
Twitter company email addresses why it’s #BreakingMyTwitter - coloneltcb
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/twitter-company-email-addresses-why-its-breakingmytwitter/
======
danschumann
If you ban a conspiracy theorist, doesn't that give him credibility among
conspiracy theorists? Suddenly he's right. Suddenly there is a conspiracy
between facebook, youtube, etc, to ban him. Suddenly he's a prophet rather
than a satirical nut. What he said would happen came true.

There seems to be a dumbing down of America, where we expect corporations to
be the ones to decide things are right or wrong, rather than letting
individuals make up their own minds and spot satire or bad will or
exaggeration on their own. Anyone watching Alex Jones could laugh at some of
his more ridiculous claims. Just because some people believed every word he
said..

How is anyone better off now that he's banned? People who didn't watch him
still don't watch him. People who did watch him still watch him ( maybe moreso
because they downloaded his app ), and people who were on the fence maybe
think he was right.

~~~
nemothekid
The concern isn’t that his “followers” would find him more credible. Those
followers will follow him to the ends of the earth, regardless if he was
banned. Conspiracy theorists never needed to be right - so operating on a
model that giving him hard ammo for his theories is worthless. Alex Jones
can’t be wrong in the eyes of his followers, so that he can’t be proven right
either.

What his removal on these platforms does is limit his reach. He’s completely
allowed to, in the confines of the law, to say whatever he wants. That doesn’t
also mean he is owed a loudspeaker to blast his asinine message to the entire
world. This is about limiting the reach of a deranged individual. If you don’t
believe this works - look at what happened to Milo after he was banned from
Twitter. The near weekly Milo articles simply dropped off the face of the
earth. And it’s likely Alex Jones’ limited reach will prevent from amassing
new followers who choose to harass the parents of the “false flag” sandy hook
shooting. That, to me, is more than reason enough to ban him.

There’s a huge line between the confusing, but relatively safe flat earth
conspiracy theorists and the the one that actively riling up people to harass
parents grieving over children.

~~~
hkai
You are correct that banning them from platforms limits their exposure, but
why do you think it's desirable?

Why defacto monopolies should decide who is allowed to exercise speech and who
must be silenced?

Do you feel this practice will never be turned against you? Do you disagree
with the idea that if crazy people don't have freedom of speech, then nobody
has freedom of speech?

And I know the common argument that sure, they can just start their own
Twitter or move to another platform.

It's similar to how Republicans close all but one abortion clinic in a state
and claim that whatever, you're still allowed to have abortions, but only in
this one remote clinic and only on certain conditions.

~~~
nemothekid
> _but why do you think it 's desirable?_

For the same reason I'm not allowed to post porn on hacker news. Why aren't we
talking about how Y Combinator infringes on my freedom of speech by deleting
my posts on Big Wet Asses 7?

> _Why defacto monopolies should decide who is allowed to exercise speech and
> who must be silenced?_

You should brush up on your definition of monopoly. What is the monopoly that
is deciding who is silenced, and what market do they have a monopoly over?

> _Do you feel this practice will never be turned against you? Do you disagree
> with the idea that if crazy people don 't have freedom of speech, then
> nobody has freedom of speech?_

This is a very tired and poor argument. If you have "crazy" ideas, like for
example, if you believe the earth is flat, you are fully welcome on
Twitter/Facebook. What Alex Jones and his ilk are accused of is harassment and
inciting violence. The day I start using Twitter to incite violence is the day
this "power" will turn against me. Until then, I have nothing to worry about.

------
benburleson
Twitter made a clear choice many years ago to move away from realizing the
potential of their platform as an ubiquitous message-delivery system.

Before everyone had a smart phone, I built a site ("app" in today's
terminology) that relied on the Twitter SMS API. It was amazing to have the
ability to interact with my backend on-the-go. After a couple years, Twitter
stopped supporting, then shuttered SMS. That was the first step in directing
the platform away from its potential as a utility service, and toward a
marketing platform.

It's just sad that the technology had so much potential and is now just a
corporate wasteland of noise.

~~~
yoz-y
I think that app.net is an example showing that such a platform does not have
a viable business model. Granted, it is a very small sample size.

~~~
classichasclass
App.net also made some mistakes (speaking as a subscriber). The biggest
mistake it made was going freemium because it enabled a whole lot of post-only
accounts that didn't have an investment in the platform. Limiting following
didn't make a whole heck of a lot of difference for accounts that just wanted
to make noise.

The social network I use is private and invite-only, and I make small regular
financial contributions to it, which means I care about its health and the
community. It's the only one I use.

------
judah
Tangential: The opening to this article is remarkably bad.

This article opens by saying it's difficult to like Twitter because it refused
to censor a conspiracy theorist.

We cannot in one breath say we are in favor of free speech, then in another
breath say we want corporations to censor people whose views we don't like.

