What are the opposing opinions and the differing ideologies that you're worried about being silenced?
Deplatforming and banning doesn't happen because of some abstract whim, so defending it in abstract terms sans context seems like it's overlooking a large chunk of the conversation.
Abstract freedom of expression is a prerequisite for preventing oppression by majority rule. It's fundamental to our core as citizens in the United States.
I think that's a stretch.
The problem with Twitter isn't the moderation or the "leaning", it's the sheer size of the thing. Any sort of decent moderation is completely impossible at the scales of Twitter, and I voted with my feet a long long time ago and frankly don't feel like I'm missing anything.
On the other hand, there are plenty of smaller social spaces out there that are well moderated, do not treat all viewpoints equally, but at the same time somehow manage to prevent their users from anti-social mob justice.
In Twitter's case I think you've nailed it. They're so big that effective moderation that pleases everyone is simply unmanageable. What that signals to me is that practically they should be considered a speech platform. Otherwise any attempts to moderate will feel like social cherry-picking. Once classified as a platform we should treat them differently, both legally and colloquially. Legally platforms would be absolved of taking responsibility for the content posted by individuals. And colloquially if people understand they're a platform, and platforms come with self-service tools to make sure unwanted content doesn't show up front and center in your feed, then I think we can collectively mature in our approach towards and response to "dirty" content.
Anyway I don't use twitter either and don't expect nor am I really all that interested in a twitter solution. I'm abstractly defending the social maturity required to tolerate diverging viewpoints without resorting to censoring and banning and extrajudicial mob justice because I believe required to prevent oppressive majority rule.
I'm not really sure what problem you're solving here. The social space is too big to moderate effectively, so hamstringing what little power the company chooses to exercise over its own space is supposed to somehow make things better? I don't see it.
I lack empathy not because I disagree with their politics, but because "getting booted out of a social space on the internet" seems like a strange non-problem.
Keep in mind that Twitter moderation is a joke no matter what side of the aisle you're on, and people leave not only because they got banned, or somebody they liked got banned, but also because of the perception that the moderators are asleep at the wheel and are too slow to take action - if they ever do.
Thing is, this is the internet. There are other sites out there. Most of them are accessible from typing something in your web browser. If there is a social space out there whose moderation you find more agreeable, why would you hang out someplace you're not welcome?
> We have to continue to protect peoples' ability to express themselves universally as technology evolves and provide platforms where they can't be bullied and destroyed by a riled up mob or institutionally silenced and de-platformed for dirty content.
You're not going to find that platform on Twitter. But you shouldn't have expected to find it on corporate-owned advertiser-friendly Twitter in the first place. The revolution will not be televised; brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions.
And yeah, we also need usable and effective filtering, so everyone can choose what to see.
This is naive at best. I know of no social space on the internet that has light moderation, no moderation, or primarily user-driven moderation that isn't also a dumpster fire.
This is the internet. There are uncountable social spaces on it, and the fantastic thing is that the owners of each social space are free to enforce rules as they see fit. If you are unhappy with the moderation of a social space, or if you get booted, find another one. Or, you could even create your own.
Heck, because this is the internet, you are likely keeping up with many of the people you know from a social space through multiple other platforms, and if you want to peace out from one, you can coordinate a migration.
The Internet is way large enough for all the spaces that we want. It just happens that I primarily focus on anonymity, privacy, and resistance to censorship. Both to protect dissidents, and to protect the ~clueless from destroying their lives.
Real name requirements deter dissidents and vulnerable people, not populist bullies. They even make it worse, because you can be more easily targeted by populist bullies who have your legal name than if everyone is using pseudonyms.
If anything we should make it harder to associate internet users with real people to deter this type of in-person harassment from spilling over from the internet.
That's where I'm coming from, for sure.
There's also the element of making the reputation war bi-directional. If somebody can trash my reputation without staking theirs, that's pretty harmful and toxic, except in exceptional cases. I think a structure where people steak their reputations when attacking others by virtue of reputation not being a commodity would help "keep things real". On the flip side, a vulnerable person shouldn't be protected just because they're vulnerable. If they're being oppressed then they may steak their reputation or find someone else to do it for them, but they don't get an easy out just because they're perceived as vulnerable.
In practice starting over was. For almost all of human history, no matter how bad things turned against you where you were, you could pick up and go somewhere else. You would have to start over from nothing in a place where no one knew you, but at least you wouldn't have to deal with having negative a billion social points forever because of some slanderous allegations that were all anyone would talk about in your home town before slamming the door in your face.
Which you're obviously taking away if someone can effectively move a thousand miles away but still can't change their name, because then any slander would follow you everywhere.
> I think a structure where people steak their reputations when attacking others by virtue of reputation not being a commodity would help "keep things real".
