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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

No, that's exactly correct. I joined Twitter to solve a problem. A problem that my boss's boss, as well as plenty of other people, did not give two shits about solving. He certainly did not want me under him, and it was far easier for him to engineer a "layoff" than try to transfer me somewhere else.

And I get the Machiavellian calculus. I cared about Twitter and its users, especially the marginalized ones that were facing a lot of abuse. He cared about his own career, and wanted people who would put his advancement first. I would not have done that, so pushing out me and anybody else who really cared about the problem was the correct move in his self-centered analysis.

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From a feature/capability perspective, what would be the most impactful ways for Twitter to help those users?

Five years later, I have no idea. Answering that requires a lot of data that isn't available publicly. For me it would start with who's getting the abuse these days, and where it's coming from.

But if I had to guess, top of my list would be faster, more targeted action to deplatform shitheels. For a while last year I was tracking a ring of nazi-ish jerks who managed to stay around eternally by getting new accounts. They'd either circulate the new account before the old one got banned or come back, follow a few people in the account cluster, and then say the were looking for their "frens", which would prompt a wave of retweets in the cluster so as to rebuild their follow graph.

I'd also look for ways to interfere with off-Twitter organization of harassment of particular accounts, which has some characteristic signals. Interfere both by defanging the content (attenuated notifications, downranking) and faster suspension/banning for jerks that are part of the waves.

I'd also love to see more support on the recipient side, but I haven't kept up with what those tools look like these days.

That said, I believe they've made progress since I left; I think twitter has a notably lower proportion of shitty behavior than years ago. So kudos to whoever's been working on this problem across the reorgs that have happened since I left.

It would be fascinating to read a deep dive from you on your thoughts on all the thorny questions that always come up with respect to this.

You seem all in on the idea that Twitter should be stamping out nasty speech, and I can certainly respect that philosophy for a private company. I certainly wouldn't want to personally work to support the aforementioned shitheels. But I'm curious what you think of the broader ethics that people often bring up in these discussions. Is it bad that the contemporary "public square" is dominated by private companies that get to determine the rules? Should there be a real digital public square that isn't dominated by private companies? Could such a thing even work?

I dunno, maybe you're tired of this so uninterested in writing such a thing, but I feel like so many people act like the answers to this stuff are both obvious and easy to implement, and I know that's not true, and would be interested in the view from the front lines.

That sounds like several books worth of writing, so I'll pass, but I'm glad to take a quick swing at the points you mentioned.

There is a real digital public square: the internet. Anybody can publish anything. Anybody, private companies included, can help people publish. But all of those people have freedom of association. Nobody has to use a particular publisher, and none of those publishers have to publish anything they don't want to.

Many popular platforms have started out with a "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos. I was part of one of those, bianca.com, which won a webby in 1997 and was gone by 2000. The lesson of every one of those, ours included, is that you can't have all the kinds of speech in one place. E.g., Twitter can have black people or people who shout abuse at black people. So the question for any platform is: who are you ok excluding?

This is not a new lesson: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952...

I think it only feels new in the digital context because people often start from a assume-spherical-cows perspective. Which can be adequate if you're building an ecommerce system or something. But when building tools to shift society online, it's hopelessly naive. So I'd be interested to read a "real digital public square" proposal that started from actual human behaviors. Say, people who studied physical public squares, their impacts, how they're regulated, and the social, non-legal mechanisms that keep them from just being filled with nazis, spam, and porn. But the ones that come out of the same naivete that we had in the mid-1990s or that Jack and Zuck had a decade later? We know what happens, and it never works out well.

I missed this, thank you for your response! I'm entirely with you on this, and I wish I was someone who had the ability to offer generous book advances :)

Thanks! Very kind.

Sorry, but your posts are making it clearer why your team was disbanded. You have been arguing that:

- Social networks can be blamed for basically any evil that happens in the world. You express elsewhere the belief that Facebook can be blamed for the Rohingya Genocide. And thus by definition that your colleagues and past/future work mates could also be held morally responsible for genocide or more or less anything bad, via the transitive property of whatever. This belief requires sloppy and motivated reasoning to sustain.

- That perhaps your job was to ban anyone you regarded as "shitheels", "jerks" or "Nazi-ish" (!). In other words anyone whose views you simply didn't like. That's not an anti-abuse policy worth of the name.

With these attitudes it is easy to believe that the team you were on was not only highly disruptive towards colleagues and users but ineffective and a legal liability as well.

Ok, random internet person. Having read a few words, you surely know better than me what happened among hundreds of people half a decade ago.

Except that you are not a very good reader, because I explicitly didn't say "Facebook can be blamed". Sorry, but you're not tall enough to ride this ride. Come back when you've grown up some.

You said in this thread [1], quote:

"Facebook has a body count"

and when someone responded blaming Facebook for an actual genocide you replied with:

"Yeah, when I say that Facebook has a body count, I'm not kidding"

Then when someone else disagreed with you, stating that "the entire (read 100%) responsibility for the Rohingya Genocide or other similar events [lies with] the perpetrators" you doubled down by saying:

"Facebook is morally responsible for that harm"

and proceeded to argue that their "barest minimum" standard should be to ask, "Hey, is there a way to be sure this next feature is responsible for zero deaths?"

You very clearly argued that in fact Facebook can be blamed for, well, god knows what. Genocide and "body counts" at minimum but it's pretty clear that you think almost anything can be blamed on a social network or other communication providers, given that basically all organized human activity involves technology-mediated communication at some point.

And now you're trying to claim you never said Facebook can be blamed! If you didn't really mean that then you need to learn to better express yourself, because a whole lot of people in that thread interpreted it in that exact way and you proceeded to respond without correcting them, indeed, by telling them why their views would lead to more airline accidents (!). Ye gods, you must have been a serious liability problem waiting to happen with these attitudes. Imagine lawyers bringing up your views in discovery and then saying, Twitter's own staff definitely believe Twitter can and should be blamed for ${litigants harm} by their own arguments. Case closed, your honor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32781165

Responsibility and blame are different things, chickadee. That you can't tell the difference is not my problem, so from here on out you're on your own. Maybe keep your lawyer fantasies in your head next time you try to have a discussion with adults.

Ban algorithmic feeds and recommenders. Just show chronological order of content from people you follow.

Failing that, squelch viral content (slow it down).

Ban 'likes' and so forth.

Treat all personal data as property of that person. Transmuting demographic data from an asset into a liability.

FWIW, here's my prior answer to your question, citing the reform efforts of US Sen Warner's SAFE TECH Act and Information & Democracy's Policy Framework:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32152428

Ban all sharp and pointy objects. Mandate that helmets and Hazmat suits be worn at all times. Personal responsibility and agency is a threat to our democracy.

Imo Ban images of tweets. It’s what allows the pile on to live forever.

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