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Comment by overrun11 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are. Commenters feign holding an absolute position but would certainly balk if the moderation ever turned against them and the idea they support.

If you believe on principle, the right of private companies to moderate content, then you must support all kinds of absurd outcomes: Twitter deciding to subtly push pro-Russian viewpoints, Facebook deciding to boost antivax content etc.

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I believe those things would be within Twitter's rights, but would object to them as being bad ideas that would make me not want to use the platform. That isn't the same as saying I think Twitter doesn't have the right to do them, though.

Right but this kind of reasoning presumes a world where everything is equal, truth in unknowable, and our priors for two statements like "women should be allowed to vote" and "a woman's place is in the home and they are too emotional for politics [1]" are that they're equally valid and likely to be correct.

So I can totally understand why basically no moderation is in this world is appealing but surely we can do better than that. Who's gonna argue that the extremely racist "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim baby photoshop" is well reasoned take that isn't based in hate? So when I say I like having moderation I'm not arguing that I'm fine with literally arbitrary completely unaccountable moderation.

[1] This was a real anti-suffragist take in the early 1900s. Which is hilarious because 100 years later it's overwhelmingly the men in politics having public emotional outbursts.

Isn't the free-market answer to this problem for users to move to other social media platforms that moderate in a way they prefer? The problem here is how powerful and walled-off Facebook and Twitter are, making competing difficult if not impossible. Perhaps if we solve that problem, everyone can get what they want.

I think saying that, on principle, companies should not moderate content at all is equally absurd as it would allow malware, CP, abusive content, and spam to run rampant. All we're really arguing about here is to what extent do we want these platforms to moderate content. Should they be limited to only removing illegal content? What's the line on "illegal" (no company could afford to consult lawyers for every post they remove)? What about spam, which is not necessarily illegal but disruptive to the service?

If I remember correctly, Google put a ton of resources into a Facebook competitor and failed spectacularly. A well funded, immediate millions of users, and an unrivaled ad network… fell on its face (for reasons of course, but none nullify the above facts).

Now, please make the case for any startup to compete with Google’s resources.

If the only case you can make is time, there is a problem with this monopolistic system.

You're effectively saying that Google failed, therefore nobody can succeed. This suggests that Google threw all its might and resources behind Google+ and still came up short. I don't think that's true, but even if they did, throwing sufficient resources at the problem was not the issue, the problem seemed to be poorly understood within Google. They seemed to be building "Facebook but Google-branded, but also somehow not Facebook" and then when it was struggling early on instead of trying to fix it, they just went "Ok all Google users have a Google+ now" and acted like they were blowing up.

There is a very interesting counterexample. A company that Facebook saw as enough of a threat that they bit the bullet and spent what was at the time an eyewatering amount of money on a company with a product that was built by a tiny team - Instagram.

We can't ever know what would have become of Instagram had it not been acquired, maybe it would just be the aspirational selfies-and-travel-pics app or maybe it would grow and become something altogether different. But it is certainly clear to me that the failure of Google+ does not mean someone can't build a company that could grow to rival Facebook. They may seem dominant in social media now, but companies which have been completely dominant in their field have been known to totally collapse - remember Nokia?

Absolutely there is a problem. That was my point. If we fix the monopolization of these industries, we solve the moderation issue as well via the free market.

Obviously solving the kind of monopolies created by social networks is hard. The best proposals I've heard is forcing them to open up their social graphs/APIs to competitors, but that's not without its own issues (e.g. bad actors siphoning off user data, like Cambridge Analytica).

> Isn't the free-market answer to this problem for users to move to other social media platforms that moderate in a way they prefer?

It's not that easy. You want to be where your audience is. People are on Twitter since there is a huge (potential) audience. Thus if the moderation only affects a small group and majority doesn't even notice others being moderated it is a tough game.

>I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are.

Of course it is. Reading "Rules for Radicals" helps calm the nerves when you see previously anti-governance "anarchists" cheering for governments and private corporations. You make your enemies play by their own rules, then disregard the rules when they're no longer useful to you.

> I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are.

I'm one of those commenters, and I'd point to Gab, Parler etc as companies who are already doing exactly that and are well within their rights to do so. And of course, their free speech (curation and flagging) is balanced by their users' freedom of association: if twitter radically changes their moderation policies, they could risk driving away their userbase and even their developers.

Well, I also believe that no single company should be allowed to have more than 10% market share in any market. So I would have competition, with different companies having different moderation policies.

How would you even enforce this? You'd require a minimum of 10 companies at all times and mandate user distribution? That wouldn't work

And if don't you believe on principle in the right of private companies to moderate content -- you arrive at even more absurd outcomes.

Like the idea that a private company has no such right, for example,

Honestly, this challenged my view a bit, because I am a person who believes a private company has a right to moderate content, and I think you're right, I've been resting on that view because largely companies seem to have not done anything insane (IMO) with that.

Looking at it now, I honestly think it's totally okay for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and change fundamentally what its policies are. I think it'd be devastating for the platform, and I think a competitor would swoop in and scoop up the vast majority of folks who would find a "free speech site" repugnant, but I believe that's up to the platform to decide (right up until the platform violates a law, of course).

Out of all of this, I'm just kicking myself for not being that competitor. There's a ton of turmoil here, I think a Twitter-That-Is-The-Same-Except-Not-Named-Twitter could do real well right now.

Kind of a ridiculous statement. "If you support any laws whatsoever, then you also support laws forcing Russian viewpoints, laws against vaccines, etc."

Doesn't follow at all from anything I said.

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