Why Twitter is a public space. And why it should be!
Today I caught up on an interesting conversation on This Week in Google between Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani and Mike Elgan about the structural openness of Twitter and why is breeds trolls. They made reference to this interesting post from Zeynep Tufekci about the differences between Twitter and Facebook and why Twitter was fundamental for the public to be informed about Ferguson and why Facebook cannot be trusted to do the same.
At one point, Mike Elgan made this analogy between throwing a party at your house or in plain street. If you throw a party at your house you get to invite the guests and you control the party, whereas if you throw the party on the street in front of your house any person nearby can show up and you don’t control the party.
Think about it! That’s the perfect analogy to a walled garden versus a public space! Your house has walls; only those you invite get in and you can throw them out whenever you feel they misbehaved according to your standards. On the street, on the contrary, everyone can roam and do whatever they like as long as their liberty doesn't conflict with yours. And you can´t control them. You can change sidewalk, you can choose to go certain places and not others, but you can’t throw people off the streets unless they misbehave according to collective standards that you yourself don’t control and don’t impose.
Now think about the analogy not in physical/spacial terms but in information terms. When you start a conversation on Facebook (or Google+, it’s the same), only people you know — your friends — will participate and you have the option to erase a comment you don’t like or block the person who did it. You can control the information flow. It is so because Facebook (like Google+) is a walled garden. It is YOUR walled garden, to be precise! In a way the information is your’s (well, yours and facebooks, it’s like a partnership!). On Twitter, on the contrary, when you tweet something you don’t control who may or may not respond and on what terms. The conversation is out there, flowing free and uncontrollable. The information is not yours and roams free in the public space. Of course you can block one “twitterer” if you feel he or she is harassing you. But that is like a restraining order and it does not affect the flow of the information that is already out there (or the ability of any person to tweet). Facebook is a private place controlled by you and Facebook. Twitter is a semi-public place controlled by Twitter, if and how the company chooses to do so. The disgusting trolling of Robin William’s daughter is a pressure on Twitter to exercise control. The outstanding public service performed by Twitter on the reporting of the events in Ferguson is a pressure on Twitter to remain open and neutral. On the discussion mentioned above, of course, Jeff Jarvis, the journalist, understood this immediately!
On the previous This Week in Google podcast someone referred to collaborative blocking as a way to control trolling on any social platform that you wish remains open. For me that’s where the discussion should head. Like Gina said in the podcast, it’s inconceivable that such advanced technology companies like the ones we have today are not able to came up with the tools to combine openness and control. They are! And they will! Collaborative blocking may be just one of the ways to do so.
Get back to the analogy between the publicness of the street and the strict control of your home. What is at stake here, when you think about information on that analogy, is that this new information and communication technologies we now have opened up information pathways that did not exist before. We can all now communicate and transmit all kinds of information more efficiently and more abundantly. Like in the physical world, we need to have private places and public places, each with it’s own rules. We are devising those rules as we go. On both places! The rules of our private online places are agreed between us and the companies that provide the platforms on which we communicate, like Facebook. We call those rules “the terms of service”. That’s between each of us and the company we contract the service with (although I think we should give it a bit more attention than we do!). The rules of our public information places (Twitter, Google search, the internet as whole, for instance) should be agreed upon collectively, just like the rules that govern our public streets.
Think about a problematic teenager in your neighborhood that, not for the first time, has gone around breaking car lights and stealing antennas. When you see him roaming the streets in suspicious fashion, you might ring his house’s door bell and yell: “Hey, guys, Mike is at it again!”. On the limit, you may even call the police, if you feel talking to his family is not going to be enough. On the contrary, if it were David you saw roaming the streets, a nice and well-behaved kid, you probably would not even look twice at what he was doing. Now look back at the paragraph: you have a troll, you have a public space, you have gathered and accumulated information on the situation and its subjects and you have both social rules and legal rules by which to abide. In the abundant information ecosystem in which we live, we are constructing the last three as we go. Technology companies are inventing new tools to gather, accumulate and manipulate information about the people we interact with online and the situations in which we do so (for example, that’s where “collaborative blocking” comes on). Governments and legal bodies are creating laws to regulate what we can and cannot do online. And we, as social beings, are collectively agreeing on what is socially acceptable online and how it should be regulated. It’s this collective agreement that should determine the tools and the laws and not the other way around. Which is what often happens when you let your fear of trolls supplant your love of freedom! Online or offline!
All of us feel safer when we are at home than when we are on the street. Yet, we understand the street — a public space with it’s own rules, not imposed by us alone — is necessary for the community to function. The public space is, in a nutshell, the spot where we collectively decide what we want to be as a community. That’s why there should be a public space and that’s why it should be public! The world wide web, as a whole, is the public space upon which we exchange information. If it was not a public space we might not be able to exchange information. For example, a paywall and a censorship wall are two very different (with different degrees of “legitimacy”) ways of blocking that public space that is “constructed” by the free flow of information. And so is a non-neutral internet. It’s so much a censorship to block an information than it is to slow one information down regarding another. And that is why we would not conceive of a world wide web that was other than public. We would not accept a private internet. Well, for me — and, for all practical purposes, I think, for everybody else — Twitter is part of the internet! And so is Facebook, Google+, GMail, IFTT, Wikileaks, etc, etc, etc. The fact that Twitter is a private company pursuing profit is, in a certain way, a legacy. It’s just the only institutional arrangement we can think of (or the one we chose) to put in place a short messaging service available to everybody (in the world). The role of Twitter in Ferguson (as so many other times in other places, like Iran, Egypt, Japan, etc) is truly, to some extent, that of a public service, as is the search engine from Google or the social networking of Facebook or the video-sharing through Vine. These are all social places, that will be as public as we let them be. I think it’s in our best collective interest that they are as public as they can be, provided they continue to innovate, develop and function as well as possible, in the context of what technology allows. Maybe a private company like Twitter is as public as it can be right now. But I think our concepts of “public” and “private” will continue to be challenged in this way. If we choose to erect higher walls on our walled gardens, we may be protecting ourselves from trolls and other potential dangers. But we may as well be limiting the availability and the purpose of our public spaces of information exchange. If I may “vote” here and now, I say I prefer to take my chances!
