I bet some of those who advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants" are probably re-thinking their stance on deplatforming from a major social media.
Many of the largest platforms featured much less moderation in their past - even when they were much larger than Gab or Parlor - while also enjoying a smaller proportion of "less than desirable actors". Of course, whether that level was acceptable is debatable. Free speech is a double-edge sword and moderation is an astoundingly complex problem.
The flavors of prejudice that they attract are the direct result of their function. Platforms that start to grow large without controls against hate and other bad actors simply do not continue to grow.
Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.
It may also reduce chilling effects on good actors. Some speech may be worth sharing but may not currently be shared because of those effects.
Pretty sure that will just let bad actors back in and drive the good faith users away. You could be underestimating the number of normal users a single bad actor can drive away.
Even when you remove the more centralized moderation, there still have to be some mechanism there to remove the bad actors.
Twitter is being used as a political weapon in a political war.
Actual bad actors who spam, harass (which requires repeated unrelenting action, not just one-time nastiness), defame or incite violence... nobody cares if their posts get removed. Defending them is not what Musk or the political right is on about.
so... Twitter
Furthermore, there's a difference between totally doing away with moderation and pruning some of the more ideologically slanted moderation policies at twitter.
Advertisers will not want to see their ads featured next to a post calling for the genocidal extermination of a race. When you allow Gab/Voat/4-chan style moderation, you run-off advertisers which are the lifeblood of social media.
I don't think advertising companies would really see this as an issue. It's not like an ad playing before a video where sponsorship can be directly tied to a piece of content. The content adjacent to ads is determined by users' viewing habits and follows.
Ultimately, YouTube users have a higher degree of control over what they consume, because they self select each video on a drop-by-drop level; on Twitter the user only curates which hoses they get blasted by. And we know that YouTube still struggles with ad suitability.
For users that don't follow this public figure, the Colgate ads are going to appear somewhere else. If someone takes a screenshot and sends it to Colgate, Twitter will say "hey, it was that user's decision to follow these toxic people."
Imagine: scam protection plugin. spam protection plugin. anti racism plugin.
Let users vote who gets ears. If users say they want to silence racists, by saying racists things a user ends up being blocked by all the people who want to silence all racists. Users then vote and racists know that algorithmically they cannot heard because they know the majority have silenced them. But they also aren't enraged that they are being silenced because they aren't. They're just blocked by the user base who doesn't think their words have value.
If twitter does not allow as much free speech as possible, that speech simply ends up moving to other platforms anyways. So much to all the pro censorship crowd's chagrin, their censorship isn't actually doing anything except protecting their ears from hearing what they don't want to hear, and in reality making the other side band together even more fiercely. Might as well keep all the speech and just allow people to choose their own protection.
You never have to listen to them if that's what you choose. Let people choose what gets silenced instead of letting some authority choose for you. Giving up that power has historically lead in only one direction, and I don't see why its any different in this case. Adults are not children. Let them discern what is right and what is wrong.
The only way forward is to keep free speech available, and we can keep it and have protections for those who want it, so why not?
But... I don't use social media, so maybe I'm not the one this would appeal to.
If you are okay with the default protections, closing that modal is one [x] away.
If for some reason you want spam, then toggle it back on.
We could go a step further and ban the bad actors entirely so they don’t pollute the pool. Just allowing them in the feed introduces all kinds of engineering headaches. How are retweets handled? Replies? Etc. it would be a huge distraction to support the bad actors instead of removing them.
HaHa, nice try Xi Jinping.
Retweets that originate from filtered tweets simply don't get included in the filtering person's feed. Same with replies.
Engineering wise, these features should be peanuts for the HN crowd.
Twitter has had spam and crypto scams in replies for years now. Every tweet by Elon Musk has had scammy fake giveaways that steal people's financial info, from accounts that copy his profile picture and name. Anyone would agree Twitter's response has not been adequately effective, and he has complained about this for a while, and even said during today's TED event that he wants to stop this sort of spam.
If anything, I think it's more likely we'll see hardcore engineering efforts - I'm not sure why Twitter hasn't looked into some sort of perceptual hashing database for profile pictures of popular accounts, and hide replies from anyone who uses a similar profile picture.
This is obviously different from the political censorship, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, where I think Musk strongly disagrees with current leadership.
Parler/Gab failed in having approximately zero engineering efforts to prevent spam.
The moment you confess that some types of speech are harmful to your platform, it just becomes about defining where that line is, and naturally people will have differing opinions on whether they agree with those moderation decisions.
There might be some edge cases where some non-spam content gets caught in a spam filter.
