It appears, at least in my little archipelago of Mastodons, that there's a Great Quote-Tweet debate happening.
One person I respect asked pointedly to see data that proved QTs were abusive. Since I've been researching affordances of social media platforms I pulled some bits and bobs out of my hideous pile of papers and thought I'd share some insights with y'all about this question.
Cards on the table: I think QTs are a net negative. But nothing's ever simple.
First and foremost, there's just not a lot of good research on this specific question. The idea that QTs are a sluice of harassment is kind of an intuitive canard at this point--and with good reason. Getting a hostile QT *is* an express maglev to Paintown.
But in terms of establishing how frequently quote tweets lead there, there's only a bit of data on the ground. It's often a small part of research into other, larger issues.
Let's first consider "Echo chambers revisited: The (overwhelming) sharing of in-group politicians, pundits and media on Twitter" by Magdalena Wojcieszak and colleagues--Andreu Casas, Xudong Yu, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker.
In short, it's what it says on the tin. They studied how Twitter users interact with posts by political elites on the platform to try and put some empirical handles on whether there are indeed "echo chambers" on the platform (spoiler: yes.)
Here's the relevant bit on quote tweeting, drawn from a large sample. Classifying how ordinary users responded to liberal and conservative elites' posts (journos, politicians, etc.).
If you suspected conservatives live in a tighter echo chamber, congrats, here's some data for you. But liberals' isn't that much larger.
And here we see that most QTs when directed at *out-group* members are negative. Overhwhelmingly so.
This may confirm our intuitions that QTs are often negative; Wojcieszak also argues that the ingroup sharing helps reinforce a certain amount of ideological conformity, even when positive.
But bear in mind the limitations. This is how us ordinary slobs interact with the powerful. Some might argue it's *good* that we give them a reality check, say.
This is the problem with this kind of data. Determining what it means is hard.
Taking a broader view, the evidence we have is mixed. Alice Marwick's "Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement" interviews numerous harassment victims and moderators; one cites quote-tweeting as an abuse vector.
In "Platformed Antisemitism on Twitter," Martin Reidl, Katie Joseff, and Samuel Wolley find evidence that QTs both amplified antisemitic content *and* recontextualised and neutered it.
But the truth is that this is always going to be hard to quantify. In doing this sort of content analysis on large data sets we're always in "is it a particle or is it a wave?" territory as we try to operationalise our variables--making them into things that can be counted.
The question of "what does this mean?" or "what should we value?" invariably gets into philosophical territory.
Which brings me to my next point--
There is every possibility that if we were to count up every QT and were able to objectively label them as harassment or neutral or positive in tone, we might find harassing QTs outnumbered. But then we get into quality over quantity.
What if the abusive QTs just matter more? What if they loom larger in the public consciousness? What if they generate more engagement? What if that engagement is itself largely abusive? (And this is the heart of the problem, by the way.)
The QT itself matters. But what *really* gets us is the second-order effects, which can be hard to accurately measure. This is the networked harassment Marwick describes--and she brilliantly covers how moral motivations often drive abuse--or the harassment campaigns *I've* studied. A quote tweet may flood with abuse in its comments, and it may also *inspire* more monadic abuse being hurled from all sides.
That's tough to measure, but it often overwhelms positive use cases in scale.
That doesn't mean the positive use cases don't exist, mind you. Nor that they're not important. *I* miss quote-tweeting a lot because of the way you could easily 'yes-and' someone worth amplifying and bring a constructive conversation to your followers.
Or as Reidl and colleagues observed, the ability to recontextualise hostile content and provide a robust counternarrative.
The question to answer is: is this worth all the downsides? And numbers can't answer that for you. Only you can.
Addendum: another qualitative point to consider is the psychological impact of certain kinds of QTs.
So, as a trans woman I find myself following a lot of other community members who frequently make a habit of QT-dunking on some bigot (indeed, I was just kvetching about this a little while ago on here). Recontextualisation is happening, an epistemic battle is being waged--and perhaps even won.
But constantly seeing the words of people who hate you? Not exactly ideal.
And that very issue kind of explodes the negative/positive QT binary. Because even a constructive or resistive use can have negative second-order effects. The panopticon of doomscrolling has many sources, after all.
So that's something else to consider, and something else that's harder to measure (a methodology using interviews would be a better approach here, for example).
