Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. Maybe they wouldn’t jump to react. Maybe they’d consider their tone. Maybe they’d quit yelling all the time.
Or maybe, not even thousands of deeply studied, highly tested product tweaks will be enough to fix the deep-seated issues with a culture more than 13 years in the making.
I don’t think hippy ideals such as described will fix Twitter – or online discourse in general. There are bad actors actively stirring up trouble and pitting us against each other, and no amount of UI changes or whatever is going to fix that.
I’ve attempted to use Twitter a few times, but it just isn’t fundamentally built for conversation. Perfect for news and narcissistic people shouting into the void of the internet. As for U.S. political discourse, won’t help that either. Decades of brainwashing by Fox News and now a handful of copycats like Ben Shapiro continue to use fallacies of reasoning like hot cakes to convince dumb people they’re smart and liberals are idiots, etc. It’s literally become their religion and they’re easy prey as they don’t ever seem to be able to think past the immediate result of the first action (i.g. the tariff war and soybean farmers that planted soybeans again this year with no one to buy them)
To be honest, I don’t see society ever restructuring itself for a long term fix. Eliminating Fox News and company will help, but you see places like Turkey turn back into theocracies all the time without it even being there. It seems there will always be a minority of smarter people arguing with a slightly bigger majority of dumber people.
Ohh, believe me, Turkey has its share of Fox News clones.
https://www.google.com/search?q=gazeteler+aynı+manşeti+attı&hs=raw&source=lnms&tbm=isch
You can see a set of government aligned newspapers (and TV channels, web sites, radios etc.) just copying and pasting every word the great magnificent holy sultan utters.
My issue with twitter (and similar services) is the promotion of the “popular” over the “valuable” in a discussion.
Pick a sensitive topic, any topic, the nuanced/balanced/fact-based views are drowned out by the extremes shouting at each other. This makes the topic tribal, and the language of the discourse follows that.
This is actually something I miss from the old OSNews site, individuals had a contribution rating, so you were naturally drawn to those with a history of adding value to the conversion and could filter out those who’s contribution consisted of hitting #godwinslaw
Twitter wants to alter human nature? Good luck with that. Twitter’s time would be better spent remembering what they actually are rather than trying to pretend to be something they’re not.
Someone should give these guys some homework, if they are serious about tackling this problem:
– The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt describes how irrational we all are, especially when it comes to moral argument, and how when we get worked up (when we feel “the other” is attacking our values, we tend to “ride the elephant” – and behave in even less rational ways than our baseline irrationality.
– Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, which describes the two predominant moral world views in America and how we process those in our physical brains (again, not rationally – no 17th century enlightenment going on here), but perhaps in most of the western world as well. He calls one the “strict father” or conservative worldview, and the other the “Nurturant family” or progressive worldview (these metaphors are based on family psychology – the difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles). These are two incompatible moral systems, both of which most of us have in our brains, and we unconsciously switch between them in different contexts. Some folks lean on one or the other more often, and in more contexts, and some of us switch between them more often. The important part of this book is how repetition strengthens one set of frames (or frame circuits) over the other, and makes that moral system more likely to matter in more contexts. Conservatives have been using this knowledge for decades, while liberals have utterly failed to respond (not just in America), and progressives have only recently started to finally apply some of this knowledge.
(As a side note, I think one of the reasons we have gotten more polarized over time, is that Twitter and Facebook, being incredibly lazy, use a value system based on the American 2 party system – leans left/right – to decide what to you echo at you from each of the two extreme silos. Before all this simplified yet consistent filtered propaganda, we used to have citizens who were anti-gun and pro-life – now folks issues heavily align with party ID, and it’s no accident. The fix is easy enough – filter based on specific interests, and not a false separation between left/right as all the current players now do. It’s just broken.)
I honestly don’t understand how people can think they know anything about political discourse without understanding about how our brains process moral information. It’s the height of hubris.