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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been solved with the concept of federation. If the social media system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own crimes, instead of blaming you.

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The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days, everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line so they can drag them into the village square for their stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be continually expanded by the day.

Just the last week a musician tweeted something dumb about making his daughter learn how to use a can opener to open beans, and within a day, the very successful podcast he did the theme song for, where his track was used for the past like 10 years disowned him and stopped using the song. Then he was kicked off the cruise gathering where he was good friends with the guy who ran it and has been a regular headliner for years.

The internet has created a culture problem that I'm not convinced decentralized social networks will fix. At best, if one was created that people actually used, we wouldn't have situations we've seen with Alex Jones and Trump where all the platforms unperson someone on the same day, cause they could still at least keep their audience on the decentralized platform.

Well, there's bad actors, and then there's twitter-assigned villains. Really bad actors, as in people who are doing things that are clearly bad enough for there to be laws against them, need to be controlled somehow. That's what most moderation energy goes in to preventing.

That's mobbing

The saga of bean dad is here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ManiacalV/status/1345870405085573...

The bean dad attention led people to discover these additional tweets which are much worse than his questionable parenting judgement in that particular thread, and that’s what drove people to stop associating with him:

https://www.thewrap.com/bean-dad-deletes-twitter-account-ant...

TBH when I first saw that he got chased off twitter for the other tweets I did think it was going to be some cringe “edgy” humour attempt à la James Gunn. But that “white homeland” and “mud people” tweet is overt and not acceptable racism.

Wow that’s some pretty important context. The parent comment is extremely misleading for leaving this out.

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