So, the Twitter curation team was curating at least Japanese Twitter to be more political?
Kind of makes me wonder what American Twitter is going to look like once our regularly scheduled post-election meltdown is over; but if true, $44B to turn Twitter into a smoking hole in the ground might just be the best $44B ever spent.
This is what makes it so dangerous for almost all major social media platforms to be controlled by the U.S. This is digital imperialism, American ideas and values are inconspicuously spread through memes (in the original sense of the term) and foreign children, teenagers and young adults are raised on them.
Any nation that wants to retain control over their culture and values should have social media sovereignty.
> American ideas and values are inconspicuously spread through memes (in the original sense of the term) and foreign children, teenagers and young adults are raised on them.
Honestly, in the case of my country (and probably many others), this is a huge improvement. Thank god the internet and social media have exposed me to the American ideas and values as I was growing up. I don't agree with all of them, but living with my head filled with the culture and values of my own country would've been so much worse.
All that stuff about "freedom" and "human rights" and "spreading democracy" may sound corny, unless you live in a place that doesn't have enough of those.
Exporting its values is probably the best thing America could've done for my country.
I could stand to hear less about American politics though)
> Any nation that wants to retain control over their culture and values should have social media sovereignty.
I'd rather control my own culture and values myself (by choosing what things to read and what websites to visit), than having someone else control them for me (which, in practice, just means censorship and/or propaganda).
Freedom and human rights weren't invented and aren't exclusive to America, as for spreading democracy I find the track record more horrific than corny.
You do not currently have control over your culture and values, you said yourself you're glad America exported its values to your country and exposed you to them. Good or bad, it should be clear you're not living in a vacuum with absolute control over what you see and believe.
If you adopt a free-market attitude to these questions you will end up being controlled by whoever has the most money and the worst morals, companies and people who will prey on our worst instincts, algorithms which reward anger and division, which prey on addiction triggers and so on. The content you consume will be controlled to present you with ideas, news and perspectives that are politically and economically advantageous to their country, and often contrary to the best interests of your own.
And to be clear there is no dichotomy between the status-quo and censorship. There is a million alternatives, the Digital Markets Act for example is a good start that should begin to break up social monopolies and companies which abuse network effects. Digital sovereignty just means you make available alternative tools to your population which are free of foreign influence.
The us is the biggest advocate though, and actually the most idealistic one. How idealistic they are, is visible in trade policies for example. The moment trump went back on free trade, all those mercantilist empires showed there true colors. Manufactured here, exported everywhere, just as it was practiced in Manchester centuries ago, allover.
There are actually very few countries which are freedom and democracy avatars. And they can export culture within the us sphere (japan, south korea/ some european countries come to mind) freely. All other culture/value spheres, are quite supressive/ethno centric (china, russia), hiding behind a thin veneer of "external propaganda".
The us secret service agencies interventions are a mess and the decay into a traditional empire is real, but overall, if you really look into other countries and cultures, its alot better, open, integrate the best of all worlds, then what you will find elsewhere.
I especially started to despise the "hollow husk" disney world "freedom" image some dictatorships export. People fall for that nonsense all the time and its ridiculous. Some nice videos of dancing people and skyscrapers, without any visible dissent, do not make freedom.
'Most money' I won't argue but I don't see how 'free market' leads to 'worst morals'. In a 'free market of ideas' people do their best to choose the best morals, some tomfoolery might make that harder to distinguish but people aren't helpless babes with no capacity for critical thought, and most of us rightly disdain empty virtue signaling.
> In a 'free market of ideas' people do their best to choose the best morals
The problem is not this, the problem is morals and free market look like they shouldn't be in the same place.
For example, Facebook controls majority of the social media traffic. People use them for reasons other than morality but Facebook itself is a deeply immoral company. So, free market is supporting an immoral idea because of amoral reasons and this is happening subconsciously.
> as for spreading democracy I find the track record more horrific than corny
Hang on, in which period of world history did the world enjoy more widespread peace and democratic rule than during Pax Americana?
