Anders Puck Nielson: Responsible Social Media
I had no idea he was a social media researcher
I was {today} years old when I learned Anders Puck Nielsen’s day job is researching social media and conflict. This post is about what Twitter was, and why it’s become a right wing digital cesspool in the same sense that sites like Gab and Truth Social area.
Responsible Requirements:
Aspiration for an unbiased algorithm.
Transparent moderation.
Good public APIs.
There was a lot of grousing about Twitter’s algorithm, but that is simply a mass of opinions not well grounded in fact.
Twitter’s moderation was almost starting to be tolerable in the last year or so before the Musk purchase. Accounts that were intentionally bad could get mobbed and removed. I feel sorry for the folks in moderation, there are periodic stories about the drone operator like PTSD people come away with when they leave those positions. Training an AI would reduce the human cost, both in the sense of payroll dollars, and in trauma to those doing the work. But adversarial external AIs would always be trying to game the system …
The loss of the API in April of 2023 was the absolute bitter end for me. Once I was deprived of the ability to see activity at scale my interest in the platform declined precipitously. I’d pop up periodically to clown around with friends, but finally in March of 2024 I irretrievably locked myself out, a decision which I do NOT regret.
I have an OG 2017 Mastondon account @nealr@mastodon.social and I snuck into the first 125k Bluesky users with @nrauhauser.bsky.social, but I don’t really use either of them. The same forces that ruined Twitter are muted, but still active on both platforms, and I have absolutely no patience left for that.
What APN says makes sense, if you accept that we need a flat global reach social media platform, which I do not. They’re an acid bath for democracy and since the first time I ever thought about this stuff, back in 2009, I assumed Social Media’s Federated Future was going to BE the future. We aren’t quite there yet, but if we do make it concerns for child safety will be the vehicle that carries us to that destination.