Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Inevitable Heat Death of Twitter

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Feb. 23, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:42

The Inevitable Heat Death of Twitter

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	So Twitter is on the decline and is probably going to join MySpace and Dig and Friendster in the dustbin of failed social media platforms.
	I think it's worth examining why this is, but also why it isn't, especially in regards to certain pernicious individuals.
	Before we go on, I'd like to thank Undoomed for that wonderful little intro that he's made for me.
	I really appreciate it.
	I've left a link to his channel in the description.
	It's really good and I really recommend you check it out.
	His artwork is fantastic.
	So you may remember last April when Twitter announced that they were going to crack down on abuse with a new filter and title rules.
	A leaked memo from then CEO Dick Costolo said that we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years.
	I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with the issue during my tenure as CEO.
	It's absurd.
	There's no excuse for it.
	I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front.
	It's nobody else's fault but mine and it's embarrassing.
	The author of this Guardian article also asked Zoe Quinn what her opinion of it was and she said it's nice to see Twitter trying to address this issue.
	Well I wouldn't pay too much lip service Zoe because if they do that's your entire business model out of the window.
	At the beginning of February someone leaked Twitter's API data to Business Insider and this data showed a distinct decline in the number of tweets and active users on the platform.
	This blue line is the number of tweets per day which you can see has been in pretty steady decline since a spike in user traffic in August of 2014 which is coincidentally around the sort of time the conspiracy in Gamergate began.
	I have no idea if this spike in traffic and then decline is in any way connected to Gamergate, but it's just an interesting coincidence to note.
	Dick Costolo resigned as CEO of Twitter on July the 1st, but the traffic continued to decline.
	Twitter have claimed that the data is not correct, but declined to provide correct data or even explain how the data is incorrect.
	Frankly, I think they're lying, which is why they're not providing new data and which is why Dick Costolo jumped ship to be replaced by Jack Dorsey, one of the original co-founders of Twitter.
	The second reason that I don't believe the leaked numbers are incorrect is the sheer number of Twitter executives who are jumping ship as well.
	A number of top Twitter executives including its heads of product, engineering and media, are leaving the struggling social communication company.
	VP of global media Katie Stanton, VP of product Kevin Weill and VP of engineering Alex Rota are all out and their departures were confirmed in a tweet by Jack Dorsey late Sunday night.
	Jesus Christ, what a bloodbath.
	If your CEO and a bunch of top executives start quitting en masse, you know your company has serious problems.
	And so do the markets, which is why Twitter's share price is nosediving.
	Growth in Twitter's monthly active users has slowed, stagnated and now seems to have stopped entirely, at a perfectly flat 320 million.
	And Twitter's user base declined for the first time from 307 million to 305 million in the three months before the 31st of December.
	Dorsey said that the users lost were quote not high quality, which is an interesting way of putting it, and we'll look into that a bit later, and that the company was focusing on more daily active users in the company's earnings call.
	The retention rate in quarter 4 increased relative to quarter 3, daily active users were flat in the fourth quarter, meaning both that the people who left the service hadn't been using it very often, and unfortunately that fewer people were joining Twitter.
	However, this doesn't really seem to have convinced the market that that's the case and Twitter stock continued to drop.
	Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be related to the unverification of Milo Yiannopoulos.
	Just for anyone who thinks that maybe they're connected, I don't think they are.
	At least not in the very direct cause and effect way you might be thinking.
	The fallen stock price was halted at least briefly when two Twitter executives spent 2.25 million on Twitter stocks in order to increase their share price.
	Given that this has been described as a show of faith, I'm guessing that it's not a long-term solution.
	But I'm not a stock trader, so who knows?
	I'm sure someone in the comments can let me know what this means.
	Interestingly, Goldman Sachs still puts Twitter among the top five internet stocks that investors should buy.
	Despite the fact that Twitter is the only one with a ticker in the red, but you know, they must know something I don't.
	So Twitter is on the decline as a company, and they think that it's online harassment that is causing the decline in their user base.
	It's important to remember that Twitter has been under a lot of pressure to actually take action against harassment on their platform by certain individuals and organisations.
