate power and chooses its accomplices, in the US that arrangement is inverted; the very rich (the few hundred billioniares, and a few thousand of not-quite-that-rich individuals and families) excercise enormous control over the government, without having to directly participate in its execution or hold office themselves.
(And our politicians themselves almost never achieve that level of wealth; many do become rich by ordinary standards, but its clear where the actual power resides.)
So we could quibble about definitions and degrees of words like "oligarch" and "the klept" but in my view the US is clearly more toward the oligarchy end of the spectrum than the other end.
I wonder how this can be brigaded and manipulated. Remember, there are millions of bots out there that can be programmed to do whatever they want. If you can brigade them properly, then it can be manipulated. Maybe that's a part of the $8/month plan that Elon has, make it very expensive to run bots.
I'm skeptical that using a wikipedia-like approach will work for small, essentially ephemeral content. There's just not enough time to debate each tweet, especially now that so many people (with large followings) tweet so much debatable content frequently. There's probably also not enough interest... or the interest and fascination with moderating will wane quickly (fatique).
Reading the various recent news items about Twitter, one would think that Musk was trying to revert the company to a crowdsource startup. I don't think that's possible, at least not without shedding a great many of the users. Of course, I also think the entire system and premise behind Twitter is bunk, so it doesn't really matter.
I don't think there's necessarily a need to fact check every tweet. If fact checks are maintained in a list, and one can navigate from a user account to their position in the list which also shows their past history of fact checked falsehoods/untruthfulness/lying, it could make a difference.
I think the general public is intelligent enough to start to come up with strategies to target the most influential people (politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, etc) and work down from there.
Of course, fact checking is a complicated skill, but people can learn new skills. The public learning new skills on social media on an ongoing basis may be problematic for some people, but it could be very healthy for the overall ecosystem.
> Birdwatch works differently than the rest of Twitter. It is not a popularity contest. It aims to find notes that many people from different points of view will find helpful. It takes into account not only how many ratings a note has received, but also whether people who rated it helpful seem to come from different perspectives.
I had to read this twice. Is it just me or is this Twitter officially acknowledging the issues with their platform (and by proxy all engagement optimized platforms), the main root cause and a solution in the same paragraph? And then proceeds to launch it only for a minor sub-feature of the platform as a whole?
When it comes to fact checking, they optimize for group satisfaction and consensus. For general content, they optimize for individual satisfaction/engagement.
Who watches the Birdwatchers? Joke aside that's an experiment I can appreciate at least it will show us how bot invested and deranged twitter and it's users really are. I actually thought it was launched months ago..
Part of the reason this is gettting attention right now is that its users added a note to a White House tweet that was accurate, informative, and so politically embarassing they deleted the tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472161
This is a tad different from the previous approach which involved third-party fact checkers that were, uh, visibly slanted towards the Democrats to put it lightly (and whenever a non-Democrat-aligned news source got blessed as a fact checker by a masjor social media network there was a major media storm over it).
I have lost friends and family to this nonsense. Both literally, to antivax Covid deaths in '20-'21, and figuratively, to the insane and ever-escalating pizzagate-style conspiracy networks from which adherents rarely emerge.
Several Republican friends are dead now due to Covid because they believed the anti-truth ideas being spread by GOP media about the vaccines. Darwin awards are indeed one of the ultimate fact checkers.
First I've heard that one - trying to take it at face value, is the thesis that truth, equity, justice, etc should (must?) be discarded or suppressed if there is money to be made in the short term?
It's more like: focusing the marketing or intended audience of product on the smallest viable minority of potential customers with the intentional exclusion and or derision of other potential customers is not generally a profitable marketing strategy.
Exceptions that prove the rule are those that focus on exclusivity or rarity, such as products that truly only are needed/desired by a niche audience but at a higher cost to make up for the lack of broad appeal/availability.
Movies and TV shows (about which the "get woke, go broke" saying originated) don't fall under that sort of exclusivity-at-a-higher-price concept. Intentionally alienating 80% of your customer base to appeal to 20% is a risky strategy.
From the page: "We believe regular people can valuably contribute to identifying and adding helpful context to potentially misleading information."
That'll end well! ;) Problem is that on Twitter people aren't "regular", they're either seeking their own echo chamber for confirmation bias or the opposing echo chamber to insult, so crowd sourced feedback will simply be used as a tool for either of those.
It is, but it has the opposite issue. Wikipedia isn't a place for opinions and it doesn't portray itself as a "free speech zone". It easily rejects new information. Too easily, in that "notability" can bias it towards rejecting consequential but obscure historical figures, especially from people who were marginalized at the time.
