Why Twitter shouldn’t delete user accounts
Why Twitter shouldn’t delete user accounts
Why are we OK with Twitter deplatforming objectionable users after amplifying those voices for years? Here’s a better way.
If any social network should function as the world’s “town square” or “social network of record,” it’s Twitter. And that’s why Twitter should strive to provide a platform for everyone to say just about anything — good, the bad and the ugly.
After years of dragging its feet, Twitter has gotten more active at banishing users — deleting the accounts of people who violate terms of service around hate speech, disinformation and personal attacks.
The background of all this is the absurd attempt to figure out if social networks are “public utilities,” like the phone system, in which the phone service providers don’t know and don’t care what is actually said, or more like a magazine, in which editors choose, approve and are responsible for every word published.
Obviously social networks like Twitter are somewhere in the middle, controlling content on the edges but mostly not caring what’s said.
More accurately, social networks can’t be reasonably compared to either telephones or magazines. They’re something else entirely.
The weird thing about Twitter is that right up to the point where it terminates an account, it radically amplifies it.
For example, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been approaching the brink of deplatforming on Twitter for weeks because of her comments questioning the efficacy of Covid vaccines. But until Greene gets terminated forever, Twitter is actively amplifying her views by allowing its algorithms to deliver her tweets (and other people’s tweets about her tweets) to many times more people than who actually follower her. Her name is one of the most frequent trending topics on Twitter.
This is madness. Why does Twitter amplify, amplify, amplify then terminate?
I think there’s a better way. For the worst offenders, Twitter should neither amplify nor terminate.
In other words, violations of Twitter’s terms of service for hate speech, disinformation and personal attacks should trigger a new status for offending users, which is to deliver their tweets only to followers and no one else. They could tweet, but their tweets could not be algorithmically amplified, retweeted or shared off-platform through the “Share” link.
That’s an unpopular idea, I’m sure. But there are three reasons why I think it’s a great idea:
Offensive and objectionable tweets are evidence against the person who tweets them. They can be used as direct quotes in critical articles, as fodder for historians and even evidence admitted in court. (Donald Trump as president lost more than one lawsuit while in office because his malicious intent was revealed in his tweets — had he been banned earlier, he might have won the cases.) In the public square, we de-legitimize ideas not by forcing them into the shadows, but by debating them. We need to know what influencers say without expanding their influence.
Making an account readable only by followers turns the service for that user into a telephone, essentially. By shutting down sharing beyond the consenting adults who actively follow, Twitter removes itself from the editorial or censorship roll, and allows objectionable speech to be consumed only by those who seek it out.
By keeping the haters on the platform, but never amplifying them, the people who are inclined to follow such people also stay on the platform, where objectionable voices are muted to some degree and only non-objectionable voices are amplified. It’s better for Democracy to keep people on Twitter where only reasonable voices are amplified rather than driving them to hate-speech platforms like GETTR and Parler where it’s all nasty, all the time.
The system I’m proposing would allow Twitter to be the “social network of record” for everybody without the company itself being a co-conspirator in the amplification and spreading of hate speech, disinformation and personal attacks. And it also removes Twitter from the role of morality police and censor.
Meanwhile, the majority of Twitter users would never see tweets by haters showing up in their streams.
Haters gonna hate. And they should be able to do so on Twitter so they can pay the social and legal costs for doing so. But Twitter shouldn’t deliver that hate speech to people who didn’t sign up for it.
In the fictional "Mythic Quest" TV series it's exactly what happened a group of white supremacists that were rampaging in the game : they were dealt with by putting them in their own virtual world, away from everyone else.
I suspect Twitter does something like this to s-workers. I say that, because I have friends who are full time in the industry, and they use Twitter to promote their content. They've all reported that sometimes they see (what appear to be) random, downward trends in their Twitter engagement numbers.