	And just in case you're unfamiliar with what they're actually asking for.
	I think it's important to recognize that harassment is, as someone had mentioned, it's not just what is legal and illegal, right?
	Harassment is threats of violence, but it's also the day-to-day grind of you're a liar, you suck, you, you know.
	Calling someone a liar and telling them that they suck is not harassment.
	What it is, is feedback.
	But either way, Twitter needs to do something.
	Their numbers are declining and they have these people who are adamant that this is about online harassment.
	And maybe it is, I don't know that it's not.
	And ultimately, it actually doesn't really matter whether this is actually the case.
	What matters is what they believe is the case.
	And they obviously believe that this is the problem, which is why they have created the Twitter Trust and Safety Council.
	And the thing is, you can hardly blame them, because there are numerous individuals and organisations who are using harassment as a method to advance their own standing, and gaining a measure of control over Twitter would certainly do that.
	Evidently, the beleaguered management of Twitter have no idea what to do.
	They're suffering from massive brain drain because all of their top executives are quitting.
	And here are a bunch of people who say, hey, we have all the answers.
	It's no wonder they would do exactly as they're told.
	Twitter says that this council is a new and foundational part of our strategy to ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.
	Well, what people is really the question.
	But we'll get to that a bit later on in the video.
	They say that in developing the council they are taking a global approach, an inclusive approach, so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organisations, including various left-wing organizations.
	I mean, I don't want to lament for conservatives, but they're really being left out of this one.
	I couldn't find any organisations on this list that had, well, any kind of conservative ideological leaning.
	Under normal circumstances, I'd say that's a good thing, but frankly, the way things are going at the moment, I would like to see a balance.
	Unless I'm missing something, I couldn't really see anything to complain about too much with the organisations they actually have on this council, other than the obvious.
	Most of them do seem to have a history of trying to prevent abuse.
	The only ones I take particular exception to are Hollaback and Feminist Frequency.
	These are the only organisations on the list that I noticed were obviously feminist, and at least Hollaback is actually concerned with preventing street harassment, so their inclusion is at least vaguely legitimate.
	But Feminist Frequency's reason for being here seems to be entirely based on Anit Sarkeesian's popularity and status as like an alpha victim.
	Shortly after the creation of this council, an inside source in Twitter revealed that they are in fact shadow banning people, which is something that apparently is real and happens every single day.
	Apparently, Twitter maintains a whitelist of favoured Twitter accounts and a blacklist of unfavoured accounts.
	Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they're not the most popular among users.
	Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users' timelines.
	So you might think that shadow banning is actually the ideal solution to this problem.
	Someone registers an egg account with Twitter, they start sending nasty tweets, and instead of having their account suspended so they can sign up with another account and carry on, their account is instead shadow banned so they don't know that the end users are not receiving their tweets, and so they carry on labouring on, and eventually they stop because they get bored through lack of interaction.
	And if Twitter was an ideologically neutral platform, I would agree with you.
	But this is why it's important for us to now talk about diversity of ideas.
	Apparently, Twitter isn't merely targeting spammers and trolls.
	For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.
	This is happening to people I recognise, such as Vox Day, Daddy Warpig, Ricky Vaughan, League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as Mercedes Carrera, and possibly even including myself have been shadow banned, at least according to those users who no longer see our tweets.
	This seems to be happening almost exclusively to conservative bloggers and activists, or at least people who wouldn't be identified as progressive.
	They're either having their accounts suspended without apparent warning or explanation outright, or they're quitting outright because they feel persecuted by Twitter themselves for going after them because of their ideological views.
	For a company that wants a diversity of voices and for people to feel safe expressing themselves, they've done very, very well to make it so that people who would represent the opposing side of that diversity don't feel safe expressing themselves.
	As far as I am aware, none of the conservative users of Twitter that I've been discussing have said anything that resembles a threat or harassment or anything of the sort.
	It genuinely appears that they are being targeted because of their political position.
	So there seems to be a great deal of panic and hysteria about Anita Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency being part of the Twitter Ministry of Truth.
