Holy crap, it’s -7°C here in Düsseldorf this morning! The world is frozen. Well, at least France beat Morocco in the World Cup which meant traffic didn’t collapse last night and I could get a good night’s rest, as the Moroccan fans weren’t driving through the streets with fireworks like the last few times their team played. Which was badly needed, too, as I’m still not fully recovered from this bloody cold. But I’ve promised to keep on the Twitter Files story, so here we are.
The Twitter Files: The Banning of Trump
The Twitter Files reporting continues with the promised behind the scenes look at how Donald Trump was banned off the platform. Michael Shellenberger has a good recap of how Twitter descended from a “public square” open to everyone to a kind of new media thought police on his Substack:
You can read the whole thread of reporting on how Trump eventually was suspended on Bari Weiss’ Twitter presence. The key points are as follows.
On 8 January 2021, Trump tweeted about “75 million great American patriots”.
This tweet did not violate Twitter’s rules, as it is not incitement to violence. And Twitter employees did recognise this. But pressure inside and outside of Twitter grew to have Trump banned from the platform.
So they decided to break their own rules and look for excuses to cover their asses. They decided that the “75 million great American patriots” refered to the people who stormed the Capitol on 6 January. Which is idiotic, because there were thousands of protesters at the Capitol that day, not millions. Clearly, Trump was talking about his voters and supporters here, not “terrorists” as Twitter employees would phrase it. So either a quarter of the US population is terrorists, or this reasoning is complete bullshit. And Twitter employees knew this. But, Twitter management decides to go with this argument nonetheless and proceed by couching this dumb idea in even more bullshit terms.
And now get this: They thought Trump was literally comparable to Hitler. If you still think the idea of hysterically woke millennials within companies like Twitter and The New York Times thinking that Trump was literally Hitler is a meme that doesn’t have anything to do with reality …well… here it is, in writing:
As a German, and someone who has extensively studied the Third Reich, I am incredibly angry and very sad at the state of education in these people. It is frankly shocking how ignorant they are. And it is made worse by the fact that these people are in a position to decide things that have political implications on a planetary scale. At least Yoel Roth redeems himself a little bit here.
In the end, he still backs the wrong decision, of course. Not understanding that censoring people’s political ideas is exactly what weakened the democratic Weimar government in Germany to the point that enabled the actual Nazis to come to power. Naturally, there were a few dissenters in Twitter’s ranks. An employee, originally from China, spoke up:
But it was of no use. The die had been cast. And thus Donald Trump was banned off Twitter for a tweet that didn’t incite violence at all, while Iranian, Malaysian and Ethopian world leaders, who actually incited violence before and after the Trump ban, continue to have accounts and be able to post on Twitter. I believe French president Emmanuel Macron summed this whole affair up best:
Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”
Bien dit.
Jack Dorsey Chimes in from His Mountain
Ex-Twitter CEO and co-founder, and eccentric billionaire, Jack Dorsey has no chimed in on the Twitter Files in his own newsletter. And he seems to be somewhat on board with what Musk is doing. Or at the least he seems to think that the above described content moderation he was involved in wasn’t a good thing. Which is, as he confirms in this piece, why he stepped down as CEO in the first place. A few years ago Dorsey, who goes by @jack on Twitter, said his biggest regret was turning Twitter into a company, so this take is pretty on brand for him:
I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:
Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
Only the original author may remove content they produce.
Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.
The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.
I wonder who that activist was. There’s a chance he’s referring to the hedge fund Elliott Management, but I am not sure.
The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.
Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.
I mean, yeah, I would agree. It’s just a bit rich (pun intended) that people like Dorsey only realise these things once they’ve become billionaires at the expense of the rest of society. It’s the Bill Gates syndrome: First you screw over everyone you can find and once you’re immeasurably rich, you suddenly feel bad about it. I do give Dorsey credit for coming out and speaking this frankly about the whole thing, though. Gates never talked about how screwing up the whole PC market for personal gain might have been a mistake.
Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.
I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today.
Sounds to me like he’s a fan of the indie web now. And I can only second this: GET YOUR OWN WEBSITE, PEOPLE!
I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.
His heart seems to be in the right place. Shame he never acted on this to a noticeable extent while being in charge of the company, instead of meditating, eating weird things at weird times, flying around the world and living in mountain cabins.
Man, whenever I think back at my short brush with being a bitcoin millionaire that I messed up by being horrible with money, I am actually glad these days. I’m much happier just barely scraping by as it is. Sounds cheesy, but it’s true. I can’t think of a single millionaire who isn’t a hypocrite. I’d hate myself so much if I was in Dorsey’s shoes.
The Anti-AI Revolt
Artists on the portfolio website ArtStation are in open revolt against AI-generated images (stuff like the DALL·E picture I used as the teaser image for this newsletter). This is because machine learning algorithms like DALL·E and Midjourney are trained on millions of images scraped off the public web — including off sites like ArtStation. When that site started featuring more and more art generated with machine learning algorithms like these (generically referred to as “AI”), people started to be upset.
“Seeing AI art being featured on the main page of ArtStation saddens me,” wrote MultiVersus artist Dan Eder. “I love playing with MJ as much as anyone else, but putting something that was generated using a prompt alongside artwork that took hundreds of hours and years of experience to make is beyond disrespectful.“
To combat this, illustrator Nicholas Kole and costume designer Imogen Chayes shared an image on ArtStation that said “No To AI Generated Images”. It’s since been reposted hundreds of times in support, with the “Trending” page currently dominated by messages of protest against AI artwork.
ArtStation has since responded to this controversy, but people aren’t happy about this either. The issue is a cultural one. Under current copyright law, it seems to be completely legal to scrape the web for publicly available images to train an algorithm that produces its own images. These images are their own works and are thus not in violation of artists’ copyright. Much like a human is allowed to look at images of other artists to train their own brain how to paint without infringing on copyright. But the fact that there isn’t a legal problem with this doesn’t mean the artists’ objections aren’t valid. They are. And thus we arrive at a cultural issue that will have to be hashed out in the public consciousness over the next few years. Is this kind of behaviour okay? How do we regulate it? Do we even want to? The same goes for machine learning tools used in writing — ie. ChatGPT and other solutions.
While I find AI-created artwork fascinating, and obviously like to use it myself, I do sympathise with artists in this. But I also think that once the craze dies down, we will realise that these algorithms can’t replace actual artists. Because computers cannot be creative. Creative computers are an impossibility — at least for the foreseeable future.
In Other News
The Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Working Group is trying to figure out how many white bearded, grouchy wizards are still out there writing programs in ancient COBOL.
Yes, the Common Business-Oriented Language may be over 60 years old, but it is still widely employed and continues to play an active role in running the global economy, according to the COBOL Working Group, which was set up in 2020 by the Open Mainframe Project to promote and support its continued use.
The Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS is having a bit of a problem at the moment:
And finally, the reviews for Cameron’s new Avatar movie are divided enough that it actually makes me want to go see it. I mean, how bad can it be? James Cameron is James Cameron, after all.
On My Desk Today
Last night, I’ve released a first podcast episode in a series about the Twitter Files. I’ve also re-designed my website a bit recently.
After finishing this newsletter, I will sit down to write my weekly Ostfriesen-Zeitung column. Probably on AI-generated images and text. Explaining that to a truly mainstream audience and delivering a take on it in under 2,000 characters will be a challenge. But it is one that I welcome.
Expect the next issue of this newsletter tomorrow. Remember to dress warmly if you go outside!1
Unless you are in Australia right now. It’s probably very warm in Australia. Man, I wish I was in Australia!