Hate speech (racism, bullying, threatening, harassment) might as well be thought of as illegal. It may not be illegal by the literal word of the law, but in the interpretation most people in practice treat these as illegal.
Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
No large social network ever ran that way and I'm skeptical that any social network could be run that way and make a profit. Here are some of the things that are not actually illegal to publish under US law:
- Most forms of doxxing
- Adult nudity and pornography
- Most gore images and videos (industrial accidents, car crashes, corpses from war zones (including children), animal abuse...)
- Praise and promotional material for pedophilia
- Praise and encouragement for anorexia and other eating disorders
- Promotional material and instructions for suicide
- Praise and promotional material for terrorist groups like ISIS, as long as it doesn't call for "imminent lawless action." Much historically banned-by-bigtech ISIS propaganda was not actually illegal, which is why government officials urged companies to do something about it instead of just dispatching law enforcement.
- Spam that isn't delivered via email
- Coordinated foreign propaganda, e.g. "50 Cent Party" commenters piling on to criticize anyone who criticizes mainland China's government
- Jailbait images (in the sense of the banned-in-2011 subreddit r/jailbait)
A lot of things that 95% of Americans never want to see online are actually legal, just so widely reviled and moderated against that you rarely encounter them accidentally.
And many of these exceptions might not even necessarily even be exceptions to US law or the First Amendment. Abuse of computer systems (spam), Federal obscenity laws, etc.
And there are many potential approaches to hiding (with transparency) from view legal content that no one (or almost no one) actually wants to see, without necessarily even deleting it.
One obvious approach would be to allow users to dictate what kinds of content they want to see. An example is subreddits, where users who want to see gore could be free to do so. Twitter could implement similar kinds of self-moderation features.
There are probably even more creative approaches that could solve some of the echo chamber effects, misinformation, etc without heavy-handed global moderation. It's a hard problem but it'd be really great to see someone try at least.
Reddit allowed porn from the beginning. Facebook never allowed nudity. Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.
Reddit proves that even subreddits, personal filters, and other self-moderation tools are not enough to prevent politician, media, and advertiser pressure around controversial content. The jailbait subreddit, like every subreddit that has been banned, was full of willing subscribers.
I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?
Some politicians say that they do but I don't believe they have considered the full scope of what is actually allowed under the First Amendment. For example, Senator Tom Cotton published an apparently fierce defense of free speech on his own web site in June 2020:
https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/op-eds/twitter-tried-to-c...
It ends with
These social-media companies have improved the lives of Americans in many ways. But they should not be surprised public opinion is turning against them when they act as censors and moral scolds to millions of Americans. Nor should they expect to find many people rushing to their defense. In fact, to coin a phrase, those of us in their crosshairs might say: No quarter for Big Tech censorship.
However, in September 2020 he accused Netflix of distributing child pornography (the movie Cuties) and wrote:
Netflix has a basic legal responsibility to not stream child pornography or otherwise promote the sexual exploitation of children.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/netflix-cuties-child-pornogr...
I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is, and how narrow the exceptions for obscenity and child pornography are. He just wants to make tech companies stop censoring his tweets and start censoring movies. Likewise, many activists who are upset about (e.g.) LGBTQ content getting suppressed by YouTube algorithms don't much care about YouTube suppressing videos about guns and explosives.
There are few people except perhaps Constitutional scholars willing to defend the full breadth of what the First Amendment guards, much less require social networks to host content of similar breadth. I'm willing to defend the First Amendment as it currently exists, even the publications I find vilest, but I don't want social media forced to publish all of it.
> Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.
That is precisely the reason sites had a light moderation touch for years. I'm not sure where you're getting that from? The consensus (from lawyers I was advised by personally) was that too much moderation would open you up to liability, and so most social sites just enforced their ToS without wading into full scale moderation.
> I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?
I'm sure there's probably at least one, but I have no interest in what politicians say they want. They're so often the people the Supreme Court is protecting us from. To me the question is what principles should guide us, and my answer is the First Amendment.
> I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is...
I think he does understand how broad the First Amendment is. I also think he's probably much more willing to sacrifice short-term (or even long-term) revenue than most people would expect. I don't claim to know for sure though. And he might change his mind in the future.
- He's a businessman. You could argue that you need to be successful to have the resources to help people
- He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster [1]. Would an advocate of free speech to the level some want here do that? Maybe he changed though, maybe he only wants free speech when it doesn't hurt him.
I'm honestly asking where the image of a champion of free speech comes from, besides what he says he'll do?
[1]https://www.wired.com/2012/02/tesla-vs-top-gear/ [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizahaverstock/2022/02/15/elon...
Because we already know from his past behavior that he's willing to make long-term bets. And his statement that he doesn't view his interest in Twitter as a money-making venture.
> He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster
That's a very biased way to frame it. IIRC Top Gear admits that they faked part of the review to make Tesla look bad, after Tesla proved that they had.
Believing in free speech doesn't mean you can't sue people that you believe have violated laws.
Or perhaps he simply made a mistake of judgement going after them legally and was wrong to do so. That's also not inconsistent with a belief in free speech.
Musk doesn't just believe in free speech, he's called himself a “free speech absolutist”.
- One can either be a free speech absolutist, or not.
- If you are a free speech absolutist, you must take a position that all speech is permissible. Because if you don't then you aren't an absolutist, because one could then always take the absolute position that all speech is permissible.
- If you insist that it's okay to be an absolutist on free speech but still maintain that some speech is not permissible, then really we're not talking about free speech anymore but instead negotiating exactly what classes of speech are not permissible.
- Therefore, if Musk really is a free speech absolutist as he claims to be, he must support Top Gun's right to shamelessly lie about his product. As a matter of principle, libel is perfectly okay for a free speech absolutist. If you claim it's not, then I can find you a free speech absolutist who disagrees.
- Therefore Musk is either lying about his motives or he doesn't understand enough about the nuances of free speech to know he's doing. Either way he definitely shouldn't be trusted as a standard bearer or avatar for free speech.
So I agree that you're technically correct about what "absolutist" means, but I don't think it makes a difference in this case.
Anyone who is willing to run social media services as if they were bound by the First Amendment has my support. They may fail but at least they'd be trying to do the right thing, which is better than what we have today.
Taken as a whole, to me this just indicates that Musk is not a free speech absolutist but instead a fair-weather supporter of free speech; he's for free speech when it works for him, but also anti-free speech when it works for him. This makes him no better or worse than anyone else IMO, but it certainly doesn't make him the standard bearer of free speech.
However, the thing that does make him worse than everyone else is that he lies about it. He calls himself a free speech absolutist knowing full well the meaning of those words. He's trying to paint himself as a champion when in fact he's not, which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar. Either way, he shouldn't be the one at the helm of Twitter, if the rationale is that it would be a boom for free speech. It would just be more of the same. Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.
Right there you're doing what you accuse me of doing, just in the opposite direction.
I will admit that I am doing that to some extent, but I feel I have some reason to believe I'm more likely to be right.
One major reason is that everything he has said seems to align with what was a very common viewpoint just a few years ago, which is best summarized by the Voltaire quote:
"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
That's the sentiment behind the First Amendment and what I believe Elon Musk most likely believes in.
> ...which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar
There are many more explanations for his past behavior other than him being delusional or a liar. He could have nuanced views, have simply failed to live up to his own ideals in specific instances, have justifications you can't imagine, etc. In any case, it's almost certainly a false dichotomy.
." Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)"
Hate speech is legal
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43864133
https://www.thelocal.de/20180803/freedom-of-speech-doesnt-co...