Last year, I felt it was suboptimal for tech platforms to outsource their governance issues, because giving permit/deny rights on a material portion of all human utterances to parties which rhyme with governance seemed unwise. This year, it feels *extremely* suboptimal.
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This feeds another theme discussed recently. No engineer and project manager got together in SFBA and said "OK, here's the Excel spreadsheet of all tuples of (government, issue) on which we will affirmatively endorse the government's perspective and de-prioritize others."
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There are people who believe that that happened, that "the elite" work hand-in-glove with each other to stagemanage world opinion. Those people are very miscalibrated.
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What actually happened was simply "There is a team which had a meeting on how to reduce disinformation on the platform. They created some tooling and handed it off to a team whose name sounds something like Trust and Safety Ops."
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That team has a runbook for issues of social concern. The runbook specifies a rubric for identifying reliable sources. That rubric includes, among other options, official pronouncements from democratic governments.
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So when an issue of social concern came up, the team followed the runbook, added some keywords to the tool, checked on the rubric for who reliable sources w/r/t those keywords would be, Googled "Name of [agency type] in [democratic nation]", and there you go.
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I suppose I should give a disclaimer: I do not work at Twitter, I do not have inside information about how Twitter operates, I am *extremely* confident that I have the right of this, and comments which I may make in my personal spaces are endorsed by no one else most of time.
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Experienced it firsthand in the last few months. I’ve seen a subreddit and three discord servers get shut down in the name of “anything that doesn’t come from official sources is disinformation.” Those same places had accurate info weeks and months ahead of anywhere else.
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Sure, there was a bit of stuff posted that wasn’t accurate, but the community was pretty good at self-policing for the most part. I knew there was gonna be trouble when all the major platforms said they would start censoring virus-related posts a few months back.

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