Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a Business section column for the New York Times calling for Twitter to forget the notion that its site is a free marketplace of ideas. Instead, Twitter commissars should police the site and encourage "positive behaviors" and enforce "reputational guidelines." It sounds a little like the "mainstream media," where the establishment is established and the "anti-social" rebels will see their access limited. The "egalitarian ethos" must go.
Titled “Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise,” Manjoo opines that Twitter needs to do away with one of its founding principles, “the idea that it is an anything-goes paradise, where anyone who signs up for a voice on its platform is immediately and automatically given equal footing with everyone else, and where even the vilest, most hateful and antisocial behavior should be tolerated.”
Manjoo complains that “the core of this problem is confusion over what kind of network Twitter should be. Twitter’s founders always talk about the service as a kind of public square, where everyone should be able to have a more or less unfettered voice.”
Manjoo believes that Twitter should in fact adopt a system where some voices are more equal than others:
Twitter should begin to think of itself, and its users, as a community, and it should look to the community for determining the rights of people on the platform…The better you used the service — where ‘better’ is determined, as much as possible, based on how others react to your account — the more status you’d earn, and the more you’d be allowed to do.
It ought to consider a radical, top-to-bottom change like this: Instead of awarding blue checks to people who achieve some arbitrary level of real-world renown, the company should issue badges of status or of shame based on signals about how people actually use, or abuse, Twitter. In other words, Twitter should begin to think of itself, and its users, as a community, and it should look to the community for determining the rights of people on the platform.
Is someone making a positive contribution to the service, for example by posting well-liked content and engaging in meaningful conversations? Is an account repeatedly spreading misinformation? Is it promoting or participating in online mobs, especially mobs directed at people with fewer followers? Did it just sign up two days ago? Is it acting more like a bot than a human? Are most of its tweets anti-Semitic memes? Can the account be validated with other markers of online reputation — a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile, for instance? And on and on.
As Breitbart’s Charlie Nash noted, this isn’t the first time Manjoo called for the new tech giants to police information for ideological reasons: “Last year, Manjoo called on Google to hide information about Hillary Clinton’s declining health, while in May he branded Silicon Valley the “center of anti-Trump resistance.”
(Apparently, Manjoo considers it a "positive contribution" to mock Bill O'Reilly as a vampire with "deep ties to the undead.")
Leave it to the New York Times to encourage Twitter to act more like the "mainstream media" when it comes to social media.
