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Law in the Internet Society
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Wicked Twitter-- By PatricioMartinezLlompart - 04 Nov 2016
“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” – Melvin Kranzberg, 1986
Twitter makes some kinds of evil easy. But the night I sent my first tweet I just wanted to keep up with the weather. I was home in Puerto Rico, awaiting the first tropical storm expected to crisscross the island in over a decade. When Facebook began to feel unexciting, Twitter did the trick. I still craved information and connection, sans the clutter of photo albums, rambling status updates, and event reminders. Soon enough, a morning scroll down the timeline became routine, feeding me what I wanted to know, without less or more.
I want to be more mindful about the relationship between self and Net. And with that want, I must ask: does Twitter really make some kinds of evil easy?
Interconnecting...Twitter was born from our innate human need to communicate and connect. In 2006, still known as Twttr, one cofounder allegedly told another: “You know what’s awesome about this thing? It’s a whole emotional impact. You feel like you’re connected with that person.” Jack Dorsey initially conceived the product as a system through which you could send text to a particular number that would then route that text to all your friends. But it’s been long since Twttr became Twitter. Beyond facilitating communication, the platform now emboldens wide misinformation, a especially heinous evil in an increasingly digital society that aspires for democratic governance. The Pew Internet and American Lives Project points that 20% of American adults used Twitter last year—a 5% increase from 2013. If this brutal election foretells anything, is that more people will turn to Twitter in the immediate future to engage in politics. In other words, the place of facts and truth in our democracy is about to get smacked....And MisinformingTwitter 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. 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?Mining Tweets"The market sees Big Data as pure opportunity."Just as it is about communication, Twitter is about consumption. Can anyone consume the data we accumulate across social media? Twitter’s answer to this question is that it depends on the size of your checkbook. In finance, big data derived from social media is referred to as “Alt Data.” Twitter data has become a tool for risk management or “being aware of what could wrong”—from elections to terrorism and natural disasters—in today’s market of high-speed electronic trading. New York-based Dataminr is at the forefront of mining aggregate Twitter data to provide financial players, and other private and public sector clients, with real-time alerts on potential breaking news. Dataminr mines through Twitter with an algorithm that identifies and contextualizes tweet patterns. It is also the only company with complete access to Twitter’s data and permission to sell it. Curiously, Twitter owns approximately 5% of Dataminr. Twitter’s developer agreement provides that partners like Dataminr cannot “assist any government entities, law enforcement, or other organizations to conduct surveillance on Content.” Yet, Dataminr was denounced earlier this year for entering a pilot program that provided mining services to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Contrary to its usual glacial response pace to user allegations of deception or harassment, Twitter issued a swift response to clarify that “they never authorized Dataminr to sell data to [the] government…for surveillance purposes.” But In-Q-Tel remains a Dataminr investor, and the company still has a $250,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security. We tweet without much regard for the afterlife of our 140 characters. But Dataminr’s entire business is to trade in our abandonment of that afterlife. We are the product, equal parts invisible and hotly commodified. Again, I must take a moment to wonder: for how much would Twitter allow Dataminr to gift the FBI and CIA with our tweets?Because It's Easy"Data is increasingly digital air...It can be a source of both sustenance and pollution."Twitter’s handling of hate speech and other forms of harassment is a story and easy evil I hope to explore in future revisions or writing opportunities. But for the moment, my initial query has been partially satisfied: Twitter makes some kinds of evil easy because it wants to. It is profitable; it is easy. 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.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. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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