I think this work is great and interesting, and I respect it. One of the things I feel like it lacks is a discussion of the broader context: we all sort of suspect that one of the reasons Twitter does not generally allow for de-escalation (like FB not censoring misleading news articles) is that such escalation is in fact part of their revenue stream (escalation=more engagement), so while I think ideas like this would be great if Twitter decided to incorporate it, the issue of course is that Twitter wouldn't want to as they actually love the cancel culture mill, it generates engagement.
I genuinely however like the ability to admit guilt such that replies are disabled because as the author notes, it explicitly ends all engagement. Any following engagement would require more work (subtweeting, screenshotting) but actively put a damp on the first derivative. But that said, reducing engagement is in fact not in Twitter's interest, as I said, so I don't see them doing it without some outside pressure.
"Engagement" is the "paper clip maximizer"[1] of the modern software industry, or more generally an example of "instrumental convergence."
Optimizing engagement without regard for negative externalities is a catastrophic ethical failure of the major players in the software industry, and we are finally seeing a backlash both from mainstream advertisers and widespread public outcry.
Engagement can also ultimately at odds with retention. We see people leaving Twitter and Facebook all the time due to exhaustion with the toxic conflict. So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.
>So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.
You've referenced engagement first, but then, you've ignored about it in your conclusion. That is, as long as the inflow counters the outflow of participants, the situation will not improve or will even worsen - just as we've experienced in the last decade.
People leaving is not necessarily a problem, if the new ones come faster. If you are small, you can grow exponentially even if literally all users left in a month. But this becomes a problem once you grow so large that there is nowhere to grow. Which is probably the case with Twitter -- everyone already heard of it, and everyone who was tempted to try it already did.
On Facebook, I think the only reasonable way to use it is to create groups and only debate within them. Also private messages, but only 1:1.
Capitalism is the paper clip maximizer, non-metaphorically.
Science fiction is pretty much always just about things that already happened. “What if we maximized a non-human value?” is just a subconsciously repressed way of asking “Did anyone notice we’ve been maximizing non-human values for a couple hundred years?”
It happens in capitalism, and it happens in socialism, because it happens everywhere. It is like saying "entropy increases in capitalism"; technically true, but misleading.
Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law happen regardless of political regime or economical system. In different situations they take different forms: in capitalism, companies try to maximize (short-term) (perceived) shareholder value; in socialism, they try to maximize the favor of the ruling party. In capitalism, your values are important proportionally to how much money you have; in socialism proportionally to how good political connections you have. In capitalism, sometimes people starve to death; in socialism, sometimes people starve to death.
The world has many problems, but lack of military dictatorships controlled by a communist party is not one of them.
Of course, unless you meant "actually, true socialism has never been tried yet". In which case, sure, as a rule of thumb, imaginary countries do not suffer from real problems (unless the plot demands it).
>The world has many problems, but lack of military dictatorships controlled by a communist party is not one of them. //
There's N.Korea, but that's not controlled by a communist party. It's notionally controlled by people who call themselves Communist, but they don't appear to do anything ideologically communist.
World politics isn't my strong point, where did you have in mind?
I note that your structure was "in capitalism, {capitalist ideological outcome, those with capital own the means of production and leech off the value of others labour}; in socialism, {activity directly opposed to socialist ideology}".
I'd say 99%, at least, of companies are run under capitalist ideology; to accrue wealth for the owners. So why blame socialism for the upshot of capitalist activity.
Capitalism's a loaded word. Most people who would call themselves pro-free market aren't in favour of rent-seeking monopolies, just like how most people who would call themselves socialists aren't in favour of putting dissidents in gulags.
I have no idea if https://dprktoday.com truly is[1] DPRK or someone else's black propaganda (nor do I read korean) but the pictures on it are congruent with those from former communist countries.
[1] traceroute is useless these days, and its whois registrar appears to be chinese.
Bonus /r/fullcommunism: "let's study"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukBcC-sK3wQ
Unless they're trolling hard with the english subs, the chorus is about studying for a better future. I know grades were important for early selection in the Young Pioneers, but can't immediately think of such a swotty song in the soviet catalogue (choreography and backing band, however, is spot on). Closest I manage at the moment is the educational background of the main characters in the movie "Three Plus Two."
