I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A very long time. In fact, I was introduced to it as a way for a bunch of friends to let one another know what bar they were about to go to. It seems to have strayed from that vision a bit.

I have not yet decided to leave it, although I’m starting to check in at Mastodon. Here’s what I use it for, in no particular order, and not without embarrassment:

• Quick check on breaking news. It’s by no means comprehensive, and what trends is by no means always important. But I find some of it worth a click even as a distraction.
• Quick commentary on issues of the day by people I follow because they’re good at that.
• Issues worth knowing about raised by strangers who know about them.
• Keeping up with fields I’m interested in by following people who I don’t know, as well as some I do.
• Engaging with people I otherwise wouldn’t have kept up with.
• There are people I know just barely in real life who I feel quite close to after many years on Twitter together. 
• Engaging with a low bar of social inhibition/anxiety with people I don’t know, sometimes leading to friendships. 
• An outlet for my stray thoughts and, well, jokes.
• A medium by which I can publicize stuff I write.
• A number I can cite to publishers as if people automatically read the stuff of mine I’m publicizing on Twitter.
• The Twitter I’m on is often very funny.

Switching social platforms is hard.

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danah boyd’s 2018 “You think you want media literacy, do you?” remains an essential, frame-changing discussion of the sort of media literacy that everyone, including danah [@zephoria], agrees we need: the sort that usually focuses on teaching us how to not fall for traps and thus how to disbelieve. But, she argues, that’s not enough. We also need to know how to come to belief.

I went back to danah’s brilliant essay because Barbara Fister [@bfister], a librarian I’ve long admired, has now posted “Lizard People in the Library.” Referencing danah’s essay among many others, Barbara asks: Given the extremity and absurdity of many American’s beliefs, what’s missing from our educational system, and what can we do about it? Barbara presents a set of important, practical, and highly sensible steps we can take. (Her essay is part of the Project Information Literacy research program.)

The only thing I’d dare to add to either essay — or more exactly, an emphasis I would add — is that we desperately need to learn and teach how to come to belief together. Sense-making as well as belief-forming are inherently collaborative projects. It turns out that without explicit training and guidance, we tend to be very very bad at it.

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This probably is not about what you think it is. It doesn’t take a moral stand about Parler or about its being chased off the major platforms and, in effect, off the Internet. Yet the title of this post is accurate: it’s about why moral frameworks don’t help us solve problems like those posed by Parler.

Traditional moral frameworks

The two major philosophical frameworks we use in the West to assess moral situations are consequentialism (mainly utilitarianism) and deontology. Utilitarianism assesses the morality of a choice based on the cumulative amount of happiness it will bring across the entire population (or how much it diminishes unhappiness). Deontology applies moral principles to cases, such as “It’s wrong to steal.”

Each has its advantages, but I don’t see how to apply them in a way that settles the issues about Parler. Or about most other things.

For example, from almost its very beginning (J.S. Mill, but not Bentham, as far as I remember), utilitarians have had to institute a hierarchy of pleasures in order to meet the objection that if we adopt that framework we should morally prefer policies that promote drunkenness and sex, over funding free Mozart concerts. (Just a tad of class bias showing there :) Worse, in a global space, do we declare a small culture’s happiness of less worth than those of a culture with a larger population? Should we declare a small culture’s happiness of less worth? Indeed, how do we apply utilitarianism to a single culture’s access to, for example,  pornography?

That last question raises a different, and common, objection with utilitarianism: suppose overall happiness is increased by ignoring the rights of others? It’s hard for utilitarianism to get over the conclusion that slavery is ok  so long as the people held slaves are greatly outnumbered by those who benefit from them. The other standard example is a contrivance in which a town’s overall happiness is greatly increased by allowing a person known by the authorities to be innocent to nevertheless be hanged. That’s because it turns out that most of us have a sense of deontological principles: We don’t care if slavery or hanging innocent people results in an overall happier society because it’s wrong on principle. 

But deontology has its own issues with being applied. The closest Immanuel Kant — the most prominent deontologist — gets to putting some particular value into his Categorical Imperative is to phrase it in terms of treating people as ends, not means, i.e., valuing autonomy. Kant argues that it is central because without it we can’t be moral creatures. But it’s not obvious that that is the highest value for humans especially in difficult moral situations,We can’t be fully moral without empathy nor is it clear how and when to limit people’s autonomy. (Many of us believe we also can’t be fully moral without empathy, but that’s a different argument.)

