It's getting really unhinged on the bird app

It's confirmation bias all the way down

December 16, 2022

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Most of you tuned into the latest episode of the Talking Twitter On Twitter saga.

If you are not aware, congratulations; please don’t read this and go back to doing whatever you were up to before opening my post (thank you for your service).

There are a lot of predictable hot takes from the usual ideological suspects.

This has become a hot political clusterfuck with identities attached. And that means every new chapter fuels confirmation bias on both sides, which primes the angriest amongst us for the next chapter of The Discourse the following day.

In the broadest sense, what is going on can be looked at by thinking of the fight as a semantics battle.

Last weekend was about the meaning of shadowbanning. One side thinks it is deboosting of tweets in search, feed, trending topics, and recommendations. The other side thinks it makes tweets invisible to everyone except the poster.

This weekend is going to be about the meaning of doxxing. One side thinks it includes boosting the location of someone, even when it is a public figure or the location is publicly available elsewhere. The other side thinks it is making previously unavailable location information of someone public.

However frustrating it might be, in this battle, the generally acceptable of those words in either technical or cultural sense is irrelevant to the loudest mouths. They have their tribal meaning, and they are ready to fight!

In a narrower sense, a lot of what is going on can be and (I believe) should be looked at through the worldview of one of his generation's most brilliant engineering minds. This particular mind doesn’t consider the optical implications of whatever outcomes or conclusions it draws based on whatever logic it runs on.

It is irrelevant whether you like that or not or whether that comes naturally to you.

A father with young kids and an engineering mind has concluded that doxxing is bad and will be banned no matter who the account holder is. Now, yes, everyone agrees that doxxing is bad. Duh!

But, go back to those different definitions of the word. He subscribes to the more expansive boosting-based definition. To him, boosting publicly available location data on a platform he owns is the same as sharing the real-time location of someone. So he banned the high-profile accounts that tweeted anything related to the now-banned account that boosted the location data.

Shared a screenshot of the banned account? Banned

Amplifying the banned account for reporting? Banned

Sharing a link to the account of the person running the banned account on your own platform? Banned (This is why Mestodon’s corporate account got banned)

It does not look like he was silencing his critics in the media. First of all, there are orders of magnitude more critics. Second, most of these critics work at massive institutions and will continue to write stories. Third, why now? He could silence his critics anytime if he wanted to.

A simpler, more plausible explanation is that his brain did not bother to consider or did not care about the optical implications of banning high-profile accounts that he associates with doxxing. He didn’t ban journalists who were his critics; he just banned people who violated the policy he created a day earlier. Those violators happen to be journalists who were his critics! To him, it is algorithmic logic.

Now, before you cancel me, yes, I do think there are multiple interpretations of every action that lead to this outcome. And, of course, there are some obvious conflicts with his prior statements. Yes, I know publicly available information on flights is legal speech. And I’m aware that construing reporters doing their jobs as boosting accounts that facilitate doxxing (in the broader definition) is perhaps a big leap in logic.

This is, ironically, a win for the believers of centralized content moderation of legal and online speech to prevent real-world violence. On the flip side, it is also a win for people who believe platforms shouldn’t have a heavy-handed approach to banning accounts.

Btw, the story about “publicly available data” is far more complicated. It is not as simple as pulling it from a website.

Like I said earlier, it’s confirmation bias all the way down.

Yes, it is a private company that can do whatever it wants, even when it’s the guy you don’t like in charge of it! All of a sudden, you can’t start screaming about free speech and government interference!

It would be fair to say I’m being way too generous. It would also be fair to say I’m being too harsh; this is just Elon's concern about safety.

Depending on your prior beliefs, you can look at this as an unhinged dumb yet super entertaining niche internet clown show, a hyperpartisan battle, the end of democracy, a class war, a poorly managed private company on the brink of collapse, a courageous chaotic high-stakes turnaround story, or anything in between.

What about the Mastodon links fiasco, you ask?

IDK about that one tbh.

If you just spent 5 mins reading this and got to this point and were like, “ugh, this was a total waste of time, no entertainment or insights!” you wouldn’t be wrong!

This is, in fact, the dumbest timeline ever.

Also, one last thing, notice how the White House has managed to stay out of all this mess.

That’s for a reason and by design. This is the most sophisticated understanding of Twitter I have seen from an administration :

Joe Biden's White House is less concerned about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter than many Democrats, officials said in recent interviews.

That’s because Biden’s team believes Twitter is largely valuable for just two things:

Selling its message to journalists and other influential figures.

Encouraging friendly activists to put pressure on those elite voices.

"There's a crowd within the White House that cares about disinformation and thinks it's a major problem for Democrats narrowly and democracy more broadly," an administration official said of Musk’s efforts to relax moderation and make the site more welcoming to the right. "But it's probably a minority."

Yep, I agree. This is the kind of wise perspective we could all use.

We should all log off more and go touch grass.

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Few scattered things that caught my attention : 

From The Information’s Kate Clark’s Dealmaker:

Some might call Elon Musk’s leadership style toxic. Others consider it heroic. It’s certainly influential.

“If Elon did it, we should do it,” General Catalyst managing director Niko Bonatsos said, describing startup leaders’ perspective on Musk’s cutthroat approach to job cuts. “What we saw with [Musk] and Twitter, it’s going to become commonplace—at the latest by March.” 