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If it's "DPRK is communist", you're not really doing that because nothing you mentioned has anything to do with communism.
I'm not trying to say "DPRK is communist", especially because I believe the Warsaw Pact countries considered themselves to be socialist, on the way to communism. What I am trying to say is that, of things that strike me as having been different between western and eastern europe in photographed culture, today's DPRK shows the same differences. So I'd consider it firmly in the "second world", insofar as that old cold war trichotomy makes any sense in the twenty-first century.
For instance, I consider "Девушки фабричные" to have been a soviet trope (an image search reveals factory girls existed in the west as well, but don't seem to have been so frequently propagandised) and sure enough, here they are in the DPRK, even clasically at textile machines:
This doesn't work because humans are the consumer. Humans purchase things based on their own person values. Capitalism has the instrumental goal of maximizing human values. In addition, humans engage in every stage of the process. Some of the biggest failures of capitalism are actually the results of human values: racism, sexism, nepotism. I can think of some issues with unregulated capitalism, but none of them seem to be a paperclip maximizer unless you're taking the phrase to be so non-specific that it essentially just means "unwanted side-effect."
There's definitely something of the paperclip maximizer to capitalism. It's due to corporations having the instrumental goal of maximizing shareholder value - which usually translates in making as much money as possible. If there is a way to convince people that paperclips in excess is what they most need, that's what they will have to do.
Sexism, nepotism, and xenophobic predate capitalism, but racism does not. Racism was created as the explanation for why African slavery, which was much more brutal than prior slavery, was okay after all. African slavery in turn was because of mercantilism/capitalism. They were getting out of debt by ruining people’s lives. It was quite inhuman.
... and may have a charter or mission, or even an established culture which sets guiding principles.
Various forms of legal power (ownership, right to collectively bargain, fiduciary/oversight responsibility, first rights to assets on liquidation), social power, market power (price negotiation), and individual intention (everyone, even bankers make decisions based on something other than just money) form, a kind of dynamic equilibrium.
So a company is going to end up being or doing whatever the combined weighted intentions of those forces imply.
It's not 'shareholders' that can do anything willy nilly. Sometimes customers have all of the power and indirectly dictate everything. Inversely maybe buyers do: Apple is a dictator to many of its suppliers. Sometimes Unions run the show or have incredible influence (auto industry, government), sometimes the debtors. Sometimes the 'CEO' particularly a founder even without 'majority shares' has considerably more influence than anyone else, with the board afraid to replace them.
A non-profit is almost the same minus shareholders.
Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest. People know this on an individual scale, and it's just as true on a corporate scale. When a company acts unethically, it is almost always paying a high price later for a small immediate win. We see this kind of behaviour a lot in companies that have been taken over by short-term MBA-style management, who temporarily boost quarterly revenues by burning years or decades of accumulated reputation and good will.
> Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest.
I somewhat disagree on a generalized form of "altruism is in the individual's interest" (as in "always"), but for ethical behavior, this essentially means that their is no ethical behavior for companies, only a mirroring of the perceived values of customers.
You need very different actions to not tarnish your reputation when you're dealing with very different customers. Since large companies typically do, there would only be very localized ethics, and they could be diametrically opposed (e.g. "expose & hunt down gays" in Riad, "expose & hunt down bigots" in Berkeley). Ethics is the wrong term here, as the company's actions are not based on principles but on the expectations and principles of the environment, their values are reactive.
>Ethics is the wrong term here, as the company's actions are not based on principles [...] //
The principle "do anything of any moral values that brings me value from others' labour" is still a position wrt ethics, though one can't really call it "ethical" without confusion.
Complete moral plasticity according to what "sells" seems to define our age quite well.
Since this is a widely held view, it is worth debating. I would argue for a contrary position: 1) every organization has an ethical responsibility, and 2) corporations not only do have an ethical responsibility but have a higher one. A few, abbreviated reasons are as follows.
Every member of a physical grouping (e.g. neighborhood, community, city, state, etc.) has an ethical responsibility to other members of that group. Organizations, like individuals, are members of a physical group. Therefore organizations have an ethical responsibility to other members of that group.
Those who are granted special privileges by the group have a higher obligation to the group as a result. Ethical responsibility represents one of those obligations. Corporations are granted special privileges such as limited liability, hence they have a higher obligation.
