Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
I mean you still need some moderation to push the community the right direction but give people ability to downvote toxic shithole to oblivion and block users and a lot of it is already done. The biggest problem is probably brigading and spamming the space with low effort content but first one is rare and second one don't need that much moderation work compared to trying to moderate every comment.
This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that.
I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace.
Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.
...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
And Twitter. Similarly if you don't like the filtered environment of these communities there is 4chan/8kun/etc. So then this is a solved problem and all the hand-wringing around the moderation on these platforms is unnecessary?
Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.
There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
I'll also be the first to say that Twitter (and most) moderation isn't 100% evenly handled. Just look at world leaders/political figures and what they can say that others cannot, I fully agree this is not ok and should not be allowed. My issue is that it's to the point that I can't hear "blatant censorship" in connection with social media without hearing the dog whistle. Those people who are so up in arms about FB/Twitter/etc "censorship" seem to be absolutely silent about the Gab/Parlor/Truth Socials of the world.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obitua...
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-facebook-censor-trump-...
EDIT: To make my comment a bit less argumentative, here is a good chart on the biases of media outlets: https://my.lwv.org/california/torrance-area/article/how-reli... , scroll down to adfontes.
The fact that you can't easily find any record of these events outside of Fox News is a part of the issue and "mass scale" censorship.
Any of them will explain to you how reporting the facts created a false sense of equivalence between Clinton and Trump for voters. Voters couldn't understand how Trump bragging to a frat boy reporter that he could just grab pussy, his using a nonprofit as a vehicle to dodge taxes on a painting, and his denial that McCain was the best hero were far worse than the 1994 Crime Bill, superpredators, Clinton Foundation associations with dictators, the Iraq War, Russian uranium, Haiti, and Honduras.
No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
People complain about reddit moderation but I totally get it in most cases. If you let people push the line they will just keep going until it gets really bad, much better to nip it in the bud. Especially when we are talking about unpaid moderators. Moderation is not an easy or fun job.
The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things.
I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.
In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world.
HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.
It's entirely fine. The problem YT/Facebook have is user's lack of control on what gets recommended. Play the "wrong" video once or twice and you will be flooded by stuff you don't want.
The fact someone somewhere on the site says something you don't like is not a problem. The problem is that it's kinda easy to go "you follow Xpotato12" -> "X potato12 is outraged by Y and hates it" -> click to see what is happens -> now YT recommends you Y because you "engaged" with it. There should be a better system to deal with that.
This is the same problem I was describing...
Users have no control over what they see, and open communities have little control over where the bar for who should be banned is or what other communities they are in contact with.
However, there is a problem that mostly is evaded or goes unexamined with many of these arguments: Does a community (in the general sense of the word) have the right to actively police/censor the content of an individual or group of people on the Internet in their own community (such as in the case of Kiwifarms)?
Does Facebook or any other community have a right to take KiwiFarms off the net? Obviously not. Is Facebook, Cloudflare or any other company allowed to decide that they want nothing to do with content like KiwiFarms and refuse to do business with them? Absolutely.
If you don't eject the extremist elements from your community, your community will be represented by them to outside world.
I do wonder what would happen with social media that had only the up/downvote system as soft moderation but without actual moderators smacking people around
Seriously, if it was up to me to design my own spam filter I could do a better job than they do.
Really I wouldn't mind there being no moderation on Twitter, but then have every user blacklist what they want from themselves.
So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it. In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").
The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor. As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
Its just a generic "you violated our rules about offensive content/abuse/self-harm and suicide" or something like that. Then a link to where you can get help if you have some kind of mental breakdown. They actually twisted this as If I was suicidal so they can ban me for my own protection.
But I would bet a monthly salary some triggered long time twitter user with high reputation who just didn't understand the joke or does not have a compatible humor reported my tweet and the twitter admins just cater to these people and not to their own rules.
Unfortunately (but probably intentional) they do not allow some way to publicly prove these cases of "bad moderation". Yet there is plenty evidence that they get it wrong all the time. For example thebabylonbee is still banned.
As I said before the context was a pun but it should not matter these are factually true statements that any reasonable person would agree on.
I also have seen incredibly too much "It's just a joke bro" "defenses" for saying certain things that I have little sympathy for it. Learn the bounds of the platform/community you want to participate in and either stay within those bounds or find somewhere else to participate.
I dont care if they ban jokes if they openly say so. Their platform their rules.
It's the completely arbitrary (or biased) interpretation and enforcement of rules that is the problem.
NH is not a place to make jokes (some still do it) but twitter was a place for jokes since day one. And like I said, even if the joke went over someones head the statement was factual correct and not inciting violence or anything like that.
"It was a joke" was not a defense but rather the reasoning why I would even make a so obviously factual statement.
People often seem to fail to understand that humor is inherently a complex system of shared values, consent, trust, and context. The personal jabs my gym bros and I make at each other would be near fighting words of said by a stranger. The sometimes off-color jokes made by my girlfriend and I to each other are understood to be parody, based on years of trust and context around who the other person is, while an outsider would have no way of distinguishing them from the real thing. A person going to a comedy show may well hear jokes they'd never tolerate in a work context. But a certain subset of the population seems to not understand this and think they can just shout out whatever terrible thing they want and everything it should be fine because it's a "joke".
Either that our they are just pretending not to understand to cover their own bad behavior.
The companies they defended by going "it's private company, they can do what they want" (which I've seen a lot every time someone is criticizing what the big social media company is doing, especially on Reddit) will do what doesn't benefit the group that defends them.
But i get shit from people pro-LLC (basically libs, neocons and fascists), so when one of those complain about a company banning them, i cannot resist saying "Companies do not have to respect the 1rst!" or something like this. Pure Shadenfreude, because i basically agree with the premise.
It's like anarcho-capitalists ("libertarians"). They have a good intuition about what freedom means, but either don't have to capacity, or the will to push the reasoning further, about what power is, what structured power looks like etc (i think it's the will, their subconscious know that if they reason further, it will cause some cognitive dissonance, so they don't).
By the way, if you're a conservative, you should read Baudrillard, in my opinion he is the only conservative who pushed the reflexion far enough (or rather, he is the only situationist who pushed his reflexion towards conservatism). And if you're leftwing (i mean, for european standards), you should too, to understand what conservatism can be if you help him think.
ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&...
Also, lol for twitter having n-word graph in their metrics
Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...