I'm no expert, but you couldn't you share your thoughts on this thread (or any other interesting post) as a reply to the author and then boost your own reply?
😄 There is quite a bit of newbie advising newbie happening in general on Mastodon and sometimes the result is just cluelessness multiplied.
But I am loving my Mastodon experience, and I am so glad that Twitter's imminent collapse alerted me to its existence, even if I'm still stumbling around in the dark quite a bit.
My worry with that is that a response in the middle of a thread would be seen out of context, and
a. not all readers would click thru to figure out what I'm talking about, or
b. Someone would jump in the middle of a discussion without going back to the beginning to see what the context is.
I don't personally have a problem with QTs. They can be used to amplify both good things AND horrible things. Boosting something without context, IMHO, implies unintended endorsement (which is why I used to see so many bios on the Hellsite have a disclaimer: RTs do not equal endorsement). But anything can be abused.
I can see that.
I suppose one could start off with "I am boosting this because ..." which would put the comment in context and have an added bonus of letting the original author know why you appreciate (or disagree with) their thoughts.
But I recognize that is not the same thing.
(I don't have an opinion on quote tweets, but I have found the conversations interesting and appreciate all the thoughtful people having the conversation.)
@Liga @Quinnae_Moon @BenAveling @benjotron
There are many situations where that is the right response, and that is what I have done (on Twitter). There are times when that is not the most appropriate thing to do.
For every pat response of "just do X" there are uses for which that is not quite the right model. That doesn't mean QT is the right thing, either. Just that there are N actual operations and we're shoehorning them into K available ones with K << N. K+1 *can* be a bit better than K.
@BenAveling @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon
In my experience when such behavior becomes prevalent the nature of a community changes for the worse.
People stop trusting each other and when that's gone it usually doesn't return.
@BenAveling @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon
This is true. The thing is, giving a reply to someone you don’t know personally, and who most definitely not are following you, isn’t as effective as quoting that person for your own followers.
Personally I have only ever used quoting to highlight “look, this is what I’ve been saying all along, and apparently the experts agree on that it is happening” and thus spreading the word of the expert-not-me to my followers. I see that as a good thing.
It should be noted I don’t have a horse in this race though, all my Fediverse services (which then are not Mastodon) already have quoting implemented perfectly.
@BenAveling @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon is there something inherent in how qt works thats causes that difference? Is it due to the display format? The way timelines and notifications work?
Could required qt approval by the quoted account make it better?
Maybe every account could have a permission — qt me always, qt me if you ask my permission each time and are allowed to dm me, qt not allowed.
@BenAveling @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon
I think the effectiveness of the QT was destroyed when they started indexing them from the original tweet. For a long time, you could use it as a way of severing the conversation and just having a separate conversation about a topic.
But when you started being able to get an enumeration of all the QT's about a tweet, then the people who were supporters of the original tweet could easily find and go harass the people trying to have their own discussion.
I think any attempt to assess the goodness or badness of this conversational device needs separate analysis of the before or after of the decision to show the list of quote tweets under an original tweet.
@BenAveling @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon I've heard "Quote-tweets mostly allow talking ABOUT someone instead of TO them" over & over.
That's pithy but not what people object to. The platform fully supports talking about someone endlessly. You can mock them "secretly" on your feed or harass them privately in direct comments.
So, people seem sensitive to _hearing_ what people post about them elsewhere. Let's put controls on that visibility, the real issue.
@PixelJones @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon
It's about adding 'friction'.
Masto makes QT-like effects possible but actively discouraged, vs Twitter, where they are actively encouraged.
And that changes the conversation. Instead of pile-on QTs being easy and common, as on Twitter, anyone on Mastodon is on notice that if they do QT, then they really ought to be able to justify what they're doing.
@BenAveling @benjotron @Quinnae_Moon
But going w/ the artificial friction of making good faith quote-tweeting hard is lazy & dumb. Why not address the trolling behavior directly? (I'm a developer so can think of a bunch of ways)
Just one: Allow the original poster to turn off (or suppress notification about) quote-tweeting on their feed or on a post-by-post basis. This would be kind of a reverse content warning saying "No dunking on this post." #QT
@timmydownawell @Quinnae_Moon That's the old "just mute them" gambit, which deliberately fails to address the underlying problem with abusive QTs.
What *is* needed is a way to opt-out of repetitive boosts of the same damn post that flood your TL, or at least regroup multiple notifications of it, as birdsite now does.