Similarly, those organizations that are granted disproportionate political and economic power, assume disproportionate obligations. With, again, ethical responsibility being one of those obligations. This is the "to whom much is given, much is required" principle. Also, since an organization with disproportionate political and economic power necessarily has a disproportionate impact on a given society, it is entirely reasonable for those granting that power to expect it to be used benevolently.
This shouldn't have been voted down. It is actually a sound question and one that should be examined.
Edit: I looked at the previous replies. All of this talk of 'society' this and 'we' that is of no use whatsoever when you are talking about global phenomena and companies like Facebook/Twitter/etc. Under the given circumstances, the ethical questions are much larger. The problem is probably totally intractable.
In a world of pure capitalism without ethical considerations at all... these sorts of issues can be "resolved" through assassination markets against the owners and operators of enterprises that become too great a public nuisance.
Is that what you want, or would you instead prefer that ethical considerations be back on the table?
Because we live in a society with social norms and a moral code. If anything, we should expect more morality from institutions that avail themselves of limited liability legal forms.
This "corporations should be cynical sociopaths" idea is even newer than the limited liability corporate form, which is itself a modern invention.
Before the current era of hyper-institutionalization and hyper-legalism there was a concept called "natural law". It basically meant morality, as understood at the time.
When society is prejudiced against a group (not the fake prejudice that society complains about - major broadcasters like Fox and CNN are both probably championing groups who have plenty of support from society, but maybe other groups are actually marginalised but it wouldn't be broadly OK to say it if they were) then it's not society's moral code that helps them (if anything it hurts them), it's businesses that only care about money who will still deal with them.
Latinos and people with mental illness (and fat people) are kinda still acceptable targets. Poor whites. Men in some contexts. Asians in some contexts. One of the biggest issues with the whole anti-discrimination movement now is that it is inherently reductionist - it has to be some grand intersectional operatic fight with clear goodies and baddies who are always winners or losers in some deep conspiratorial structure of society, they can't appreciate that discrimination isn't always so black and white and that often context can matter because for the "theory" to work it always has to be about some imagined power struggle.
What? That isn't the argument most anti-discrimination people make.
Most argue that subconscious bias and wealth inequality due to historical reasons are a significant part of discrimination. I've not met someone 'anti-discrimination' who believes there is a deep conspiracy of people working to instill discrimination across society.
In modern times in the western world, conspiratorial sort of discrimination seems to me to occur more in pockets or if the culture of an organisation goes bad and festers. But it's rarely overt or widespread.
More subtle and nuanced forms of discrimination are still everpresent of course, but everyone I discuss and work with in these issues knows this all too well.
Oh I've definitely encountered rhetoric that suggests middle class white-appearing males have intentionally and in bad faith created discriminatory structures because their power complex is what gets them off at night. I did go to a very liberal college though. I hope that stance is not becoming mainstream...
Because externality is everywhere, and a society where organizations pay attention to this is preferable to one that suffers a thousand cuts by ignoring it.
If there's anyone out there who wants to earn money from advertising there are two words you need to be aware of:
"BRAND SAFETY"
No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic. This is why YouTube is demonetising any video that mentions Covid-19. YouTube themselves technically probably don't care, but brand safety conscious advertisers certainly do, and so YouTube must too.
They've realised that Twitter and FB, and others, are currently toxic platforms. The discussion threads can be awful, driven by fascists on both the far-left and far-right of the political debate. They no longer want to buy this advertising space, it's too much of a reputational risk (I will say that advertisers outsource the buying of advertising space to Ad agencies who may not be as savvy since they're under pressure to spend allotted advertising budgets).
Hence the news about big brands pulling budgets from social media.
Another issue that I've never seen discussed is that if Twitter (and other social media platforms) relies completely on advertising revenue, it can be forced to only allow content that advertisers approve of. In other words, advertisers can in theory control political debate. Social media platforms then ban or remove content that's undesirable for advertisers because they can't monetise it.
> it can be forced to only allow content that advertisers approve of
This was already the case before social media, mainstream media has always been controlled by the powerful. By "the powerful", I don't mean a secret cabal of white men deciding what happens, but that only people with enough resources, right connections can have an influence over what gets published. This is a pretty small group and not representative of the general public.
Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control. I think they're going to succeed, and we'll go back to a higher barrier of entry in terms of influencing public opinions, which can be both a good and bad thing.