This doesn't actually resolve the asymmetry, because there are a great many people whose reputations aren't worth anything to begin with, or who are too young to realize that they are.
You also still have the problem that reputations are community-specific. If someone is a vicious extremist in a community of vicious extremists, anti-social behavior against outsiders improves their reputation within their community. They may regret it later when they grow up and tire of that lifestyle, but that doesn't stop them at the time. It may even make it worse, because once they've trashed their own reputation among reasonable people by behaving badly, they can't get a do-over and their best option becomes to continue to behave badly and stay in the community where that gets rewarded.
> On the flip side, a vulnerable person shouldn't be protected just because they're vulnerable. If they're being oppressed then they may steak their reputation
It's not about reputation in that context, it's about safety. Democracy advocates in China get arrested or worse. Any system that rate limits pseudonyms has got to be mapping them to real people to determine whether you have one already, but the existence of that mapping is the thing that compromises their safety when their oppressors use it to find them.
> or find someone else to do it for them
So you have a dozen Democracy advocates in China. None of them can use their own name or they'll be arrested. If they use the name of one of their compatriots, they get arrested instead, so how does that help?
Also, "vulnerable persons" aren't people who feel vulnerable, as in being emotionally insecure. They're people who are vulnerable, given their circumstances. For example, Hong Kong residents who advocate independence from China. Or male homosexuals in Saudi Arabia and some African countries.
The cypherpunks list comes pretty close. I don't believe that anyone has ever been banned, and there's no censorship. But yes, there are no ~modern social media like that. Perhaps Notabug could become that, once peers exist.
Dumpster fires aren't problematic if you can filter well enough. And sometimes they're good for lulz :)
Also, mobs do go after you for your online speech, so the possibility of a platform that keeps your speech up does not preclude the possibility (and fact) of censorship
It's true that CMU researchers deanonymized onion services and their users by exploiting the relay early bug, and then produced data to the FBI. However, site owners and users would have been safe if they had protected themselves better. By reaching Tor through nested VPN chains, and by using firewall rules or Whonix to prevent leaks around Tor.
I'd be careful about mentioning filtering.
I just remembered that there was a Reddit Masstagger that helped folks with that filtering, but people got really upset about how it infringed on free speech and might have even gotten Google or Mozilla to remove it from the extension store.
I think there might have also been some for Twitter, which I imagine would have elicited a similar reaction.
Also, any software tool that can be removed by someone else is broken by design. But yeah, maybe that's why there aren't any useful tools for using Twitter :(
Simple. There's people agitating for free speech on idealistic terms, and then there's people agitating for free speech because they have an agenda and want a captive audience.
You can even see it in this comment thread. Take a look around and see if you can find any greyed-out comments that are arguing against the pro free-speech crowd. Down-voting is censorship via mob rule, so that should be twice as distasteful, but yet you see greyed out comments. The folks doing that are the latter, and not the former.
I don't want filtering that's imposed by sites or their users. I want filtering that's implemented locally. I'm OK with opt-in filter lists, such as those used by ad-block extensions, as long as they can easily be customized. But I'm not OK with server-based filter rules that prevent me from ever seeing stuff.
On HN, I have "show dead" enabled, and I occasionally vouch for dead comments.
Edit: typos
You generally gravitate towards down-voting unhelpful, out-of-place, or in some way inaccurate content not simply content you don't agree with, BTW. More often than not I see comments start to turn grey because they miss the point and/or aren't really useful contributions to the discussion. Good points, despite the position being argued, tend to remain opaque.
If one fails to stay within the boundaries of HN's Overton Window, you run a high chance of being rate-limited for "starting flame wars", regardless of whether you were the one who actually started it. What comes after that I'd rather not find out so I try to keep my opinions to myself as much as possible. Whether downvotes are used to detect instances of dissenting opinions is unknown, but it's one of the most obvious ways to discover it I'd think.
> ...not simply content you don't agree with, BTW
You do not actually know this, it is a heuristic prediction. Even getting a half-accurate feel for that would require access to voting data and a lot of time reading over downvoted comments.
People often do not even know why they themselves are doing many things, such is the nature of the human mind, that evolved to optimize for speed over accuracy.
* Slaveowners deserved to die
* John Brown is an American hero
* Police & large-corporate property constitue legitimate political targets during protests
etc.
Essentially reddit wants to restrict the scope of permissible discourse to the same region allowed on mainstream news websites: support of neoliberal capitalism with debate focused on how overtly racist the system should be.
The thing is, I don't think the solution is to force Reddit to host those kinds of subreddits - the solution it to find or create a different social space. Alternatives to those spaces exist, you just have to look for them.
He captured Harper's Ferry, with his nineteen men so few, And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled thru and thru; They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew, But his soul is marching on."