News from Cyberia
I experienced my first “strike* on X/Twitter today. I was joking and responding to
on a thread about Boeing accidents. He was saying something along the lines of “is someone trying to kill Boeing” making reference to the expanding list of recent accidents involving Boeing. I responded to this tweet with “Suicide is an option”, obviously talking about the company. The fact that and I are mutual followers and interact on a regular basis never entered into account, neither Alexandros was presumably never warned about that (maybe he had a word to say?)... It took a split second to the Algo to decide that I had breached the ever changing and unclear Terms Of Service/Rules of X. I was given the choice to delete the tweet or else. And then after having deleted it, I was told to wait for 12h to restore access to the account. This unexpected experiment turns out to be very informative to where we are on terms of free speech in our digital era.Due Processed
Of course I had the possibility to contest the decision and make an appeal: to whom and under what circumstances? Maybe after few hours of navigating the obscure policies I could have find out. Clearly deleting the tweet and waiting for 12 hours was, by orders of magnitude, the quickest way to solve this. It would be an equivalent of puting a suspect in preventive jail for few weeks then to sentence this suspect the exact amount of jail time when the verdict is made. Of course the suspect could make an appeal and remain in preventive jail until the new verdict comes. The absurdity of the fact that the sentence had already been served, and no amount of appeal could change that , is not lost on anyone. Yet it is lost on the Algo. Or not.
On the surface level it is designed to look like a judiciary process as we understood it in the pre-digital era. The right words are used: TOS, right to make an appeal, etc. In reality the policy is implemented in real time by a machine and the sentence is carried out before you had time to blink. Judge Dredd like. You have been due processed.
Reach is Speech
There could not be more appropriate circumstances to show how the now in-famous Musk quote “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” is not just wrong. It is an anti-truth. It is the polar opposite of the truth. When the reach is 0 it is called censorship. It means that there is a point in which limiting the reach is the same thing as actively censoring. Where is this point, how can it be characterized is a complex discussion, but one thing is clear: reach has everything to do with freedom of speech.
The reach of published tweets is a mysterious affair. I have 4 times more followers on X than on Substack, yet on average a basic publication is seen twice as much on Substack than it is on X. My posts on Substack are longer and more difficult to engage with. The whole ecosystem of Substack is smaller than the one of X… Clearly from a social media perspective there is something weird going on. But nothing is done explicitly. Just as the fact that the automatic decision of X was self assessed as having been done “after careful review”. Really ?
Another angle that I discovered is how much Twitter has become a closed platform. I explicitly predicted it in
It is one thing to think and another one to experience. Because of having been kicked out I have tried to access X from a browser without been logged in. This is something that I never do because when I go on X I log in right ? Results were … interesting. If you just ask the browser to display you the feed of an account (type in the address bar X.com/name_of_the_account) you see at best tweets from 2022 (somehow it doesn’t work with pinned tweets). You can do better via Google search and keywords. This is deeply inconsistent. Now, maybe because my account has been locked I can only see my pinned tweet. It means that far from the original twitter philosophy that everything is public, we have moved to a model where everything that you see has been selected for you by the platform.
2024 George is Well
2024 is going to be the year when most people have ever voted: more than 4 billions people will be able to cast a ballot. If you think everything is going to go smoothly on the media front think again. New forms of speech controls will be deployed. Everything that you have already been to witness (mal/mis/disinformation and co.) will run on AI steroids this year. It is going to happen at every scale. Now, thanks to social media, individuals will be targeted. Imagine Goebbels's propaganda with Google analytics and LLMs at hands. This is not a dystopia. This is hic et nunc.