> Why would that be relevant? The truth and importance of a message can't be entirely determined by its source
You said it yourself, not "entirely", implying it is of relevance. If the information comes from the opposing political party, or from a troll farm, or from a different country as to the one the information is about, or from someone known to be against or for something, knowing the source of the information, the bias, and conflict of interests of the source of information is very important to determine your trust in the information.
> I fail to see how that would help. OP says they're accusing him of being an agent. That's something that could be done even without a parody account.
I'm assuming OP feels that not owning the verified account for themselves hurts him in some way and makes it harder for him to defend themselves against the accusations and slandering. The issue I can see in general is that it means other accounts could pretend to be him, and if he tries and respond to some claims, people reading can assume it's not truly him responding.
> So, no more news on Twitter? No more whistle-blowing? I mean, what if OP actually is an Israeli agent? Or perhaps you would like Twitter to actually investigate whether he is an agent, in which case you're agreeing with me, that Twitter would need to know everything that's going on in the world
You can still have all these things, but simply increase your bar for them. Basically, if someone says something that could be defamation or slander, they should show due cause, if they don't, then it doesn't meet the quality bar for Twitter and Twitter doesn't have to accept hosting the content and promoting it to others. One can still self-publish if they want.
The bar for due cause doesn't have to be very high either, you could simply say that justification must be provided, and only minimal assessment of the justification needs to take place, basically just check that a logical reason was provided, not that the reason is good or undeniable, but simply relevant.
This person is an Israeli agent
The above provides no justification, so it doesn't meet the bar.
We think this person is an Israeli agent, because they've been spotted talking to Jewish people in New York.
The above is a very stupid cause, talking to Jewish people is such a small indication that one would be an Israeli agent, but already it can meet the bar, because due cause was provided and now the readers can apply their own judgement to it.
So hopefully I showed how such a process wouldn't impact free speech, nothing gets censored or blocked, but potentially harmful and damaging to other speech is asked to provide a small amount of additional justification for the claims.
> I agree, Twitter is already not the ideal communication medium. I'm saying that adding censoring to the problems you've already listed takes it farther from the ideal, not closer. It's also unreasonable, because it asks Twitter to be the arbiter of truth
I'm not asking for censorship, I'm asking for mechanisms to increase the quality of the discussions and benefit the truth seeking process.
I literally spent like 10min thinking about this and already came up with three possible improvements. Imagine being Twitter and having employees that could have access to all their data and spend much more resources brainstorming on this problem, I'm sure they could come up with even more ideas.
1. Provide more transparency on the source of the information.
2. Provide a way for the targets of Tweets to provide their counterpoint.
3. Increase the requirement for tweets that attack a target to provide justification.
> I don't think it's a bad idea per se, but it seems like it would be easy to thwart it. And I doubt it would have helped OP if it already existed. He's not complaining that he can't reply to those tweets, he's complaining that the tweets exist at all.
He's complaining that he can't keep up replying to them all. Ya he's also complaining they were posted in the first place, but that's to your point, we're not trying to prevent truth from coming out, but for claims made to have more legitimacy, and for targeted individuals and organizations to have more recourse to defend themselves. All things that actually help distinguish a truth from a lie.
This has to happen in a way that avoids the reader trap. That is, most readers won't go out of their way to fairly evaluate the claims and search for counterpoints or research the bias and conflict of interests, etc.
Take me, I see a tweet, if a reply is posted to it a week later, very likely I don't see that reply. The original tweets message is all I saw and now lives in my subconscious as a data point.
It's things like this that makes it easy to use for propaganda, anytime you can silence your opponents by having more man power then them, like more followers, more people working for you retweeting things, the ability to flood your message over others, it's a system that plays to the benefit of propaganda.
