Shadowbanning is big tech’s big problem
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
“toe-to-toe in actual combat”? WTF does this refer to? Rolling up on Twitter HQ in F150s with pintle-mounted machine guns?
I mean, I think—irrespective of whether the particular policy is “passive-aggressive” or not—most people involved in deciding content policies are, yes, not particularly interested in defending them “toe-to-toe in actual combat”. I am not sure why you think that's surprising; if someone offered to escalate a dispute about my coding decisions to actual combat, I’d choose not to engage if practical, too.
> In essence its a denial of service attack.
Exactly. Free-reach absolutism prevents exercise of free speech by those set upon by the unmoderated mob.
The author himself doesn’t do much in addressing the root cause. He admits
>” What makes shadowbanning so tricky is that in some cases, in my view, it is a necessary evil. Internet users are creative, and bad actors learn from informed content moderation”
Yet follows through with a proposal for more transparency, without addressing the contradictions inherent in his position.
Shadowbanning on a social media website is nothing more than a simple deception and it’s neither all that effective or all that menacing and I do wonder why people are so obsessed with the idea.
The implicit trade is that we create content for them and they sell ads to keep the lights on. But if they're not following through on their half of the bargain, I think they should be upfront about it. THe "shadow" part seems like fraud to me.
Could you cite such a contract or terms and conditions that states that the platform agrees to distribute whatever content that we as users want to distribute. I am not aware of any mainstream ones that does. There are however crypto based platforms that make censorship impossible or hard, but they are not mainstream
Those sound interlinked. A mainstream audience will never want to read that