But these should be two separate systems under different teams and leadership. And if your tweet was removed, you should know if this was antispam or censorship in order to craft an appeal effectively.
> advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants"
To me, this compresses several conversations into one:
- In the US, the first amendment applies to the government, not to private actors, so companies do not need to allow any particular person on their site (with the provision that it's illegal to ban people because they are part of a protected class).
- The idea of a "public square" is in flux and we are in the midst of trying to figure out what areas of our interactions we would like to consider public and what the advantages and disadvantages each approach are.
- The tactic of urging private companies to ban certain people for certain reasons as practiced by many groups (often with different justifications).
Different groups have different interests at each level and have different preferences as to how policy should change. In some sense, your statement of: "I bet some of those who..." will always be correct because of course *some of them* will! I have a guess about how you feel about the above issues (and other involved issues that I didn't break out), but I'd be interested to have you expand what you actually mean.
It really hinges on what you mean by the phrase "free speech" when there is no clear context.
It is true that in the context of US lawmaking, the free speech rights specified in the 1st Amendment are in play.
But there is the concept of free speech outside that context also. For example the editors of a newspaper being inclusive of viewpoints in the "Letters to the Editor" section or a radio show being inclusive of viewpoints from callers or a website operator being inclusive of viewpoints in public comment sections.
I think there is value in advocating for inclusiveness in those (and other) contexts and labeling that idea "free speech" but I don't think it has to be "absolutely no moderation or restrictions". There is room for an editorial policy in those places and there is room to criticize any particular policy that some entity might put in place as not being supportive of "free speech" even when there is no 1st Amendment context in play.
that's just a loophole from people who have no argument so they go with the [legal in the US = Moral]. Just because the modern "public space" is now private, it doesn't make it any less bad when the group in charge arbitrairely ban groups of people based on politics, opinion, etc.
whether you like it or not (I hate it personally), the vast majority of the news and opinions that people consume today comes directly or indirectly (eg. linking an NYT article on facebook) from a handful of social media companies. It's getting even worse now that organisations and politicians are using social media platforms as their official channel of communications
I think we have a similar problem with email accounts. Getting your gmail account banned can really fuck your life and sooner or later something will have to be donne to protect people (eg. force them to a have a proper appel system or to hand over all your data +forward your emails for a while after they kick you out).
Part of me hopes he buys it just to test this hypothesis. My feeling is that we'll learn one way or another how important a given social media brand is.
Everything that follows is based on that inference.
There are two major possibilities here. Either Musk lets twitter continue much in the same manner as it operates today. In which case, nothing really changes.
Musk operates twitter as his personal bullhorn, promoting beneficial tweets and removing tweets that are critical of him, his companies, his ideals, whatever. All of which would be his right to do. However, all actions have consequences.
Twitter isn't twitter because it was ordained from on high as the service to spit hot takes in 140 characters or less. Twitter is twitter because of everything twitter did. From the initial concept, to the pivoting to whatever the hell "micro-blogging" is, to letting people say mostly whatever, to the various standards they've implemented over the years. All of that makes twitter what it is.
If twitter just becomes "Elon Musk's dream platform where he can shit post all day and no one can say shit to him", that's entirely something else. Most of the people left on twitter would be Musk and people who want to follow him.
Like how the crowd shifted from Slashdot to Digg to reddit. From Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. Something will come along and supplant twitter.
So, I believe the people who "advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants"" are going to be fine with their stance. Because if Musk changes twitter into a shithole, no one is going to want to stay regardless.
American Social Media corps are pretty heavily progressive-dominated, which is typically called "The Left-Leaning Bias", but that's a shame, because American "Leftism" is really a laughable low-dimensional projection of what actual leftism looks like. So anyways, because of this, progressive social media denizens reciprocate this preferential treatment by being free (as in bear) and dependable apologists, always defending said corporations whenever they arbitarily ban, censor or otherwise unfairly treat those with the wrong opinons, often employing the well-known phrase that GP quoted.
GP is implying that those people are about to discover the brutal truth that suppression tactics are perfectly symmetric and care not who employs it against whom.
GP means that those resorting to "freedom of speech is not for companies" are hypocrites. They're defending the right of companies to supress opinions on their services, not because they believe that's fair --actually they're anti-business-- but because they can pressure the companies, threatening their advertisers, so only opinions approved by them will show.
If Twitter goes private and stops depending on ads, they won't be able to exert such pressure and will lose that advantage. Even if Musk is totally fair with moderation, they're going to complain he's not censoring enough.