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PatricioMartinezLlompartFirstEssay 3 - 27 Nov 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Twitter empowers us to be the reporter, publisher, and broadcaster of our own media companies. Its web of hashtags and retweets propels our words across vast distances, and allows for a “broad-based, free-flowing, and instantaneous discussion of political claims.” This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a world-wide oracle for those in search of political truth. In fact, research studies and recent events suggest it's the opposite. | |
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No. The Web does all these things. Twitter actually just reduces the web's complexity so that people who don't have much to say can say it as easily as those who have more, for whom the Web natively, without the tweet bullshit, works better. It's important to understand what is being democratized, in a service-balancing sense. The front service is self-promotion, the back service is surveillance. The illusion that information is involved in the front service is just that.
| | | Studying over 300,000 tweets on the 2012 election, researchers at the University of Southern California found that Twitter served as a “platform for partisans to selectively share unsubstantiated claims with their followers and accelerate virality.” Researchers found that unsubstantiated claims —like the rumor that President Obama’s birth records were sealed—diffused through “homogenous follower-followee relationships using the retweet feature rather than through public hashtag communities.” This means rumors often don't even enter the broader Twitter sphere, where cross-partisan political discussion may push their correction. Perhaps most telling is that those spreading the rumors did not discuss their plausibility or looked for accurate information. This final observation supports the larger claim that media over-saturation enables us to discard information and only consider that which supports our beliefs and fits within our narrative.
Fast forward to the wreckage of the ongoing electoral cycle. This past week, a Twitter user reported another account was targeting African Americans and Spanish-speakers with tweets informing that, to skip the lines on Election Day, they could “vote from home” via text message. Twitter initially responded to the complaining user that such tweets did not violate platform rules. But the company ultimately deleted the misleading tweets after Buzz Feed published a story about it. I wonder: what truth will tweets communicate on Election Night? | | | It’s been three hours since I last checked my timeline. Matthew Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald are probably spitting brawling tweets about the election. Going on Twitter has always been easy, and, oh, it has always felt so good. | |
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The tendency to analyze services in terms of "the unique thing about the service I use most" is an example of mistaking propaganda for information, or bias for judgment. There is useful information in this essay, but the most promising route to improvement for me would be to back away from the Twitter-specific to a more general taxonomy of service pairs, and their social functions. Then perhaps we could ask questions about the nervous system as a whole and not only about the physiology of particular impulses it carries.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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