The Social Media Thread

By "social media" we mean any large computer network that allows people to interact in shared communities. The big ones of course are Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram, but we can't forget newer platforms like Discord and Slack.

Dedicated video sites are off-topic here and YouTube has its own separate thread.

What we should discuss in this OTC topic are news items, business operations, and activities by the networks themselves, not specific things posted by users. Those should go into threads appropriate to the subjects of those posts. For example, if an actor tweets about a film, we'd discuss that in the Media forum topic for the film, not here. If Facebook changes its policies, that could be discussed here.

The politics, motives, competency and wider business activities of the owners and leaders of social media companies (e.g. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg) are also off-topic — except in situations where they are directly making specific policy for the platform.

Talking about a particular Instagram policy change (or a high-profile ban on a specific user) directly announced by Mark Zuckerberg would be acceptable in this thread, speculating about Zuckerberg's wider motivations wouldn't be.

The thread's also not about "dumb thing [public figure] said on [social media platform]". If there isn't a specific thread related to the subject of the statement (e.g. US Politics), then it's probably gossip and not worth talking about.

So, I was looking for a dedicated social media thread and apparently there was this one created back in 2020 that we never opened. Unfortunately, it's a little stale, so bumping it isn't going to work very well, but I would like to restart it. The reason I'm doing so is that the Computer Thread seems to have become the de facto place for this sort of talk, and it's a big tonal clash with talking about computer tech.

The hot topic of the day is Elon Musk's bid to acquire Twitter. We first discussed it in the Computer Thread, starting roughly here, and I am not going to rehash the entire discussion. Instead, I am going to resume from the last post:

CNBC: Twitter is reportedly taking another look at Musk takeover bid

Twitter's board is reportedly meeting with Elon Musk and may seek to negotiate on his buyout offer. Musk claims to have secured $46 billion in funding to buy the company at a valuation of $43 billion and is preparing to make a tender offer to its shareholders.

While the board has passed a poison pill, it could be facing resistance to that from groups of shareholders and will want to talk things out rather than face a hostile takeover. It's also possible that Twitter's stock could crash if the offer fails to go through.

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Another possible topic was originally posted here.

Ars Technica: EU to unveil landmark law to force Big Tech to police illegal content

Following on from the recently passed Digital Markets Act, which requires large tech companies to unbundle first-party software from hardware platforms, the proposed Digital Services Act will require medium and large social media platforms and search engines to police hate speech and disinformation while adding additional protections for children against targeted marketing.

It also bans "dark patterns", which manipulate or trick people into clicking on ads or other content. The article doesn't explicitly say what that means, but I assume it includes things like disguising ads to look like parts of a site's user interface, hiding "close" buttons, and such.

For large companies, the requirements would go into effect immediately. For medium companies, they would have a grace period to implement the changes.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, has warned that Big Tech has become “too big to care.”

This phrase, "too big to care", intrigues me. It's an indictment of the idea that these companies have decided that growth and engagement metrics overwhelm any sense of social responsibility.

In my opinion, a law like this would be impossible in the United States, since it would be challenged (likely successfully) on First Amendment grounds.

Edited by Mrph1 on Dec 12th 2023 at 11:24:56 AM

I think that law is an excellent idea, hopefully it can curb the worst side of social media.

On that topic, and ironically enough, I am hearing fears that Musk's idea of "free speech" will effectively mean unrestricted hate speech, and speculation that this could mean a return of Trump to Twitter (source is a podcast called "Boekenstein en de Wijk" on BNR radio, a rather left leaning podcast made by avowed SP (Socialist Party) members).

Are these fears justified? Is Musk likely to allow Trump back on Twitter under his absolute free speech platform?

Musk has elaborated on his position on free speech on several occasions; the most detailed was in a recent TED talk. Bearing in mind that I cannot see into his brain, only relay his words, here is the gist:

• He would not personally moderate Twitter. He doesn't have time to do that anyway.
• He would respect all government laws: for example, hate speech and calls to violence would still be prohibited. (My reading of this is that Trump would still be banned; there is no love lost between those two anyway.)
• He would make the "algorithm" that Twitter uses to moderate, amplify, and/or filter content open-source so that everyone can see exactly how decisions would be made. Correspondingly, actual moderation decisions would have their reasoning made public.
• He would instruct moderators to err on the side of allowing speech in "grey areas".

