HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

I highly recommend anyone who wants to know about Vijaya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

>Gadde did more for free speech on the internet than almost anyone else I can think of.

Call an ambulance! Medical emergency! I'm dying right now of laughter.

He sat in a Joe Rogan podcast twice. Tim Pool told him exactly what he needed to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

In the last 3 years, what exactly did he do? Nothing. The situation got significant worse.

Worse yet, because of their size they are 'too big to fail' and so they flagrantly allowed to break the law and violate free speech? Section 230 liability protections limits their ability to censor. Twitter is certainly in violation of Section 230. They simply need to stop doing this. That's it. Fire any twitter employee who isn't a free speech absolutist.

Eventually Twitter will hit the wrong topic to censor and they will collapse so rapidly just like digg and how many others. I am very surprised it hasn't happened to date.

Hunter Biden's laptop is real now? Censored on Twitter because it's 'hacked' or illegitimate or whatever. How many Trudeau Tyranny trends have been censored for no valid reason. We are counting.

Meanwhile, the givesendgo hacked information of freedom protest donors was not only allowed... it was bumped up into trending. CBC covered it widely. Government then used hacked data to seize people's bank accounts.

I dont see parler/mastodon/gab as true alternative to twitter yet. Twitter can fix themselves. They can move into compliance with Section 230. They can return free speech to their platform. If someone comes along to hostile takeover twitter and makes this change... they are going to be worth a trillion $.

> Ultimately, the hearing won't reveal any surprising facts about these companies and will likely feature some theatrics, as is often the case with antitrust hearings.

The article says it best at the very end.

Wherever you lie on the spectrum of blaming these tech companies for doing obvious things to continue to drive the bottom line to their investors, the problem here is that this is just a show. And everyone involved knows it.

There are no mechanisms in place for making competent adjustments at this scale, ESPECIALLY in the United States government. If you’ve ever tried to watch any of these, it’s clear the legislatures either aren’t competent enough in the field to challenge these prepared talking points.

There’s more of a chance of legitimate, competent discussion in a forum like Joe Rogans podcast where he gets people like [1] Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool in a room (albeit with the babysitter counsel) to have a back and forth.

I think the key to moving forward as a decision making body of any kind is to merge the two. Clearly, nothing can come of the Joe Rogan show of note, but imagine: what if it could? What if there could be more transparency and accountability for these huge companies and we could objectively examine what they actually do rather than just hear their talking points and move on?

I guess I’ll end my rant here. It’s just very discouraging that, despite the fact that this hearing is occurring, there’s a next to nothing chance that anything useful for the advancement of our country’s liberties will come.

1 https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ

⬐ umeshunni

Once you internalize the fact that this is an election year and that these congressional hearings are just meant to generate clips that will be replayed in your local senator's election ad ("Senator X ASKS the HARD questions!!"), it's much easier to watch them and be entertained.

⬐ SaltyBackendGuy

> There are no mechanisms in place for making competent adjustments at this scale, ESPECIALLY in the United States government. If you’ve ever tried to watch any of these, it’s clear the legislatures either aren’t competent enough in the field to challenge these prepared talking points.

IMO this is the root cause. If our legislatures can't even login to said website then how could they possibly understand the depth of the power these companies wield? If there is a lack of understanding then there is no way a real solution can be derived from these hearings.

The episode -- linked below -- with Tim Poole, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde (who manages Twitter policy) was mostly just Rogan sitting back and watching Poole go back and forth with Dorsey and Gadde, mainly only stepping in to deescalate when things started getting heated or to ask a question about which he was curious. I don't recall if it was in that episode (or a previous interview just with Tim Poole) that they debated Twitter's place in electoral politics given that all candidates are conducting direct-to-voters communication via the media and whether it would run afoul of Federal Election law to ban, limit, or even censure in any way the tweets of a candidate for office. I thought that was a pretty intense debate and one that has significant importance give it's election year.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

⬐ cygx

I thought that was a pretty intense debate and one that has significant importance give it's election year.

Sure, there are such episodes; I can think of another one off-hand, and if I took time, probably a couple more. But remember, the JRE podcast is currently at episode 1506, and most of them aren't like that.

I would imagine that accounts of "important" people are handled personally rather than by automated algorithm. As Jack Dorsey points out in this[0] Joe Rogan podcast, the reported tweets by public or algorithm are manually checked at some point.

