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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

What should be allowed?

Twitter’s speech moderation policies should be public, and all decisions pertaining to speech should be public, and there should be a public appeals process before a jury of the speaker’s peers.

That's a lot to ask when each user account is free.

You're basically replicating the US Courts Legal System, except those on trial pay 0% taxes. Not viable.

Keep thinking though, we need a hero of an idea to make forward progress on the question of what strategy is best for US-based public companies, and what their role is in showing the world what the gold standard for "freedom of speech" online looks like.

This is why Twitter needs to go private. The current management has no idea how to run a public square without falling back to an authoritarian censorship regime.

EDIT: Arguably, much of what I am suggesting can be automated cheaply.

Private companies have less transparency than public companies. You're hoping the owner will be benevolent and okay with losing money indefinitely for the sake of transparency, or if that turns out to be the case - that ownership will not change (e.g. bought out by Murdoch or Carlos Slim)

You misunderstand, it’s true that a private company can be opaque, but a public company cannot be altruistic due to the composition of the shareholders. No one was able to prevent the Saudis from buying a major stake in Twitter, and the Kingdom is historically opposed to free speech.

A publicly traded company cannot solve this problem but a private company might be able to.

I understand you just fine - I was just pointing out that a private company can also choose to be opaque in a way public companies can't. It probably would have been easier for the KSA to buy a stake had Twitter been private. Incidentally, the infamous "Funding secured" tweet was predicated on funding from the Saudis[1]; so Elon taking money from the Saudi's isn't unfathomable, should he hypothetically choose to sell to them.

1. According to Elon, who now insists the tweet was true.

I like this description of the problem and the suggestion:

> Today on Twitter, as on most social media, justice works in a roughly Stalinist style. The normal penalty is permanent execution. There is no transparent explanation for why an account is executed, before or after the execution. It has simply “violated the Twitter rules.” The public rules are extremely abstract and could theoretically justify almost any execution. The private rulebook by which the secret police, or “Ministry of Trust and Safety,” operates, is of course as secret as everything about the secret police.

> Of course, it is easy to observe that a two-day-old spam account does not deserve a six-month trial, with lawyers, before getting the bullet it needs in the back of the neck. Due process in this context must not be a clone of the IRL judicial system, which is more broken than anyone can possibly imagine.

> And there is a simple solution to the problem of scaling due process: *scale the level of due process to the size of the account*. An account with a million (real) followers might well deserve a six-week public trial, perhaps even with some kind of counsel. The spammer with 20 followers? Any cop can shoot him, as at present, and leave the body by the side of the road as a warning to others.

> There is a use for online Stalinist justice—it is only an injustice when it is disproportional to the user’s investment in the service. When Twitter is your career and any cop can just shoot you, an eerie atmosphere of terror pervades everything.

Source: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup

Everything legal in the jurisdiction they reside in (USA).

Why? It's not a government entity.

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