I doubt that is true. SV crowd may be loud but they aren't the majority on HN.
Here's how I would group HN based on income, what keywords make them click and demography.
1. Old system admins, FOSS lovers, and retired due to age folks.
Around median income.
Keywords - vim, Emacs, firefox, awk, unions, inequality, privacy, new tech bad, linux, open source projects, go, haiku, history, and against-big-tech.
2. Fresh college graduate/ enrolled in CS or equivalents, teenagers, hermits, and recently laid off.
Below median income or none.
Keywords - education, degrees, FAANGs, interviews, privacy, income inequality, against-the-popular-social-media, against-google-apple, firefox, chrome, free-speech, thought-crime, and twittter.
3. SV crowd, founders, and employees of a big company.
Above median income.
Keywords - rent, homelessness, parenting, investment, CA, economics, happiness, open source but the profitable or commerical kind (kubernetes tool, cockroachdb, materialize), startups, climate change, big-company-profit-loss, apple, security and immigration.
4. Researchers and retired by choice.
Above Median or low/no income.
Passive consumers so they click on wide variety of keywords. Occasionally, participate in something related to their field.
5. Long time active HN members.
Above median or median income.
They click on most posts on the front page but comment in their own silos or interests. They help direct the site by filtering from new or stopping hoard of initial comments.
6. Marketers, sales and non-tech crowd.
Median or lower median income.
Keywords - medium article, heres-why, how-I, growth, crypto, ads, effective-ways-to, and the likes.
This is only my observation so it will be biased and wrong but I definitely don't think hners are 1%.
I didn't single it out to SV. But yes, I did omit a huge portion of devs. I couldn't find any patterns. A dev living in [country] will talk in threads about their [country]. Such details are obvious. But SV crowd talk about rent details of other countries or states which is a trend.
But that's very different to the people who are typically refereed to as "the elites". That typically includes - for example - journalists - who aren't well paid at all.
These generalizations and plattitudes are off the mark and dangerous. Sure, there are those working as PR for the elite, or they are honest journalists that work for MSM that is in the hands of the elites. Most journalists, especially investigative journalists want to do their job as well as they can, in an environment that is increasingly hostile to good journalism. We need these people to help keep our democracy intact.
> No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic.
That's pre-historic thinking. No reasonable long-term user of Social Media would think that a Frozen ad showing next to some BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism. It just means that you've liked Frozen (or similar things) before.
The dinosaurs will die out. They'll be replaced by social-media-savy advertisers.
That may be true at some point in the future, but I believe we're quite far away from it. Most users on the internet are not savvy at all, and I don't see that changing.
I had expected the younger generations to be "digital natives", but they're not. They know their apps and services, but it's not a generalized understanding to how things work or what's common. Imho the fact that adblocker-usage isn't approaching 100% is a powerful demonstration of it.
Additionally, there's the subconscious effects. Even if they consciously understand that it's based on their ad profile, brand will likely still not advertise there. There may be some exceptions (Benetton comes to mind), but I don't think Disney ever wants their ads to be displayed in an article about Auschwitz.
This is so weird to me. When I saw an ad for Toyota whilst watching Unsolved Mysteries in the nineties, I didn't think for a second that Toyota thought aliens were real or whatever. There has always been a complete disconnect between ads and content for me. In fact only recently has that shifted with e.g. podcasts and YouTube channels having sponsors that are explicitly worked into the content and are topical because that's a better way (or the only way for the case of podcasts) to do targeted advertising in these contexts.
I imagine TV before I was born was a little more like this since you could't just buy generic ad space - you needed to deal with the producers of a show specifically to get into their ad slots - but for TV when I was growing up, ads were ads. They'd target your age group (ads for kids toys during breakfast cartoons), but it just never occurred to me that anyone would think it was an endorsement of anything.
This is such a confusing concept to me. Do people really think like that? I know they do now, because it's a self-reinforcing concept. Yelling loudly that ads are an endorsement of content makes it true - since if you're an advertiser and you know that attitude is out there, and you still run an ad, that's now a conscious decision and everybody knows it. But it seems like this came about artificially, via activism, rather than people naturally making the link that ads imply endorsement.