Or are you claiming that the most peaceful and democratic era of history happened in spite of the US, not in any way due to it?
I don't have any objections to criticizing the US but my read on its history in this context is basically - once it expanded as far as it could militarily it decided the next best thing to do was build up a global network of nations it could trade with and make money off of. Those powers needed to be peaceful and stable so frequently ended up being democracies.
spreading democracy I find the track record more horrific than corny.
Has there been another nation in history that it was better to lose a war against rather than win? Compare Germany, Japan, South Korea to Vietnam, North Korea, Afghanistan. Perhaps the Achaemenid Empire also qualifies.
This is a dangerously naive view.
The US lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, committed mkultra against its own citizens, and infinitely more.
It's not a trustworthy place, just has higher production standards for their propaganda vs your home country.
Im a strong critic of US policy, but this kind of hyperbole is noise that hinders actual discussion.
In the US there is free press, which is why everyone knows and speaks freely about these things. When Bush 2 was pushing his administration's lies about WMDs, a large chunk of the population saw through the deception immediately, and another large chunk also saw through the deception but decided to go to war anyway. We still have the ability to think about our own history in ways that would be inconceivable in many places. That ability is maintained by individuals exercising their rights.
There is objectively no comparison between the state of things in the US and say Russia. These are not two different cases of the same model or two sides of the same coin, they are utterly different models and practices of governance. The US is also so culturally focused on rights and freedom that people don't understand the first amendment only protects citizens from action by the government, and people are able to hold onto this notion because of the extent to which they are generally left alone.
That's just not true.
During WW2 Disney was occupied by the US military because Walt was anti-war.
The federal government under Bush and Obama routinely spied on dissidents ( see the Michael Hastings report).
Time and time again, just like every other country, people who disagree with the Rich and Powerful or the government get crushed.
Again American propaganda is simply better than other countries and it comes from deliberate practice. For example the US military works very closely with Hollywood and videogames like the best selling Call of Duty series.
The US was doing much worse stuff during the WW2 era, this was during segregation after all. I don't actually disagree with any of your points. In fact another example is how torture is consistently portrayed in a positive light in hollywood movies (when it's the "good guys" doing it).
My point is that the fact that we are freely having this discussion, and able to access reliable sources of information without government impediment, is in itself very significant in the context of human experience on earth in 2022. The US is still in a situation where we can self-correct. Crying wolf about the state of press freedom is counterproductive and harms the credibility of people working to actually improve things.
For example, what the US is doing to Julian Assange is wrong. However, if Russia had been equally pissed at him they would have simply murdered him long ago. There is still a system within which to work in the US, and pretending it doesn't exist is self-defeating and draws attention away from possible solutions.
I wish america would export its values of speech and guns here. It'd be a massive improvement. I find it strange that the latter is never an exported value (only ever clandestine exported goods) and only some of the former.
American politics has basically become common conversation in Australia in the last 6 years, to the point where you often see people chatting as if it is their own politics. I wouldn't be surprised if some Aussies truly believe we have republicans and democrats here or even remotely the same policy landscape.
We even had a "Black Lives Matter" rally here, when things were happening in USA. Media reported on it, mostly Lithuanian teens showed up, some skipped school to attend. I don't think there was a single black person. They even had some signs against police brutality, when in Lithuania most of incidents happen not by police but to police.
Likewise in Hungary. When an opposition party leader (after a big election flop) suggested that instead of importing cultural issues from the US, opposition parties should concentrate on the problems of the people living here, it was almost treated as a heresy.
> American politics has basically become common conversation in Australia in the last 6 years […]
Noobs. We Canadians have been at it probably since before Confederation (1867).
One reason is that it's probably good for ratings: drama, heroes, villains, etc. Who needs West Wing (or Veep) when you can watch the real thing instead?
> This is digital imperialism, American ideas and values are inconspicuously spread through memes (in the original sense of the term) and foreign children, teenagers and young adults are raised on them.
