(2022-04-29) Levy Twitter Obama

Steven Levy: Barack Obama, once seen as the embodiment of a tech-savvy leader of the free world. On April 21, in a rare post-presidency policy speech at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, Obama addressed disinformation.

How do you create a convivial, or at least a non-destructive, environment while providing voice to all, even terrible people?

No one has managed to solve this problem as of yet, and perhaps it is insoluble. While Obama advocated for both regulation and new innovations, his suggestions for what should actually be done to increase algorithmic transparency and empower users lacked specifics

And that is kind of a commentary in itself. Obama’s medium was ancient: 63 minutes at a podium on a Thursday morning, delivering 7,000 words of well-shaped, carefully reasoned prose. If it was a Twitter thread, it would have gone on for 162 tweets. And to be honest, it was not one of his more fiery, inspiring acts of rhetoric

He announced this week that he’s inclined to allow people to tweet anything that’s within the law. (Um, legal speech includes porn, violent images, and racist slurs.)

Despite all of this, I’m not panicking about Elon’s plans for Twitter—yet. (Musk Buys Twitter) Nonetheless, the blithe bluster of his tweets are troubling.