Maybe it's that TV itself is mostly bland and ad friendly, non-controversial for that very reason. Content that is obviously for entertainment purposes is cool to put ads on. TV had few channels and programs that weren't for the general population, so you wouldn't have The KKK Weekly or Cool Communism that advertisers would have to avoid.
That's different on YouTube, where the content is much more heterogeneous, where you have super-optimized, ad-friendly influencers with millions of subs who take great care not to offend (and are therefore great to throw ads at) next to fringe political ideas and people with mental health issues presenting their world view.
I believe funding is often considered as an endorsement, and ads are the primary source of funding for most media companies. Similarly, you'll often see disclaimers on Twitter "retweet != endorsement" because people tend to understand it as such.
I believe that the bigger deal is subconscious association. I have no idea whether it's true, but putting McDonald's ads next to a documentary on factory farming seems unwise.
You can understand different things to different degrees, you can have a better or worse understanding of web-technology (and computers in general) than of consumer activism. I don't believe that the average consumer has a great understanding of either, but my experience is that they certainly don't understand the technology they use more than they need to.
>BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism
Are you trolling with this comparison? In a thread about de-escalation it seems a bit unwise to casually tie BLM to violence and suggest that it's somehow comparable to white supremacist extremism. I get that you were trying to choose one example from each 'end' of the political spectrum, but I think this particular choice was badly misconceived.
No. First, it’s not a comparison, just 2 examples. Second, I’m pretty sure that many on the opposing end of political spectrum (compared to you) might find it offensive in the other direction. But yea I did expect it to be badly received here on HN.
I think that white supremacists are off the end of the political spectrum, and that we shouldn't worry too much about what offends them. But the issue isn't just the comparison, it's the suggestion that BLM is inherently a violent movement (so that endorsing BLM would equate to endorsing violence). BLM is a broad movement. It's not only people on the left - and certainly not only people on the far left - who support it.
No matter how much you detest them, how can the members of the ruling party, in a country that until very recently had their views enshrined in law, be off the end of the political spectrum?
Me too, but it's a tough situation. There's a lot of 'nod nod wink wink' alt right stuff on the site, and since none of that is banned by mods, I think there ought to be a response to it too. What do you think we should do instead?
How long have you been on HN? Begin by assuming good faith, please.
> it seems a bit unwise to casually tie BLM to violence
"unwise" reads like a threat at worst and a warning at best but since I've invoked good faith I'll accept it's poor wording… but what do you actually mean? Is disagreement with your view something that should be avoided on HN? Will the mob (is this what HN readers have become?) descend on anyone for dare suggesting that BLM has been associated with violence or extremism?
Considerably longer than you, as you can easily tell by looking at my profile to see when my account was created.
>"unwise" reads like a threat
No, it doesn't. Don't be silly.
>dare suggesting that BLM has been associated with violence or extremism
Most large-scale protest movements attract violent extremists. There are always some violent idiots out there. The point is that BLM is a mainstream political movement, not a violent extremist movement. (Most polls show a majority of Americans supporting the protests.)
Yes it does, and if you’ve been here considerably longer than me then you should know the rules just as well, so try sticking to them. It is not trolling to point to the violence that follows BLM around or you wouldn’t need to produce an apologetic for it. Try the principle of charity and try not to tell others what they should think or write simply because you disagree.
My original post obviously did not contain a "threat". The rest of what you're saying similarly seems to be based on a misconceptions. I think my previous comments speak for themselves, so I'll leave it here.
reads like. I asked you to clarify but all you've done is dig yourself in, ironically on a post about providing mea culpa. If you don't wish to clarify, that's your decision, but please show some awareness in the way you write as what else should one conclude other than you really wanted someone else to shut up? The absence of any other explanation and your unwillingness to avoid clarifying or providing an apology and accepting it was a mistake is unhelpful.
I just meant that it's unwise, i.e. not a good idea, to suggest in passing that BLM is an inherently violent movement, as this kind of inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory statement is not likely to lead to a productive discussion. I am not sure why you think I meant anything else.
Thank you for being good enough to clarify, I appreciate it. My objection was sincere, I accept that your words were and are sincere too and not designed to elicit a malign outcome. Hopefully what follows will allow you to see why I would think they might have.
