Distinctions
I’m seeing people saying Reich is contradicting himself here, but I say he’s not.
The first is just pointing out a fact: the First Amendment limits what government can do, it’s not about everyone else. The second is talking about how the free market works, it’s not about government.
What am I missing?
I agree with you that it isn’t a contradiction. It is unfortunate that so many people in the US conflate all concerns about free speech with “first amendment”. Corporations and institutions restrict speech as well. Saying “It’s legal, nothing we can do about it” misses the point entirely. I think Reich is clear about it. Just because it is legal doesn’t make it right or good; we can talk about things that are problems without it being a demand that something be made illegal.
It’s been my experience that a lot of people believe the first amendment protects them against anyone restricting their speech. I once asked a friend of mine not to try to tell me what was wrong with the Constitution until she actually read it; there are problems with it, but not the ones she was talking about, because they are things that aren’t even there. She accused me of violating her free speech. I pointed out if she actually read the constitution, she might know why that wasn’t correct.
I am cautiously optimistic about Musk’s Twitter takeover. If he does what he says he intends to do (a big “if”, of course), I think it will make the world a somewhat better place.
– More robust free speech. No more women getting banned for saying men aren’t women
– Making the algorithm open-source. This proprietary algorithm is driving world discourse and we have little to no insight into how it works or what it does.
– Making it possible to verify your identity. Easier to filter out potential bots, including misinformation spreaders.
Honestly, even having Trump back on Twitter is probably a net positive for the political prospects of Democrats. Trump is more unpopular than politicians like DeSantis.
I’m a twitter viewer, rather than participator, so I’ll suspend judgement for what Musk’s takeover of twitter might mean. I do have my doubts though. Musk talks a big game about free speech, but his personal actions have been more about restricting and punishing speech he doesn’t like or that paint him in a less than flattering light.
I also think that despite being an intelligent guy, his thinking in a lot of areas is noticeably shallow. Probably a result of spending so much time having big ideas that other people have to turn into reality, and only ever getting to see and hear summaries of their progress, not having to actually do the grind to find and test solutions for someone else to approve.
More robust free speech might mean more women free to say men aren’t women. It might also mean more people shouting invective teach other (and women especially). Making the algorithm open source might ensure unrestricted and fair access to tweets, but is far more likely to enable spam bots, advertisers, scammers, political dirty tricksters, etc to game the system even more effectively. I doubt there is even a ‘single’ algorithm anyway. One thing Twitter has actually done better than any other social network, is to defend in court the free speech rights of its users, including the right to remain anonymous [source: Mike Masonic – Tech Dirt]. In fact, for many good tweets and articles discussing this sort of think @mmasnick and Tech Dirt and good places to start.
Isn’t it the case that the Twitterati overestimate the reach and influence of Twitter? I need to get up and get ready to go to work, but ISTR many sources saying that Twitter is mostly used by a small group busily typing at each other. If those who use/depend on Twitter find the new regime uncomfortable there’s always the rest of the Fediverse to type to each other on.
I think what you’re missing, if I may venture a guess, is that there’s a real belief out there that “freedom of speech” should apply to private companies and individuals in addition to its constitutional meaning that just restricts the actions of the feds. As in: people actually think that they can come to your facebook wall and call you a trans-murdering harpy with no spleen and only 1/2 of a thyroid gland, and not be blocked for that–and when you DO block them, they immediately cry FREEDUM UV SPEESH. Robert Reich, whatever his annoying traits (and holy fuck he has many), isn’t wrong about this.
You know, it wasn’t too long ago that all of us at the-blog-aggregator-where-PZ-et-al-lived used to snark about “Freeze Peach”. As in, slymepitters bemoaning getting banned from commenting on the blogs and respondents laughing at them and saying “whuttabout MAH FREEZE PEACH”. With accompanying pictures of peaches.