This has been going on since missionaries, perhaps going back to the original Apostles, started travelling the planet:
Imo, the problem isn't that cultures influence other cultures, but the speed at which this now happens. I like many parts of American culture but I don't think that it should be the only culture. For a smaller group to develop and preserve its identity, it needs time and some amount of isolation. Not sure how this could happen in the modern world, but wouldn't it be great to be able to go somewhere and see people with different scientific ideas, art, technology, philosophy etc?
It's funny you're talking about the spread of American/Western ideas specifically when talking about Japan; from my perspective Japan (along with South Korea & Taiwan) has been very successful at actually spreading its own culture through the West. 20 years ago the concept of sushi and boba tea shops on every street corner would have been foreign, but now we live in a period where even mainstream Netflix has a dedicated anime section.
This is weird, because when people have a chance to choose (and the funding) they regularly come here for care.
Our healthcare may be skewed towards those who have the means to afford insurance (and this isn't quite true because emergent care must be treated), but it is the best in the world. We routinely do things that are science fiction in other countries with "enlightened" healthcare policies: deep brain stimulus implants, laser-etched re-mapping of nerve impulses across the heart (that bought my physician father a few extra years of life), CAT scans are routine, etc. Our physicians are also the best trained in the world. After having toured hospitals in the UK, only a fool or the near-indigent would rely on NHS in the UK — there's a reason why the Royals go to private clinics.
That's a bug, not a feature. American doctors know that they order too many scans; they know it's harming their patients; but they can't stop doing it because there's a false belief that "more scans == better care".
If you're in England and you need a cat scan you get a cat scan. They're not forbidden.
but it's not just control by the owners. also domination by the majority of users. the question is, how can you avoid that if you want a global conversation?
hackernews is pretty US dominated to in userbase and selected topics. even without the influence of skewed moderation. and like australia, most of what's discussed on hackernews includes american politics.
sometimes i feel pretty sheepish when i comment on some topic starting with "yes, but in europe..."
fortunately hackernews readers are pretty open to other viewpoints, but still american values and ideas are quite strong.
Both the Japanese video sharing site Nico Nico Video (nicovideo.jp) and art commission site Skeb (skeb.jp) have regularly made statements about their intent of regulating their services based on Japanese law, and explicitly NOT what US-based tech companies impose on their services.
Skeb is even in the process of launching its own cryptocurrency, intended for use in payment within the service, to avoid pressure from US-based credit card networks like Visa or MasterCard.
Many find the alternative bone chilling: American sovereignty, or soon perhaps Chinese, an alternative I haven't seen much enthusiasm for on HN for some reason.
Sovereignty doesn't need to mean government control, censorship, firewalls, nationally isolated networks. It can mean having alternative tools which are free of foreign influence. The implementation can take a million form, one might be the enforcement of open protocols and interoperability to counteract network effects.
I believe in the free internet (however nebulous) as much as anyone who has seen its origins and works in software, but it's clear the internet is not free anymore, we are all centralized on closed and carefully curated American platforms.
Then I would advise looking for a different phrase because while I wanted to read it much like you were describing, there’s no way I can read “social media sovereignty” as anything other than “thought control”.
Or: it reads like one of the worst aspects of American culture (from an American perspective): that human instinct to want to control how our neighbors think, live and breathe, and our incessant nagging about how other people in other parts of the State and Country are living wrong. Growing up here you’re immersed in it: farmers vs city dwellers, “right kind” of people rhetoric and other such nonsense I lost all patience for at a very early age because it’s all just provincialism and finding excuses to see the worst in people.
This isn’t unique to America either. In my experience most places have some kind of dynamic like this because deep in our heart of hearts, we’re a xenophobic species and we need to keep the xenophobia in check. People who sound, think and act differently are much scarier to us than people who look different. Wanting to exercise “sovereignty” over someone else’s social media habits—the someone else being your fellow countrymen—just sounds like you want to control what your own people think and hear, basically the thing I’m criticizing Twitter and saying it’s probably best left as a smoking hole in the ground for.