> this kind of inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory statement is not likely to lead to a productive discussion
I disagree that it's inaccurate, and hence is not unnecessary nor inflammatory. However, instead of being bald men fighting over a comb about whether prominent BLM members calling whites "sub-humxn"[Toronto] and calling for violence implicitly[NY1] or explicitly[NY2] is any kind of evidence of BLM itself being inherently violent (I accept it may or may not), let's focus on the general point by leaning on J. S. Mill's words from On Liberty[Mill]:
> Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.
My favourite part of the whole book.
> I am not sure why you think I meant anything else.
Threats are often given as ostensibly well meaning advice that dissuade, or attempt to dissuade, someone from continuing on a course of action via an unspoken alternative that is personally bad. The discontinuance will happen to benefit the kindly person. Was the advice about unwise things…
- apparently well meaning?
- attempting to dissuade someone from continuing their action?
- would it benefit you?
- did you make explicit what the alternative was?
Then it may appear like a threat.
We also live in an age of increasing censorship, by government, by corporation, and by groups in society who are willing to shut down discussion by their opponents. It used to be "conservatives" burning books and railing against gangsta rap, now it's "liberals" with cancel culture and pile ons. To hear an attempt by a (possible) supporter of BLM, on an online forum, to be quiet, that is clearly in threat territory. I've experienced threats online of many kinds and they're not fun, and they often look similar to this case.
Like I wrote above, I fully accept your explanation and I hope you accept mine.
[NY2] https://youtu.be/NZEulL30vdY?t=26 …he repeats it too often, and with less of the "figurative" nature. "or we will burn this country to ashes", to a crowd is incitement to violence in my book. The speeches are full of violent rhetoric.
I did not make a threat. If you think you need to write paragraphs and paragraphs to explain why I did, you are probably just off base on this one. I am also not calling for anyone to be censored, so most of your post is irrelevant.
The length of an explanation has no connection to the complexity, validity or soundness of any point, concept or idea under discussion, anywhere, at any time, in any language, so if we're looking for irrelevancies we should start with your complaint.
I would suggest that if you don't wish for your utterances to be examined or misconstrued then you might try to avoid speech that appears threatening, and instead inject more sincerity in any defence you make, otherwise your opponent will feel justified in their scepticism of your intentions.
In short (since you appear to favour succinctness), you'd be wise to be more careful in future ;-)
I gave them the benefit of the doubt explicitly and reminded them of the rules - what more do you want?
Their reply shows I was wrong to give the benefit of the doubt and that they really need a reminder of the rules. Feel free to come up with more “no it’s you” replies if you like but they’re unhelpful, unwanted, unwarranted, and directed towards the wrong person.
I didn't even see your reply until you brought it up. More often than not for things like that I'll drop my perspective and leave. Otherwise if I took umbrage with your comment I would've actually replied which since you seemed to look through my post history you can also see I'm not one to shy away from an argument for better or worse.
But it seems like you're not interested in sticking to the rules yourself funnily enough. If you want to assume there was some grand conspiracy instead of me just reading a thread and seeing a bad remark by all means.
There are a lot of unreasonable people out there. There are also people who get a kick out of causing a scene. All it takes is one Buzzfeed (or whomever...) article about this exact situation to make other advertisers run to the hills.
>No reasonable long-term user of Social Media would think that a Frozen ad showing next to some BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism. It just means that you've liked Frozen (or similar things) before.
It's not that simple. The other angle you're missing is that advocacy groups (as a proxy for some customers) pressure advertisers to stop funding entities they don't approve of. E.g. the "Stop Funding Hate" to pressure companies to stop advertising in conservative newspapers.
Therefore, it's not enough if Disney itself doesn't approve of white supremacists. It's also not enough if Disney's customers also know that Disney doesn't approve of neo-Nazis. Instead, protesters would insist that Disney to take further measures of "not funding white supremacists" by not advertising (or allowing Google to show their ads) next to Nazi content.
Thus "brand safety" isn't just about association. It's also about how customers connect the dots between the company and the funding of activities they disapprove of.
And social networks have hundreds of millions of them
Do you think Coca Cola cares if KKK members drink it and bottles of Coke are shown in pictures of their rallies?
Brand awareness is more important to them
Starbucks cups with name spelled wrong are the perfect example: people think they are funny and post the picture of the cup with the Starbucks logo making the brand more popular
So what seem an honest mistake is actually a well thought brand awareness campaign
While I appreciate your comment otherwise, fascism is universally agreed to be a far-right ideology and claiming otherwise at this point in history can't really be taken as anything but inflammatory, which isn't what belongs here in an otherwise insightful comment.