I think if you (or I, or anyone) is missing anything here, it’s just that a whole new set of people have suddenly discovered that being silenced on a private platform is annoying, and that being nincompoops with little understanding of the very same things they’ve been doing for the last decade, they are grabbing at whatever notions that might seem to back up their feelings of indignation. I mean, I do get it, nincompoops: being banned or blocked on these platforms sucks. Hell, I was blocked on facebook for six days for quoting “I say that we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit” in response to a friend thinking something was yucky, which, as any fan of the Alien movie series knows, is a direct quote from the movie “Aliens”, but Facebook thought I was calling for global thermonuclear war. I got quite the chiding for “Breaking Community Standards”, hate speech, etc. But the thing is, it wasn’t blocking my “freedom of speech”. I complained about that ban for the entire six days, both on facebook as well as other platforms, but they had every right to ban me; they needed no reason. (Take that, facebook, you never have figured out my sock account.) Seriously, moaning about a private platform blocking you for some offhand, meaningless comment as BLOCKIN’ MUH FREE SPEECH when in other countries people are locked into prison for 15 years for holding a sign that reads “NO WAR IN UKRAINE” strikes me as the very epitome of self-indulgent, egomaniacal, narcissistic delusion.
And now this topic has come up again with Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He may very well open it back up to Trump, and stop people from being banned. Twitter doesn’t exactly have the best track record for making competent bans (I was banned there for insisting that only female humans can be women, for example), but again, they are a private firm, and federal laws about speech don’t apply to them. They do whatever they do for the benefit of their stockholders, not for society. We can talk about how to address the issues of platform and visibility and the untoward influence that comes with those things when one is, say, a horribly misogynist, orange, hateful, stupid ex-president, but at least the way things stand right now we cannot apply federal laws against government overreach to private firms or individuals (for the most part).
(With all due apologies to the non-Americans here; my previous comment was very American-centric, and meant only to apply to American society.)
I suppose there’s free speech as a normative, good for society thing… But even with that there’s the norm that you mostly don’t scream vile obscenities to someone else’s face
Alas, with the vile telepathy that is the internet we all know each other’s surface thoughts at all times opt-in or not.
There’s no contradiction. Twitter is a de facto standard and while it’s perfectly within its rights to act as a private company within the laws of its various jurisdictions, it ought also to have a responsibility – even if a corporate rather than a legal one – to take its power seriously. Women who are banned for saying sex is real not only lose their voice, but lose their networks. A lot of people rely on those for their activism and for their social lives. Being banned for life can be a serious blow to individuals and can shatter networks.
As a matter of practicality, there are no real alternatives and the big social media companies have made damn sure that the barrier to new entries in the market are incredibly high, by very successfully lobbying for that to be the case.
Then, of course, there’s the political responsibility; it should not be possible for a company to be in a position to influence enormous sections of the world so easily or for them to stifle perfectly legal political opinion or debate. It shouldn’t allow itself to be used to enforce political silencing on behalf of governments, but of course it is highly susceptible to strong-arm tactics by governments.
None of these things are closely or directly related to constitutional free speech rights (or similar in other jurisdictions). They’re an artefact of Twitter (etc) being allowed to grow so large and influential in the first place and then being allowed to continue operating as such. But I’ve ranted about that here before more than once, I won’t do it again.
As for Musk’s takeover, I think there’s a lot of wild speculation about the future based on a small handful of very vague and ambiguous statements by Musk. Most of the speculation is being done by people who don’t understand technology or how companies like Twitter work. There’s also a lot of wild speculation about what’s important to Musk and the only thing we know for sure is that, whatever he says, what’s important to Musk is Musk.
For these reasons and others, I don’t have any predictions. But there are a few things he’s said, some of which people have mentioned here, that it might be worth adding my own (somewhat informed) speculation about.
First, people always overestimate the malleability of software, especially large software platforms like Twitter. Change is slow and difficult and expensive. With the best intentions in the world, all software is badly written because there’s always too much pressure of time, cost, expertise, testing etc. to do it properly. Consequently, all software is to some extent fragile, brittle, monolithic, chaotic and poorly documented. Modules are too tightly integrated in some places and too loosely in others. The abstractions used to build the software do not resemble the ones used by executives to describe how the platform works or how change might occur.
