@JeremyCherfas anything I could help you with?
@kdfrawg I used to jump out of perfectly good planes for a living. Straight black, accept no fecking substitutes.
/@phoneboy
@phoneboy It just makes me so angry, and so so sad. Yes, what happened in Manchester was awful, an appalling act. Thing is that our governments do similar things every single day, all in the guise of 'protecting' us…
/@bazbt3
@bazbt3 102 dead, including 38 children, today in eastern Syria, by a joint US/UK air strike on a civilian target. 105 dead yesterday, mostly children, outside Mosul, in a deliberate op which maybe killed 3 mid-ranking daesh leaders. That's just two air strikes in two days, deliberately targeting civilians to, in the words of our leaders "keep us safe at home"…
@matigo What's the style guide for referring to 10C in an app/integration?
Ten Centuries?
10Centuries?10Centuries.org?
Anyway, sorry if this has dragged on overlong, but that's why I disagree that the ownership structure of twitter or any similar mass-market-audience service will ever make a blind bit of difference to the quality of the content of the service.
// @skematica @kdfrawg
We've already seen in the Facebook Files on the Guardian that what US corporates consider to be 'free and protected speech' is completely anathema to what most of the rest of the world would consider to be such.
Violent threats of sexual violence are protected speech.
Nonsensical pseudo-threats against politicians, are not.
With a few exceptions, those two results would be flipped on their head outside the US. Politicians and corporations are not worthy of or deserving of automatic lese-majeste, but common people are certainly deemed so worthy. This is anathema to the interests of the users of Facebook, Twitter et al. They demand that these interests be protected by their service providers, and the influence of these interests are pervasive. That's why Twitter took so long to provide anti-harassment tools, and when they did deliver them, they were so half-baked and useless.
// @skematica @kdfrawg
Now, the issue of the improvement of the audience-protection tools has to be understood in the context of the users priorities. If you, as an audience member, can ensure that the users' fake news and troll/sockpuppet armies don't pervade your timeline, then the service becomes distinctly less valuable to the users.
What twitter is selling is eyeballs, what they need to do is to guarantee delivery of those eyeballs to the users. If that contract is broken, then no service can be given.
This runs into the last of my theories - the whole free speech thang.
// @skematica @kdfrawg
Changing the ownership structure of Twitter won't change the character of the users - Thiel et al will continue to work on using their ownership of the userspace to sell their 'product'. As long as the users of the company remain Oligarchical Billionaires, that will remain the case. Changing the structure to give the users of the service full ownership will just accelerate that process.
Now, giving the audience of the service, the people with the @useraccounts, ownership of the service still won't achieve anything, at any level. Ownership by the audience will just be concentrated, in practical terms, in the hands of the users.
// @skematica @kdfrawg