I'm not a fan of Twitter, never have been. But that's not because I don't think the platform is a good idea. In fact, I think it's probably the best social media model available, it's just been allowed to run rampant. In the early "Wild West" days of Web 2.0 when MySpace and Facebook were still just upstarts fighting for dominance, Twitter was just another social media model, but it's potential lay in its simplicity. Of course, it's now evolved into something far beyond it's original boundaries and the time to put up guard rails is long overdue.
Humans need rules. I'm sorry, but it's true. That's why we have laws and law enforcement. But rules and free speech are almost antonyms and censorship is a dangerous endeavor. I'm not advocating censorship, but to simply allow an anything goes communication platform loose upon the world creates problems. There must be some means of self-control that allows checks and balance on the forces that generate damaging content. Do I want the government to do it? Absolutely not. We the People should do it, but we need the tools. It would appear, Dorsey has finally caught on and is providing Twitter users the means to fight back.
The mechanism for combating bots, fake accounts, misinformation and other nefarious posts has been the reporting process, but the reporting function has been limited in scope and transparency. Dorsey is changing the process to address these issues in the coming weeks.
One of the key changes is being able to report a tweet not just as spam, but what type as well. Is it a tweet that attempts to manipulate the service, originates from a bot or fake account, does it include a malicious link?
It remains to be seen how effective this new process will be, but at least the truth might have a fighting chance now.
I think I just might fire that account up again.
No comments:
Post a Comment