That's great for making Wikipedia safer from abject misinformation, which is a huge plus. It's less good at ongoing discoveries and news.
Notably yesterday a birdwatcher added a note to one of Elon's tweets, and then later the explanation was removed. They do use opaque algorithms that take other birdwatchers' feedback and decide whether to keep a note. Of course, many immediately suspected Elon had it manually removed.
Regardless of whether he actually did it I think this is a fatal flaw that will prevent birdwatch from ever being trusted.
The note wasn't removed. It's still visible as a potential note; it just dropped below the threshold necessary for general display. This is not common but it's not abnormal either; it happened to one of my notes on a controversial topic.
You can download all the data apparently, so you could watch the birdwatchers!
However although users get a permanent id it's not possible to get actual Twitter handles from these ids. So identification of who the birdwatchers are is not easy (wisely so)!
There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day. Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs.
> There isn't enough time in a no-sleep 24h day to verify every single piece of content one is reading/hearing online that same day.
If it was necessary to fact check every tweet, this would be a big problem. Luckily though, that is not a requirement. With a proper implementation, it should be reasonably easy to surface a historic list of (a subset of) any given user's incorrect statements, which provides objective evidence to distrust someone's claims and opinions. With the style of epistemology practiced by most people in 2022, everyone is going to have black marks on their history. And if we had a cultural change as a consequence of this, people might start putting some effort into speaking in the form of true statements.
> Just go to any major news site's homepage; there's at least 40 articles there, plus videos. Count the number of tweets or instas you're glancing upon on your feed, they're infinitely loading below your thumbs.
Establish a persistent and centralized list of well fact checked "untruths" (rhetoric, innuendo, etc) from popular media outlets, and we will then have undeniable evidence that can be easily referenced, making common claims that mainstream media is ~"not that bad" transparently false.
> Self-service fact-checking is not scalable.
There is an important difference between scalability and infinite scalability.
If Elon is smart, this feature could be a very big problem for belief shapers.
I'm fascinated by the idea that we have enabled everyone to talk to everyone else and now have to find ways to agree on, what are and are not facts, what is and is not "acceptable".
Eons ago we old buffers dreamed of a new world online - a virtual world. And we built it. And it has the same problems and we are trying to find almost the same solutions - but they fit differently.
And there is opportunity- to share wealth and knowledge and spread out power.
Related story: Musk got a note attached to his tweet removed. Edit: but now it is back.
"After new Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted a complaint about losing advertisers on the platform Friday, a note offering additional context was added to his tweet, before it later disappeared."
I think it is gone again, but after reading the article you linked it makes sense why it is coming and going.
"Users are able to vote on whether the fact-checks are helpful or not. They can appear or disappear based on how many people found them to be helpful, Twitter's Vice President of Product Keith Coleman said Friday."
No no no. You see? If you want to be a Birdwatch contributor, you'll have to pay them. /s
It's actually pretty okay. The contributor & rating system seems to work well, and contributions are anonymous. I participate mostly through rating contributions a little here and there when I see some things that are wildly unfounded or misleading claims.
It is my belief that any fact checking system based on consensus and not actual factual evidence will eventually result in an echo chamber. What’s the value of homogenizing a community down to just the voices that agree with you?
Depends how you define "consensus". If two people who disagree on most things agree on X, then arguably we can have more confidence that X is true. There is no left-right divide on whether the sky is blue, for instance.
We both know that this will be applied against will be applied universally to more nuanced scenarios than that. It shouldn’t be.
More often the “fact-check” is synonymous with “what we know based on publicly-available information” than what is objectively true (or, as more often is the issue, what is untrue). This basically rules out anyone from being able to credibly whistleblow/call attention to something known only by a few that would be incendiary if it became widely known. Knowing and proving are often in different arenas, and I don’t think constraining conversation to only facts that can be checked is helpful for genuine discourse.
I don't think this constrains the conversations that can happen on Twitter, so much as adding "context" to any conversation. The context that something is not provable using publicly available information although some people claim to know it's factual status is also valuable, and I agree this nuance would ideally be available in that "context".
I think what bothers me more than anything is how often even fact-checkers are just wrong. We had a moderator in the last presidential election literally interrupting the president to tell him something wasn’t factually correct, and the moderator was wrong!
Fact checking should be reserved for things that are just provably untruthful (i.e. flat earthers and other nonsense). But when only applied in that capacity, it doesn’t really have much value anymore.
So if it is, on one hand, "collaborative" and it expects people to work for free, and on the other hand there is apparently so much value in putting misinformation on twitter, wouldn't most people that work on that be paid by the various parties that want to put misinformation on twitter?
You know how amazon reviews are collaborative and volunteer based and 99% of them are made for money and are easily spotted lies.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives.