~~~
nhfoiwehf
> We cannot in one breath say we are in favor of free speech, then in another
> breath say we want corporations to censor people whose views we don't like.

Pretend you own a publishing company. You publish books by authors you like.

Then I ask you to publish my book, called "99 Reasons Why We Should Murder
Puppies and Abuse Our Children."

If you choose to pass on my book, is that censorship? I would say, as a
publisher, you have freedom of the press, including editorial discretion. The
right to free speech isn't the right to an audience.

Now how is this different from Twitter? Well people say Twitter is not a
publisher, but a platform. They take submissions from everywhere, so they
shouldn't have the freedom to pick and choose who they want to publish on
their site. It's more like a phone company than a publisher.

But I don't buy that argument. Here's why:

1\. For a long time, Twitter has made rules about what content belongs on
their network. My phone company doesn't tell me who I can call or what I can
say.

2\. Twitter is completely owned by a single company and tightly controlled.
With phone companies, there is interoperability between networks.

3\. Twitter is not regulated like a phone company.

5\. Twitter has an editorial team which curates "moments," which further blurs
the publisher / platform distinction.

5\. Twitter does not treat content on it's network in an equal way. Their
algorithm determines the "best tweets" for you and displays them more
prominently. They also make suggestions as who you should follow. My phone
doesn't ring louder depending on who is calling. This is crucial, because when
you see far-right content, it's not only because you have subscribed to it. In
many ways, Twitter's algorithm is helping it spread.

\-----

So Twitter if not a neutral platform that has to cater to everyone. They have
always tried to control their network - how it can be used, what you can say
on it. As long as they do that, they bear some responsibility for what people
say on their website.

If they don't want to do that, that's fine. But then don't censor any content
at all. Open up your API. Stop recommending certain tweets and posts. Give
users a chronological feed option, and make the "best tweets" algorithm
transparent.

~~~
judah
>> You publish books by authors you like.

Right there your analogy breaks down; Twitter publishes content it doesn't
like. It publishes all content that doesn't break the law or its rules.

But it's beside the point. Do we want Facebook, Google, and other social media
companies deciding what we can and cannot say?

If we are consistent in our libertarianism, we must answer no.

~~~
nhfoiwehf
> It publishes all content that doesn't break its rules.

And some of those rules are about the content of what's posted (no nudity, no
harassment). Therefore it's behaving like a publisher, with editorial
discretion.

If you don't like the book publisher analogy, consider a newspaper that runs
letters to the editor. They don't officially endorse the opinions in those
letters, and anyone can write one. But the newspaper can still pick which
letters get published.

> Do we want Facebook, Google, and other social media companies deciding what
> we can and cannot say?

They aren't telling us what we can / can't say. They are telling us what we
can / can't publish on their websites.

But to you, it doesn't feel that way. And me neither. Why? Because Facebook
and Google have a near Duopoly over communication on the internet. That's the
real problem. We need to break them up. We need to acknowledge that network
effects create natural monopolies, and perhaps regulate or force
interoperability on some social networking sites.

------
atomi
Twitter is doing a good job at making some people (including myself) realize
how inappropriately dependent we are on their service.

I'm using their platform less so now.

------
parliament32
I can't wait for Mastadon to eat Twitter's lunch. 800k users over 1200
federated instances and steadily growing by the day.

~~~
lylecubed
According to this article[0] that's unlikely. It looks like Mastodon is
engaged in the same sort of blocking behavior Twitter is.

I think it's more likely we'll see private, invite-only services take off
instead.

[0]: [https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-
water-888c10e...](https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-
water-888c10e8abb1)

~~~
parliament32
That's a half-truth: Mastadon itself can't and won't block anything.

In the Mastadon network, users live on instances which all talk to each other.
Each instance can choose to block any other instance.

If a user doesn't like their instance's policies, they can join another
instance with less, different, or no blocks. Alternatively, a technical user
can run their own instance and federate with other instances from there.

Your linked article claims, "running and administering your own social server
is friggin’ expensive". This isn't true: a $5/month VPS can easily host a
Mastadon instance for a dozen users, and requires less than a few minutes of
administration per month.

------
codazoda
The authors complaints about the API are valid and I agree with other posters
that we shouldn't rely on a service so much that we are highly impacted when
they change it. The rest of this blog post reads like a rant about all the
ways Twitter has changed over the years. People hate change.

------
bdcravens
Soon enough we'll realize the world we (developers) created is one we are no
longer a citizen of. Our voices are tiny in a world of social media avalanche
and billion (and now trillion) dollar companies. See Macbook Pro, Twitter,
etc.

------
ihuman
Why was this flagged?

------
tantalor
Oh, "email addresses" as in "an email which addresses"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-
path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

~~~
Kiro
Yeah, don't know what they were thinking here. I couldn't parse the title at
all.

~~~
drcongo
It's techcrunch, they weren't thinking.

