I can start a campaign reaching hundreds of millions of people claiming insane things like that the earth is flat and dominate the mindshare because nobody on the opposite side has the time or will to counter me.
Then I can have groups of followers propagating my nonsense and keep expanding the insanity bubble. Eventually the average Joe will observe the size of the bubble and conclude "hey everyone believes that the earth is flat, so it must be true"
The closest to that was the TV but TV does not have that interactivity multiplier that the internet has.
While I don't think your position on free speech is unreasonable, to overlook the harmful things the right is doing and base your vote on Twitter's moderation policies seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Off the top of my head:
* Don't say gay bill * Huge restrictions on abortions that have been enacted recently and will undoubtedly be upheld by the SCOTUS. Even in cases of rape and incest. * Gerrymandering, ensuring the right will stay in control even if they are not supported by the electorate. * Restrictions placed on voting that target minorities
I also think phrasing this as crushing political dissent is a gross exaggeration. We're talking about very extreme people being suspended from a social media website. No one is getting arrested. If you want to see examples of people being arrested, look at Texas where a woman was recently arrested for suspicion of having an abortion, or Florida where Desantis had a researcher arrested for releasing COVID data.
She wasn't a researcher, she was an admin for the GIS dashboard.
She was arrested because she misused her access credentials, mass-emailed everyone then took 19,000 personnel files and transferred them to her home computer.
She did the classic thing when she was removed from being in charge of the dashboard (not fired, just reassigned) - she crashed the dashboard while her permissions were still active by creating a new admin account and transferring a boatload of data to it. She refused to make the new admin an admin for 'security reasons' and then told the media she was removed from being in charge of the dashboard because they wanted to lie about the data. THAT is what they fired her for.
Florida didn't have her manually falsify data - there is no evidence that they falsified data at all. She's just nuts.
I am in favor of abortion rights. Without them they still happen in a far more gruesome way. But I will not deny that there are some problems that might warrant discussion.
In fact I think it was social media that promoted the worst advertisers for the position for abortion and I think that pushed a lot of people away. The topic quickly becomes emotional and self-righteousness often fails to advertise sensibly.
The system appears to have come under existential pressure.
I used to be a free speech absolutist. I'm wondering, now, if absolute free speech is like direct democracy. It's fine in theory. But if we look at its history, the track record consistently veers towards chaos. (Much more for direct democracies than free speech, though.) A value set can be laudable but useless if any attempt at manifesting it tears its host apart.
I haven't made up my mind one way or the other. But the debate unfolding across society doesn't seem unreasonable. (My hunch is the problem is dark-box amplification algorithms married to ad-supported business models. Not Billy Bob tweeting KKK NFTs or whatever.)
Free speech ensures we can talk about pros/cons of lockdowns. It ensures there is space to discuss COVID origins. It ensures people in power are held accountable. It ensures people are able to challenge the status quo and debate.
While there is a clear line IMO when it comes to speech – that line has been moved quite a bit far in CCP-like censorship by the kinds of Google/Apple.
The problem is more fundamental in a way that is relevant. Direct democracy's failings predate the concept of the corporation. (The concepts of democracy and statehood could be argued to be contemporaneous.) Independent of the media environment, the crowd autocorrelates and devolves into self-extinguishing mob rule.
The issue is that autocorrelation. People aligning for the sake of alignment and then torching perceived opponents. That last part rapidly degrades into tests of ideological purity at which point we're back to mob rule. Modern social media, including Twitter, thrives at facilitating this process (alignment, amplification, zealotry).
That's what we're trying to get away from. Moderation is one solution. It appears to have gone too far.
True, but that was before we networked billions of people together with this thing called the Internet.
> The issue is that autocorrelation. People aligning for the sake of alignment and then torching perceived opponents. That last part rapidly degrades into tests of ideological purity at which point we're back to mob rule. Modern social media, including Twitter, thrives at facilitating this process (alignment, amplification, zealotry).
I agree, this is why privatization of Twitter is good. Less quarterly YoY growth MAU/DAU metrics, and more focus on improving society and moderation. Rage selling has gone too far, one of the negatives of rampant uncontrolled capitalism.
Leverage increases focus on financial metrics. Twitter is being taken private by way of an LBO. Maybe focussing less on Silicon Valley metrics in favor of Wall Street ones will make Twitter a better company? (That would be ironic.)
See: CNN’s treatment of Bernie sanders vs Hillary clinton
Those that want to crush hate speech and are in politics are mainly concerned about the reach of their networks. The incentives were hinted at for quite some time, just a few years ago their openly advocated to cull back the free exchange of information. Same reason why whistleblowers are still imprisoned.
It's useful as a framework for governments to prevent jailing people for critique, to prevent throwing reporters into jail for dissident and so forth. But as a private platform it simply cannot work nor will it ever work. It falls apart at scale because as a platform you MUST make a decision as to whom you decide to support or not. Some users will inevitably harass or stalk or make the most vile comments to other users and will chase off people. If you do nothing, then the most toxic users of your platform will run the asylum.
This was true of Usenet. This was true of IRC channels, forums, Digg and many more smaller sites. Sites like Parler, Gab and so forth pride themselves on being 'Free Speech' platforms but prove the dynamic I mention above.
The reality check is that people should learn from the past, but I have a feeling the cycle of people thinking free-er speech will solve the problem will continue into infinity. And I have a feeling the people intent on believing that they're free speech absolutists will never be in a position to learn this lesson.
plonk!
I don't need someone else shielding my delicate sensibilities for me. And anyone claiming to do so "for the greater good" should be called out for the vipers they are. There is no right to not be offended!
Conventional wisdom today seems to be that most people are mindless meme relay bots that simply believe and propagate whatever they read if it's presented in the right way or pushes the right emotional buttons. Sure there are some people you might describe that way, but is it really most people?
Personally I've been on the fence for a long time. I am not ready to throw in the towel on the idea of a global radically open conversation, but I have certainly had my faith in humanity shaken profoundly by things like Qanon. A disturbingly large number of people are frighteningly gullible. Are there people who simply can't mentally handle unfiltered information?
And they shut down speech because they feel it threatens them.