Signal Founder on Shadowbanning, Social Media Companies "Curating" Information

I remember the first day that I was at Twitter. At the time, the most popular person on Twitter was Justin Bieber. He had more followers than any other person. Was that when you guys were trying to rig it so that he wasn't trending number one always? Because they did do that, right? I don't remember that. I don't remember that. Oh, really? Conveniently. Jamie and I were talking about that one day. Because they had to do something because if they didn't do something, Justin Bieber would be the number one topic every day, no matter what was happening in the world. I can believe that they wanted to change that because the problem was, at the time, Twitter was held together with bubblegum and dental floss. Every time Bieber would tweet, the lights would dim and the buildings would shake a little bit. Here it goes. They blocked me from trending. This is 2010. I'm actually honored, not even mad. He's also 12. Then I get on and see, yet again, my fans are unstoppable. Love you. Okay. People talk about the invisible labor behind that tweet. It was just kind of comical because when he did that, it's like my first day there, he tweeted something and the building's kind of shaking and alarms are going off. People are scrambling around. It was just this realization where you're just like, never in my life did I think that anything Justin Bieber did would really affect me in any deep way. Here I am just scrambling around to facilitate. What are your thoughts on curating what trends and what doesn't trend and whether or not social media should have any sort of obligation in terms of how things, whether or not people see things. Like shadow banning and things along those lines. I'm very torn on this stuff because I think that things should just be. And if you have a situation where Justin Bieber is the most popular thing on the Internet, that's just what it is. It is what it is. But I also get it. I get how you would say, well, this is going to fuck up our whole program, like what we're trying to do with this thing. What do you mean fuck up our whole program? Well, what you're trying to do with Twitter, I mean, I would assume what you're trying to do is give people a place where they could share important information and have people. I mean, Twitter has been used successfully to overturn governments. I mean, Twitter has been used to break news on very important events and alert people to danger. And there's so many positive things about Twitter. And if if it's overwhelmed by Justin Bieber and Justin Bieber fan accounts and Justin Bieber, if it's overwhelmed, then the top 10 things that are trending are all nonsense. I could see how someone would think we're going to do a good thing by suppressing that. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Well, why do you think they did suppress that? What do you think? You work there. Why do you think they kept him from trending? Well, I mean, I don't know about that specific situation. I mean, I think I think, you know, looking at the larger picture, right, like in a way, you know, it's like if you think about like 20 years ago, whenever anybody talked about like society, you know, everyone would always say like the problem is the media. It's like the media man. Yeah. If only we could change the media. And a lot of people in who were interested in like a better and brighter future were really focused on self-publishing. Their whole conference is about an underground publishing conference, now the Allied Media Conference. People were writing zines. People were getting their own printing presses. People, you know, we were convinced that if we made publishing more equitable, if everybody had the equal ability to like produce and consume content, that the world would change. And in some ways, like what we have today is like the fantasy of, you know, those dreams from 20 years ago. But in a couple of ways, you know, like one, you know, it was it was it was the dream that if, you know, a cop killed some random person in the suburbs of St. Louis, that like everyone would know about it, you know, just to do, you know, everyone knows and also that anybody could share their weird ideas about the world. You know, and I think in some ways we were wrong, you know, that we thought like, you know, the what we got today is like, yeah, like if a cop kills somebody in the suburbs of St. Louis, like everybody knows about it. I think we overestimated how much that would matter. And I think we also believed that the things that everyone would be sharing were like our weird ideas about the world. And instead, we got like, you know, flat earth and like, you know, and you have acts and like, you know, the stuff. And so it's like in a sense, like I'm glad that those things exist because they're like, they're sort of what we wanted, you know. But I think what we did, what we underestimated is like how important the medium is, like the medium is the message kind of thing. And that like what we were doing at the time of like, you know, writing zines and sharing information, I don't think we understood how much that was predicated on like actually building community and like relationships with each other. And that like just like what we didn't want was just like more channels on the television. And that's sort of what we got, you know. And so I think, you know, it's like everyone is like on YouTube trying to monetize their content, whatever, you know, and that it's the same thing. Like bad business models produce like bad technology and bad outcomes. And so I think there's concern about that. But I think I think like, you know, now that there's there's like, you know, these two simultaneous truths that everyone seems to believe that are in contradiction with each other. You know, like one is that like everything is relative, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, all opinions are equally valid. And two, like our democracy is impossible without a shared understanding of what is true and what is false. The information that we share needs to be verified by our most trusted institutions. Like people seem to simultaneously believe both of these things. And I think they are in direct contradiction with each other. And so in some ways, I think most of the questions about, you know, social media in our time are about like trying to resolve those contradictions. And but I think, you know, I think it's way more complicated than the way that the social media companies are trying to portray it.