Approx. 4000 employees of Twitter all around the world. Every day 100k (edit: 100M) tweets are sent. The reports of tweets that violate the platform policy are (reported by public) enter a queue. These are then inspected by personnel hired by Twitter (number varies proportionally to the scale reports in the queue).

The personnel then go through a series of steps to take an action such as making you verify again, delete those tweets, suspending the account, or in the last resort ban the user permanently.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

⬐ andrepd

Only 100k/day? That sounds quite low.

⬐ jwcrux

It is low. Estimates [0] put the number closer to 500M/day.

[0] https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/#source...

⬐ seesawtron

You are right, the volume is in millions, as I heard in the podcast from the Twitter executive. Corrected.

⬐ ASalazarMX

Twitter is mostly retweets, though.

⬐ dr-detroit

And bots but that basically the function of the app is to give yourself phony pr

⬐ arnvald

Maybe 100k tweets by people who are checked manually? I'm sure there are millions of tweets send every day.

⬐ rco8786

> Every day 100k tweets are sent

When I worked there we handled about ~6k tweets/sec all day every day. (~500,000,000 tweets/day)

⬐ azalemeth

What database did you use?

⬐ sieabahlpark

Probably hbase or some derivative of it.

⬐ rco8786

It was just* MySQL for a lot longer than you might imagine. They were switching over to Manhattan (in-house DB, similar to FB's Cassandra) when I left, dunno the current state of affairs.

* highly customized and sharded, required team of senior MySQL DBAs to maintain, but still just MySQL.

⬐ sytelus

There are 145M daily active users on Tweeter. So that’s approx 3 tweets per user. Sounds reasonable.

I encourage you to watch a Joe Rogan episode from last year when he brought Jack Dorsey, a Twitter VP, and Tim Pool. [1]

The reason this episode is relevant to your comment discussion is that Pool presents that there is this paradigm problem where certain policies intended to bring "inclusion" end up excluding something like half of the U.S. population. This paradigm Twitter management is stuck in prevents them from understanding how people outside their paradigm view their actions, and this results in effectively banning a enormous set of the population from popular discourse.

It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

⬐ kabacha

> It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English.

What does speaking english has to do with this?

Regarding twitter case I feel that it's unfair to classify the issue with a single anecdote. Especially when this anecdote is about notoriously mismanaged, pointless corporation such as twitter.

⬐ generalpass

> What does speaking english has to do with this?

> Regarding twitter case I feel that it's unfair to classify the issue with a single anecdote. Especially when this anecdote is about notoriously mismanaged, pointless corporation such as twitter.

Evaluating online behavior, which is presented in text, across all languages, is Hard.

It seems clear you didn't watch the video. Pool doesn't present Twitter as a single anecdote, but an example of a larger problem.

Addtionally, it is not clear to me that a platform as large as Twitter can be dismissed as an "anecdote".

The larger problem is people with these positions are not even interested in evaluating other positions, a claim supported by your comment and the down-voters of mine.

I know I will be downvoted, but I don't care: why are people using Twitter? To me it's the most vile and disgusting platform: no signal, just noise. On top of that, the people that run it are effectively coming up with arbitrary progressive left-wing policies on restricting free speech: for proof, watch this: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ after seeing I realised Twitter/Facebook/Google/Apple are evil corporations taking away your freedom with you cheering to it. Why are you using Twitter's platform? For business? Do you want to make business from Twitter's users which are mind-numbed angry, twitching zombies? Are there no business opportunities elsewhere? Anyone who is doing any sort of business related to social media is wasting their time: it's a broken system that deserves to be boycotted. To anyone who would call me angry: I am saying this so you open your mind about the pointlessness of social media: I dont use it, and I seem to live a nice life, only time I get angry is when I think about social media, like in this post. Oh well, this is HN after all, born and bred in silicon valley where such blasphemy will not be tolerated. But lets see.

