Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

So much of this article either seems to be trying to paint Musk in a bad light or has little understanding or low-effort put into seeing how the situation could be contrary to what's being stated.

> And here’s the important bit: all of them eventually learned that their simplistic belief in how things should work does not work in reality and have spent the past few decades trying to iterate.

I would suggest that Tesla and SpaceX were similarly simplistic in vision.

> [...] open sourcing it is different and not as straightforward as Musk seems to imply. First of all, it’s often not the algorithm that is the issue. Second, algorithms that are built up in a proprietary stack are not so easy to just randomly “open source” without revealing all sorts of other stuff. Third, the biggest beneficiaries of open sourcing the ranking algorithm will be spammers [...]

Weasel-worded that doesn't say that these things can't be done or won't help, only that it doesn't 100% solve the problem. Opensourcing an algorithm doesn't have to opensource all the input computation that feeds it. E.g. the spam reduction algorithm can be unpublished feeding the ranking algorithm. Yes, spam detection can also be inaccurate and skew the rankings but it shouldn't be a dominant characteristic and certainly worth making the effort to try to do better. I don't even care to read the rest of the uncritically considered post.

His argument hinges on the notion that the common public perception that shouting fire in a public theater is not protected speech is somehow false. But the article he references directly contradicts his assertion. March 3, 1919, <Supreme Court> Justice Holmes wrote: ‘The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.’ That seems pretty clear to me. Free speech does NOT include the ability to create a clear and present danger to public safety. (The clear and present danger language also exists in the same Supreme Court ruling)

Not that I think Elon would be a good steward of public speech since he has the habit of using twitter to illegally manipulate the stock market and defame hero rescuers. Just pointing out that the argument presented is a bit shaky.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220324231029/https://www.theat...