It's complicated

Tribalism, or how I prefer to look at it, people pick their teams outside of a sports context, is ruining our ability to listen to each other. We pick a side and dig our heels in deeply, forced to defend every position held there. It makes it impossible to find the actual truth of anything.

Few things, if any, are entirely black or white. There is context and nuance to just about everything. Lately, I've been thinking about how Twitter, a platform I love dearly, can be saved.

I have friends on both sides of the debate here. I am not firmly on either side. I can understand why people felt silenced by the old regime on Twitter. I can also see why people are disturbed by the path Twitter is now on. One thing both sides can agree on is that Twitter has perpetually been in crisis. It's been declared dead more times than I can count. It refuses to die.

The "Twitter Files” has been dismissed by some but show important context behind the decisions made by human editors. What's wrong with the "Twitter Files” is how they're being disseminated. We're not getting all the conversations that took place internally within Twitter. We're getting the ones chosen by people with inherent biases of their own with commentary attached that is more opinion than straight reporting. If Elon wanted true transparency, the files would have been made available in a data dump, ala WikiLeaks, for reporters to dig in and report on dispassionately.

Twitter was unsustainable in its previous state, under its previous owners. It's becoming clear that the plans the new owner has are not well thought out, and he's wasting valuable time learning the lessons the previous owners already learned the hard way.

What's the right path forward?

Content moderation is hard. Folks like myself who have been in online communities since the days of IRC know this. A free-for-all doesn't work as much as free-speech absolutists might prefer. An opt-in free-for-all and a choose your level of moderation from there option for others, as Jack Dorsey seems to be endorsing, seems interesting, but unclear how you execute those levels in practice.

Can an algorithm do it well enough? The idea of human editors doing the moderation at this point seems problematic because their motives are always going to be questioned. However, the algorithms are programmatic expressions of human decisions at scale.

Jack's principles for Twitter seem correct in theory but lack clarity on how they could be reasonably executed. Elon seems too busy shitposting to thoughtfully dig into fixing the platform for a sustainable future.

I don't want to leave Twitter because it's still, to this day, an extremely valuable service for what I tend to use it for, which is to gather information faster than anywhere else in the universe of news. It's not all reliable, which is why you need to apply traditional journalistic tools to verify, but it's a hell of a first signal to begin that journey.

Elon will go through the same tortured path as those before him, learning you cannot do certain things because, as much as you'd prefer to be a free speech purist, the system will collapse under its weight of noise and chaos. He'll get there eventually, but at what cost?

The tribes must find a way to put down their swords and shields and find common ground. The public square requires it. Compromise and reconciliation. If Twitter was too influenced by one side before, it won't improve by being overly influenced by the other. The path forward is somewhere in between.