Platform Wars (part 2): Twitter & the Blue Check

If you’re just joining us, check out The Platform Wars (part 1).

Paying for a blue check on Twitter and Meta has radically shifted the online landscape. Some of these changes are good. Most of them are bad. But many of today’s news media commentariot are getting key issues wrong.

I’ve spent the last few years making the unabashed argument for critical trolling and it’s important role in political discourse. In this piece I want to trace the limits of our current social media rule set and its downstream societal impacts. Designing good communications infrastructure is not statecraft. And improving social media will not “solve” democracy. But it will bring us closer than what we have right now.

Ad-driven Models.

Lol are you seriously going to pay for social media? In the 2010s, society ceded its main communication network to an advertising platform. Much of today’s online social ills are a result of these ad-driven dynamics that ruthlessly incentivize controversy, sensationalism and divisiveness. (meme: This is the future libertarians want.) Advertising accounts for a staggering 90% of total revenue for Twitter and over 97% of revenue for Meta. Attention is highly valuable and it powers all of social media.

On today’s internet, great novels sink to the bottom of your feed and culture war clickbait dominates over all. Each user is competing in a race towards infinite scale. There are clear incentives to inflame as many viewers as possible to make your content go viral. The less dependent our social media platforms are on the indirect subsidy of advertising, the less these anti-social engagement hacks will dominate their design.

Reducing the degree to which big platforms are reliant on ad revenue will force them to tune algorithms away from outrage and more towards audience satisfaction. Basically, you’re going to get served less rage bait and more of the cool stuff you currently have to find on Substack, Patreon or similar web 2.5 sites.

Always remember — you don’t get “free-to-use” platforms out of benevolent social democratic generosity. Twitter and Meta are selling your attention to advertisers. To get around this problem you either need to pay for social media or create a public option (more about this later).

Human Moderation.

Lol but are you seriously going to pay for social media? For any platform that grows to a sufficiently large scale, real human moderation becomes cost prohibitive. Taking into account the very low labor costs in the developing world, even the vast resources of Google would run dry if they had to hire human workers to personally review every video on YouTube. When many lifetimes worth of content is uploaded every single day, there is a need for some level of algorithmic filtration.

A low cost subscription for human customer service on big platforms is likely desirable for small shitposters and medium size content creators. (Remember, the big accounts already get this for free.) For example, when podcast guest Douglas Lain, formerly of Zer0 Books, was shadowbanned on YouTube, he was unable to appeal the algorithm that flagged his content. The channel lost months of revenue and views for a decision that was ultimately overturned. A $5 monthly service fee for the absolute guarantee that a real human person will pick up the phone and review your appeal makes sense for both creators and platforms. Already, there is no such thing as shadowban on sites like Substack or Patreon, because everything is already monetized. These Web 2.5 platforms can afford to carefully review content appeals and are incentivized to retain their user base rather than deplatform.

In the case of political content, when an algorithm trips on a given keyword or image, we want to know that satire and edgy speech can be understood in their human context. Under the current design, criticisms are often flagged as endorsements of the very things they oppose. Posting memes that make fun of QAnon are clearly not showing support but they tend to get flagged anyway.

Before you ask — we can’t open source the algorithms. Filtration needs to be a black box and it needs to constantly change. The worst actors are always in search of exploits. If static algorithms were made public, the resulting memetic arms race would quickly turn YouTube into Stormfront.

The Blue Check.

I laughed along with everyone else at the early exploits of trolls with look-a-like accounts making public statements on behalf of corporations. Insulin is criminally overpriced in the United States. This type of critical trolling should be supported as a legitmate form of public dissent against a corrupt pharmaceutical industry:

But the downstream implications of this verfication exploit go far beyond plummeting stock prices. When world leaders threaten each other online, we want to know *with absolute certainty* that the statements are coming from these individuals and not radical actors impersonating them to stoke conflict. To be sure, anonymity plays an important role in political discourse and should always be allowed. But a system of trustworthy verification for state officials is also necessary.

Where the New Check Goes Wrong.

The crucial mistake of Twitter, Meta and others is to bundle all of these features together. Moving away from ad-driven models, affordable human moderation and trustworthy verification each have an important function independent of the others. They should never be linked together.

For example, anonymous political accounts should have the option to be unverified with affordable access to customer support that carefully reviews their legal speech. Conversely, politicians can refuse to pay for a platform (or to boycott Twitter) but we do need to know it is verifiably them behind their political statements.

Personally speaking, I have no big interest in Twitter. I don’t have a large account or use it very often. I don’t have a blue check (legacy or paid) on any platform. I’m happy to be a weird truth-teller in my niche corner of the extremely online internet. But I do have to live in a society where our political class and journalists are absolutely obsessed with social media. To that end, it benefits all of us to have a set of universal rules that do not bend under the shifting whims of an oligarch.

In a later part, I will discuss public options for social media and some of my preferred solutions. But for now, I will assume that big platforms will continue to be privately operated and consider solutions within that limited framework.

In principle, we should not be opposed to paying a modest fee for social media. But the way it has been implemented thus far is fundamentally flawed. These core functions need to be disentangled or we are doomed to repeat the chaos of the 2010’s.

Lastly, payments are here to stay.

Web 3 is on hold for the foreseeable future. But stripe integrations for pay-walled digital content, like subscriptions, donations and more, are generally producing a better media landscape. As much as people hate the idea of paying for anything, they vastly prefer it to the junk advertisers serve you on the For-You-Page.

Talking about digital economies is often a big hill to climb. So think of it like this — the United States Post Office (indisputably the greatest American institution of all time) had the invaluable foresight to ask you to pay for a stamp when you send a letter. Meanwhile, we send our emails for free and wonder why the internet is full of spam. Making everything “free” online has resulted in unhealthy dopamine hacks, political division and generally rewarded the most anti-social aspects of humanity. A small amount of network friction (such as a stamp) doesn’t exclude anyone but massively limits the infinite scale exploits of online advertising models.

I hope you find this to be a challenging and thoughtful assessment. Thanks for reading. In the rest of this series I will outline some further considerations I’ve picked up during my time in the niche corners of art, politics & tech.