Among other social networks, the PSF @PSF-Board actively publishes news and updates to its X/Twitter account (here is an unofficial mirror for those like me who don’t have a X account).
Twitter/X has always had issues around moderation, harassement and hate speech, but lately it has been repurposed into a huge disinformation and propaganda machine in favor of far right ideas and movements.
A social network’s worth and influence is directly correlated to its number of active users and their followers (the PSF’s account has 600k followers, which is a lot). This poses an ethical conundrum for people/orgs still active on X; it also seems heavily at odds with the PSF’s diversity goals.
(Other organizations in the Python open source ecosystem have already moved away. For example, PyData Paris and my employer, QuantStack, have just stopped any activity on X)
As far as I understand, there are recommendations around leaving X such that the message is heard without letting others hijack one’s account.
Hi there- thank you for starting this discussion! We know that many community members share your concerns. Our activity/presence on X has been in discussion periodically for some time, and more actively in the past few months. We are working internally on how to proceed and hope to enact changes to our social media approach within the next couple of months. We appreciate and value the feedback while we work on our updated approach!
One could equally take the position that diversity goals are supported by trying to meet people where they at. Offer posts on multiple forums (x, mastadon, threads, …) and let people go where they want.
The PSF should not be taking political stances. That isn’t its core mission. What is its mission is to promote Python around the world. The mission does not include judging groups of people or excluding them because their politics don’t align with yours.
At this point, staying on X is just as much a political act as leaving it. In any case it’s been hemorrhaging users for a while for all sorts of reasons.
I don’t think either staying or leaving are particularly meaningful political acts, but if leaving is considered that way then staying must be too. Inaction is still making a choice.
I agree with Zeke. A bit of Googling yields pages that suggest that X has around 600m users and that Bluesky has around 30m. if the PSF wants to reach people, it seems bad to abandon a large audience for a small one.
It seems that Antoine is saying that X is not censored in a way that suits him. It seems that many people have a different opinion.
If numbers are being taken into account I think it would be better to base it off engagement, not theoretical maximum user count.
For example, X/Twitter’s algorithm is known to demote posts that would lead users off the site. I’m not sure if the PSF posts links or would like to. But if so, being at least available on other social media sites might see better engagement.
Can’t say I care what the PSF (or any other entity or person) does or doesn’t do on X/Twitter, because I don’t use it at all. Or any other “social media” site other than Facebook (which, I’m told, is still by far the largest such site). I sampled them years ago (long before Musk took over Twitter), and found no attraction - “what a cesspool of incivility, partisan political propaganda, and outright lies” all along.
So my real comment here is about Facebook, where a “Python software Foundation” page was created about 3 years ago, but appears never to have posted anything. Since it has only 5 followers (I’m one!), I assume it’s an inauthentic page, and suggest that the PSF should press Facebook to close it (or take it over), before it suddenly starts posting damaging stuff (“quiet” pages on Facebook are often part of devious tricks):
For many of the reasons cited in previous posts, the PSF should consider archiving all of its existing X/Twitter content in a safe, permanent, and accessible location. The X/Twitter account can then be deactivated in a manner that prevents it from being captured and used inappropriately.
In addition to what has been stated here earlier, we should recognize that those who are in control of X/Twitter are in a position to reconfigure the platfrom in a manner that features content that they like, and obfuscates, in some manner, content that they dislike. This could include how they handle PSF content. Their public actions suggest to me that they would be prone to doing so.
Moving away from X/Twitter need not be viewed primarily as a political statement. Rather it would constitute a practical action aimed at protecting the members of the Python community from potential abuse.
Since I don’t do more with X than rarely browse, maybe I’m missing something, but when I look at the PSF’s feed there, for all the world it looks like an announce-only bulletin board. Does X, e.g., pop up random posts from other X accounts when more active users browse the PSF’s account? It’s hard to believe that people find the PSF’s X feed offensive in any way, and I saw not a hint of the “far right ideas and movements” we’re supposedly trying to spare PPF fans from being exposed to.
If, e.g., people follow Elon Musk on X too, knowing they’re going to find his tweets offensive, well, that’s their choice. Or does Musk force his tweets on X users? I haven’t seen that, but don’t know.
Again, it’s all the same to me which which non-PSF sites the PSF posts announcements on, because I won’t see them regardless. What I can’t know - or guess - is the effects losing its 677K X followers would have on the PSF’s missions. That’s a whole lot of followers for such a small and niche non-profit. I’m at a loss to understand what tangible benefit could be gained by taking the presumably non-zero risk of giving them up.
What I know for sure is that when a source I follow on Facebook announces they’re leaving because they find FB’s policies too oppressive, I’ve never yet bothered to endure the hassle of following them to their new host. I enjoyed following, e.g., the sequence of “Police the Police” pages (focusing on police brutality in the US), and North Korean state media pages (I’m a longtime fan of propaganda of all kinds), but with no more than “I’d rather see it, but won’t miss it much” enthusiasm. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
So that’s (“discover more”) something a user has to explicitly click on to risk being exposed to tweets from sources they haven’t followed? I haven’t seen that option at all, myself. For example, if people don’t want to risk being on X, I don’t see anything like that in the “unofficial mirror” @pitrou linked to in the original post.
