A Modest Proposal to Fix Twitter

Since Elon Musk (a person for whom I have a lot of respect) is back to buying Twitter, here is my proposal for a really useful Twitter (or any other social media platform on this type).

Conditions for the New Twitter

• Only real humans are allowed to sign up.

• They are only allowed one account.

• The account would have some basic demographic information associated with it, though not much (very general stuff which could not identify people).

• It would be free.

• They can only post once every 24 hours.

• They would have to do the posting personally, no selling or lending of posting rights. No pure “paste and copy”. They would have to make some personal contribution to the post.

• They can post on any subject they like. That could span the range (from what they had for dinner to their opinions on international politics, and anything else that they feel to be important.

• There would be very little censorship, other than some reasonable standards regarding threats, personal insults, criminal behaviours, etc.

• They are only allowed one like every 24 hours.

• They are only allowed one retweet every 24 hours.

• They are only allowed to comment on one post every 24 hours.

• They are only allowed one personal message per 24 hours.

• Privacy would be rigorously respected, though aggregate information would be available to any interested researcher, whether affiliated with a larger institution or just working on their own.

I know that enforcing these rules would be difficult, or maybe impossible, but this is a thought experiment or an “ideal-type” case.

Advantages

What are the advantages of this?

• It would be a “one person, one vote” expression of public opinion.

• No group, political party, religion, movement, etc could artificially inflate their importance.

• However, a group could informally canvas their members to post on a particular subject. The fact that members would be leery of “wasting their posts”, would provide a counter-balance to efforts to unduly sway public opinion by any group.

• If people wanted to use their daily post to show their fandom of a pop star, political party, cultural product, etc, they could do so. But, in the aggregate, this would reflect the actual feelings of the population.

• Similarly for once-per-24 hours likes and retweets.

• The limitations would make the entire site more interesting for users, as the content would be refreshed every day with new ideas which would come from varied sources.

• One account, which is free and limited to one post per day, would give everyone an equal say.

• In other words, this would be authentic “diversity, equity and inclusion.

• The limit on posting would ensure that people wouldn’t spend inordinate amounts of time on the site, obsessively posting or getting into pointless comment flame wars. That would help with civility and ensure that people aren’t wasting their precious time, by becoming addicted to the site.

• This would also go someway to solving the problem with political polling (selection bias, response bias, etc), as it would be a sort of free-from rolling poll.

• Analyzing the data would provide plenty of interesting work for social scientists, which anyone could verify for accuracy, ideological bias, etc (though some might say that providing work for social scientists is of dubious utility).

Problems

What are the potential problems?

• Enforcing the rules, obviously. But as I say, this is a thought experiment, the actual implementation details would have to be worked out.

• Monetization would be an issue. Perhaps some advertising might be allowed, but the advert to actual post ratio would be maintained at a reasonable level (say one post in ten could be advertising). Since it is “one-post-per-day” there would be competition between advertisers, who would vie for having their post appear on what is equivalent to “prime-time” for the product in question.

• Alternatively, it would be a wiki-type venture, where donations would be used to raise the needed revenue.

This would be good for the phone system too. Imagine if telephone solicitors could only make one call per day – oh, what a wonderful world.

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