Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube

Well, until today, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and Twitter are all doing exactly the same things with regards to content moderation so at least Elon can try doing something different for a change.

View on HN

There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one. If Musk orders Twitter to relax content moderation it’ll fill to the brim with absolute garbage (at best, at worst it’ll be child porn) and they’ll backtrack. Nothing new here.

At least the system can aim to be less selective in its application and apply all across the spectrum rather than target some groups and not others.

Why does everyone use child porn as an argument against freedom of speech? Child porn is legally required to be taken down per section 230.

the argument isn't against freedom of speech, it's against this mythical implementation of free speech in which content moderation is magnitudes better than what is known.

The only method of content moderation that has been tried recently is: upvote/downvote/report and ai-filtering.

There's a lot more out there. For example, slashdot has a unique moderation mechanism where random users were temporarily promoted to mods and could assign tags rather than just take things down.

Filtering could allow users to choose to block anonymous accounts. Feed algos could prioritize content that presents a quality differing view rather than just reinforce filter bubbles.

There's a reason that it's constantly brought up - Twitters content moderators are literally pedophiles, as are Facebook's, as are Reddits. They've figured out how to "self-police" as it were, assuring that enough is deleted and the rest is hidden in PMs and moderated with other tags when caught.

Speaking for personal experience, I met a Facebook person at Folsom Street Fair, through a friend of a friend who I had already marked as super fucking creepy. They were remarkably upfront about it, being drunk and apparently I have a good poker face. See also the "Aimee Challenor" affair at Reddit, and the fact that their initial defense was "Highly recommended by other staff" - They never looked further into that, for a fact.

>There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one.

Are you sure the reason isn't ideological? After all, the people running them are all ideological cousins.

All carmakers said the same thing about electric cars in 2005.

Old space told the same thing about reusable rockets.

Doesn’t mean Elon will get it right this time, but you cannot fault him for thinking people don’t get it and he can solve it and he has the resources to back his vision .

Better than say bezos or elision are doing with their fortunes at least he is trying something.

Losing 40 billion isn’t all that much money for him and losing twitter is not all that bad for us either so why not

that is how I look at it also. if twitter doesnt exist in a few years, the world will be a lot better place

if he somehow manages to fix it, that could be great too.

You could just not ban people for saying impolitic things about race, immigration, and homosexuality/transgenderism, or for disagreeing with scientists regarding covid or climate change, or for reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

It'd almost be like every single website has those problems in the first place. Do you suddenly think he's going to turn off the csam filter?

Those people would still be banned because csam content isn't free speech.

Or Musk believes it's not garbage.

Generally I think that's true, but I looked at youtube comments the other day and it seems like there have been some radical changes in the past few years.

The comments are not really more informative, but they seem a lot less offensive and somewhat more coherent than I remembered.

I found it a little unsettling actually, as though the whole community had quietly been ai-rehabilitated or re-educated or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com