Perhaps the option only shows up if there are replies to a tweet? If so, most PSF posts don’t get replies - they’re announcing stuff, not looking for debates.
So that’s something a user has to explicitly click on to risk being exposed to tweets from sources they haven’t followed?
I haven’t seen it directly inserted into a specific users feed, but if you click to see any kind of replies, including a tweet thread by a user, that you can be exposed to that feature. I would personally consider this explicit opt in.
Perhaps the option only shows up if there are replies to a tweet? If so, most PSF posts don’t get replies - they’re announcing stuff, not looking for debates.
The “discover more” shows up with no replies to a given tweet, I have seen it many times, and occasionally with jarringly different topics from sources I would consider to be extreme and distasteful. It was one reason I largely disengaged from that platform.
My anecdotal experience is many large social media sites specifically gate “annoying” features, such as ads, and showing you other parts of the site to try and keep you more engaged, based on how much you use that site. For example I never see any adverts on TikTok, and I rarely use it. Whereas I started using Instagram a lot more and saw a huge increase in the number of ads it started showing me. This may be one explanation why you don’t see this feature much.
Rings true! Good catch. For another example, I essentially never saw ads on YouTube before I started it to use it heavily to “catch up” on a musical genre that caught my fancy.
So I’m willing to believe that my X experience is nothing like other peoples’. In fact, I’ve never seen an ad yet on X either.
The PSF content that is currently there looks informative and beautiful to me as it is now. Thanks are deserved by all who have been crafting it! However, the following was written out of concern for what may happen in the future:
It’s still early in the current political cycle. Maybe nothing harmful at all will happen to our content. So, we could either wait and see, or make a change now, with the choice based on a general consensus. However, it would be greatly disappointing to realize, at some time in the future, that X/Twitter had begun to phase in a policy of either relegating such things as statements that PSF may post about an inclusion policy to dark corners of the site, or for them to grant to us (for free!), an automated smart (possibly brilliant!) “protective” service of placing advisories next to such policy statements, noting that they may be offensive or to be in conflict with current government policy. There’s lots more potential beyond just that.
So, if we remain with the status quo for now, let’s be ever watchful.
Yes, that’s always prudent. If it were up to me, I’d do “all of the above”. That is, start posting PSF content on whatever other platform(s) people “trust” (but with full awareness of that any private entity can change its policies whenever it likes, and none are actually immune to political pressures, despite what their PR flaks may say).
Then if X turns “even more rotten”, fine, the PSF will have already established a presence elsewhere. It’s not necessary to abandon X before building a presence elsewhere.
I can speak to years of engagement with Facebook: I follow all sorts of “fringe” pages, from ultra-far-right to ultra-far-left. In part because the edges of human psychology have always fascinated me.
Facebook policies absolutely shift with the prevailing political winds, as should be dead obvious to everyone now. But one thing has remained constant: pages “to the left” of the American Democratic National Committee, and “to the right” of the American Republican National Committee, both get picked on (demoted, suspended, kicked off).
They’re pandering more to “Trumpism” now. 4 years ago, on Twitter, Jennifer Palmieri, who served in high-level communication roles under the Obama admin, and in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, tweeted:
If a decision is made to move away from X/Twitter, an announcement of such action would undoubtedly need to be accompanied by an explanation. For some guidance regarding formulating this explanation, we could delve into to the content of the Python Software Foundation Code of Conduct (CoC) page. The point of doing so is clearly not that the management of X/Twitter must abide by that CoC. Rather, it is that the CoC page does a fine job of explaining how the Python community would like its members to be treated while they are within the territory of that community.
Note this from the Our Standards section:
The Python community is dedicated to providing a positive experience for everyone …
On that basis, I think most of us would want out if X/Twitter were to reconfigure into a form that negatively impacts the experience of those perusing the PSF content there.
So should an announcement of a departure be overtly political in nature? I think not. The language of the page includes that of respecting differing viewpoints. The political and social views of its members are quite diverse. This often presents a conundrum. But it is behavior, rather than thought, that must be governed. Think whatever we want, but be nice to each other. So, imo, justifying a departure from X/Twitter on the basis of how we would like our members to be treated would be best, and in accordance as maximally as possible with community standards of respecting diversity in (nearly) all its forms.
Would it really? I think a hypothetical X-it would stir the least shit by precisely NOT offering any explanation, especially not one referencing the CoC. The kind of people who would be triggered by the PSF leaving X would be doubly so by any mention of a CoC.
Like, would the point of leaving be to make a statement? If so, by all means make a statement. But if not, then… don’t. Just leave.