So please find a better phrasing, because you’re going to have to explain that one every time you drop it.
It might be standard in that part of the world but it’s also crap jargon for all the reasons I outlined and saying it’s the “digital strategy of many European countries” does nothing to alleviate any of my concerns, only increase them.
Where “sovereignty” enters the picture so does “control” and “power”.
Ah, with the previous comment and its diction I thought you were doing to start advocating for the great firewall outright as a means of internet protectionism.
It seems to be one of those cases where people suspected it but didn't realize the tinfoil hat theories might've accidentally hit the nail in the head.
Like, I'd expect them to marginalize the topics twitter censors don't like but that's so far beyond that
> So, the Twitter curation team was curating at least Japanese Twitter to be more political?
From the article:
> This change may have already made it’s way to the west as well, at the time of writing (it’s Election Day in the US) #GodofWarRagnarok is currently more popular than #ElectionNight.
Not everyone uses Twitter for political flamewars.
I use it to follow my favorite researchers and innovators. It's the only website where I can actually interact with Yann Le Cun just like I was at a conference. (with HN of course)
In Reddit's case, I think it was a result of American culture and media in general changing to be more political. Late night television and Twitter experienced similar changes around that time too.
> Late night television ... experienced similar changes around that time too.
It's unwatchable now. It used to be kind of OK when Trump was in office, but once he got kicked out they continued with the same formula, so I just tuned out.
Do you watch all or popular, or just your subscribed feeds? I like browsing things when not logged on, and reddit certainly turned very political in the all/popular feeds you see by default. Before then they were mostly full of funny pictures, jokes and random rants about life.
You picked the day after the elections. Of course it’s political. The difference is that modern Reddit looks like that every day of the year, and old Reddit did not.
I just tried to pick a date most similar to the present one :)
If you dig through the archives, I think you may find that the politicisation of reddit happened earlier than you thought. 2008 reddit already seems like mostly politics to me, which I think happened simply because the audience started trending less nerdy.
I propose that politics are simply a very popular topic to discuss, and naturally rise to the top as the group becomes less homogenous.
Early reddit was very similar to HackerNews. One front page where users submitted interesting links and stories. Then slowly subreddits started to get introduced, like "/r/science", "/r/programming", and "/r/atheism". Already very early people didn't like this change and created /r/TrueReddit. Read their rules and you can see how similar to HN this is "only interesting stories", "do not editorialize the original title" etc. However even /r/TrueReddit shifted heavily towards politics (i.e. short by top -> all time and see which stories get most upvotes). After that /r/TrueTrueReddit for people who were trying to maintain the same spirit. But it is dying now more or less.
Many many small changes had to happen before it downgraded into what we see today [0].
I don't know if the above commenter is talking about the same time period. However, the period around 2016 when Trump got elected revealed some odd decisions that Reddit had that it eventually needed to change. It's been a while, but this is what I remember:
How Reddit works is you have various subreddits about different topics. You can go to each subreddit individually to view the highest rated posts about that specific topic. However, most people don't do this, but rather go to reddit.com and see a feed of various subreddits combined. For active users this feed will be tailored to their choices, however, what to show users that are new or not logged in is a question that Reddit struggled with.
For a while, this was done by having some subreddits be chosen to be shown by default. Initially there were only a few, I think around 10-20, and they were handpicked. At some point more subreddits became default, I think it grew to 50-100 if I remember. However, this caused a lopsidedness where these few handpicked default subreddits had orders of magnitude more views than non-default ones, so Reddit was split into two worlds between popular default subreddits and niche unknown ones. Imagine a website where half of it was like Twitter and Facebook and half of it was like Hacker News.