It is centralised and only for US. I am not going to participate on any platform that is not decentralised, federated and zero trust.
In past I put a lot of effort into various forums. Well sourced information, several thousands hours of work. But very ofter it was all wasted, wiped and deleted.
Now I only write books. There are well established censorship laws. And work I put into writing book will be preserved!
Every 12-24 months there’s a five mile long line for the soapbox so all the computer nerds can get up and tell us that they’re putting a line in the sand and that federation is the only answer. Now, just as always, the world will continue spinning without them and this sort of idealism that seems completely blind to reality that for all the Smart People that have put their mind to federated / decentralised social networks, none of them are any good. Now, as always, all that make this claim will inevitably succumb to the reality that their vanity is worth more than their ideals, and will make their way back to Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate and despise both Twitter and Musk. But to act like Mastadon or any of the other attempts at this stuff appeal to people that aren’t tech / privacy wonks is tone deaf. And as much as Twitter is a ‘platform for elites to disseminate their thoughts that’s pretending to be a social network’, “publishing books” is certainly amother step in that direction.
Search doesn't really work on Mastodon and it's full of boring content. It only works if you can get all your friends to use the same server. That's impossible these days. Nobody is going to install and figure out an another app just to be on your personal mastodon instance.
There's nothing quite like walking into a bookshop, library
or someones house and seeing a copy of your book.
You can see from the well thumbed edges that it's been read. It's been
around for 10 years and it will be around for another 30 or 40 (modern
bindings notwithstanding) - and some copies will probably outlive you.
The same cannot be said for the "Internet" - although I think what
Brewster Kahle has done with The Internet Archive is amazing - much of
which remains ephemeral.
Once books were the preserve of "elites". Now I think the tables are
turned. Some marginal voices get traction only through traditional
publication forms because they live in repressive technological
regimes or outside the walled gardens of the so-called "town square".
It is not the egalitarian utopia once promised.
Here's an excerpt from Digital Vegan
"With opportunities to fix our digital world from /within/ the
system vanishing, book publishing remains a bastion of open
intelligence. What you hold in your hands (or have as a non-DRM
file) may soon be one of the few remaining means to circulate
critical opinions that would quickly be censored online."
Some third party forum/social media site failing to host your writing for eternity is not even slightly the same thing as censorship.
If you've written a bunch of stuff that you think is valuable and you want to make sure it's available forever then you should make a blog and host it yourself. (Which you have sort of done by writing a book, but you didn't need to go that far if all you cared about was longevity)
Actually the internet is decentralised. It's just that a lot of people either don't know or simply aren't willing to trade convenience for ideological purity.
Anybody can run a web server at home, get a domain name, write a Twitter clone, host it and publish whatever content they like. And when you exceed your traffic limits you can take that web server, drive to your local co-located provider and in almost all cases they will let you grow that site almost ad infinitum provided the content isn't illegal.
You don't need to ask permission. You don't need to compromise your ideology. You can just do it.
But people don't want freedom or decentralisation. What they want is the ability to say anything they like and for everyone to hear it.
So the "actshually" meme comes true. Instead of reddit-style legalisms, just try to be more human and understand their perspective for a change.
People do have the desire and right to ask for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. Is it feasible today? Technically: yes, realistically: no.
Why?
Because even MORE people are needed to effectively demand the right for mainstream platforms to be decentralized. You know that. Now be nice to them, please.
Hi, birdwatcher here. I resent the implication that the time honored tradition and enjoyment one gets from watching birds could be used as a metaphor for adjudicating the integrity of bad actors on social media. One is a graceful reflection on the pristine experience of being alive, the other is a form of policing bad behavior. It is a shame they had to soil such a worthy endeavor as birdwatching with this name.
Hi. Twatwatcher and lover here. I resent the implication that a twat is a bad thing which need policing.
Yeah, one meaning of the word is synonymous with "fool", but let's not encourage overloading the word since one of the meanings is related to that which is necessary for human life (and is also quite fun) with stupid human behavior.
In my experience, having lived in a few English speaking countries, "twat" is commonly understood as a fool, whereas it's derivative "twot" can be used to describe either a fool or for female genitalia. So given this distinction, I am very much pro twot but anti twat.
I get that. I am familiar with the common usage of that word, although I have never seen the spelling with 'o'. The spelling with 'a' appears in dictionaries with definitions including both meanings.
I'm just objecting to the common usage (and also trying to make a joke related to the Birdwatcher objection above).
It's fascinating and unfortunate that (slang) names for human sexual organs often get used as derogatory adjectives for people.
That guy is a d-ck! She's a real tw-t. What a c-nt!