The relatively new  — 30 year old  — ethics of care avoids many of the issues with both of these moral frameworks by losing primary interest in general principles or generalized happiness, and instead thinking about morality in terms of relationships with distinct and particular individuals to whom we owe some responsibility of care; it takes as its fundamental and grounding moral behavior the caring of a mother for a child.  (Yes, it recognizes that fathers also care for children.) It begins with the particular, not an attempt at the general.

Applying the frameworks to Parler

So, how do any of these help us with the question of de-platforming Parler?

Utilitarians might argue that the existence of Parler as an amplifier of hate threatens to bring down the overall happiness of the world. Of course, the right-wing extremists on Parler would argue exactly the opposite, and would point to the detrimental consequences of giving the monopoly platforms this power.  I don’t see how either side convinces the other on this basis.

Deontologists might argue that the de-platforming violates the rights of the users and readers of Parler. the rights threatened by fascismOther deontologists  might talk about the rights threatened by the consequences of the growth of fascism enabled by Parler. Or they might simply make the utilitarian argument. Again, I don’t see how these frameworks lead to convincing the other side.

While there has been work done on figuring out how to apply the ethics of care to policy, it generally doesn’t make big claims about settling this sort of issue. But it may be that moral frameworks should not be measured by how effectively they convert opponents, but rather by how well they help us come to our own moral beliefs about issues. In that case, I still don’t see how they much help. 

If forced to have an opinion about Parler  — andI don’t think I have one worth stating  — I’d probably find a way to believe that the harmful consequences of Parler outweigh hindering the  human right of the participants to hang out with people they want to talk with and to say whatever they want. My point is definitely not that you ought to believe the same thing, because I’m very uncomfortable with it myself. My point is that moral frameworks don’t help us much.

And, finally, as I posted recently, I think moral questions are getting harder and harder now that we are ever more aware of more people, more opinions, and the complex dynamic networks of people, beliefs, behavior, and policies.

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My old friend AKMA — so learned, wise, and kind that you could plotz — takes me to task in a very thought-provoking way. I reply in the comments.

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It’s good to have Hoder — Hossein Derakhshan— back. After spending six years in an Iranian jail, his voice is stronger than ever. The changes he sees in the Web he loves are distressingly real.

Hoder was in the cohort of early bloggers who believed that blogs were how people were going to find their voices and themselves on the Web. (I tried to capture some of that feeling in a post a year and a half ago.) Instead, in his great piece in Medium he describes what the Web looks like to someone extremely off-line for six years: endless streams of commercial content.

Some of the decline of blogging was inevitable. This was made apparent by Clay Shirky’s seminal post that showed that the scaling of blogs was causing them to follow a power law distribution: a small head followed by a very long tail.

Blogs could never do what I, and others, hoped they would. When the Web started to become a thing, it was generally assumed that everyone would have a home page that would be their virtual presence on the Internet. But home pages were hard to create back then: you had to know HTML, you had to find a host, you had to be so comfortable with FTP that you’d use it as a verb. Blogs, on the other hand, were incredibly easy. You went to one of the blogging platforms, got yourself a free blog site, and typed into a box. In fact, blogging was so easy that you were expected to do it every day.

And there’s the rub. The early blogging enthusiasts were people who had the time, skill, and desire to write every day. For most people, that hurdle is higher than learning how to FTP. So, blogging did not become everyone’s virtual presence on the Web. Facebook did. Facebook isn’t for writers. Facebook is for people who have friends. That was a better idea.

But bloggers still exist. Some of the early cohort have stopped, or blog infrequently, or have moved to other platforms. Many blogs now exist as part of broader sites. The term itself is frequently applied to professionals writing what we used to call “columns,” which is a shame since part of the importance of blogging was that it was a way for amateurs to have a voice.

That last value is worth preserving. It’d be good to boost the presence of local, individual, independent bloggers.

So, support your local independent blogger! Read what she writes! Link to it! Blog in response to it!

But, I wonder if a little social tech might also help. . What follows is a half-baked idea. I think of it as BOAB: Blogger of a Blogger.

Yeah, it’s a dumb name, and I’m not seriously proposing it. It’s an homage to Libby Miller [twitter:LibbyMiller] and Dan Brickley‘s [twitter:danbri ] FOAF — Friend of a Friend — idea, which was both brilliant and well-named. While social networking sites like Facebook maintain a centralized, closed network of people, FOAF enables open, decentralized social networks to emerge. Anyone who wants to participate creates a FOAF file and hosts it on her site. Your FOAF file lists who you consider to be in your social network — your friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. It can also contain other information, such as your interests. Because FOAF files are typically open, they can be read by any application that wants to provide social networking services. For example, an app could see that Libby ‘s FOAF file lists Dan as a friend, and that Dan’s lists Libby, Carla and Pete. And now we’re off and running in building a social network in which each person owns her own information in a literal and straightforward sense. (I know I haven’t done justice to FOAF, but I hope I haven’t been inaccurate in describing it.)

