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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

I think Twitter is already pretty great. My suggestions are below:

- Twitter is a platform, open it up to allow any clients first class access.

- Stop political censorship immediately. It's fine to prevent scams and bot-nets, but do not stifle political speech.

- Lower burn rate. Cancel all of the product-oriented projects that are expensive, simply focus on building the infrastructure to make Twitter's platform as inexpensive as possible to maintain. I'd estimate 10% of Twitter's employees are actually needed.

- Be very cautious about ads. Do not compare yourself to Facebook for ad revenue generation. This is a long-term decision that will require adequate funding to undertake.

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> do not stifle political speech

And when that political speech threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people? 'Cause I'm not saying you're conflating the two, but a whole lot of people for whom this is an axe they grind really kind of constantly do.

> threatens violence or is intended to foment violence against a person or people

I see no reason why having a clear, public record of such communications is worse than forcing those involved to use a different messaging system.

It's just words. The simple answer is press the "unfollow" button, or follow it, read it, and act in your best interests based on it.

Nnnnnno, it's not "just words". It's threatening to kill and rape people, directly attacking their safety and their right to a peaceable life. It's giving a platform to people who are putting the idea in others' heads that they should hurt and kill people. I don't have to follow the "race realist" assholes among us to have the fact that they are given a platform by a company under no obligation to do so--and that they use that platform to gather followers under the direct purpose of separating the white race from the blacks or the Jews or whoever the hate-object-of-the-week is. Their followers do. They are strengthened by being given their platform with which to attract more soft-headed followers. Words have consequences that cannot be waved away so cavalierly. Those consequences may not impact you, but they impact a whole lot of people and they can't be dismissed.

The government should, for reasons that make a lot of sense, be reticent (but not wholly unwilling, because the real world doesn't work in absolutes) to intercede here, because freedom of speech with regard to the state is a different thing from respecting and accepting speech by society--but Twitter isn't the government.

> they use that platform to gather followers under the direct purpose of separating the white race from the blacks or the Jews or whoever the hate-object-of-the-week is

I find the sort of speech you describe highly unsavory, but I also disapprove of many other messages. Many people would advise Twitter to suppress the speech of gay people or immigrants, all the groups they hate.

The point of speech being speech is that it doesn't harm anyone. If some unsavory group manages to get 5K followers then I'd like to be aware of it and see what they are talking about.

Also, for the purpose of law enforcement, public Twitter activity could constitute signals intelligence to help stop crimes.

The idea that words have consequences (as you describe) is one of the most anti-liberty ideas in our modern culture right now. It's behind everything from unconstitutional "material support of terrorism" charges based on speech, to prosecuting journalists who report on classified information under the espionage act, to trigger warnings on works of classic literature, etc.

By censoring politically charged accounts Twitter likely benefits those groups by allowing them to skate by with coded speech in public but then keep their private rallying cries away from public scrutiny.

Keep in mind also that as a company, Twitter will be under pressure from interest groups and governments worldwide to suppress speech. Should we be allowed to criticize China on Twitter? Well, not if the China market becomes important enough to Twitter's revenue.

By failing to adopt a firm stance against censorship, Twitter has greatly damaged its credibility as a platform and opened the door to all sorts of censorship requests.

There are enough moralistic gatekeepers in the world, why should Twitter be another?

I'm not sure why Tweets and free speech are so closely intertwined in this sort of discussion. Twitter is a for-profit business that isn't profitable. The OP asks what would you do to turn it around (which I'm taking as "make it profitable"). Some suggest better prevention of perceived harassment. My Uber driver has the free speech right to tell me 'my father smells of elderberries,' but if they do it's reasonable to assume I will no longer be riding in Ubers. Consequently, Uber sees it in their interest to try to prevent this sort of occurrence. Nobody tells me 'my father smells of elderberries' on Twitter, but if they did on more than a one-off basis I could see myself no longer enjoying the product, and consequently no longer using it, engaging with it, or promoting it. Twitter would be acting rationally to try to prevent this. So really the question becomes, is the damage to their brand and their user base from perceived harassment greater than the damage to their brand and their user base that would be induced by blocking this perceived harassment. Since one harasser can harass many users I suspect that the benefits would weigh in favor of protecting users from perceived harassment. I use "perceived" repeatedly here because I don't think it matters to the business of Twitter whether it's real or over-sensitivity, the customer is always right.

