Over at the NY Times, the same paper which hired virulent racist Sarah Jeong to sit on their editorial board, tech writer Kara Swisher thinks she knows what Twitter really needs
Rules Won’t Save Twitter. Values Will.
This week, Alex Jones, the persistently mendacious conspiracy-theory spouter — yeah, that’s a real job in 2018 — finally became the ultimate swipe left of the social media age.
Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Spotify and most other major internet distributors banished Mr. Jones, either permanently or for some unspecified star-chamber-determined amount of time, for hate speech and other violations.
But not Twitter. Instead, Jack Dorsey, the chief executive, founder and tweet inventor himself, took to his own platform to explain in the high-minded tone that one takes with small children that Mr. Jones wasn’t suspended from Twitter because he “hasn’t violated our rules.†(snip)
While principles and rules will help in an open platform, it is values that Mr. Dorsey should really be talking about. By values, I mean a code that requires making hard choices — curating your offerings, which was something Apple got made fun of for doing, back when it launched the App Store, by the open-is-best crowd.
Let me say that I have nothing but admiration for the long-suffering trust and safety team at Twitter, which has been tasked with the Sisyphean job of controlling humanity and scaling civility, armed only with some easily gamed and capriciously enforced rules. How are these people supposed to do that when the company has provided them with no firm set of values?
Values would require that Twitter make tough calls on high-profile and obviously malevolent figures, including tossing them off as a signal of its intent to keep it civil.
Who says people want to keep it civil? Who says people are against the wide open Twitter? Who says they can’t decide for themselves who they want to follow, who they want to interact with, and whom they want to block? If you want to read Alex Jones, that’s on you. Don’t like what he’s writing? Don’t follow. Is he tweeting nasties at you? Block him. We’re adults.
But, it can be a very slippery slope when we start using “values” based on whims. Whose values? Those of the far left?
Of course she jumps into what Trump does on Twitter, because Trump pretty much resided rent free in the heads of all Democrats, before moving to
All this is not to say that fixing Twitter will be easy; in fact, I think at this point it is nearly impossible. Add to that the fact that this is a global issue, making it hard to have any consistent rules that address the complexity of the world and, really, its deep and abiding ugliness.
But will Mr. Dorsey ever stand up to the uglies to protect the rest of us?
I’m an adult: I don’t need Jack Dorsey to protect me proactively. I’ll decide myself.
Interestingly, at the same time Bret Stephens has an opinion piece up defending racist Sarah Jeong
.@BretStephensNYT writes about the Sarah Jeong controversy, saying we are not the sum of our tweets https://t.co/H34ZwSRRGG
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 9, 2018
See, when we talk of “values”, again, whose? On one hand, they want to take down Alex Jones. On the other, they’re fine with protecting Jeong. We should also be wondering why a member of the Credentialed Media is advocating private sector censorship.
