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Comment by chiaro | Hacker News Reader

"I'm personally center left" ... <Reactionary talking points>

Hopefully I don't get dang'd by observing how common a meme this is.

Companies, public and private, have the legal right to take on whatever political position they have, and beyond having the power to control dialogue, there is no way they can abdicate exercising that power; it's unavoidably emergent from their technology that someone's tweet has to show up top when you log in. This extends to anyone that writes code connecting a query to some media content.

Since asking for Government intervention in this realm is highly illiberal, the exercise of this power is a matter of corporate social responsibility. And how the CSR shakes out around the use of a platform to encourage hate and violence of any stripe is a point of contention.

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"I'm personally center left" ... <Reactionary talking points>

They said "center left." That, by definition, means they're not going to be in lockstep.

So you're taking someone that effectively said: "I generally agree with Foo but some of their actions are not to my taste" and responded by finding them guilty of association with the enemy.

For the sake of argument, I'm ignoring the fact that the "reactionary" label is thrown around to mean a "contrarian" to the left's memes rather than a bonda fide political "reactionary" (which means something more specific than "contrarian" + "right wing").

SJWs, free speech, and safe spaces are all indeed reactionary talking points.

From Wiki: "A reactionary is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society"

Seems dead-on to me.

Well one solution is to take the reddit approach, where you allow different communities to mostly choose who they want to interact with on their own free will.

In twitter's case, one way to do this would be to give users more power over what shows up in their feed, and who they interact with.

Perhaps they could allow users to compile their own community block lists. IE, a group of volunteer moderators would compile their own block lists together, and then if you want to subscribe to the "Trump Trolls block list" then you can feel free to do so.

And the people who DON'T like your block list, can feel free to NOT subscribe to it, or subscribe to their own "liberal trolls block list".

That way everyone wins. The trolls can troll, but you don't have to listen to see them if you don't want to.

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