I saw some comments about how founders are sadly replicating what is viewed by many as bad leadership of Musk. I think it’s easy to conflate goals with behaviors. When founders say they feel inspired by Musk's moves, it is not what many call recklessness or cruelty. They refer to reinstalling focus and discipline to survive a turbulent period to thrive in the future. This CEO memo shared by Gavin Baker is well representative of the sentiment. There is no culture, jobs, or kindness if the company shuts down! Layoffs are necessary.

Another bit from the same issue :

For founders bracing to deliver bad news, it helps to have company. For any tech CEO who’s on the fence about cutting positions or teasing back entrenched employee concessions, Musk’s moves, as well as layoffs at tech heavyweights like Meta Platforms and Stripe, “provided some cover,” said EQT Ventures partner Laura Yao.

Yep, that makes sense. Everyone wants some social proof.

“In the next 20 months, 50% to 60% of all the early-stage companies will go under,” Bonatsos said. “It’s going to be a very sad state of affairs.”

This supports what I wrote in my previous Scatter Brain issue. We are in for a lot more pain.

The use of ChatGPT in education will spark a national conversation about AI. I’m cheating a little here, since it’s kind of already happening: Zeynep Tufecki published an op-ed about it a few hours ago in the New York Times. My prediction is that this conversation will massively accelerate in 2023, as the technology spreads by word of mouth among kids home from school over the winter break. By spring break, we will have seen controversies related to the use of AI in education around the country, and by year’s end I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI had been dragged in front of Congress to talk about it.

I found that the most interesting one. I agree! As more and more students use AI in applications, essays, assignments, and theses, it is hard to see how institutions and educators won’t get concerned and restless.

Copying China doesn’t work — group buying edition in India: 

First, unlike in China, where the concept has been very successful, in India, production of goods does not happen very far from where they are consumed. For instance, a lot of agricultural production is consumed locally, which does not allow for much of a profit margin.

“Even if we are able to bring down prices, the maximum it can get reduced is 3% of the market price,” said the executive quoted above. “Just 3% price reduction is not enough to change consumer behaviour in any big way. Kirana stores in India are already doing the necessary aggregation to bring down prices.”

Whether it’s social commerce or super apps, entire generations of startups have failed to create the scale and impact of Chinese trends in the States and India. It feels like a bull market phenomenon that we won’t have the appetite to try again anytime soon.

If you’ve watched Netflix’s acclaimed behind-the-scenes docu-series on Formula One, called Drive to Survive, I’m sure this rings a bell. Break Point, in fact, is produced by the same company, Box to Box Films, that made Drive to Survive. And that’s no coincidence, since the show is widely credited with helping grow interest in F1, a largely European and elite sport, around the world. The fourth season of Drive to Survive, released in March, made it to Netflix’s top-10 list in more than 50 countries. The series has been renewed for two more seasons.

Nowhere has the Drive to Survive effect been as prominent as the United States. Back in March 2019, when the first season was released, F1 used to get about 500,000 viewers per race in the country—a pittance compared with NASCAR (four million) and the Indy 500 (more than five million). The US used to host one F1 grand prix back then, but interest was dwindling.

I think all the streaming players should invest a lot more in shows of this genre. Raise awareness about something through aspirational and exemplary drama. Of course, tennis is a popular sport already. I wonder what strong niches this can be done for in and outside sports. I loved how The Queen’s Gambit made chess a lot more popular.

Musk had already proclaimed publicly that he didn’t believe in permanent Twitter bans. So here was a moment for a careful response—perhaps an explanation of how the company planned to guard against the former president’s predilection for misinformation and incitements of violence upon his return. Instead, Musk replied that it was the question he was getting from everyone, too, and, sitting there, composed a tweet on his iPhone: “If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if Trump is coming back on this platform, Twitter would be minting money!” He paused, surveyed the room and asked everyone whether he should post it. One of the Twitter ad execs strenuously objected. Musk laughed and posted the tweet anyway—and fired the dissenter later that week.

What a character!

In some fascinating and important ways, the gyrations and shapeshifting impacting the largest media companies in the world have descended to the smaller ecosystem in America’s capital. In 2016, for instance, Netflix had streaming virtually all to itself, linear was imperiled but not decimated, and the other biggest media companies had yet to build their own O.T.T. products. Now, Netflix, Disney, Paramount Global, Warner Bros. Discovery, and NBCU/Comcast—not to mention all the SVOD and FAST options—compete directly with one another for subscribers and advertisers, alike.

Meanwhile, in 2016, there was really just The New York Times and The Washington Post competing for the eyeballs of the aggrieved institutionalists and center-leftists who couldn’t keep their eyes off the Trump car crash. Axios came about that year, followed by the resurgence of Politico and The Atlantic and The New Yorker and Vox and Substackers. Now there’s Semafor, too, and whatever crazy idea Jimmy Finkelstein is kicking around. Maybe Ryan hasn’t really screwed anything up, but to adlib from Inherit the Wind, perhaps it is the Post that has changed by standing still.

This a pretty good summary of how the world of media (legacy news incumbents, younger digital outlets, streaming players) is going through turbulence right now in the light of troubles at The Washington Post.