Twitter is shocked -- shocked! -- that people use it to be mean to each other. CEO Jack Dorsey took to his platform March 1 with a series of tweets that were part mea culpa and part plea for help. Dorsey wants suggestions to solve Twitter’s anger problem. Question is, what does that mean for conservative tweeters, who’ve had their wings clipped disproportionately when Twitter has tried policing itself before.
“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” Dorsey tweeted, confessing that the company is not “proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”
Twitter will be gathering input through April 13. The idea, according to Dorsey, is to “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation around the world, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable toward progress.”
If you have any ideas to help Twitter, please do send them along, because what the company says it has so far looks like an open invitation to censoring opinions not based on stridency or tone, but content:
Cortico, a non-profit research organization, has spent time to more deeply understand the concept of measuring conversational health and developed four indicators to measure it: shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion, and receptivity. We believe that we can identify indicators of conversational health that are even more specific to Twitter and its impact.
The first two of those criteria immediately stand out as scary.
First, “shared attention” -- shared by whom? Liberals and conservatives care about very different things and, frankly, have less in common every day. And the problem isn’t just left and right. Libertarians rarely care about the same issues social cons do. Intersectionality aside, the LGBT gang is probably far less focused on carbon levels than the environmentalists. How will Twitter choose what should be paid attention to?
Second, “shared reality” sounds awfully Orwellian, and a concept that can easily be used to shut down dissent. The view of the world informed by traditionalism and religion is very different than the secular progressive view in Silicon Valley.
Furthermore, how Twitter ultimately addresses shared attention and reality is going to impact it’s last two criteria. If you don’t think a topic is worthy of attention and/or you dismiss the “reality” of those who care about it, you’re unlikely to end up with much variety of opinion. Receptivity (being “open, civil, and listening,” according to Cortico) will be great, since you’ve eliminated topics and people you don’t want to deal with. Twitter will become an enthusiasts’ chatroom.
No matter how sincere Twitter’s efforts at reform are, and however even handed it tries to be, it’s clear that its culture is decidedly progressive. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2016 Twitter employees gave $4,060 to Trump, while they gave $122,613 to Clinton’s official campaign. Among the ideologically identifiable American groups on the Twitter Trust and Safety Council, 10 are liberal and only one is conservative.
We’ve also seen Twitter’s bias in action. Earlier this year, a Twitter employee was caught on hidden camera explaining how he’s “shadow banned” conservative tweets. In October, Twitter refused to run a pro-life campaign ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. After public outcry, the company reversed the decision. Before that, Twitter refused to allow the pro-life group LiveAction to promote any of its tweets unless it agreed to “delete all tweets related to: the group’s undercover investigations; the Center for Medical Progress undercover investigations; images and videos of abortion procedures, including but not limited to late-term abortions; content related to defunding Planned Parenthood, including petitions; ultrasound images; and any links to sections of the Live Action website containing videos with any of the above content.”
Hard to see much “shared reality” in that.
