Twitter: A Few Unsorted Thoughts

2022-04-26

Many on the political left are very concerned about Twitter's purchase by South African businessman Elon Musk. I've seen several articles and posts from prominent sources detailing how to close one's Twitter account or bracing for an anticipated flood or right-wing content. Some people are already leaving the platform, and others who had previously left are starting to come back.

I stopped using Twitter in early 2018, and I closed my account in early 2020. My primary reasons for leaving were twofold: the constant rush of politically-driven negativity, and the ubiquitous tracking and violations of privacy. (Twitter is not as bad as Facebook on this front, but I find their terms of service to be chilling regardless.) I have no idea how political discourse will change on the platform, if at all, but I seriously doubt that a change of leadership will cause the tracking and surveillance to end. I thus have no intention of returning to Twitter myself.

Much of the debate about the future of the site hinges on how Musk might change the way content proliferates. There seems to be a consensus that he will move to expand the types of political content allowed on the site; the right hail this move as supporting "free speech", while the left decry it as platforming "hate speech". Regardless of one's feelings on those changes, however, few people seem to be discussing the effect that Twitter's timeline algorithms will have on such expanded content. Freedom of expression does not simply mean that I am allowed to talk about what I choose; it also means that other people are allowed to seek out what I say and listen to it, if they so choose. Even if different political r social views are allowed on Twitter via a change in TOS, if Twitter's algorithms bury and hide such content, its users will not truly have free speech. This applies even if the algorithm chooses to boost or hide posts purely on a popularity system that does not factor in politics at all. This is why I much prefer sites and systems that use only strict chronological ordering.

There have been many reports of people moving to alternate services such as Mastodon. I support this; I hope more people learn of the strengths of decentralized discussion platforms, and especially that the move might pique their interest in open-source technology that gives them control. I do worry that opportunists will use the momentum to build large, monolithic instances that are just as controlling as Twitter is, but because Mastodon is federated, the ecosystem at large may decide to kick such bad actors. Having said that, I find it interesting that some left-wing sources are claiming this move could lead to the complete dominance of Mastodon over Twitter in a few years, while sites such as Minds and Gab are dismissed as failed right-wing delusions--despite being the havens for much larger conservative exoduses from Twitter. If the move to Mastodon leads to the demise of Twitter, one cannot ignore the influence that right-leaning sites have had on that demise.

There are far too many people out there for whom Twitter is their entire lives. They socialize, get news, entertain themselves, look for sexual satisfaction, or even run their businesses entirely on that one site. I'm not going to say they're living their lives wrong, but having a diverse range of ways to interact with the world is never a bad thing. And for those who despise Elon Musk and have put all their eggs in the Twitter basket, I hope this is a wake-up call for them. Twitter has never respected your rights or your privacy, and that isn't going to change simply because someone else is at the helm. And to be frank, I do hope Twitter starts to dwindle in the wake of this buy-out, not because of what I think about Musk, but because in my opinion Twitter is not a good place.

Now might be another chance for us on Gemini to share our space with disillusioned Twitter users. A similar service to Twitter already exists in Geminispace: the wonderful Station^. Of course a flood of thousands of users could easily overwhelm just one volunteer-run service, but I imagine a federated upscaling of Station's software. Picture a network ecosystem in which capsules can run their own message boards and connect to other capsules--perhaps via feeds, perhaps via APIs, perhaps via message queues--to allow users to interact with other capsules than their own.

This is also an opportunity to share other forms of communication in general, particularly self-publishing. twtxt is an excellent low-resource way to send messages out to anyone, as long as one has a public-facing URL with which to access the file. An enterprising Geminaut could spin up a tilde on a hosted service and create a Web interface for new users to post content. In the world of Urbit, ~tirrel has created Studio^^, an app to host notebooks from one's pier as a publicly-accessible blog on the mainline Internet. Hell, it might be a good time to push for the return of Usenet or Gopher. The ways we use technology, old and new, are changing all the time, and we can use that to our advantage.

I'm curious to see how Twitter will evolve, but regardless of what happens, I think we should take every chance we have to advocate for our digital rights, and make it as easy as possible to assert those rights.

=> ^ Station

=> ^^ Studio (HTTPS)

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[Last updated: 2024-10-06]