To fix this, at some point they changed it to ALL subreddits being default. In other words, the most popular posts sitewide would reach the default feed, no matter which subreddit they were from. There was a NSFW filter, but other than that there were no controls at all. The people in change of Reddit at this time were very anti-censorship, to where they felt that there should be no moderation other than voting. Around this time Trump was elected and a certain subreddit that could charitably be described as frenzied for Trump started growing in popularity. As a result, a lot of their posts reached the front page of Reddit, and their posts were not just biased but cult like or even containing outright fake news.
Reddit eventually solved this with a feed called popular that was a middle ground, where instead of having a handful of default subreddits, it would be all subreddits minus those with extreme topics. Critics viewed it as censoring, and it was, but it stopped Reddit from sliding towards a 4chan like reputation, and I am confident the Reddit of today would have never been able to be mainstream without this type of change.
Reddit, ca. 2010, was a small community with mostly civil, but always adult discussion of topics, where people tended to try and understand each others. The term "circlejerk" was known, sure, but it was more a self-ironic observation of subcommunities (aka "subreddits") starting to diverge on a common viewpoint after a while. Bans were rare. We had side-wide charity activity (e.g. we bought some kid prosthetics his family could not afford). We had our little in-site activity (meet-a-redditor, around that time, secret santa started out). We had "important people" on the site as active redditors apparently out of their own drive, not being driven towards us in one-off events (prominently, Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger used to be somewhat active redditors).
Reddit took a first hit after the digg exodus, when it became a lot more about gaming - but we absorbed them, and eventually got to a somewhat acceptable place again.
Around 2014, "Chairman Pao" took over, and very soon, we had the influx of very left-wing, very college-liberal minded people, and stuff went downhill. Suddenly, it was all about politics, about Hillary vs. Trump, it was all about LBGT, it was all about what it meant to have free speech. People started getting banned for activity on other subreddits. ("You posted on /r/gunmaking? You are no longer welcome on /r/todayilearned"). Of course, that led to an immediate reaction from the "opposing" side, whoever was not college-liberal left moved to become increasingly right-wing (I've observed such an unconscious shift in myself, when on Reddit - and that has affected my thought in general), some extremely so. Which attracted ... more right-wing extremists to come in. Reddit reacted to that with force against most of these right-wing subreddits, banning and deleting whole communities (some are allowed to stay around, for the time being, most likely to act as honeytraps).
But the Overton window has moved radically to the left (to the point where fantasising about mass murder of the affluent part of society is not only tolerated, but sometimes encouraged). Discussion about "neutral" topics still exist, in niches - but often get poisoned by people trying to find fault in other people's browsing history.
Reddit is a cesspool, its golden age is over. If you wanted to salvage it, you probably should hide user comment history from the public, you should limit the number someone can moderate to maybe five to avoid "moderation cartels", and you should install a team that objectively enforce the reddiquette.
(I'm a redditor for 14 years now, but rarely go there anymore)
> This reminds me of how Reddit changed basically overnight years ago to be all about politics.
Depends on the sub-Reddit. /r/sysadmin and /r/networking are on topic, as is a lot of the personal finance stuff I like helping out in. /r/motorcycles, television, and movies also stay focused as well.
Since you've mentioned r/motorcycles, let's not forget it's fun brother r/CalamariRaceTeam (one of my personal related favorites).
Jokes aside, you are correct that there are still really focused and entirely non-political subreddits out there, and there are many of them.
But I don't think that the grandparent comment implied they didnt exist anymore. I think they were talking more about r/all, r/popular, and lots of big non-politics-adjacent-topic subreddits turning very political in a very short period of time (e.g., r/funny and some other default subs)
It was far less political in the past, now I visit the front page and it's all politics all the time. Note that I don't log in and I'm just browsing the front page, so it has nothing to do with me selecting subs.
The latest Gundam series (Witch from Mercury) that borrows heavily from Revolutionary Girl Utena is rather new and interesting take on the franchise, while keeping its signature bleskness and being pretty funny at the same time.
Funny to see this crop up—I've had my explore location set to Japan for the past few years and would strongly recommend it. I hated the explore tab, but don't speak a word of Japanese so it's a great way to avoid news. As such the actual content does even matter so I didn't notice the change mentioned in the article.