I would stake my life on the prediction that there are probably quite large parts of the platform that absolutely nobody understands. They will have been built in the old days, when Twitter was a small platform, by a poorly supervised prima donna developer who everyone mistakenly thought was a genius and who has since left. That developer didn’t document the code and wrote it in such a convoluted fashion that it would take a huge amount of effort to understand it and re-engineer it. That task will have been scheduled in every single release since, but will never have been deemed important enough to actually do because that section of code is so deeply and twistily embedded in every other part of the platform. It would be hugely expensive and since it works now, why change it? The fact that it will be even more expensive in the long run not to re-engineer it will count for absolutely nothing.
So speculating about what changes will be made to such platforms is always incredibly dangerous and I wouldn’t put much store in anyone’s predictions, including Musk’s (especially Musk’s, he is not the technical genius his PR makes him out to be). Or mine, for that matter.
A similar thing is true for operational costs and the impact of seemingly small platform changes on those costs. These are not always predictable with large, complex platforms. For instance, a lot of people have suggested that Musk’s claimed emphasis on free speech will mean that the burden of content moderation is greatly reduced. I doubt that. I suspect, in fact, that the moderation burden might increase, perhaps quite significantly. In either case, Musk cannot not know what the operational impact of sweeping changes might be and there’s every chance that superficially small changes to the platform might not be operationally viable, even in the long term.
A lot of people are speculating about what Musk means by human users being verified. His remark about this was very ill-considered, in my view, and the speculation I’ve seen about it is largely ill-informed. I can think of at least a dozen ways Musk’s remarks could be interpreted. All have wildly different implications, outcomes, costs and payoffs. For example, how does users having to provide some proof of a meat identity to Twitter (however that might be done) fit with free speech, particularly under repressive regimes? What are the implications when governments inevitably (absolutely inevitably, not just the more traditionally repressive ones) begin to demand access to that information by threatening to legislate to break Twitter up? What will the additional security burden be? What will the consequences to Twitter – in addition to the consequences to users – be of inevitable security breeches?
Even things like the much-anticipated edit button have serious, far-reaching implications. If someone can just reach back and edit tweets once people have replied to them, then the greater part of Twitter’s value as a platform is immediately lost. If changes are to be preserved in some sort of version control so people can browse back through them, that’s a seriously big change to the platform, a giant increase in complexity of an already complex platform and would need some impressive interface design (something at which Twitter certainly does not excel).
I could go on all day, but TL:DR I would expect Twitter to be a much more unwieldy platform than most people (including Musk) suspect. I think the technology and operational costs of proposed changes are unpredictable and might be very large. Ditto governance issues and precarious compliance with regional legislation. And I don’t think for a moment that Musk has thought through what he really means by any of this stuff in the first place.
Don’t expect too much! We might get back a few people we’ve missed, though. And a few we have not missed at all.
There are already verified Twitter accounts, so I wonder if Musk is hinting at eliminating unverified accounts. If so, wouldn’t it mean collecting individual data on more users and the privacy issues that go along with that? Also, wouldn’t requiring everyone to have blue checks reduce the amount of users overall? Less users means less ad exposure, so what would make up the difference, possibly subscriptions? Maybe that’s what he means by unlocking the “extraordinary potential” — by making more money off of the platform.
Teslas are expensive luxury cars, not economical people’s cars, so I wonder if he’s planning on making Twitter more exclusive (via subscriptions) and monetizing it that way. I wouldn’t call that an improvement, luxury social media could easily be worse than the current ad infested platforms in the long run. Nothing would stop him from pumping up the income and share price and then bailing out before it collapses (a la Netflix).
I think the people celebrating that the Twitter has been unleashed now from the clutching hands of liberals will find that they were not careful what they wished for because they got it.
There may a Grand Restoration of banned accounts for some people we really want to see on Twitter again, but then also when we report accounts that exist just to harass women and gender atheists, or DM foul things, find it’s not so easy. It could also turn out to be like GettR, which is just full of garbage from conspiracy theorists to covid-deniers, to people who just hate liberals on principle and think we should be shot on site. I deleted my account after a week.
