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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

What goes around comes around. If Twitter wasn't so ideological to begin with then Musk may not have decided to meddle.

I personally would like companies to be less ideological in general.

EDIT: By less ideological I mean less interference on behalf of an ideology. Allowing all legally covered free speech would be the minimum interference possible by a company but not necessarily the maximally profitable position. Some interference may actually be a good thing - I think many companies have gone too far. My problem with companies being ideological is that they are signaling a willingness to interfere that invites substantial pressure from third parties to do so which can cut both ways.

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Is the argument that Musk will make Twitter less ideological? My assumption is that he’ll push for his own ideology. If so, nothing gets better unless you happen to agree with Musk’s ideology. If nothing gets better we’ve traded one echo chamber for another.

> the argument that Musk will make Twitter less ideological

Well musk seems to want Twitter to follow the principles of open and free discourses with less moderation.

So it seems like there will be less forced top down moderation.

that is an ideological position.

I don't think you understand what people mean when they say less ideological.

For example, would you call it ideological that the government does not arrest people for criticizing it?

Imagine if we compare 2 governments, 1 which arrests people for criticizing it, and another that doesn't. In the context of this comparison, the one that censors less people, most would call less ideological.

By ideological, people usually are talking about enforced ideology. So if you censor more people, then that is enforcing your ideology more, and if you have less censorship then that is less enforcement of ideology.

people call things less ideological when they agree with them more, that's all - if your views are unexamined then they look like a natural or intuitive position.

The idea that freedom primarily exists as a lack of compulsion is libertarian or neoliberal ideology. Your total freedom from censorship is somebody else's freedom to harass and send death threats - obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere or twitter devolves into 8chan, and oftentimes people call for a nebulous "free speech" or "anti-censorship" instead of specifying what particular speech is being censored that they think is legitimate. Moderation is essential on the internet.

If people think something is being censored and it shouldn't be, they should point to specific examples.

> principles of open and free discourses with less moderation

That is an ideology

> For example, would you call it ideological that the government does not arrest people for criticizing it?

Um, yes

no, they are just different ideologies, one in which you prefer more than the other.

In some sense but if a platform takes a neutral stance on the content within it becomes as "ideological" as a pinboard in a super market. So yes the platforms content may reflect the ideology of those who uses it most the platform itself as long as it does not interfere with what is posted to it would in my opinion less ideological.

That’s a really pedantic point to keep injecting throughout is thread.

Yes, technically it’s an ideological choice to NOT gather up various books at the public library and burn them. But in practice, it’s not ideological at all compared to doing the opposite.

> Yes, technically it’s an ideological choice to NOT gather up and burn various books at the public library. But in practice, it’s not ideological at all.

No, in practice it's very ideological, but it falls into a the blind spot most people have for broad consensus ideology. People tend to recognize something as “ideological“ only when a large group strongly opposes the ideology in question.

(The Musk case is different from the analogy you present, though, because of the ideologically loaded way rhetorical appeal to “the principles of open and free discourses with less moderation“ is used in regard to internet fora by a political faction that actually supports intensified censorship of lots of things, but also happens to want to promote lots of things that various large platforms have decided they don't want to be a megaphone for.)

> No, in practice it's very ideological

How so? How is it “very ideological” to NOT be burning the third book from the left on the first shelf in the library? Or the ninth one on the right. I don’t even know what’s in either and I spend roughly zero time thinking about my local library. I’m not even sure where the first shelf from the door is situated.

How is my (ongoing) choice NOT to walk over there and start burning a non-empty set of books “very ideological”?

I suspect if you were to enter the same library and light various books on fire, nobody hearing about your arrest would agree that you were no more ideological with respect to that library than I (or the billions of others who also did not chose to engage in that behavior).

OK, so the free speech versus censorship argument, let's go:

Speech rules exist on a spectrum from total free speech where you can threaten to murder someone or continually harass them, to total control where everything you say must pass inspection (say, letters out from a classified military base). Any position on that spectrum has tradeoffs. If you ban Nazis you are being censorious but at the same time, providing space for the people that Nazis hate where they won't have their existence constantly challenged. If you ban fake news and one side of the political spectrum puts out more fake news than the other, that side will accuse you of political bias. Where you draw the line is not an objective decision, it's one based on what you value. That's an ideological decision. Brian Armstrong banning "politics at work" is because he is probably a libertarian rather than a progressive and would rather shut up the political people at work so he can focus on making money without having his actions criticised. Twitter allows politics at work because it was founded by liberals and they allow staff to criticise the direction of the company. 8chan refused to censor their platform for ideological reasons, twitter does censor their platform for ideological reasons. Does that clear it up for you?

> Does that clear it up for you?

I find this bit deeply unhelpful for the discussion.

It’s clear from your numerous comments on this story, that you have an axe to grind. My comment above was to highlight how it was repetitive and annoying as a reader of the thread.

It was not a request for a longer expanded version of the same talking points with a condescending swipe at the end.

I comment a lot in threads when I'm bored. As for the swipe, it gets annoying when people wilfully disregard the point being made and just restate their opinion in various ways without forwarding an actual argument.

No. The idea is that moderation wouldn’t tend to select for/against specific ideologies. Twitter discourse will remain extremely ideological in character.

How would you describe Twitter’s ideology as compared to Musk’s?

Twitter is a psychological hell-hole that like all social media preys upon the absolute worst of humanity in a perpetual negative feedback loop to generate advertising dollars to sustain itself

Elon is a deluded billionaire who cares only about himself

How do you determine whether someone only cares about themselves? How do you determine whether someone doesn't only care about themselves?

The same way anyone else does. By subjective observation and opinion of the subject

This isn't "The Good Place" where an objective arbiter of the net good or bad we put out into the universe through our entire existence can be measured

Musk is very pro-free-speech-even-speech-that-offends.

Twitter is very ban-anything-that-doesn’t-comport-with-our-woke-worldview-and-call-it-hate-speech-or-disinformation. Also they selectively apply TOS against people they don’t like while regularly ignoring blatant TOS violations from people they like.

Well, except for when their head of moderation offers to personally ban leftists for the people you say aren't allowed on the site.

https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1496034016209915904

>Is the argument that Musk will make Twitter less ideological? My assumption is that he’ll push for his own ideology. If so, nothing gets better unless you happen to agree with Musk’s ideology. If nothing gets better we’ve traded one echo chamber for another.

That may be true, but if ideology in moderation is what's killing twitter, that already exists, so it will be just as bad as it is now, just a different flavor I would think. People might not like the new flavor though, but for many people, it's already ruined by having any flavor at all.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if Musk just changes the flavor, it will just continue to suck. If he removes the flavor, it will be better for public discourse.

There's no way to know if Musk will seek to impose his own brand of ideology or make it less ideological overall (I'm hoping for the latter).

For example, if he stopped banning users who "misgendered" people on Twitter, but instead started banning those who "took God's name in vain", I would qualify that has imposing his own brand of ideology (just for the sake of argument I have no idea if he is religious or what his stance is on "gendering").

If, on the other hand, he stopped banning of users who "misgendered" people, and didn't replace that behavior with a ban on something he frowned upon, I would qualify that as "less ideological". Obviously in this day and age many authoritarians will argue that the absence of censorship is an ideology in itself, but I think most reasonable people can agree that overall, less censorship = less ideology.

"I personally would like companies to be less ideological in general. "

The irony here is laughable.

Free speech and vibrant debate are ideologies. Respecting free speech while limiting the amplification of hate speech and Russian disinformation is an ideology.

I think those are good ideologies for a social media platform to have.

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