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Comment by saboot | Hacker News Reader

It's not just trump, it's likely we'll see other "unfairly censored" people like David Duke, Milo, and Alex Jones.

This will elevate the level of discussion to be more like the highly praised philosophy forum known as 4chan.

I'm sure all the users will appreciate it and not leave immediately.

I don't buy this line. Twitter used to be "the free speech wing of the free speech party." So your theory is that this happened:

1. Twitter is totally open free speech 2. This scares people away and user counts drop 3. Twitter censors and users come back

But this didn't happen. Twitter and other, at the time, free speech platforms like Reddit were experiencing rapid user growth throughout their free speech phases. The "this will scare away users" justification for censorship is used entirely as an ex post facto justification.

No, this is the route that literally every popular social media platform goes through if they want to make money. Having an 'absolutist' stance on free speech is only tenable at smaller scales. As your platform scales up and more people join, so does the amount of people posting things that are borderline illegal, chase off advertisers/other users and so forth.

There's a reason why none of the other purported full free speech platforms ever taking off and it's because they end up so odious that advertisers never go near them and the userbase stalls out. Personally I think most of the people that believe full freedom of speech is possible have never been a moderator of even a small social media platform. If you have two users and one of them is harassing, stalking etc another user you eventually have to make a decision which of the two you want to keep around, and it inevitably involves you censoring one of them.

This is not the argument I was responding to. That was the argument that the platform will lose users, which objectively didn't happen. You are talking about losing advertisers, which is a reasonable theory, but also incorrect. Twitter and Reddit to this day are full of content, e.g. porn, that is absolutely toxic to advertisers, but it doesn't drive advertisers away from the platform as a whole because they have segregated their platforms and allow advertisers to pick and choose where they advertise. An example of this is Google search and Youtube demonetization of controversial videos. Advertisers are certainly an explanation of those policies, but it doesn't explain outright banning content from the platform.

why don’t these “unfairly” censored people build their own platform? oh! it’s hard. much harder than spouting their bs and complaining about “free speech”

They've already made a half dozen platforms, the market has clearly said that the majority of users are happy with Twitter as it is without them.

But it's not good enough, we must be forced to listen to hear how the COVID vaccine is a mind control weapon and why we must fight (((globalists))).

> why don’t these “unfairly” censored people build their own platform?

Don't you recognize that this is exactly what happens?

They do end up going to their own corners of the web, and idealogical-activists refuse to leave them alone and try and shut them down wherever they go. Look at how many times Gab, Parler, and other more free speech sites have been shut down.

I wonder if the world can support a conservative Twitter. I think the problem is that if you're going to spout offensive nonsense it's not as much fun if there is no one around to be offended by it. And while those who are offended will fight it when it's a percentage of their platform, there will be a wave as people abandon what they see as a toxic platform. I mean sure there are platforms like 4chan and The Donald but 4chan's traffic is a fraction of what reddit's is.

Given Elon's predilection for trolling it's odd he doesn't realize those people who are banned don't want to build anything, they just want to watch the world burn.

The unfairly banned people have made several platforms, they just never blow up and you don't hear about them. It's like an employee gets fired from target, a well known and established company, so they make their own pseudo target and you're shocked that you've never heard of their small one Edit: corrected autocorrect miswording

why don’t the platforms blow up? you’d think if these people are banned based on ideological issues only they would accumulate and thrive on these new platforms

It almost sounds like you're implying that most of the conversation is happening on Twitter, that it is the town hall.

Good. Time to break it up and enforce fair rules.

nope. not implying that.

the reason twitter works and is successful is that you have people from all backgrounds and walks of life. people that get banned don't follow the rules that Twitter has (if the rules are fair, etc, is another discussion, but everyone has to follow the rules)

Some of them tried and either failed miserably or built cesspools only other hate addicts want to visit.

exactly! the gist of it is that they need people from the “other camp” and they need to get into shouting matches to feel like they matter and their crackpot ideas are valuable.

Sure. But if Elon Musk buys twitter, a private corporation, then he can decide who he platforms. Yet you see tons of people complaining exactly about that possibility here. So your comment is pretty ironic in the context of an entire thread filled with complaints about Musk getting his own platform.

i don't think the comment is ironic.

it's in the direction of "I don't want Musk to mess with Twitter". I personally cannot do anything about it but watch and voice concern, but if enough people see the concern I am voicing maybe this will lead to a better outcome. who knows?

I totally agree with that! The thing is, that's exactly what people have been doing only to be constantly dismissed because hey it's a private corporation and they shouldn't complain. The comment I replied to was literally doing just that, mocking people and calling them annoying because they kept voicing their concern for free speech, because they apparently shouldn't even complain since it's not their platform.

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