There is not universal agreement that the earth is round.
But a better word choice by op might have been extreme authoritarians, but a sub-optimal word choice hardly makes a comment intentionally inflammatory.
Left and right are indeed not ideologies but properties of ideologies and they are well-defined in mainstream political science models of classification. In all of those models, fascism is a far-right ideology.
> fascists on both the far-left and far-right of the political debate
According to Merriam-Webster, fascism is:[0]
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
It's true that some on both the "left" and "right" (which is an absurdly simplistic one-dimensional distinction) are over-the-top extremist and forcibly suppress their opposition. However, that's only one aspect of the definition of "fascist".
Even so, Merriam-Webster doesn't restrict fascism to the right wing, so I defer to it. But Wikipedia does.[1]
Last, I note that the Soviet Union was arguably fascist. While it didn't exalt any nation above the individual, it did exalt the Party, and more generally the state. And its government was certainly autocratic and dictatorial.
> You appear to be starting from an assumption that everything USSR did, politically, was left-wing; and thus concluding that fascism can be left wing.
No, I did not. Basically I'm arguing that the USSR pretended to be "left-wing" but were actually "right-wing". So perhaps they were fascist, but that doesn't imply that truly left-wing governments and movements are fascist.
The USSR is what happens when you take left wing to the extreme. Go too far replacing free speech with right speech and you get censorship. Censorship requires a heavy police state to enforce.
If USSR was arguably fascist, so are the USA then.
Do you think bombing other countries for their oil or to seize control of countries close to the enemy borders (like in Vietnam) looks more democratic or fascist?
USSR has been at war in Afghanistan for 9 years, mainly because USA financed the resistance, creating and arming those mujahideen that years later became "terrorists" simply because they weren't needed anymore...
USA has been at war in Afghanistan for 19 years now (and counting) and the evidence to go to war were falsified.
Fascism is a specific thing, if we broaden the meaning of that word, anything can be called fascist.
As Italian, with a grandfather imprisoned by the fascists and the other sent by the fascist regime to die in Russia, I can tell you what fascism is and what is not and I can tell you we never thought it meant "government that hurts people" like nazism is not just "people who wear swastikas", if you use it that way, you are wrong.
My grandmother died few moths ago, she was from 1922 and escaped from the fascists on one side and the Marocchinate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate) on the other side, while my grandfather was in jail even if he was ill with tuberculosis, my father house was occupied by fascists and he had to hide from the day he was born until he was five, and when the war ended his father never came back.
I think it's not long past when people that suffered from it are still alive, don't you think?
You're oversimplifying something that's been very hurtful for my country, the history of my continent and for my family.
But let me make a simple example for you: fascism was about separating people in classes, USSR was about eliminating classes.
Fascism was about colonialism and they did unspeakable things in North Africa, justifying their actions with he excuse that "black people are not humans, they are like animals"
USSR never did something similar, because of people's race.
Fascism was about individualism, USSR was about colletivism.
Etc. etc. etc.
Just to exemplify for you what fascism is and what is not: US is more fascist than USSR could ever have been.
And not because I like USSR, but because words have meanings and it's not for you to decide what fascism means when we are the ones who faced it, in our houses, fought it, defeated it, and rebuilt from the ruins and the trail of dead fascism left.
That might be what it used to mean, but it certainly does not mean that now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#"Fascist"_as_a_pejorat.... You can call it wrong all you want, but the use of the word has been diluted enough that the meaning that you seek is not people believe when they use it.
I agree with most of your comment. So I guess that I wasn't very clear in mine, if it elicited yours :(
> If USSR was arguably fascist, so are the USA then.
I wouldn't argue too hard against that. It's just that the US hides it better. Or at least, it seems that way at times.
But my main point is that the term "fascist" is being misused to mean extremist and intolerant of opposition. So many today who are "left-wing" are so, but that doesn't mean that they're fascist.
I don't think twitter is not allowing de-escalation as much as they haven't figured out how to do it. The product itself hasn't changed much in a long time, and there are likely many internal reasons for that that have little to do with revenue. Meanwhile the FB misleading articles example is a much more nuanced problem that has less to do with engagement than simply being a political hot potato and a really challenging question of top-down authority (as well as a straight up massive cost center).