Broadly censoring accounts based on a subset of the content those accounts have posted is like Uber deciding not to do pickups / dropoffs near mosques.

Twitter has a profit incentive not just to censor content, but to make as much of the content as possible paid ads.

My suggestion to Twitter was to focus on what I think is the core value prop of twitter -- its infrastructure as a broadcast platform.

I realize many people prefer the approach Facebook takes where everyone is required to enter their real name and accounts are linked to credit scores and social security numbers, and login is required to view the content so that an ad can be served.

But I think the most promising social media infrastructure is something more like an unfettered Twitter. Simply a medium for exchanging ideas and broadcasting to the world without big media budgets or high production costs.

Yes, this gives some prejudiced jackass (or presidential candidate or ISIS) the same facility as highly credible organizations, but I think it's for the best.

Twitter's strength is an addressing scheme and non-reciprocal follow graph which allows a lot of expression to happen that would not likely occur otherwise.

The challenge for Twitter is to think of itself as an infrastructure company but not think of its product as ads.

> Twitter has a profit incentive not just to censor content, but to make as much of the content as possible paid ads.

The latter implies the former. I promise, Coca-Cola is never going to advertise on Gab. You're never going to see a paid spot for Budweiser on an 8chan board. There is simply no demand from marketers for prime placement alongside death and rape threats, photos of people outside their homes with crosshairs overlaid, etc.

> focus on what I think is the core value prop of twitter -- its infrastructure as a broadcast platform.

Yes, but every successful broadcast platform I'm aware of imposes some standards on the content they carry. I'm not sure why you think Twitter needs to break from that model.

Wait wait wait, a mosque isn't an individual. What people want Twitter to do is prevent certain individual users from pointing objectionable content at other users; based on those certain users patterns of behavior. So, Uber not picking up a certain cleric because they're known to bite their thumbs at drivers. Maybe a better analogy is a restaurant patron sitting in their own both, but yelling across the room at other patrons. If you own the restaurant, you'd consider silencing them or booting them so they wouldn't detract from the other customer's experiences. (Or maybe I just like analogies.) The complaint I hear from Twitter users isn't that people are broadcasting things they disagree with, it's that Twitter makes it to easy for people to broadcast directly at a specific person. Bearing in mind that anyone has the opportunity to leave the platform if they don't enjoy it. When I was in college I wouldn't have tried to prevent my institution from letting (for example) Milo, speak, I just wouldn't have gone to see him. But if my university let him show up in my dorm room, or gave him my cell phone number, or required me to attend his talk - I'd have had an issue. To be clear, the idea of Twitter being an entirely open broadcast platform has merit, and maybe it would be a better strategy (I assume that's sort of what Gab is trying to be?), but I think the people who say Twitter would be more successful if it pushed back harder on patterns of perceived harassment have a valid point too. I suspect any platform that opens the door too wide to one user bothering another is going to suffer in acquisition, retention, and referral - not a great start to any path to revenue.

There is no such thing as "just words". That's a position only sustainable from privilege.

See grandalf's reply to eropple. In addition:

No, it's not a position only sustainable from privilege. I'm fairly privileged - white, male, upper middle class, good job, good neighborhood. If someone threatened to kill me, that's just words - it's not the same as them showing up at my door with a gun in their hand. But I'd still have to think seriously about whether they were going to show up at my door, and what to do about it. It's just words, and also it's not. My "privilege" doesn't insulate me from the "and also it's not" part.

Very true. My comment was not meant to suggest that I think Twitter should promote already illegal forms of speech like threats, etc.

To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.

A non-privileged person is free to draw a cartoon of Trump that looks like Muhammed. In a totalitarian society nobody is free to draw cartoons of certain subjects.