BOAB would do the same, except it would declare which bloggers I read and recommend, just as the old “blogrolls” did. This would make it easier for blogging aggregators to gather and present networks of bloggers. Add in some tags and now we can browse networks based on topics.

In the modern age, we’d probably want to embed BOAB information in the HTML of a blog rather than in a separate file hidden from human view, although I don’t know what the best practice would be. Maybe both. Anyway, I presume that the information embedded in HTML would be similar to what Schema.org does: information about what a page talks about is inserted into the HTML tags using a specified vocabulary. The great advantage of Schema.org is that the major search engines recognize and understand its markup, which means the search engines would be in a position to constructdiscover the initial blog networks.

In fact, Schema.org has a blog specification already. I don’t see anything like markup for a blogroll, but I’m not very good a reading specifications. In any case, how hard could it be to extend that specification? Mark a link as being to a blogroll pal, and optionally supply some topics? (Dan Brickley works on Schema.org.)

So, imagine a BOAB widget that any blogger can easily populate with links to her favorite blog sites. The widget can then be easily inserted into her blog. Hidden from the users in this widget is the appropriate Schema.org markup. Not only could the search engines then see the blogger network, so could anyone who wanted to write an app or a service.

I have 0.02 confidence that I’m getting the tech right here. But enhancing blogrolls so that they are programmatically accessible seems to me to be a good idea. So good that I have 0.98 confidence that it’s already been done, probably 10+ years ago, and probably by Dave Winer :)

Ironically, I cannot find Hoder’s personal site; www.hoder.com is down, at least at the moment.

More shamefully than ironically, I haven’t updated this blog’s blogroll in many years.

My recent piece in The Atlantic about whether the Web has been irremediably paved touches on some of the same issues as Hoder’s piece.

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Dennis Tenen has an excellent post reminding people that calling Reddit a community is at best sloppy. I have committed this sloppiness, although at times I do try to be more careful, because I fundamentally agree with Dennis on this. In fact, I resist calling anything on the Net a community because it’s a word worth preserving, although I’m afraid it has already slipped its moorings and has floated away from its original meaning.

I think of communities in their traditional sense as being people who care about each other more than they have to. Even so, Adrienne Debigare [twitter:adbigare] and I recently wrote about Reddit at HBR.org, and we use the word “community” 32 times. We do, however, try to clarify our sloppiness toward the beginning:

[Reddit] is often talked about as a community, but its scale—169M unique visitors a month—stretches that term. Rather, it’s helpful to think of it not just as a community but as a culture that springs from a set of values and a form of discourse.

Adrienne and I also did a Radio Berkman podcast on this topic, and may have been much sloppier.

Dennis does a more precise job. He notes that a community typically: [1] is a social entity, [2] that occupies some contiguous stretch of real or virtual space, and [3] will usually “share a value system, which in turn manifests itself in specific customs, norms, and modes of governance.”

The pedant in me wants to fiddle with that, but Dennis isn’t arguing about the application of a term. He’s pointing out that it’s a mistake to think that Reddit is a single community, a single culture, a single set of people who share the same values, or whatever terms we want to use. Reddit “can be better described as a platform that facilitates a range of activities: some communal in nature, some commercial, and other simply private.”

Dennis is right.

But I think there are some weak ways in which it make sense to talk about a Reddit culture, even while recognizing that there is nothing one can say about values, discourse, or content that would be true of each of Reddit’s tens of thousands of subreddits. But there are at least four reasons to talk about the “Reddit culture” in the singular.

First, Reddit the Company makes a decision about what the default subreddits are on the front page, and I imagine that some very high percentage of users don’t customize that page. The company therefore has made a decision about what topics, values, and forms of discourse will stand for Reddit.

Second, contributors to those default subreddits, and to others, sometimes express a sense of identity, as Dennis notes. You can be a redditor. You can be a good redditor or a bad one. Of course this identity is fluid and not uniformly shared. But it exists. It has something to do with participating generously, accepting some norms of behavior (will the OP deliver?), and appreciating particular values that are assumed to be Reddit’s. These values include things like: valuing what is perceived as free and open speech, responding to challenges with some type of reasoned answer rather than mere assertions or hostility, etc. I’m not saying that Reddit lives up to these; there are deeply troubling gender issues, for example. But to say that someone is a true Redditor is to say something.

