Item — HN Reader

> They're not. And the specific reason they are not, is the algorithmic timeline and content suggestions.

I think the more pertinent reason here is that these platforms have broadcast capability (immediate communication with many people) as opposed to p2p capability (traditional SMS or phone calls). Even if Twitter was strictly chronological, without any algorithmic mutation, we'd still presumably be insisting they police content, right? I agree with your conclusion that they're publishers, but to me, what makes a publisher a publisher is not content curation or mutation, but is simply broadcast capability. And so our drive to regulate follows quite naturally from similar drives to regulate the press and media.

1 comments

Not really.

One involves a neutral role, in which subscribed feeds are delivered to users without modification or filtering.

The other involves an active role on the part of the platform for any number of reasons: increased engagement, removal of voices that may cause perceived damage or lack of trust in the platform itself, or other, more ideological reasons.

I've noticed an intentional avoidance of distinction, lately, between active and passive behavior on a number of fronts, from sexual activity, to medical advice and intervention, to social media publishing. It's a pretty crucial component in ethical analysis that I suspect is being intentionally blurred.

The public wouldn't buy the 'neutral' aspect, as every mechanism that a platform provides, is in some way biasing the type of content that is broadcast. Twitter's RT feature, which requires no curation or modification of actual content by Twitter, still biases content to that, perhaps, which is most divisive or simplistic. Broadcast technology, even without algorithmic bells and whistles, is already a biased technology. I think we might in-fact agree, but to me, there is no crucial ethical difference between a chronological twitter and a algorithmically mutated one, for in either case, the very platform itself (its existence, its design) pre-biases the type of content that will flow through it, and thus we'd end up with content that would make us consider policing it.

So, in your words, I would say, it is somehow fundamentally impossible for a technology to be "passive".

Retweeting doesn't bias content; it's rather the opposite: making it easy for people to share content they like removes a longstanding bias. The old models of broadcast media selected content to fit the biases of a few powerful media executives.

You may find the choices of the average person "divisive or simplistic" but the Retweet button doesn't dictate their choices.

"Policing" content, however, is all about dictating people's choices, motivated by the thought that the "police" know better than less powerful people, and reestablishing the biased filter controlled by the powerful (new-)media executives.

To an extent, but if they provide the information through a set of transparent protocols and mechanisms that users can comprehend, they are remaining as neutral and passive as possible. And that's key: Twitter, at its core, started out as something extremely comprehensible, and grew less so as it began to paint over its transparent abstraction.