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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

Community notes are awesome. Very often useful. Sometimes hilarious

I have mixed feelings on Community Notes. Indeed, they're very often useful and sometimes hilarious. In fact, almost always useful and very often hilarious from my experience. Yet it is also a way of putting the thumb on the scale in terms of the way information is communicated on Twitter. I'd prefer it if every tweet were to be judged on its own merits, with bad, misinforming, or even disinforming tweets being called out by other tweets made by other Twitter users, not by some big box placed below the tweet by official Twitter UI through the input of other Twitter users. Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority. If some bad piece of information spreads like wildfire on Twitter because a misinformed tweet didn't get properly called out by other people tweeting, then so be it, that's Twitter working as intended, and I think the world in which that misinformation gets spread and misleads people is better than the world in which that misinformation gets suppressed by high-minded, well-intentioned authorities other users merely on the basis that they believe it's misinformation.

Yet, again, I've found Community Notes very helpful personally, as every time it's corrected a Tweet, and I've decided to do independent research, the Notes have ended up being the more correct one, often times actually correct while the tweet is actually incorrect. Hence the mixed feelings.

Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority.

All the other forms of feedback - getting ratiod, getting dragged in quote tweets by high-clout accounts, etc - are also basically just tyranny of the majority. The problem is that if, say, the BBC posts something absurdly wrong, and a swarm of users points it in the replies, many people won't bother reading the replies, and even when they do official institutions will have a clout-shield by virtue of being official institutions. The reason Community Notes is awesome is that that official box lets the opinion of the common people be put on par with the mainstream media, NGOs, factcheckers, etc. This is why Elon is never getting any brownie points for fighting misinformation on social media, even though he probably did the most to stop it out of all SocMeds - none of it was ever about misinformation, but about imposing the official opinions on the common people.

I don't think I could have written a better steelman of the "pro-Community Notes" position than this. It is a highly convincing argument, but it's just one that I don't find convincing against the counterargument.

Which is that there's something meaningfully different about the "tyranny of the majority" that forms within the medium (Twitter in this case) due to the way people use it and gain reputation there and the one that forms when the medium itself puts a thumb on the scale. When BBC tweets some misinformation, people believe it not because Twitter gave them any sort of special privileges, people believe it because of the reputation BBC built off Twitter. The way to combat that is to give people a more accurate view of the reputation BBC deserves, both off Twitter and on Twitter by Twitter users using tweets. Twitter's role shouldn't be to adjudicate the truth value of a statement so that its users get a more accurate view of the world by the standards of Twitter and its community members, and neither should it be to manage the reputation or credibility of its users. Those are things that will play out naturally by people using Twitter for its role, which should be to be the dumbest, fastest, most reliable pipes in the world for delivering 140-character (280 to 10,000 now, but I'd prefer to go back to 140 - this isn't a key issue here, though) snippets to one's followers, with as little regard for what's in those snippets as possible.

If a bunch of Twitter users got together and made an organization to tweet out the equivalent of Community Notes and then manipulate their behavior to make the algorithm put their reply at the top of the view when seeing a tweet, I'd consider that just fine and things working as intended. The fact that Twitter itself blesses it and puts it in a special box whose mere presence says that Twitter itself decided to manipulate this Tweet to appear differently from other Tweets, because the contents of this tweet are wrong by Twitter's standards. That's Twitter putting their thumb on the scale.

Which is that there's something meaningfully different about the "tyranny of the majority" that forms within the medium (Twitter in this case) due to the way people use it and gain reputation there and the one that forms when the medium itself puts a thumb on the scale.

I get where you're coming from. If I remember right the predecessor to Community Notes was a very similar infobox that Twitter slapped onto one of Trump's tweets, my argument against was exactly what you outline here. I think there's a difference between that, and what Community Notes has become. By making it democratic it is no longer a thumb that Twitter-the-company is putting on the scale, it's just an extra meta layer added onto the game, any user, including the BBC can participate in it, downvote the notes they don't like, or add their own. I'm fine with the mechanism as long as it remains relatively evenhanded the way it is now, but if you prefer OG Twitter, I can respect that too.

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