The alternative facts and hate speech that dominate Facebook have been incredibly harmful for society, and I think there should be tighter guardrails for online content moderation. There are legitimate reasons to disagree on this issue.
"Unacceptable views" could include: Covid came from a wet market, the Iraq war was about WMD, etc. Pick your controlversial topic, there's going to be a battle over even the limits of rational debate - ones you agree with and ones you definitely don't.
You may be happy with the censorship flavour of the month now, but wait until a government comes into power that you dislike. Imagine what G.W. Bush would have done with the censorship powers available now?
You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control. I want no part of that, and I don't want my democracy to be destroyed by the broader effects that would have. If you're consciously advocating for that, then I disagree with you in the strongest terms. Yes, there's an ocean of trolls out there. And the effects of strong censorship are far worse.
I think a big problem is the short attention span of most people - myself absolutely included. But finding ways to amplify the influence of those who have paid attention and reduce it from those who only read the titles - that could be interesting as well. There's lots of info out there to use ML to discern low quality input, it'd be interesting to see it applied for good instead of evil!
Maybe this is OpenAI's next challenge :)
The irony of this statement in a discussion about taking a public company private
"common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury."
Regardless of if his or the company's official claims, when network effects centralize virtually everyone into a small number of platforms, it becomes a defacto utility. This has wide ranging and damaging effects on actual democracy. I don't particularly care what statements Twitter has made, if their platform has such wide ranging negative effects then it becomes an issue that needs to be addressed. How that's addressed is another question, but being a private entity doesn't magically free them from accountability of the negative effects of their platform.
Twitter is a business and it literally has nothing to do with democracy at all. Using twitter is a personal choice, if you don't like it, don't use it. That's the solution. Your perception of their business being negative or even positive is neither here nor there.
Once that was done, they noticed that people aren't free to speak & won't use a platform where they are constantly under attack from racists, sexists & harassers. As a private entity, Twitter cared more about people feeling comfortable participating than it did about other people's "right" to bully, harass or send dick pics.
They also realized that if they kept letting their platform be used to radicalize terrorists, the government was going to shut them down because they were harmful to the community. It's also possible that they didn't feel great about helping people murder people they hated. Repeatedly.
By that point Jack had realized that "Free Speech" is a lot more nuanced than he imagined as a 29 year old with no background in sociology, philosophy, law or political science. Jack still believes in freedom: he just knows now, experimentally, that you can't achieve that by letting might make right.
Nobody is arguing that constitutional rights directly apply here. They're arguing that free speech is important, especially when the government has been pushing around that private company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2021/07/15/gover...
You can censor comments suggesting the current understanding of the science might be flawed, but then what happens when the understanding shifts to that censored understanding? Do you go censor all of the comments, CDC articles, and news clips that communicated the incorrect understanding? Do you remove the censorship for the old comments? Are there any repercussions for unknowingly leading people astray, and perhaps even causing some deaths for those who thought they were protected by flawed guidelines?
When was this exactly that YouTube was banning videos for saying it was airborne? Examples?
I'm considering running for president on a one issue platform: A constitutional amendment to criminalize false claims that a non-governmental actor has violated your free speech.