I don't agree with every call Twitter makes, but I find Dorsey to be by far the most interesting public figure in the social media game. His two JRE interviews[0][1] and his Tales from the Crypto interview[2] are all worth checking out, IMO. He seems to think Twitter should use a blockchain in the future, and that small social circles should have a system for internally moderating content without needing it to be okay by Twitter's standards, but obviously they're still currently taking down content that breaches their policies in $CURRENT_YEAR. I'm really interested in seeing where Twitter goes, I think Dorsey plays realpolitik sometimes but I don't think he has the same goals as Zuckerberg. I could be wrong, and Dorsey could just be a next-level showman, but I'm hopeful that he might do something truly interesting with the platform. I've still never made a Twitter account.

[0]: https://youtu.be/_mP9OmOFxc4a

[1]: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ

[2]: https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/tales-from-the-crypt-61...

⬐ aakilfernandes

I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.

⬐ nexuist

It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don't like, but to lock out people the majority of people don't like so they can't communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message.

Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."

⬐ stale2002

> Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility

Yes, that is the point. Making censorship more difficult is one of the main goals of blockchain technology.

⬐ kllrnohj

Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it.

If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.

⬐ zeroxfe

> Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost

Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)

So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.

⬐ kllrnohj

Modern blockchains don't host images and face twitter's level of traffic, either.

Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.

⬐ blotter_paper

> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility.

I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.

I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.

⬐ kllrnohj

> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.

How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.

⬐ blotter_paper

The same question can be asked of Twitter. Twitter serves up other content alongside tweets, and makes a profit doing it (as of last year). Is this a privacy nightmare? Yup. Is it more of a privacy nightmare if a different company does it? Depends on the company. Maybe a given user will trust a given provider more than they trust Twitter, or maybe they'll like their ad policy more, or maybe they'll be willing to pay a premium to not be served ads, or maybe they'll want to search through tweets using more specific filters than Twitter allows. To me, choice of provider sounds like something that should increase security for those who desire it and educate themselves. For those who don't, there are other tradeoffs they can make.

This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.

⬐ kllrnohj

It's the same question sure but a vastly gargantuan difference in context & scope, making it entirely irrelevant to what we were talking about.

If you use twitter you only have to trust twitter. If twitter becomes decentralized like a blockchain and those hosts are incentivised via the ability to inject ads then you need to trust the entire world since anyone can be a provider. You're not connecting to a known entity. You're connecting to a random node in a distributed network controlled by anyone.

⬐ blotter_paper

Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I'm forgetting if that's me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.

⬐ a13n

We've learned that you can't get around the law (eg. court orders) "because blockchain". The government has shown us that the law prevails.

⬐ stale2002

But it actually is being shown to work.

When was the last time that a court successfully reversed a transaction on the Bitcoin Blockchain? The answer is never.

Sure, they have sent court orders to companies, or whatever, but the blockchain itself has never been reversed by court order.

⬐ iikoolpp

Telling the government "I know you've told me to take it down, but we specifically designed it in such a way that we can't take it down" sounds like an incredibly good legal strategy that will definitely not backfire.

⬐ blotter_paper

So far, the "we can't do that" defense has worked for companies that provide E2E encryption. The government may change the rules, of course; they keep talking about it.

⬐ aeturnum

I guarantee you that if you tell a judge you can't take something down "because you use blockchain" the judge will not care and just sanction your company.

To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.

⬐ AffineStructure

Author Moderated Replies https://twitter.com/TwitterCanada/status/1149327628106641408

⬐ buboard

Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he's generally leaning left of course. Still , he s the only one who dares give Trump a megaphone. I think he handles the whole situation exceptionally well.

⬐ iikoolpp

> and yet he's generally leaning left of course

Words clearly do not have meanings anymore

⬐ buboard

clearly. But let's say "socially very left/progressive"

⬐ throw_m239339

> Dorsey espouses some very libertarian views and yet he's generally leaning left of course

Since the left has a embraced intersectionality, you can't be a "libertarian" and lean "left", that's completely incompatible, or I'm not sure what left you are talking about. That Dorsey puts up a facade because he lives in the silicon valley? sure, just like the higher ups at Alphabet.

⬐ briandear

However shouldn’t the president have a “megaphone?” In the old days, when a president spoke, the media would “interpret” what he said. Politicians being able to speak directly to the population is a good thing.

⬐ buboard

Of course. Like it or not, the transparency that Trump's twitter provides is unprecedented and a win for democracies.

⬐ jimkleiber

I like that politicians can speak directly to the media—I just wish orgs like Twitter would apply their rules and guidelines fairly to everyone.