Third, the company has expressed political opinions, and has engaged with the “community” directly, responsively, and as equals-in-culture. (Clearly, that’s not been the case in the recent brouhaha.) That is, the company has expressed itself as a culture.

Fourth, the software itself enacts a set of values. Of course it can be used in ways contrary to those values, but it tends toward certain values. For example, it promotes unfiltered speech or speech filtered by the community and its mods; it gives every user equal upvotes or downvotes; it enables digressions from a thread without cost; it encourages linking out to the Web rather than assuming everything interesting is within its boundaries; it generally respects the user by not plastering itself with ads; it encourages pseudonymous speech; it assumes that the “community” will decide for itself which topics are interesting enough to merit creating a new subreddit; it is open source code.

None of these warrant us calling Reddit a single culture, much less a community. I agree with Dennis. I just want to leave room for also talking about Reddit as a culture, or at least as having something like a dominant culture, even as we always append Dennis’ caveats. As he writes, since “Reddit is not a community, then there is no reason for us to expect a uniform set of responses or behaviors from it as a whole. ” That is definitely a mistake we would be wise not to commit.

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Amazon is refusing to post reviews when its algorithms sense a personal relationship between the author and the reviewer. Amazon says, “We are removing your reviews because you know the author personally,” according to Chris Morran at The Consumerist.

The intent is fine. A review is likely to be swayed by a personal friendship. That’s why some of us disclose friendships when posting reviews at Amazon.

But, it would help if Amazon clarified what “knowing an author personally” means. In a networked world, that is an incredibly vague description.

After that, here are some suggestions that I think would help matters while preserving the policy’s good intentions:

1. Flag reviews by people with personal relationships, but don’t remove them. They may in fact shed special light on the work being reviewed.

2. Allow reviewers to flag their own reviews, and to describe their relationships. E.g., “We are colleagues,” “She’s a lifelong friend,” “We were close friends until I moved 12 yrs ago,” “We’ve been on panels together,” “We were friends until the lying bastard done me wrong.”

3. Do not count the ratings by such people in the overall total.

4. Provide some avenue of appeal when the algorithm goes wrong.

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Atlantic.com has just posted an article of mine that re-examines the “Argument from Architecture” that has been at the bottom of much of what I’ve written over the past twenty years. That argument says, roughly, that the Internet’s architecture embodies particular values that are inevitably transmitted to its users. (Yes, the article discusses what “inevitably” means in this context.) But has the Net been so paved by Facebook, apps, commercialism, etc., that we don’t experience that architecture any more?

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I’ve posted at Medium a list of the 11 questions CNN asked Bernie Sanders and the top 11 questions at a Reddit AMA with him two days later.

There’s no question in my mind that Reddit’s questions are better in any relevant sense of the term. How typical was the godawful CNN interview? Based on my watching a lot of CNN, I’d say it was particularly bad, but not atypical.

The post has provoked some interesting comments by journalists and others.

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The project with Doc that I mentioned is a new set of clues, following on The Cluetrain Manifesto from 16 years ago.

The clues are designed as an open source publishing project: The text is in the public domain, and we’re making the clues available at Github in various computer-friendly formats, including JSON, OPML and XML.

We launched this morning and a happy hell has broken loose. So I’m just going to posts some links for now. In fact, I’m copying and pasting from an email by Doc:

• @DaveWiner’s listicle version of New Clues (at listicle.io, one of his many creations).
• Dave’s blog post on New Clues, and working with Doc and me.
• New Clues on Medium’s Backchannel (courtesy of @StevenLevy).
• @Cluetrain on Twitter. Also @dweinberger and @dsearls
• The New Clues group page on Facebook
• Halley Suitt’s interview with Doc and me at the Globe’s BetaBoston
• Doc’s blog.

Gotta run…

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Here’s a four-minute video from July 13, 2003, of Zack Rosen describing the social networking tool he and his group were building for the Howard Dean campaign. DeanSpace let Dean supporters connect with one another on topics, form groups, and organize action. This was before Facebook, remember.

This comes from Lisa Rein’s archive. I’m sorry to say that I’ve lost touch with Lisa, so I hope she’s ok with my uploading this to YouTube. The talk itself was part of iLaw 2003, an event put on every couple of years or so by the Berkman Center and Harvard Law.

(I think that’s Aaron Swartz sitting in front.)

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