Likewise, the overloading of f-ck is a shame too.
Edit: fixing formatting stuff related to asterisks.
I've long since lost count of project/product/company names that hijack and overload existing terms with new, possibly opposite meanings. I don't like it either, but if you don't want that you'll essentially have to emigrate from humanity.
Then again the beautiful, pleasing sounds of birds tweeting has also been used as a metaphor for short form posts, many of which are not at all beautiful or pleasing.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Birdwatch takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
It was explained in the paragraph immediately below the sentence you quoted. Here it is again:
> Birdwatch assesses “different perspectives” entirely based on how people have rated notes in the past; Birdwatch does not ask about or use any other information to do this (e.g. demographics like location, gender, or political affiliation, or data from Twitter such as follows or Tweets). This is based on the intuition that Contributors who tend to rate the same notes similarly are likely to have more similar perspectives while contributors who rate notes differently are likely to have different perspectives. If people who typically disagree in their ratings agree that a given note is helpful, it’s probably a good indicator the note is helpful to people from different points of view.
I’m not a crypto fan but spitballing here: what if it were tokenized? Not necessarily in a distributed blockchain sort of way, after all this is Twitter which is centralized, but rather in terms of setting economic incentives for making good moderation judgements, eg when you make a judgment you stake something of value (money, tokens, reputation, whatever) and set up some mechanism such that making “bad” moderation judgments is an expensive choice. Seems like this is a scenario where there is low levels of trust and therefore can use the thinking of a similarly low-trust domain (crypto).
Enabling authenticated identity online (personas) is an objectively good thing. Authenticity is a precondition for most of modern life; small things like payments, driver's licenses, voting, education, employment, surgery.
Alas, the $8/mo blue check is not that. Payment method is the only verification. No further effort is made. (Please correct me as Musk's answers change.)
Instead, the blue check is nothing more than flare.
Twitter's pivot towards freemium, gacha, and ultimately Freemium Speeches™ (pay-to-say) could work.
There are precedents. Vanity press and academic journals, for instance.
And I can envision a substack, medium, or twitter that enables a marketplace for value added services. Fact checking, copyediting, visual design, and so forth. An Upwork for content producers.
The question I am wondering is twitter doing any due diligence for the 60/year you're paying to verify you are who you say you are. (Other than charging your credit card) I am guessing probably not.
The problem for him going forward is that he’s burned all trust. Maybe his alt-right bootlicking is theater to get a volatile crowd on board, but it alienates the rest of society, not to mention putting him on the wrong side of Popehat’s rule of goats.
The basic use case for crypto is imposing costs, and a protocol that uses it decides where you or your parties impose those costs. A cryptographic moderation protocol question would be, on what aspect of publishing a statement would you like to impose a cost?
To do that, we would need to break out publishing a statement into a collection of dimensions, like origin, destination, distance/reach, length, entropy/novelty, and likely some dozen or so others, then express our evaluations of them in terms of those criteria. The HN method of 'effect' is pretty good, and an origin's track record of engagement could give a new statement momentum, etc. Not to solution it - but in terms of what you would use tokenization for, it would be to impose costs on criteria expressed in these underlying message dimensions.
The goal is not that far from what birdwatch wants to do, but it's restricted to adding data context to online discourse.
I am frequently pondering those kind of thoughts regarding, low trust and crypto. And I would love to discuss it with you, or other people, if you are interested.
Basically the design dilemna is you want to anchor the moderating behavior to some hard identity or value, without ruining the collaborative spirit task.
Isn’t that how most political ads/disinformation campaigns already work? Many absolute truths in politics are self-evident, but if you need to get some lies out there… buy some ads.
yes, having skin in the game (staking for example) prevents bots, trolls and creates more responsibility. With added benefit of zero-Knowledge, security, and decentralization.
Whats the betting this gets canned pretty quickly. Musk just fired all the teams responsible for ethics, accessibility, accountability, fact checking, content curation, etc. Not just made them smaller - totally removed anyone involved with them.
The requirement for agreement seemed to work well at preventing weird factchecks from anywhere on the political spectrum. I saw a fair number of people trying to use Birdwatch to argue with each other, bad faith factchecks, and so on. None of them made it to general visibility.
I wrote 45 notes. I tried very hard to keep them unbiased, but I'm human and I have strong political opinions. 5 of them wound up approved. I suspect the requirement for agreement tended to keep anything that's more than a little divisive from getting approved; no evidence for this, though. I'd be curious to know what the average percentage was for active users.
There are way more Birdwatch notes getting written right now. A lot of them are terrible quality. However, they mostly aren't getting approved, so I think the system is working as designed.