I'm starting to see these "rules" more like "laws," and starting to look more closely at how some of these platforms are governed in the same way I look at how governments are governed:

- Who makes the laws? - How does one become a lawmaker? - How long can one be a lawmaker? - Who enforces the laws? - How strong is the rule of law? - What are the consequences of breaking a law? - etc etc.

How does this analogy sit with you?

⬐ ahbyb

It does not take a whole lot of courage to give a megaphone to someone who's making you millions.

⬐ lonelappde

My impression of Dorsey is that he doesn't really know anything but me makes statements (like the OP, and the Bitcoin gunk, and making Twitter more "conversational") that don't make sense or stand up to scrutiny, but use a bunch of words that try to convey a position of leadership on not topics.

⬐ Reedx

From what I recall in the JRE and Sam Harris interviews, Jack seemed very reasonable. I think Twitter is something that's gotten away from him (certainly from what he'd like) and is being run by the inmates to a significant degree.

⬐ blotter_paper

I wish he had a controlling share.

⬐ TheSpiceIsLife

Inmates - does this means the legal team?

⬐ jonplackett

Unsure if you’re asking who is running twitter or what’s meant by ‘inmates’ so will attempt to answer both.

I suspect it’s marketing people / short-sighted profit minded people rather than the legal team running the place.

And if you are asking about inmates meaning, it’s an idiom, “the inmates are running the asylum” meaning the least useful/knowledgeable people have taken over from the competent.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+inmates+are+running...

⬐ TheSpiceIsLife

Thanks :)

⬐ jonplackett

Glad to help. Which one was it you wanted to know?

⬐ TheSpiceIsLife

I think both / either work in this context, though it seems obvious the inmates running the asylum was the intention now you mention it.

I think inmates would be a good dysphemism for the legal department too.

⬐ jonplackett

Word of the day, thanks!

⬐ tenpies

That was my impression as well. It was interesting to see Jack answer and then have the legal council (?) amend Jack's answers or push them in a specific direction. It's very clear that there is a mismatch between what Jack wants, what Twitter shareholders want, and what Twitter's activist pseudo-employee contingent wants.

⬐ randomsearch

My impression was the Jack made too many excuses.

But this announcement is absolutely stellar. Who knows if Harris influenced him ;-)

>>>They're banning violations of their ToS. As long as that is performed equitably

Except it isn't, as Tim Pool demonstrated on the Joe Rogan Podcast when he ripped Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde a new one, with examples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

This comic routinely used as a "Gotcha". However it so over simplifies the position that we are in.

Youtube now totally owns online video, there isn't any competitors that are even close. Facebook has almost half the world signed up to its platform. This isn't someone's online forum or a news site. These companies completely own their respective parts of the industry.

The major social media sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook are so large they are considered to be a "public private space" (I forget the exact legal term).

These platforms agree to DMCA safe harbour where they are considered to be a "platform" and not a "publisher". That means they shouldn't be censoring anyone on their political opinions and must be politically neutral (otherwise they are taking on the role of a publisher as they are acting as an editor), now IANAL but there is certainly an argument that can be made. Whether a judge would rule it so, who knows.

This is worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

Tim Pool in this video manages to point out quite clearly how Twitter terms of service are political and they don't even realise it.

> Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists?

They aren't. You're totally free to advocate instituting a Marxists state, the execution of the bourgeoisen masse, and forming a communist society on Gab. Gab has the blanket policy that any legal speech is okay on their platform (and yes, calling for the execution of the bourgeois is legal in the US. Non-specific threats of violence are legal as per Brandenburg v. Ohio). There's nothing fascist about that in and of itself. The fact that Gab is filled with fascists is because of displacement. Fascists got banned from all the major platforms, so the only ones that don't ban them like Gab and 4chan are full of them.

Free speech absolutists are disproportionately made of up right wingers these days, likely because the right wing is being subject to harsher censorship. I think it's unambiguously true that most big tech platforms are overtly biased in their policing. People are getting banned for tweeting "learn to code" to journalists (in mockery of how some suggested that laid off coal miners should learn to code). And by comparison, verified leftist Twitter users outright advocated for the doxxing and violence of the Covington high school students with no apparent repercussion. This podcast with Jack Dorsey, Twitter's global lead for trust and safety, and Tim Pool gives some good insight into the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

> Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread declassification of state communications, for suffrage rights for felons, and for unionization and striking rights? I don't exactly see the gab users advocating for laws permitting sympathetic striking.