To assume that a person of lower social status is more likely to be emotionally wounded from words is akin to claiming him/her to be less rational (and thus less human) than others.

Speech is dangerous because it can incite passionate behavior while also being nonviolent. That is why we must preserve our right to this freedom. It is far better than the many coercive alternatives.

Information is powerful, and it can empower and inspire people to act. But the idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed reminds me of the embarrassing attempts during the 1980s by social conservatives to cast heavy metal lyrics as satanic and deserving of censorship.

> To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.

No, we're not. As a straight white guy, I can say "video games suck because X, Y, and Z" and people might call it stupid or call me a "cuck", but that's about it. A woman who say "video games are generally cool but have some problematic tendencies like X, Y, and Z" gets death and rape threats and have people post her personal information online. I know this happens because a friend did this, had it happen, and ended up crashing on my couch for a few days while she found a new apartment and moved because she feared for her safety, something which literally-literally does not happen to straight white men (though does happen, in varying but generally lesser quantities, to queer and minority men, and happens a lot more to trans people in general) who express similar opinions in that space.

Almost as if the numbers I drew in the genetic lottery has led to the privileged position of being able to speak in ways that others cannot without being literally endangered. How very strange.

> does not happen to straight white men

There are many aspects of how society treats men and women differently that are abhorrent to me. One of the most abhorrent is how a girl who struggles in math is more likely to be encouraged to focus on other subjects, while a boy in the same situation is more likely to be encouraged to achieve mastery.

We (as a society) can do so much better... but censoring ideas is not he solution.

Refusing to associate with people is not "censorship" of ideas or anything else. Damaging, abusive people can be kicked out of one's place of business and it ain't a problem.

I will not cede the ground of basic language to protofascists and you shouldn't either.

So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word).

I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no matter how threatening the content of the speech - opens another door to the fascists. You want it as a weapon to use against vile speech. But the problem is, that weapon will be turned against your speech soon enough. Your speech will be classified as "vile", "hateful", "violent", and banned. Rationally, based on content? No, but as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time.

Well put.

I don't use phrases like "proto-fascists" because I don't think the term really has meaning.

> as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time.

This is exactly right. When we allow liberties to be taken away, they are likely gone for good, even when the context for their removal goes away.

The self-described white supremacists (since you don't like "protofascist") who plague the mentions of women who dare to comment on politics or make video games are not deprived of liberty because Twitter decides to show them the door. They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves.

Put those goalposts down. You're going to pull something.

> They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves

We can all imagine what Twitter would be like if created by a church group. Certain, virtuous tweets would be promoted, and tweets containing sinful thoughts would be banned.

This system would be fine, but not really any better (or different) than a phpbb system maintained by that same group. It would be a walled garden with very clear limits to the kind of speech and expression it wished to foster.

Twitter can be this too, but by doing so it lowers itself to the status of simply a large phpbb board with a righteous troupe of moderators keeping order.

Some people (such as yourself) seem to prefer this, and seem not to tolerate certain kinds of views being expressed, even when users are not forced to consume those views.

The drive to create a heavily censored/curated environment is exactly the opposite of the drive to create a platform.

Viewed as a worldwide platform, Twitter would have to maintain a ridiculous ratio of censors to users in order to provide adequate levels of totalitarian censorship of unapproved ideas.

If Twitter's massive censorship bureaucracy is causing it to flounder and face a loss of credibility with investors, it ought to correct for this rapidly by adopting a firm no-censorship stance.

Coca-Cola could easily ask to advertise only to people who have not viewed (for whatever reason) a white-supremacist tweet in the last 30 days.

Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech? I'm saying that private organizations should choose not to be associated with white supremacists and their ilk. Twitter's not the government. The protofascists and their broheims can go hang out on Gab dot AI for all I care. But they don't want that, because that means there aren't any targets for them to assault. Which they do, en masse, as part of a planned and intentional strategy to silence and shut up women and minorities across a wide range of topics.

