Category: Facebook and Social Media

I’m still trying to figure out what Twitter is for. Much more so than Facebook, Twitter seems to bring together people with different backgrounds and perspectives. The result is a lot more misunderstandings and opportunities for humor with fake misunderstandings.

Here’s my own example:

The Harvard Medical School professor says, presumably informed by Science, that COVID-19 spreads because of arrogant, dismissive, and selfish people. I look at the map and sincerely point out that “Looks like arrogant, dismissive, and selfish people like to live in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. #Science”.

On further reflection, it would have been better without the #Science and maybe rephrased “Looking at the map, it seems that …” But until Elon Musk takes over, there is no edit button!

Here’s one where President Biden promises more good stuff free and/or cheap and a subject ungratefully demands to know how the Vanquisher of Corn Pop is vanquishing the “housing crisis”:

Here’s the misunderstanding-based response:

As you might have gathered, I’ve been using Twitter lately to see what the fuss is about. A friend messaged me on the service and I tried to send him a 105 KB PDF file. This was impossible to do. Only images and text can be sent through Twitter’s “Messages” chat system. Facebook Messenger, on the other hand, which would be the obvious system for Twitter’s programmers to copy, can handle this easily (up to 25 MB).

Is there a good reason that Twitter left this out or is it an example of the kind of obvious flaw in their product that Elon Musk can correct to boost the enterprise value? It is never good to force people to hop over to Facebook or iMessage or Gmail if they want to communicate on your own platform, right?

Aside from the removal of misinformation, such as anything that Donald Trump might have to say or anything regarding Hunter Biden and how he earns enough to pay off a $2.5 million child support plaintiff, it strikes me that the main advantage of Facebook over Twitter is that one can have two classes of post: public and friends/family. One can write about how great Dr. Biden’s husband and Dr. Fauci are for public consumption and the next post can be some kid pictures that would be of interest only to friends/family (and/or that the author might want to keep slightly private).

What if Twitter had a “friends” connection option between accounts, similar to Facebook’s, rather than only “follow”? Would that help Twitter gain market share against Facebook? Currently, Twitter has a “protected” option in which tweets are shared only with followers, but most or all of those followers might not be friends/family.

In the pre-Elon days, Twitter’s only option for reacting to a tweet was/is a heart (“I love it”).

It doesn’t make sense to “love” a tweet about a person suffering a pulse oxygen decline to 79 (“If it’s below 90, you’re reading your IQ” is the aviation standard). Could Musk give Twitter a usage lift by adding the ability to respond with a range of emotions (Facebook) or a limited-only-by-Unicode range of emojis (Signal)?

Another example, a teacher in Australia fired for refusing the Sacrament of Fauci:

Presumably 7,700+ people didn’t actually “love” that she was fired and is unhappy about it. But there is no other way for users to show support.

A typical reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter seems to be that it is easy to toss out a term such as “free speech” but that it is difficult to implement a plan. Internet conversations need moderation, is the theory, especially on platforms where users aren’t authenticated by real name.

Here’s a tweet from a friend back in Boston, a law firm partner:

Toucan Sam has pointed out here that I myself established a comment moderation policy on photo.net, carried over into this blog. Sam’s tweet got me thinking about whether there was a difference between what Twitter has been doing and the policy that I established. I responded to Sam:

photo.net never tried to do what Twitter tries to do. We moderated out Reader A attacking Reader B. We never deleted content because we believed it to be false and thought that readers needed to be protected from misinformation/disinformation. The antidote to someone saying something false, e.g., “don’t go to France because everyone there is rude”, was other readers posting their own experience and perspective, e.g., “French people were nice to me.”

The most famous Twitter bans have been because Twitter said that it believed information to be false. The New York Post’s stories regarding a laptop allegedly belonging to Joe Biden, for example. A long list of folks saying that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t preventing infection with COVID-19. People saying that children were not experiencing an “emergency” such as they needed to be injected with an emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccine.

What if Elon Musk simply got Twitter out of the business of figuring out whether tweets were true, false, misinformation, disinformation, etc.? Would that solve most of what irks people regarding Twitter as the public square?

Related:

• Why does Twitter make thoughtcriminals delete their own thoughtcrimes?
• Why did Twitter and Facebook suppress the New York Post after it published the Biden emails, but not the New York Times after it published the Trump tax return info?
• “Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene for 7 days over vaccine misinformation.” (NYT, August 2021): She said there were too many reports of infection and spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidance states, “Covid-19 vaccines are effective at protecting you from getting sick.” In a statement circulated online, Ms. Greene said: “I have vaccinated family who are sick with Covid. Studies and news reports show vaccinated people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid.” Data from the C.D.C. shows that of the so-called breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated, serious cases are extremely rare.