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Comment by 4lch3m1st | Hacker News Reader

While I expect a lot of people to not agree with what I am going to say, I believe this is much more linked to the political moment than to Twitter having a problem with "handling controversy". This just feels like an excuse to find a way to filter human communication, at this point.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Brazilian and the latest years' politics headlines have been flooding Twitter around here too, but spurious political tweets tend to be much more boosted by people who don't agree with them -- they just feel that urge to answer it or create a hashtag against it -- than by people actually supporting said tweets.

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> This just feels like an excuse to find a way to filter human communication

Interesting. I've modded a fair amount of communities and the censorship argument to moderated discussion comes up frequently as new rules are implemented.

From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.

As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine (if you don't like the rules of my service, you are free to use someone else's). When it is government driven, censorship is murky territory at best, but not immediately bad and illegal/unconstitutional. The FCC in some form or another has rules against broadcasting certain types of content. You can't swear, you can't show nudity (or certain types of nudity anyways). That's government driven censorship, and its largely accepted.

Slashdot had a hands off approach for a long time. I couldn't go to their site without seeing a n-word reference in the comments because their approach was abused. If you go to reddit, facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram, or any other major site you run into astroturfing campaigns. We've grown to accept that Microsoft is good at it and Sony is bad at it. But somehow when AT&T does it, it's evil.

I don't know what the solution looks like. I just know that we need to evolve. Filtering communication is part of it. A bigger part of it would be finding ways to drive healthier habits.

The "evil" associated with censorship scales with the social importance of the medium. Xbox and PlayStation? Those communities could turn in to or do essentially anything and nobody would really be that worried. The entire internet? Now, that would be terrifying.

So, people don't depend on the Xbox network to regulate the social position of Microsoft. We have those discussions on other forums. But, if AT&T started censoring, what would stop them from working with other telecoms to standardise on a CoC where you couldn't criticise them? If you say, "because that would be wrong and people would stop them," then you're back to believing in limits on what it's right for a private corporation to censor.

So, the question is, where should we draw the line? Well, I'd propose that it should be deeply frowned upon to limit any discussions that server any social purpose; pressure release, activism, anything that connects society together and keeps it in sync. Unfortunately, those discussions sometimes use bad words.

By the way, there actually is an important (progressive even) social purpose served by individuals being crude. The bystanders watch, and depending on how the crowd responds to the bad behavior, they adjust their idea of how wrong it is to engage in the behavior. If you were to take bad words and hate entirely out of the information diet of everyone, we would all loose our socal resistance to seeing them. (Note: this is a great argument against filter bubbles as well.)

"As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine"

This is sort of begging the question though, since the question at hand in a way is precisely whether that is still a good manifestation of the free speech ideal. A good case could be made that scale critically matters; your tiny football forum of like a couple hundred people can make whatever rules it wants, and anyone who doesn't like it can easily just go somewhere else.

On the other hand, if Level 3, the internet backbone provider, hypothetically started censoring based on the content of what was going through their network, we'd have a free speech problem.

I don't think it's that shocking an idea that Facebook and Twitter are now large enough that they should be obligated to take a very light hand, basically the minimum the government permits, on the grounds that free speech is not something that should be killable by the simple expedient of making as much communication as possible flow through commercial entities, then freely applying arbitrary censorship to the communication because it's a private entity. It isn't even that far of a trip before the government "requires" things of the companies that produce this result with some clever plausibly-deniable requirements, and thus free speech is just mysteriously suppressed even though it's nobody's "fault". If free speech is that fragile, it's materially ceased to be free speech.

I'm pragmatic about free speech, not legally deterministic. I want the effect of free speech, not a legal form of free speech that yet somehow lacks the effects.

> From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.

I think this is absolutely true. But things get murky when you're talking about sites like Facebook that are a primary means of communication for a significant part of the world's population. Because there's no "public space" online, large social networks become the de facto public space. But because they're not truly public they can do things like censor speech that would normally be allowed in the town square.

I think that's what the top comment was trying to say. High profile controversy like that prompts many people to react (either to disagree or to agree), which generates traffic and therefore helps the platform.

In addition, just the huge media coverage of Twitter (in the slipstream of Trump) is like a massive free ad campaign.

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