@Quinnae_Moon Finally! I've read so many accounts that argued "QT enable [some positive feature] so we need them and they're good" while simply dismissing possible downsides or even assuming that those against QTs are simply "not in the know" of said positive features. Which is simply wrong, we all know that there are upsides to it—the difficult part is balancing them against each other. So thanks for this measured contribution that's no shouting match "But I NEED feature X and everyone who says it can be bad doesn't understand my need".
A few further points:
* Due to the federated nature & with upcoming better moderation tools I do hope that bad behavior w.r.t. QTs could be heavily sanctioned and thus limited.
* Maybe the solution is something different altogether. Maybe, instead of a QT have a contextualized-subtoot, where you (a) boost the original post as-is(!) and (b) have your subtoot visible directly after "linked together". This could disincentive abusive behavior, since you boost the original post. Or have some way of interactivity lock when posting QTs?
@Quinnae_Moon
As someone who was part of science communication / academia Twitter, QTs are so important to the way we do science outreach. It has really impacted the way I am able to impart things to the folks that follow me.
I can't just boost that nifty paper from Nature because that's not outreach. That doesn't help the folks that aren't in medicine understand what that paper means. I don't want to just boost information on vaccines, I want to talk about what's good about the information, what's not so good about the information. I want to point out what certain terms mean. I want to teach you about what I'm boosting.
I want people to understand my job in the clinical lab. How to advocate for themselves. Why this news article is bullshit and how to spot similar issues with the media blowing medical discoveries out of proportion. This is why QTs are extremely valuable. They help us teach.
@robotrecall
@Quinnae_Moon
It's an effort thing tbh. I spend my day in the lab dealing with COVID, flu, RSV, etc samples. It's stressful and I get paid shit all. By the time I get home I'm toasted. I'm lucky if I even eat dinner.
If you talk to scientists that do this, you're gonna talk to people are passionate about teaching people. The majority of us also are low on spoons.
I guess I just hung out on a completely different part of the birb because it just never was an issue where we were. I think it's completely unfair to expect the same result in a new space.
@warkittens @Quinnae_Moon I’m also disabled, so I get the spoons thing. But that’s a major part of why a dogpile can drain me so badly even if it’s a battle I sort of got to choose. They don’t have to have even slightly good arguments if there are enough of them. They just have to have enough people leveraging dangerous rhetoric even very badly that it overwhelms you.
If the defense against people who have opinions on other people for a living is exhausted scientists with no time who aren’t even focused on that aspect of harm because it’s outside their purview, then I feel bad for the scientists, and I am worried about larger issues, but my much more immediate safety concerns have to come first. No one steps in to help us. They’re either not concerned with that issue, or they’re too close and it’s too risky to get involved. We’re all alone.
So no, I don’t think that more work for the sake of other people’s safety is too much to ask. If it’s impossible, that sucks a lot, but still no.
Let's think about it this way — Nothing is stopping these people from copying a link to your post and doing the same thing.
Some instances put a preview of what you post, so it's pretty much like a QT. Some instances already HAVE QTs and it's not blockable. Anyone running Misskey has them.
That's kind of the problem with open source, people can just add features if they want them. And the way Mastodon works is that you'll never know because it won't render for anyone without that option built into their instance, it will just look like a link and OP won't get pinged. We went thru this entire process today as someone coded up the feature as a test.
What do you do in this case?
How does de-federation from outgroup (a.k.a. fascist) instances affect those ratios?
@emmah I can't say! Some? I think the issue for me is noting the large volume of in-group negative QTing, which is something I've become increasingly concerned about in both my academic and popular work.
So: defed from fascist instances? Great! Now what to do about the horrible things that, say, progressives and/or members of minority groups do to *each other*?
@pensato @Quinnae_Moon @emmah No technical mechanism.
You can provide equivalent variety (=for every poster, a moderator), you can constrain variety (=post that, and you-as-your-actual-self get booted off the system forever), or you can build a variety amplifier that lets relatively few people moderate.
That last one is not easier than strong AI.
"Community standards" is "equivalent variety", everybody agrees to moderate themselves and to pitch in at need. It's hard, but maybe least bad.
Why are you concerned about the large volume of in-group negative QTing? Is it growing?
Is increased in-group QTing a symptom of group facture?
On social media, is the GOP-fascist-Evangelical group showing any signs of breaking up?
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