Further, as part of his effort to de-bot the platform, he would implement a system by which users could pay a small fee to positively identify themselves to Twitter and get an "I am a real person" check box. This would be different from the verification system that gives check boxes to businesses and well-known individuals. The idea is that free speech can only survive in an environment in which people are held accountable for their speech, and anonymity is antithetical to that.

Musk suggests, and I agree with him, that Twitter refuses to take meaningful action to ban the hordes of bots that infest it because doing so would cut its subscriber count significantly, and that would have an adverse effect on its share price. Therefore, its "fiduciary duty" prevents it from acting in the best interests of its users.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:18:19 AM

The notion that you can only have free speech if you're identified so everyone knows who you are and the opinions you hold is a very bizarre one.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 25th 2022 at 1:18:29 PM

It's not that you would have to identify yourself to the general public, but that you would have to prove to Twitter that you are a real person so that (a) you cannot artificially amplify your voice by using multiple accounts; (b) if you violate the rules you will be punished and that punishment will stick.

This is almost exactly the same approach we take on TV Tropes. I don't know who you are personally, but I can have confidence that "RainehDaze the troper" is a singular individual and is not using sockpuppets because of the tools we use to prevent them. If you are banned for some reason, we will prevent you from returning under a new handle.

This provides an incentive to be forthright, because failing to adhere to our standards may mean you lose the right to use TV Tropes, and thus lose your "free speech" on our platform.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:23:49 AM

That is, you only have to identify yourself as far as to do all the legwork for interested parties.

I don't think we're ever going to agree on this, especially because we have far different reasons to possibly worry about it.

For the record, Musk acknowledges that this idea of prohibiting anonymity has issues in nations that suppress free speech and/or where having one's identity known can subject one to persecution. I don't envy him the task of figuring that problem out. Here on TV Tropes we have such a small and dedicated community that there is relatively little societal risk if we take a stricter stance on it.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:32:21 AM

Making that algorithm open source raises eyebrows for me.

There's a reason none of these companies do that, and quite a bit of it is that they really don't want people to see what kind of garbage processing it uses. Like, one thing that's cropped up lately is that it's very bad at detecting anti-Semitism. To a comical level.

I'll admit that a lot of what he's saying sounds good, but I have zero faith in his ability to actually follow through in a way that's actually constructive. Even in the US, there's a lot of people who very, very much need internet anonymity, especially right now. The instant any sort of database like that exists, you will get the anti-queer politicians demanding access to it and threatening to cripple social media in general if they don't get it.

And I think that anything that has a very likely end result of driving queer people in dangerous situations who desperately need support off of social media is ill-conceived at best and actually disgusting at worst.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:47:21 AM

Well, the good news there is that if Twitter is private, the government has no leverage to compel disclosure of user lists.

That's unusually naive of you.

If some politician tells Musk to send them lists of users, he tells them to fuck off and come back with a subpoena. This is no different than with any other company. It's not that hard to use Twitter's data to figure out who someone is anyway, even without positive identification. If you think they can't already do this, you are naive.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:51:38 AM

It'd be dead easy for the Republicans to whip up support for publicly releasing the user lists.

"Why do these people need anonymity? Is Elon Musk actively aiding and abetting groomers? Is he a groomer? The only way he can prove otherwise is releasing all of this information." Plus constant lawsuits and threats from "concerned citizens."

And any barrier between queer kids and homelessness or suicide or being literally murdered is a good thing. I don't give a shit what Musk thinks about this, he has a history of extremely bad, low research judgement calls and proposals that ignore the reality of a situation. His plan is bad.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:53:19 AM

And since the company will be private and backed by someone with the financial resources to withstand such lawsuits, there will be no perceived or actual fiduciary duty to accede to any of those demands.

How many threads on this forum have to be about Elon Musk?

x4 And every incremental bit of plausible deniability is one extra step between submitting to unfriendly requests (or going for burying in so much data as to be obstructive) and withdrawing access.

