Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the wp-plugin-hostgator domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114

Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the ol-scrapes domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1893
{"id":4494,"date":"2022-04-26T15:00:48","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/04\/26\/how-elon-musk-and-twitter-can-really-fix-free-speech-act-like-a-messaging-app\/"},"modified":"2022-04-26T15:00:49","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T15:00:49","slug":"how-elon-musk-and-twitter-can-really-fix-free-speech-act-like-a-messaging-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/04\/26\/how-elon-musk-and-twitter-can-really-fix-free-speech-act-like-a-messaging-app\/","title":{"rendered":"How Elon Musk and Twitter can really fix free speech: act like a messaging app"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/4\/25\/23041754\/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-messaging-app<\/a>
\n
<\/br><\/code><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cFree speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated\u201d is how Elon Musk explained why he spent $44 billion to acquire<\/a> Twitter. <\/p>\n

That phrase \u2014 \u201cdigital town square\u201d \u2014 has a long and messy history in social networking. Facebook and others have proven that throwing millions or billions of people into a single unfettered space is a mostly impossible and mostly terrible idea. But maybe we\u2019ve just been defining it wrong. In reality, a town square isn\u2019t a place where everyone stands in a crowd and yells at each other while advertisers throw things at them. It\u2019s a place where groups of people find each other and spend time together. And yes, maybe they debate matters that are vital to the future of humanity. Just not with everybody else.<\/p>\n

Twitter shouldn\u2019t try to optimize the public arena, a 200 million-person conversation that will never make sense. Instead, under Musk, the company should focus on the private side of the platform, a woefully underdeveloped system for messaging and communicating that could turn it into the best messaging app on the market.<\/p>\n

Twitter should invest heavily in making DMs a powerful, searchable, encrypted messaging system. It should finally roll out the much-rumored \u201clong tweets\u201d feature that lets people post more than 280 characters. It should continue to work on the Communities feature<\/a> so people can chat about things they\u2019re interested in rather than junking up their followers\u2019 timelines with stuff they won\u2019t care about. It should integrate Revue newsletters and focus on making Spaces more useful and reliable. It should worry less about ranking your timeline and more about giving you ways to talk and people to talk to.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Twitter is the internet\u2019s best platform for building an audience and then sending that audience to other places. You build an audience on Twitter, the joke goes, and monetize it on Substack or YouTube or any number of other places. Twitter should keep leaning into that because it\u2019s what gives the platform its cultural cachet \u2014 after all, what is cable news if not just a bunch of people in suits reading tweets? <\/p>\n

But most people don\u2019t want to communicate with 200-some-odd million people at a time, and even those who do don\u2019t want to only<\/em> do that. Instead of just focusing on connecting people to the public square, it needs to focus on connecting people to each other. Twitter should catch up to where Facebook and others have gone over the last few years: toward a more private version of the internet, where hanging out online involves less shouting your angriest thoughts into a teeming mass of thousands of equally angry strangers and more actually spending time with people you care about.<\/p>\n

\n