How Twitter poisoned politics

Was there a time when politics wasn&#x27;t full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral.<p>And that&#x27;s just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective.<p>Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting.<p>But politics have never been pure, it&#x27;s a myth. Don&#x27;t blame communication platforms (although again, they can do better), blame the humans that use them.

Part of me wonders if it&#x27;s possible that there&#x27;s just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can&#x27;t discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet. I know enough people that have gone from &quot;totally outwardly normal&quot; to &quot;detached-from-reality, Hillary Clinton is a lizard person&quot; (this isn&#x27;t an exaggeration, yes, people I know in real life appear to sincerely think this) and I&#x27;m struggling to think of what else could contribute to such seeming mass psychosis. It&#x27;s more than just propaganda, it&#x27;s people deliberately abandoning critical thinking.

From the moment that news outlets started reporting on things said on Twitter years ago, I assumed this would happen.<p>With enough bots, you gain the ability to create any narrative you want. Create story, then create the image that you want the supporters of one side to have, followed by the image for the other side. Use bots and retweets to amplify.<p>You gain the power to define what&#x27;s happening culturally if the news reports actually take Twitter trends as what&#x27;s happening culturally. Create a villian, politicize the villain, popularize &#x2F; demonize websites, etc.<p>An entire Twitter event can be orchestrated to amplify the irrational into a position believed to be popular&#x2F;main stream.<p>The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it.

Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls.<p>There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people interacted and communicated to places that were no more than sources of disinformation and flamewars. Modern social media is like post apocalyptic Usenet, except it’s occupied by the general population, not just scammers and mentally ill CS majors. I think that’s really messed up and can’t possibly be good for anyone.

I&#x27;m glad the article mentioned Twitter&#x27;s engagement algorithm — I don&#x27;t think enough attention is being paid to it.<p>With a different algorithm Twitter could be a remarkably different experience. The current one has a strong bias toward engagement &amp; velocity. It amplifies anger, outrage, and bad faith arguments over less &quot;engaging&quot; content.<p>If Twitter let off the engagement pedal a bit and re-factored the algorithm, our political climate might be less hostile overnight.<p>These companies have long claimed their algorithms are politically unbiased. That&#x27;s not true. While I don&#x27;t believe they lean left or right, they certainly have a strong bias towards extremism. Extremism keeps you engaged, which maximizes the time you spend in their apps.<p>Imagine if Twitter instead decided to bias their algorithm towards positivity

Media criticism of Twitter is suspect. If the Weinstein case in the US has demonstrated anything, it is that news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.

It&#x27;s not only Twitter or politics. I&#x27;ve been playing some Heroes of the Storm as team building with my company and when we are not a full team the toxicity can get intense, with some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over.<p>Mind you this in a no-stakes free to play game and the phenomenon seems common. Sometimes I think our culture is not ready for a substantial part of our communication not to be face to face.

I can’t remember who originally said this, but the problem with Twitter is that you think you’re engaging in jokey banter with your mates but random strangers are reading each tweet without context in absolute seriousness and judging you

Noam Chomsky doesnt like twitter either. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UOX5ghu-h-k?t=35" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UOX5ghu-h-k?t=35</a>

Twitter is like trying to watch a football game where all 40,000 members of the audience have a microphone and each think they should be the announcer.<p>You turn the TV volume off, but members of the media have been perusing the seats for a interesting cherry-picked &quot;announcer&quot;. Finding one, they parrot it to the rest of the world and that guy&#x27;s opinion shows up on your phone anyway.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;7gle4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;7gle4</a><p>Cached version, no login required

I doubt that Twitter has improved politics, but I can remember them being pretty poisonous well before that. I also found a couple of sentences in the article a little bit apart:<p>&quot;A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account.&quot;<p>&quot;By 2012, the number of Brits with (more or less active) Twitter accounts had overtaken the number of people who regularly bought a newspaper.&quot;<p>Hard times for the newspapers, I guess.

Twitter should start placing a visual marker on Tweets that have been posted via their API. Maybe a yellow exclamation mark around the same location as the blue check mark (which is for verified accounts).

How many people&#x2F;resources does twitter have on staff specifically dedicated to coddling the POTUS?<p>Given that twitter has achieved a defacto ligitimized status as a mouthpiece of US policy - how should it be viewed&#x2F;regulated&#x2F;handled differently, if any?<p>Also - what efforts is twitter taking to use the fact that POTUS has compulsive tweeting issues to sell the service to less sophisticated power systems in the world.<p>Are people in other countries, namely more developing countries, encouraged by twitter to use twitter as an official messaging system for their political machinations?<p>I mean, the philippines is one of the most connected-via-mobile developing nations, with a large population in the US and a very western society -- is twitter attempting to be an official platform in the philippines? I would expect so.<p>What about other nations?<p>Then, when they are a defacto standard medium for power structures communicating to their populations, then what standards is twitter held to? What implications does&#x2F;will this have?

When new methods of communication arise, they will eventually be exploited by the powerful and the wealthy to achieve their ends.

I am of the opinion that in a couple of decades we will look back at all these social networks and find that they caused a lot of problems, in social and personal levels.<p>Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Linkedin, do they really bring more benefits than detriments? I personally don&#x27;t think so.

Normal people got access to the internet. It all went downhill from there.

The medium is the message.

I only see three paragraphs here and I can&#x27;t make sense of them

I just wish it wasn&#x27;t full of bots... facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum I have access to (friends in SF, Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and then internationally).<p>Despite subscribing to one of those bot blocklists, it&#x27;s still incessant. There&#x27;s just <i>so many bots</i>. It&#x27;s become a mild hobby of mine to hop on the latest &quot;Twitter Moment&quot; about politics just to refresh my public blocklist.

How about we take a look at the relationship of the size of an original tweet and click-bait headlines? Twitter wasn&#x27;t the beginning, it was just a massive next step on click-bait to get eyeballs on ads. It has evolved to the point of punditry and playing to &quot;your&quot; audience and being actually false. Hey, at least &quot;Headless Body found in Topless Bar&quot; was accurate.

Whatever is broken is an opportunity to create something better. Problems wont cause a retreat to three TV networks. It wasn&#x27;t long ago that we had Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities.<p>The next 20 years will see a fascinating evolution in this space. Nobody should think that competition is over, or that these platforms have won. These issues should feel very exciting to folks in technology.

Instead of crapping all over one platform or another, or thinking politics is full of cheats and con men, what are we doing to promote ideas that aren&#x27;t my half will chant at your half.<p>We have a lot of power in tech to make things better, but we often pass it on, and let those who want to exploit it take advantage of our passiveness.

The cost of communication has fallen much faster (quantity of discourse) than the cost of education (quality of discourse). I don&#x27;t just mean monetary cost: time, effort, and attention required to communicate is much less than the amount of those three required to keep yourself informed.

Twitter is great for publishing information updates. It&#x27;s terrible for having a conversation or reasoned debate. Almost all of the built-in incentives are the exact opposite of what you&#x27;d want if you were creating a place for conversation and debate.

I would say politics and people involved with it poisoned Twitter.

Loudest voices to the dumbest people

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How people poisoned politics.