This is pure whataboutism. What do any of those things have to do with free speech? Why do you assume that support for freedom of speech should needs to be coupled with destruction of intellectual property rights? Is it not possible to staunchly believe in free speech but also believe that patents are an effective way of incentivizing innovation by allowing innovators to monetize their work? Why does freedom of speech have anything to do with unionization or letting felons vote?

⬐ busterarm

> so the only ones that don't ban them like Gab and 4chan are full of them.

To be fair, you see just as many if not more socialist and black bloc anarchist content on /pol/ as you do nazi content. It's a meme and most of it is posted by the same people.

Heck, I know one of the more prolific white supremacist troll /pol/lacks and he's Pakistani.

While I don't think it should be considered lightly, a lot of the reporting about that board comes from journalists that know better and deliberately deceive the public because it gets hits.

Tim Pool raised an interesting point on the Joe Rogan interview with Jack Dorsey: as Twitter becomes more powerful and important in shaping political discourse in the United States, banning someone from Twitter could be argued to be a restriction of political speech: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ

Personally, I think the mute and block options are all adults on twitter need if they encounter speech they don't like or makes them uncomfortable.

While I agree with you, Tim Pool (as well as many others) made a good point recently about the fact that when platforms are as powerful as being able to influence elections, maybe allowing them to define the structure within which we communicate might not be a good idea.

I am a free market guy, so for me these companies ought to have the right to determine the parameters within which their users can operate on their service. However, with things such as EUCD and GDPR rules, introducing competitors to the established networks becomes harder and harder for each day, which only benefits the existing platforms. So when the platforms are biased and competition is hindered by red-tape and regulations, we cannot expect alternatives to popup that can compete with said entities.

All of this leads me to believe that things will only get worse as I don´t see a way out of this clusterfuck we´re in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

Edit: why the downvotes? :S

I wish larger tech companies would follow Jack Dorsey's path and have more open communication about their policies. His debate with Tim Pool on the Joe Rogan podcast[0] especially provided insight into why they're making these type of decisions.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

Jack Dorsey (CEO) and Vijaya Gadde (global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety) from Twitter recently was interviewed on Joe Rogan's podcast along with Twitter critic and journalist Tim Pool.

Link to the stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

I have some criticisms of Twitter that tightly align with what Dr. Doyle experienced, what was discussed on Rogan's podcast, and my own experiences:

* Twitter is not a free speech platform, regardless of what Mr. Dorsey and Ms. Gadde say. They have prior assumptions that guide their decision making especially when it comes to identifying what is called hate speech.

* Twitter is largely guided and controlled by progressive ideals. The people that make decisions there admittedly live in a bubble. Tim Pool does a very good job of pointing this out.

* Twitter is a giant echo chamber. The limited functionality of the platform make it that way.

* Twitter cannot be completely free speech because it allows it's algorithms to run wild. We've already seen where ML can be viewed as racist (https://towardsdatascience.com/the-new-hot-take-machine-lear..., https://medium.com/source-institute/how-to-stop-racist-ai-de...). Presumably Twitter's algorithms can be shaped in such a way to allow extreme progressive ideals to make decisions.

* Unlike Reddit, which has decentralized command over it's sub-reddits, Twitter has a centralized decision making body of which is too small to look closely at the nuance and detail of every report.

* The suggested jury review system only re-enforces the echo chamber problem Twitter already has. It's different than American/English common law juris prudence in that there are relatively no bounds, no tight controls on what can be said and discussed by a judge.

* For every account ban, Twitter should publish a chain of reasoning for the ban. Twitter only bans (at least, this is their claim) based on the content of public tweets and not DMs. Since the tweets are already public providing that chain should not be an issue.

In my mind Twitter is no less evil than Facebook.

⬐ blhack

INCREDIBLE amount of respect to Jack and Vijaya Gadde for agreeing to this. Sounds like it could be an incredibly uncomfortable discussion.

⬐ cleanyourroom

Tim Poole was gunning a bit hard here. I actually came out of this feeling better about Twitter.

⬐ GuillaumeBrdet

Listening to it now, it's quite interesting.

Kind of feeling back for Jack and Vijaya for some of the questions.