All for... slightly limiting the ability of people to spew vile rhetoric that they shamelessly do anyway? Right. But we stop bots, so the potential harm is fine.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 25th 2022 at 1:57:18 PM

This is an effort to consolidate all of those conversations. Nobody is making you participate. But the answer is that people want to talk about Elon Musk. Very badly.

I don't think you fully appreciate just how bad the bot problem is on Twitter. If for that reason alone, I would support what Musk is doing. If it turns into a right-wing cesspit, I'll just quit.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:58:33 AM

I'd rather not but he won't stop making problems. ._.

Still kind of spotty on his actual free speech record. So it wouldn't shock me to see people getting memory-holed off Twitter for their opinions.

Paywall.

DBL, the forum rules about adequate link context don't get turned off because you're expressing righteous outrage.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 9:04:08 AM

Basically, he has a history of trying to silence people who make him look bad.

There's the diver who saved those kids in Thailand, of course, there was the time he tried to ruin Martin Tripp's reputation and paint him as homicidal when Tripp was trying to bring attention to real problems in the factories, there's that teenager who was tracking Musk's private jet that demanded $50,000 to stop and Musk's response was to try and block him everywhere.

He also has a lot of prominent tech reporters blocked, minimized Tesla's communications team, barely responds to press inquiries, and of course his use of Twitter to fuck with the stock market.

This is not a person who genuinely believes in absolute free speech. This is a person who wants to be able to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants, but also to shut down anyone who dares criticize him.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 9:10:15 AM

To put my frustration with your opinion another way, Fighteer, what you espouse in scenarios like this is that if we can make political discourse better by policing and limiting bad actors, then everyone benefits. This might be true in the long term if circumstances permit.

But "please make it even easier to identify you and track your activities" is not something any vulnerable group wants to hear.

And you're always coming at it from the position of someone that's probably fine until it hits full totalitarianism.

Let's be clear: Musk faces a lot of criticism, and he is under no obligation to unblock anyone just because he's a public figure. I have a lot of people blocked on Twitter. Does that mean I can't be a free speech advocate?

Musk is honest about his lack of respect for certain people. Does this get him in trouble? Sure, but he doesn't try to hide behind lawyers or an impenetrable wall of corporate PR. I can't count how many times I've heard people complain about getting the "stock corpo-speak PR answer" to questions, but when someone does away with that and makes themselves the direct public face of a company, that's bad too? Make up your minds.

The Unsworth thing was settled in court: Musk did not defame him. So that's that. The Tripp thing became a cause celebre of the anti-Tesla crowd on social media, and if you want to see toxicity, just wade into that pool. I'm not saying who was right, because I don't know, but Tripp also had his day in court and lost.

Look, I get your point, and I am sympathetic with people who face serious risks in their use of social media. I would rather solve this by banning and/or jailing the people who are harassing and killing you than by compromising the integrity of a platform for speech, and forcing them to identify themselves would allow us to do that.

If I understand Musk's plan, it would still be possible to use Twitter anonymously — without identifying yourself to the platform — but "anon" users would be relegated to the level of bots in terms of how much trust they are granted. Your public profile need not expose your real identity, of course. That wouldn't change.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 9:21:00 AM

Dude, the guy is the public face of like five companies and the only line of communication for at least one of them, it doesn't matter if he's allowed to block reporters, it's a super bad look for him to do so.

And "refreshing"? He called a guy a pedophile for making his awful plan look bad and then spent time and money trying to tank the defamation suit against him. He tries to ruin people who criticize him. He routinely tries to transparently manipulate the stock market with his account.

He is not a good faith actor, and his actions show me that he is an awful choice for the job, because his words can't be trusted.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 25th 2022 at 9:23:22 AM

This thread is about Elon Musk right now because Elon Musk is trying to buy out Twitter. That seems like a perfectly legitimate reason to talk about Elon Musk in a thread about social media.

So lets stop with the "why are we talking about Elon Musk" posts. He is relevant to the topic at hand.

I think some of his ideas for Twitter are good, but the main question is, is Musk really the right person to work on those ideas? The man has a bit of a tendency to get in his own way sometimes.