Last week I listened to a great conversation over at FLOSS Weekly regarding social media, conversations, and moderation. In case you don’t read the news often…or social media…in which case this might not interest you but I digress…there’s a been a bit of a stir around Twitter lately. The short version is that it’s about to become a privately held company controlled by an eccentric person with a lot of money who isn’t interested in curtailing anyone’s free speech.
Go ahead, I’ll let you catch up…
So, yes, regardless of how you feel about this…and my feelings are mixed…I think we all can agree that Twitter is about to become a very different neighborhood.
Like most of you, I’ve used social media for a long time. I would even have called myself a power user at one point, although I’ve stepped back from a lot of platforms, including deleting Facebook. Twitter has been the one that I’ve generally held onto, although lately I’ve been staying with the sites that were mainstays back in the day….Reddit, Digg, and so forth…because Twitter is beginning to become a platform for people to scream at each other, as well as making really frustrating and isolating decisions about how it can be used.
On the podcast, there was discussion about how, if Twitter is the public square for conversation in America, what moderation is necessary and appropriate? In short: is Musk’s vision of reducing moderation a pipe dream? The panel talks about how Reddit is heavily moderated, and, as a result, new users are often moderated out and leave. This poses the question, is that level of moderation a good thing?
Some level of governance is necessary for social discourse. However, the idea that the right kind of governance…taking the form of content moderation…can resolve the noisy echo chamber that Twitter has become is faulty at its premise, because it’s trying to fix a cultural problem with technology. We can’t moderate how people feel about each other, even if we can how they interact with each other.
The problem with Twitter, or any other social network, isn’t that there aren’t correct rules. The problem is that it gives everyone a platform to speak, but no one knows how to have civil discourse. To the contrary, it’s become fashionable to not be civil. As the panelists point out, when moderation reaches its extreme and people are banned from a network, they just create a parallel network. These are just echo chambers.
The problem is cultural. The problem is that we view anyone who disagrees with our perspective as “other,” as a hostile. The problem is that no dissenting views are tolerated in our so-called public spheres. The problem is that America’s version of discourse is to scream louder than the other person so that no one can hear them.
Let me say again, a functioning community must have some rules. Classrooms, faith communities, neighborhood gatherings, all have some level of expectations of behavior, if nothing else. If Twitter is indeed our public square, then I also have to wonder if the scope of the rules is different. If so, however, then I think that it has to be pubic and democratic, not private. There needs to be expectations of how to behave, but this will be useless if those engaging don’t care about those expectations.
Of all social networks, Twitter still doesn’t know what it is. It has grown into something unintentional, and can’t facilitate the conversations of a culture un-educated in civility. We can try to fix this with moderation all we like, but those efforts will fail. The problem lies much, much deeper than the platform which gives it voice, and trying to use more technology to resolve this will not be effective.
This is a problem that our tools cannot fix.