Folks knock on CCP's overzealous suppression of political news for political serenity, but it some virtues:
>Japanese users have compared this list to previous days where almost all trending topics were political in nature. The user who posted the list called the new trends “peaceful” and joked about how the curation team must have spend their time “sorting out topics like this every day”.
I've argued TikTok/Douyin's success is pushing peaceful content - stuff that survives the crucibles of PRC censorship - which unsurprisingly has mass appeal vs polarizing fringe shit fests. Obviously not all platforms should moderate like this, and hopefully not twitter, but it has it's "enjoyers".
It's pretty much always been like this. It doesn't resemble at all what tops the Trending charts in America.
I've been checking Twitter Trends here in Japan for the last ~3 months, prior to the Musk acquisition, and I've always thought it was fascinating how there's very little political discussion. I don't think this was related to the curation team being axed at all.
To be honest, I don't see any real sources for this beyond anti-woke types who comment on japanese culture from America. None of the japanese people I follow (who aren't anime types really) are remarking on this at all. All the Musk and twitter drama seems disconnected for them.
As another sample, I'm in Singapore, and the trends last night were about the American election, nothing seemed to be that different than before Musk took over.
Just living here in Japan, I've noticed that people here rarely talk about politics. Japan doesn't have the political division that America has; the LDP is by far the largest party with the most seats, and it's been like this for a long time.
Japanese people do talk politics occasionally, like when Abe was assassinated (that had many people worried about gun crime becoming a problem), but it's nothing like in America, where it's ever-present. They will occasionally talk about foreign politics I've found: many don't like China, for instance (which is understandable, Americans don't either), but domestic politics just aren't a big topic.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Japanese Twitter echoes this.
Of course, Japan has its extremists too, and also many people express more extreme opinions online where they have the safety of anonymity.
But in daily in-person life, you just don't see the extreme politics that you see in the US. Nor do you see it in the regular news outlets. The only really obvious political stuff you see here in-person is the annoying sound trucks blaring far-right political messages. But I haven't heard one of those in quite a while; maybe I'm in the wrong place.
If you think the Chinese government isn't worthy of derision, then you and I have extremely different values that cannot be reconciled. Do you also write these kinds of messages when people deride Russia?
Every government has their shortcomings but Chinese gov lifted hundred millions out of poverty, developed unrivaled infrastructure for public good and you think they're worthy of derision? IMO they're doing better than most government in the world right now, if you think they're worthy of derision, then the US and most western government is worthy of way more derision.
Could it be that thanks to Elon we are going to see beyond Truman's Show? What if people only wanted to be happy with their lives and comment their favourite series? Politicians were the nobility/aristocracy, journalist were the ecclesiastic class, etc.
They will never forgive Elon for that, he needs to become the antichrist. He needs to be destroyed by the system, otherwise what will happen to western partitocraties?
P.D. I wish to be out of the Truman Show too, cannot even picture a society less divided and more focused on its own wellbeing
There's no curation in Taiwan. Since coming here I only see "Taiwan" and #<random Chinese City> + "girl" trending. The latter is selling adult pictures or content or scams.
"I'm pretty sure Twitter's news feed isn't updated. We, the media, have been following the steps of creating a moment for our own article → contacting the Twitter curation team → reviewing it or not picking it, but I wonder if this work will make sense for a while."
These are not regular tweets, it was a feature specifically to allow reporting of news.
It looks like Moments were a curated list of recommendations by topic but specifically around news.
With topics being "Media, Pop Culture, Music, Travel, Politics, and more."
Assuming it's true something did change and affect the trending trends, could it be if Moments stopped happening, news just stop showing up, and people just stopped discussing the news?
Kind of makes me wonder what American Twitter is going to look like once our regularly scheduled post-election meltdown is over; but if true, $44B to turn Twitter into a smoking hole in the ground might just be the best $44B ever spent.