Twitter apparently has something slightly north of 300 million monthly active users; the daily tweet volume is a matter of some dispute(twitter says ~500 million; people whose paychecks don’t depend on that number tend to quote somewhat less impressive figures; but all in the low hundreds of millions).
How exactly are they going to assemble something that fits on a web page from all that without some sort of ranking mechanism? Even if you assume a nice spacious monitor and don’t mind clutter, you can only really display a few hundred items, at best.
You can certainly argue that twitter should be using a different weighting scheme or ranking algorithm; and the question of whether to totally block/drop traffic or just downmod it is a matter of ongoing debate; but you simply cannot escape the requirement that some activity be more visible than other activity. There isn’t an ‘impartial’ option when trying to cram that many items into a limited amount of display space.
It is perfectly cogent to criticize how they do it(whether for being overzealous or underzealous or zealous in the wrong direction); but they have no choice but to do something; because their catalog is a lot larger than anyone’s attention span.
And when Twitter does figure out how to get the speech of a handful of racist trolls from dominating the conversation space, I hope they let the 2016 election know how they did it…
so it’s just a listing of top tweets by some simple criteria, with no further review until people complain - good enough, probably
reminds me of the old saw about NASA spending millions on a pressurized pen with gel ink that could write in microgravity, whereas the Russians used a pencil
Love the idea that excluding racial slurs from trending topics and the like is some elaborate machine-learning conundrum of political bias and nailbiting algorithmic decision tree failure
From the looks of it, aggressively policing Olympics Multinational Sport Competitions gifs, and actively ignoring actual harassment. #brands are important, after all, and so is the monthly active user count. Even if that count is being not-insubstantially inflated by a torrent of filth and abuse that will eventually drive away anyone of value using their platform, along with whatever fleeting ad dollars they’re managing to pull in right now.
These objections often come down to "If we exclude certain words from trending topics, or from accounts we tell people to follow, people might not trend! Oh dear Constitution, they won’t be promoted! 1984 wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual! "
like so much in life, it comes down to the angle of your slippery slope, whether the angle is shifting, what’s causing it to shift, what it’s lubricated with, who’s doing the lubricating, by what method, how forcefully, etc., etc.
As a publicly-traded, privately owned corporation incapable of offering or guaranteeing anything remotely resembling free speech in the first place, and perfectly willing to squelch copyright infringements, parodies, political speech and the varieties of abuse it doesn’t tolerate, Twitter flew off the precipice years ago. Slippery slopes indeed!
First they came for the racist slurs in trending topics, but I didn’t use racial slurs in trending topics, so I didn’t complain.
Next they came for the algorithmic recommendation excluding white supremacists and neonazis with racial slurs in their handles, but I loathed all those people so it was fine.
Then they came for the armies of racist, homophobic, and sexist targeted harassment, but I wasn’t a bully looking to abuse people, so I was happy with the change.
…
Not seeing any slippery slope, nor seeing any downside to doing basic moderation along the lines of what every other large social media site already does better. If anything their lack of moderation creates a hostile environment that limits free speech more than it enables it.
I mean, come on, I’m not even saying Fake George Zimmerman should be banned. I’m just saying that just maybe putting him and his racist bullshit on the front page of your site while the billionaire proprietors of Disneyworld are kicking its tires exemplifies a business problem.
