[ExI] The Shape of Twitter

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

The pattern of connections between Twitter accounts that describes who is
following whom, antagonistic vs. friendly relationships, primary focus or
theme, is a complex multidimensional shape that reflects the underlying
social, intellectual and political relationships between users. The pattern
can be described in an algorithmic fashion and it contains a huge amount of
information that is valuable to users.

Users could use this shape to choose who to interact with, join groups and
cliques, to shape various aspects of their engagement with the network,
such as finding themes of interest, keeping abreast of common interests and
emerging trends, avoiding content that the individual finds objectionable
while being able to detect the existence and reach of such content (i.e.
knowing one's enemies).

If I were to advise Twitter's owners, I would suggest the following:

- Create a visualization of the pattern of connections between accounts
that would be easy to use and would show many dimensions (thematic,
political, affinity, ethnic)
- Enable individually controlled content filtering, based on one's
preferences informed by the visualization
- Make it impossible to delete your own content, except if the user can
show he is acting under a US court order to delete that content
- Make it impossible to hide your own content from any other user
- Allow only one named account per verified human user
- Never deny an account to a verified human user, regardless of his
previous history of account use, such as history of posting content
condemned by other users
- Allow all users to access all posts at will, regardless of the content of
the posts, including posts that may contain illegal content, until
specifically taken down by a US court order
- Allow one anonymous account per verified human user
- Mark accounts owned by verified institutions (corporations and other
legal persons in the US)
- Make all posts open source, not protected by copyright
- Make it easy for all users to scrape Twitter content and repost on other
sites
- Use both automated and manual censorship on all unverified accounts to
prevent illegal or merely annoying content
- Provide a wide array of preformed, explicit and implicit filtering
options to suit the needs of those who do not wish to directly control
their own filtering algorithm

This Twitter would allow all users to shape their experience, avoid bots
(by choosing to pre-emptively block all non-verified accounts), while
maintaining accountability to other users. This system would also export
enforcement of the law to the courts, rather than internalize it in
Twitter, such that Twitter would act as a mere conduit for the users'
speech. Of course, this is likely to be illegal in the US under many laws.
Twitter's content database might have to be split into the legal tweets and
the illegal tweets, with the latter being hosted offshore, perhaps in space
and under a separate corporate entity but still accessible to all users.

This is what it would take to make Twitter the arena for absolutely free
speech.

Rafal
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