While I agree that in the short run, drama = engagement = revenue, businesses have to consider both short and long term risk. One of the biggest long term brand risks to Twitter is how toxic discourse can be. Twitter's mission is to "give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers", in other words to be a kind of global commons where everyone may participate. To preserve that position means making sure discourse is constructive, because if it is not, that represents a "barrier" that will cause people to churn and revenue to fall.
I'm glad you bring up the high friction paths of subtweeting & screenshotting. These things are still going to happen, but in design it's about how easy things are to do. We have to make the constructive things easy.
Another way to put it is: if Twitter were a friendlier place, wouldn't that increase users and engagement? If you're not completely sure this would be false, then it's worth experimenting.
I should temper my above comment (my own sort of mea culpea :) ). You're right, given that I don't work for Twitter, I don't know whether there is an explicit desire not to reduce toxicity due to revenue concerns. I will say whether I am right or not, there at the very least does exist the incentive especially if they ignore the long term issues as you mention. Some evidence that at the very least they don't have an incentive to detoxify is that twitter has been toxic for years, almost a decade at this point. One of the most often cited essays on twitter toxicity from a leftist perspective was written in 2013[0] but the opening discussion sounds like it concern today.
All in all, I think you're quite correct about how the toxicity is a long term risk, but perhaps people there need to realize how much of a threat it is for the platform.
Finally, I think your article was really great, as I said before. I came with a negative perspective but you convinced me otherwise. I still believe that certain cultural and mindset issues need to be addressed that might be beyond design but I definitely feel you're right that the UX design could help reduce toxicity.
Thanks, I enjoyed our exchange. Your concerns resonate with many people here because there's real truth in them.
People in companies like Facebook and Twitter debate and disagree all the time about features and their effects, and that has a real impact on how culture and ethics are defined in organizations. Part of the goal of this project was to empower them with ideas to advocate for and drive change. I'm a strong believer in thinking about value over longer time horizons (ala Warren Buffett) and find short-termism a real cancer on our society, and I hope we as a society can come to realize incentives need to be more aligned around long term value and effect. This does require a different mindset than some companies take, but if we can get people to think longer term, it will trickle down to individual product and design decisions that I think can have big impact.
I'll take a look at this article, I hadn't read it before. Cheers
> I don't think twitter is not allowing de-escalation as much as they haven't figured out how to do it.
I think what they are doing is perfectly in line with their mission statement.
"Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" lacks functional constraints such as "let the better ideas propagate more", "put some barriers around good judgement, rationality, relevance, factuality" etc. If a human mind operated through twitter algorithms, it would be equivalent to some sort of psychosis, every voice in one's head valued equally without due discrimination on reality checks, uncontrollable, irrational, amplifying irrelevant viewpoints, unable to conform to reality. Unsurprisingly at times our collective behavior fueled by twitter (and any other social media that operate through such filtering/amplification functions) resembles mass psychosis.
I find twitter to be friendly and helpful. It depends on who you follow what experiences you get.
You can have real or filtered experiences. Twitter is going in the real.
The problem is twitter brings in so many people to the discussion tribes form. I would elimate tribes by removing identity.
When you reply it is no longer in your name connected to your profile, the identity is a secret. This allows users to go back and continue the discussion but not follow users around the platform.
Probably one should also see this less one-sided, de-escalation is not the answer to everything and escalation is not bad in every single case. Without ever escalating anything, everything that is hard to change is likely to stay the same. Too much escalation is of course a toxic thing but in moderation it's actually very useful and it wouldn't be so entangled in everyday lives if there was no use.
That said, admitting guilt does not work when the other person is actually hostile since it can be used against oneself. (Just imagine what would happen if the current protest movement in the US would apologize to Donald Trump...) Apart from that, there are still online forums which work very well and don't turn toxic despite occasional rants. Twitter should take that as an example...
I genuinely however like the ability to admit guilt such that replies are disabled because as the author notes, it explicitly ends all engagement. Any following engagement would require more work (subtweeting, screenshotting) but actively put a damp on the first derivative. But that said, reducing engagement is in fact not in Twitter's interest, as I said, so I don't see them doing it without some outside pressure.