	This has led quite a few people to say things like, Anita is going to use her newfound power to ban everyone she doesn't like or disagrees with.
	And other people saying things like Anit Sarkeesian has taken over Twitter and is now in charge of Twitter.
	I don't want to mock anyone but this is hysterical nonsense.
	Twitter is more than capable of fucking up all on their own.
	Yesterday Feminist Frequency put this blog post on their site.
	On February the 9th Twitter announced the formation of a council made up of over 40 organisations of which Feminist Frequency is one.
	These organisations are not involved in micromanaging Twitter on a daily basis or making decisions with regards to action taken against a council tweets but rather have been assembled to consult with Twitter generally about how best to navigate the challenges of allowing freedom of expression while fighting abuse.
	I believe Anita when she says this because she does not need direct control over Twitter.
	She's one of 40 organisations.
	She is obviously not in charge of any of this and she doesn't need to be.
	And you might be thinking of the example of DH Mapplethorpe who sent a list of tweets to Anita criticizing her with the end result being fuck right off because she's wrong and I agree she is wrong and yes this account was banned and yes it probably was because of love of Anita Sarkeesian that this account was banned.
	But she didn't do this.
	Again, she doesn't need to.
	She went down to Twitter with Zoe Quinn and a couple of other feminists to go there and give them policy advice and press the flesh.
	The thirsty beta engineers and moderators at Twitter are going to do this of their own accord after Anita goes down there, turns on the charm and presses that sweet sweet side boob against them in a photo opportunity.
	She is an attractive celebrity woman.
	This guy is going to be beating off to the feeling of her pressing her side boob against him for years.
	And the thing is, it allows her to take the hysteria and play with it and use it to her own advantage.
	Saying that you guys think that she's some sort of diabolical supervillain, hell-bent on creating an oppressive society.
	She might be, but it doesn't matter.
	Nobody else is going to fucking believe that.
	Honestly, though, I really think people are attributing to Anita powers she simply doesn't have, and time she probably doesn't have either.
	Although the plus side of this is it does give Anita an opportunity to demonstrate her mind-reading skills.
	She says, This conspiracy and others like it are a manifestation of misogyny, born out of a deep distrust and hatred of women.
	They're designed to foster fear and serve as a warning to other women about what awaits them if they challenge the status quo.
	Or they're actually directly about you as an individual, Anita.
	Maybe it's not about any other women at all.
	Maybe it's just about you.
	This is of course feminist narrative crafting 101.
	Take something that has happened to one woman and extrapolate it to mean this is going to happen to all women, because it makes it scarier.
	You know, it's a better sort of fear-mongering.
	In fact, the general feminist narrative surrounding Twitter is that it's broken for women.
	A social media firestorm has erupted after Sachi Kuhl, an editor and writer for BuzzFeed Canada, sold her soul, I mean sorry, shut down her Twitter account after several days of being slammed with abusive tweets.
	Of course, if you're not a gender bigot, then you will be well aware that this is not something that happens exclusively to women.
	Recently, actor and comedian Stephen Fry quit Twitter over a jive he had towards a friend of his at the BAFTAs.
	He made a joke about some woman dressing like a bag lady because they were friends and he was ribbing on her.
	The resulting harassment Fry received was why he decided to quit Twitter.
	Now, who do you think the harassment was coming from?
	I mean, maybe there's something in his statement that we can use to identify where all this harassment was originating from.
	So he says that Twitter has become a stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second guess and leap to conclusions and be offended on behalf of others that they do not even know.
	Whether they think they're defending men, women, transgender people, Muslims, humanists, whatever.
	I'm guessing that we're dealing with SJWs.
	And this come as absolutely no surprise because we have seen them time and time again go for people who simply disagree with them, even people within their own community, within their own belief system.
	Let's not forget the chewing out Joss Whedon received at the hands of the progressive community because he dared to write a character that they didn't like.
	But don't worry, Joss, I totally believe you, that it's not because you received all this hatred and harassment from feminists and progressives on Twitter that you left Twitter.
	It's other reasons.

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