Newark727 wrote:Tugger wrote:A bit of a sticky wicket this.
You are saying Twitter has the right to choose who they post/publish and apply their political opinions etc. in determining that.
Tugg
This appears to be Musk's
de facto position, in spite of his protestations to the contrary. It's also the position of, say, the Washington Post.
What's interesting here is the goal-seeking performed by all commercial interests that deal in information. If the goal is to attract the largest user base, then the long-standing presumption is that the base will value truth and accuracy. And also that the interests have legal liability for inaccuracy, to motivate their adherence to standards.
In the modern world, there has been a breakdown in these two presumptions, which has been largely driven by the Internet, and the freedom of communication and access to information it provides. As well as the removal of legal liability.
That is a counterintuitive result, and not the one that was expected. Until you consider the innate tribalism of human nature. Tribes have historically been defined by geographic boundaries. The Internet permits tribe definition by ideological boundaries, with their members organizing almost without limit.
That has resulted in fragmentation, not only in opinion which has always been present, but now in factual representations of truth as well. When Kellyanne Conway first argued "alternative facts" in the mainstream, that was a watershed event. The topic was trivial, the size of the inauguration crowd. But this splintering of the basic notion of truth, has since blossomed and flourished. It existed long before, but not in the mainstream as it does today.
This created new opportunities for commercial information interests, in that they no longer need to goal-seek for truth and accuracy, to develop a large user base. They can cater the provision of information to the chosen tribe, and still have a lucrative financial model. Which is the ultimate expansion of the splintering noted above. There can be multiple versions put forth for basic facts & truth. News can be a boutique offering, you can choose the truth that is best to your liking, and for your tribe.
However, this also leads to the inevitable collision of tribal truths on social media, where the tribes come together. The fierceness of this collision is an oddity, in that the tribes apparently don't have self-awareness of the selection of truth they have made. Despite having knowingly made this selection, they still view their selected truth as a singular entity.
The problem here is that social media is also a commercial interest, which needs to goal-seek for their user base. Which leaves them with a dilemma, they can either become a boutique offering, such as Truth Social, or they can try to mediate or moderate between the tribal truths, like Facebook and Twitter.
That in turn creates huge stakes for the mediation method chosen. One method is no moderation, a free-for-all. This is the free-speech absolutist position. It runs the risk of the most extreme tribes driving the others away.
Another is fact-checking, to identify a singular truth, and then use it to attenuate the others. That will invoke the outrage of the tribes whose selected truth is attenuated, who will claim censorship, deprivation of rights, and may also choose to leave.
Another is to have a truth-master or judge, who decides what is allowed and what isn't, without appeal or due process. That too will invoke outrage from the various tribes.
At the root of all this, is the splintering of truth into multiple tribal versions, each complete with their own facts, while simultaneously considering each version to be singular and excluding all others. That obviously is a logical contradiction.
If truth is singular, then we all have to accept fact-checking as the mediation method, even if it doesn't support our tribe. This is the basis of our justice system. If truth is selective, then no solution really exists for the tribal information wars.