Free speech as a marketplace of ideas is great if that’s what people are doing. Free speech as the private playground for a wealthy man with mercurial whims could be a different thing altogether. Everyone has their own idea of what freedom means, whether it’s freedom from offense or freedom from the restrictions against offending. And as James mentioned above, how much of it we take for granted with the freedoms we have compared to other places.
We know what some people do to a lesbian on the anniversary of her partner’s death, and words can hurt as much as sticks and stones.
So, we’ll have to keep an eye on Musk’s Twitter. I’m not really celebrating a man with such wealth and power getting access to even more wealth and power, but the reports of me being on a fainting couch are grossly exaggerated.
twiliter,
Musk could mean several different things by ‘verified’. All of them come with significant downsides for users (and for Twitter). I won’t go into them all, but the most likely two are abolishing anonymity or using pseudonymity.
In the former, everyone has to make their real name (and perhaps photo and other information) publicly available. This will be disastrous for many, many people and will certainly curtail free speech in all sorts of ways and is a security risk.
In the latter, we can still use pseudonyms and hide our personal information from the public, but we must provide verifiable information about our identity to Twitter or have our identity certified by a third party in some way acceptable to Twitter. Some ways of doing this are safer or preferable in other ways than others, it depends on the implementation.
Of course, if accounts are tied to identity, if we get banned, there’s no way to get another account.
There are two main reasons for doing any of this. The first is to reduce online abuse by removing anonymity. It’s not at all clear that this works at Twitter scale, especially if ‘freedom of speech’ is to mean (as some people speculate) a complete free-for-all anyway. The cost to many people (especially women and/or people who live in repressive regimes) of removing identity will be far too high, since it will be much easier for people to take the abuse offline, which is obviously much more dangerous.
The second (and real) reason is to collect information about us to sell to marketers. This is dangerous, too. What marketers are really looking for are people who can be categorised as ‘vulnerable’ in a variety of ways so they can be targeted. Exactly how dangerous all of this is depends on the implementation, how data is aggregated, how it is sold, sold on and to whom etc.
None of this should be welcomed, users lose out either way.
Some interesting comments here.
@Latsot – re the enormous complexities of Twitter – most of us just see the usable interface, which I suppose is like seeing a victory parade after a war where there were masses of logistics of moving men and material and many cock ups until the final result. Mr Musk might be in the position of the armchair warrior thinking he could run this better and ending as Tsar Nicholas II, as a hopeless commander in chief, with consequent disasters.
Re the free speech issue. I did have great fun teasing libertarian Trumpist facebook friends when their man was chucked off Twitter, saying why don’t they do as Ayn Rand would advise and set up their own platform? It is concerning that the power of social media should be in the hands of the super rich, but I suppose it was ever thus – eg Rupert Murdoch’s stable of newspapers has had far too much influence in the UK, ditto Fox etc and this may be without any remedy.
I follow twitter for the big stories whether the war in Ukraine, the French election, the transgender issue and the like. I also follow it for the small, local stories on the campaign (cycling infrastructure) I’m involved in, and there it is very useful – someone with 50 followers will have some information about traffic conditions, bike buses etc. I should think this will be very much under Mr Musk’s radar and we petty folk can walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves useful communications in our small affairs, though of course Mr Musk’s ideas of urban transport are tunnel networks for electric cars – ie technical fixes rather than public transport and active travel, so he may turn his capricious attention on us.
Heh. Nice JC reference.
latsot @12 Thay’s what I was thinking, the passive marketing has become monstrously out of control, but the targeted stuff that uses personal or private info might be much worse. It could get to a point where it would be impossible to escape filter bubbles and the like (not that it’s as easy as it used to be even now). Maybe I’m just being cynical, but I’ve avoided ‘social media’ proper for a long time now because of that, and how it’s evolving doesn’t inspire confidence. Guess we’ll see…