Or must it “take a stand”?
I watched Dorsey’s ted appearance on my computer at home … Listening to him speak at ted felt like witnessing the end of something: the end of the techno-utopian period when social-media architects could speak eagerly about democracy and openness, without also mentioning the potential for enabling authoritarianism. …New Yorker
This Tuesday, a week after Dorsey’s appearance at ted, Twitter released its first-quarter earnings report. It announced that, in the past year, the number of monetizable daily active users had increased by eleven per cent; there are now a hundred and thirty-four million active users on the platform. At the news, the company’s stock soared. That afternoon, Dorsey swapped his hoodie for a suit, removed his beanie, and sat down for a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump, who, earlier that morning, had tweeted that the platform was “Very discriminatory” against Republicans. According to the Washington Post, the President’s primary concern in the meeting was his follower count. Dorsey also took the time that day to call Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, to discuss a tweet by Trump, sent earlier this month, that combined footage of the Twin Towers on September 11th with out-of-context excerpts from a speech Omar recently delivered on Islamophobia. After the tweet posted, Omar received a host of death threats; Twitter did not intervene. Dorsey explained to Omar that the President’s tweet had not violated his company’s rules.
What the media want is a man in the loop, because there was always a man in the media loop. The alternative to human intervention is a ruthless competition of memes, some of which may spread at the expense of the host.
However there is a technical solution to making memetic competition fairer and that increase trust of issuance; that is to make sure institutions cannot create facts or tokens of value from nothing.
Twitter cannot prevent the media or trolls from creating facts from nothing. The two most common ways to “print facts” are to quote secret sources (unidentified informant) or to argue from victimhood or virtue.
These are the media’s (and social media’s) engine of creation. Trump tweets something; Steele releases a dossier; the NYT publishes an unbylined editorial. Greta Thurnberg worries about climate change. And presto a meme is born.
Can Jack Dorsey fix this? No. But he could for example implement code so we can go back to the Tweet Zero of anything. This would make it possible for readers to reward or punish truth or falsehood. It won’t solve everything but it’s a start.
Each new Twitter user could get a startup sum of tokens. To tweet he must use up some of his tokens, which are either replenished or consensus fined by Tweeters, of course expending tokens. Solving the problem of junk info is like solving spam.You can’t have a competition of memes without a market.