Twitter is public, but it could offer a lot more privacy
Yesterday, Twitter issued a call for proposals to measure its “contribution to the overall health of the public conversation” so that it could help “encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking,” and discourage “abuse, spam and manipulation.” It’s the kind of high-minded request that you’d expect from a platform that presents itself as a powerful civic forum for the digital age. But measuring the “public conversation” isn’t going to solve Twitter’s central problem: that there’s a big difference between promoting a public conversation and creating a livable space, and Twitter might not be able to have both.
Twitter’s model of engagement is almost completely binary: you can take a veritable vow of silence with…
