It's true that large platforms are a sort of public square, and being excluded from them is something to be a bit wary of. What if Musk decided to kick out entire classes of people? That'd be pretty gross.
On the other hand, if you don't moderate stuff with a pretty heavy hand (like Hacker News) does, it can go downhill pretty quickly.
It's sort of like if you have a bar, and you get some rowdy drunk skinheads in the corner bellowing about some racial group they hate (ok, I know there are skinheads that are nice people and anti-racist... it's just an example, bear with me). No one kicks them out, and normal people don't want to be around them, either, and start leaving, to be replaced with people who are ok with the racist behavior. Pretty soon, you have a bar full of nazis.
I'd rather be in a bar where they kick out the nasty people, even if I strongly believe the nasty people do have a right to, say, put on a march.
Not to mention general corporate marketing presence on Twitter. Can't imagine there's much of an appetite among brands for a Parler-style "free speech zone". Twitter's content policies make it easier for brands to engage directly with users with the same UI and experience as any other user. That's valuable to them, and I imagine it would be hard to maintain that status quo and keep brand feeds free of racist, sexist nonsense or other hate speech.
FWIW, I think this is the answer, or at least this pinpoints the problem: scale.
I feel like if social moderation were a purely technical problem that we as software engineers would immediately recognize it as, y'know, NP-hard, and not even try to solve it (above a small scale). Would you actually try to compute the Ackermann function with large inputs? No, what's the point?
In the early 90s every seemed decent online. There was this idea of online étiquette.
With the masses getting easy access to the internet, all that seemed to get thrown out the window.
Maybe we need a license like we do for driving?
>Somehow this has been construed to mean that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other private companies cannot place limits on what can be said on their platforms.
Twitter can do whatever they want. Government doesn't seem to be involved or enforcing section 230. Therefore it's totally up to the owners.
><Cadey> Amusingly enough this person followed up to this email with "Just to be clear that wasn't transphobic (I am enby) I just think you know you're annoying and unfunny shark cartoons won't help", as if internalized transphobia is not a thing that exists. Internalized transphobia is a bitch and a half to deal with, but I've found it worth my time to fully dissect those feelings and then dismiss them properly.
I'm failing to see how twitter is involved. If you attract hate from trans people because you make offensive cartoons toward trans people, you'll receive this hate from wherever you promote the cartoons. I expect your target audience is trans people? Mind you, I don't have a clue who you are and I've seen nothing of yours. So I'm not commenting on your cartoons. Just commenting on the position of free speech zones.
>There are also politicians in my country of citizenship that want to make my existence anywhere near children a sex offense at the federal level.
What I read the legislation as saying is that federal funds cannot be used to fund the production of sexual context for children under 10. I assume your cartoons, which are sexual, are targeting children besides trans people? Therefore you make the association this legislation targets you. Fair enough, I understand the connection.
Mind you, I do believe politicians should certainly have laws indicating things like the age of consent and minimum age of pornography. As such this is the same as a legal thing to be defined. Which to me is quite reasonable. I hope politicians in my country implement exactly the same law.
>This is how you scare people like me away from the public sphere entirely.
“In a society that profits from your self-doubt, loving yourself is a rebellious act.”
You by accepting and loving yourself have made yourself a rebel. Surely you understand you are culturally way over the line? You are a rebel attacking society and earning the attacks that comes with it. You are the person who needs the free speech zone the most.
The hate from fellow trans is because the disenfranchisement of trans people, trans people WANT to be included in society. By becoming a rebel fighting society, you're fighting against them. This all makes sense.
Your blog from how I read it explains exactly why we need free speech zones.
> or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.
One interesting solution I'm aware of is to utilize blockchain technology for the base social layer (L1). All communications or 'posts' can be minted onto a blockchain. Once minted, they could not be (easily) censored. The token provides proof for who shared the communication (important defense against fakes) and could provide fascinating provenance for the origin of specific ideas.
The token feed would display chronologically and include 100% of minted tokens. At a certain scale this feed would become dizzying and essentially useless. This is where the next layer comes in (L2). Call it the curation layer. This is essentially what twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc are today. The difference is that they are not pulling in their content from a base layer, rather the content needs to be created individually on each of their platforms. On the social blockchain anyone and everyone would be allowed to create a curation platform at L2. These curation hubs could choose to show or not show whatever they want. Some very popular platforms would surely gain favor, but some people may decide to handle curation on their own. Curation on L2 would allow very healthy competition and significantly reduce switching costs. This is because we'd be able to switch curation platforms without having to disturb the network effects as they'll be preserved by L1. It's very hard (though not impossible) to switch from platforms like twitter, facebook, instagram, etc due to the network effects they've built up.
This solution also provides an interesting opportunity for individuals to own their own content online and control aspects of their privacy. As the owner of all social tokens that I mint, I could have the ability to deleted content at L1 and have it disappear across all instances at L2. (though there def still needs to be a lot figured out there).