Twitter does not need them. Twitter does not benefit from them. Twitter will actively lose users by pursuing these jackals as customers. And so Twitter should show them the door. But I certainly haven't said a word about the government prohibiting speech.

(I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.)

> Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech?

> And so Twitter should show them the door.

Um, you just said something about prohibiting speech. I agree, Twitter's not the government, so it's not a First Amendment issue for Twitter to do this. Nevertheless, you are calling for Twitter to block speech.

> I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.

I will not engage with you with regards to "threats are violence", because you're trying to change the definition of words, and then say that those who disagree are silly. You should be better than that, or at least better than your "argument" in the last paragraph.

It's not coming from the people that users follow, it's coming from strangers who either @ them directly (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/lily-allen-stillbir... ), or use twitter to forment violence against persons or people who aren't even on twitter.

Milo was banned not because of anything he said directly against Leslie Jones, but because he drove a hate mob against her. Twitter really needs to give people the anti-abuse tools they demand.

> Twitter really needs to give people the anti-abuse tools they demand.

I strongly agree with this. It's a far better solution than censorship.

The people who actually harass (and are the ones who primarily bleat about "censorship" on private services) have been bleating about tools like BlockTogether and similar being "censorship"--how are "better anti-abuse tools" out of Twitter themselves any different? When--not if--these tools auto-block poisonous harassing protofascists from the default because they are poisonous harassing protofascists, how is that any different?

> how is that any different?

It's different because then users who don't like content to be censored can turn it off. I turn off Google Safesearch and have not regretted it in the least.

What would those tools look like exactly? If you tell your 50,000 followers where I live and that what I really need is a bullet in the head, what does the tool do? Hide it from my feed? Super. When the armed militia appears on my lawn, at least I will have been spared the stress of reading about it first, I guess.

That's a serious question. What anti-abuse tools do you think they should deploy that don't actually prevent people from posting or seeing the abuse?

Removing all the anti-hillary trending or pro-bernie hashtags really pissed me off during the election. Google does similar things with auto-complete.

Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them? You can threaten people over anything, why conflate threats with political speech? There is real censorship on twitter over political ideas, and threats don't even enter into it.

> Politics is truly separate from threatening to kill/rape people, why are you grouping them?

Because it's not. The actions of actively authoritarian/alt-right political actors on Twitter are inextricably tied to the movement itself. Milo Yiannopoulos was not banned for the content of what he said. He was banned for saying things he knew would rile up his base of threatening, assaultive troglodytes into attacking someone based on their political priors. Coca-Cola is not going to pay Twitter if Twitter is a cesspool of people whose idea of political speech is threats. And, right now, a very large portion of it is. And given that free speech has the implication of free association, it's very fortunate that those poor benighted alt-righters who are so very censored have their own places to talk where nobody will get in their way--

--but, of course, it's not about talking about their political ideas at all. It's about forcing others to listen to them.

Twitter need not be an accessory to that. There is no great loss, either moral or financial, to the slow leakage of anime avatars and Twitter eggs.

> Twitter need not be an accessory to that. There is no great loss, either moral or financial, to the slow leakage of anime avatars and Twitter eggs.

Many people would say that exact thing if Twitter decided to censor content that was about gay marriage, etc. You are giving Twitter an easy out. Just censor everything that doesn't go over well in the suburban zipcode that best mirrors the target audience of Coca Cola.

If that would make them more money, I expect they would do that. It's obvious from even a cursory look at Twitter's demographics that it wouldn't make them more money and would make them look bad and hurt their bottom line. Much like the alt-right racist contingent makes them look bad and hurts their bottom line.

That would be why I am making a clear distinction between "moral" and "financial". The alt-right is immoral and financially negative. The people you so concernedly cite are neither.

> Many people would say that exact thing if Twitter decided to censor content that was about gay marriage, etc.

Well, since we're talking about Twitter:

https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312

Neither 4chan nor 8chan are terribly profitable. Also, twitter needs to figure out how to make money. That won't go without much more ads.

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