“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

I predict the best case scenario is that he does no worse.

It's either going to be a double standard or not. I moderated a busy gaming site for years. Users have nothing to do but re-post what got someone else banned and then complain things aren't consistent.

I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.

First, whenever it comes to "free speech" 99% of the time people make that argument they're not arguging for "all speech". They're talking about "my speech". And most of that time they really just want to utter hate speech.

Second, the idea of what's normal or acceptable is built on deeply ingrained beliefs that typically aren't rational. You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist" (eg [1]). Even suggesting things like everyone deserves access to healthcare is viewed as an extreme left position in the US.

So when Elon argues he's a centrist, the calibration is off because your choices in mainstream American politics are mostly between extreme right (often called the "alt right") being the party of Trump and the center right in the form of the Democratic Party (eg [2]). There is no "left" in American politics. The takeover of neoliberalism in the US is near-total.

As for Elon's plans for Twitter, he's put a lot of money on the line and the letter to advertisers I think gives a good signal of where this is going. I predict Elon will simply cut costs, unban a few conservatives as a token gesture and wait a couple of years to take the company public again and get out. He may as well start making a "Mission Accomplished" banner now and book the aircraft carrier. This is basically the private equity playbook.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/17/elon-musk-should-apologize-f...

[2]: https://twitter.com/cnbc/status/1471615893411090433?lang=en

He literally just had every engineer print out the last 3 months of code lol

Take your originally intended actions and obscure responsibility for them until risks of accountability are sufficiently mitigated?

I actually think the opposite is going to happen. He's already said he wants Twitter to be the most prolific site for advertisers saying that he thinks advertising can "delight, entertain, and inform you."

If he introduces a subscription model TikTok will pull ahead and take over the entire social media space.

I don't see anything in his behaviour which would justify your "optimistic" outlook. Sure it won't degenerate in one of those gutter platforms right away but I doubt he'll be able to maintain an acceptable level as long as he's directly involved. He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.

imho this may end up being really good for the rest of the internet if it drives away interesting and important people to other platforms.

> scapegoat

Earlier this year he seemed pretty set on the idea of allowing whatever's legal, making Twitter all about free speech. But now it'll just get some minor changes? If it's true, why the change of heart?

Is there a list of how many different institutions and investors have money in Twitter now? Because I remember Musk taking in a lot of money for this takeover. And those people probably had the smarts to give them an exit in case Musk decided to release the hounds.

Isn't this his duty to shareholders as long as Twitter is (still) a publicly traded company?

There’s a reason the legal system said free speech is out to the point of direct imminent harm. It was the arrogance of 20 year old programmers in silicon valley who thought they could create a better legal system.

This hasn’t been the case until now. Just as an example lot of radical leftists, BLM activists etc. have openly called for extermination of white people and contantly used racist rhetoric without any consequences. Meanwhile a lot of convervatives, libertarians etc. have been banned/suspended from Twitter due to false ”hatespeech” reporting.

No one has ever asked for ”hounds to be released”. No one sane wants Twitter to become another 8chan. What people want is the one-sided 1984 experiment to end.

It wasn't any political or contentious topic, so no idea what set it off. Basically along the lines of "as X working at Y said in the article, they want to do Z soon".

You just can't have human moderation at that scale. They have to brainstorm how to prevent these tweets in the first place, rather than how to catch and delete them.

Having said that i think relying solely on the judgement and discretion of rich powerful ceos to regulate political discourse is dangerous. Its how oligarchies are born. We need clear laws on how such platforms and news sources or distribution mediums work.

At that scale, it's very hard to achieve. 500M tweet a day. Let's suppose 1% of the tweets are flagged by users or by keyword, that would be 5M of tweets a day to review. Let suppose that one person can review 1000 tweets a day, that would be 5000 people working full time. And even with humans, there'll always be some flagging that will be contested.

Besides, different countries have different legislation regarding what can be be published on the web. It's a hard problem to solve, even with the best intent.

I don't think Musk is going to fix this. I think it'll be more about reinstating people like Trump on the platform.

If someone were to enter a privately owned "public square" in the physical world and start yelling racial slurs, they'd be removed by the cops.

What? I think a lot of people are very bothered by that... especially the victims.

I think that's an entirely different product. Something closer to Discord or Telegram. Would be interesting to see a pivot along these lines.

Are you aware Twitter already allows all sort of depraved porn on their platform already? Did Advertisers leave the platform as a result of this already?

Maybe Twitter should get rid of the hardcore pornography first.

Musk already said that it couldn't be free for all. Of course, it should be removed if it is against the laws. But moderation should be minimum or less than what it is today.

But you don't seem to care; you parrot misconception which is akin to fake news, which I thought we didn't like.

Except very few fringe people (and progressives towards black people leaving the plantation) nobody wants to use or see racial slurs on social media. That shit doesn't even fly on Zerohedge and most are absolutely fine with that.

What we want is to be able to say "okay dude" and "only women can get pregnant" without being banned.

Not to give citizens a free for all tongue wagging that can harm others or incite violence.

Free speech is to be used against tyrannical governments.

If someone is saying "jews are vermin", they absolutely have to be gagged.

As always the right wing is better at working the refs

>Over the past several months, conservative groups— including associates of President Trump— were often not penalized by Facebook for violating its rules because people at the company worried about the perception of anti-conservative bias, The Washington Post reported.

What is happening to Reddit?

I recall hearing the phrase a lot in the context of overbearing DEI initiatives (now commonplace) that were criticized for being too superficial in their concern with diversity of "race" rather than diversity of opinion.

Racist = like calling Kanye West the n-word on twitter. Oh wait that was one of your blue checks.

But what DID happen though, is the opposite team doing the same and banning anything or anyone right-wing.

Every social progress that has ever occurred started out as a fringe viewpoint.

I like that; add in "banning decisions must be unanimous" and I think you'll have better decisions.

Far left anarchists? Far right fascists? Do Furries get a voice in the council?

It's only on pseudonymous mega-sites like Twitter, Reddit and HN where jumping down people's throats for having an opposing viewpoint is even a thing.

(It was covered by the Times but paid for by a non-partisan group, with researchers participating)

It's the politicians and similar race-baiters who benefit from convincing citizens that they should hate eachother.

The future of entertainment is a modern twist on old school gladiators. Elon Musk is our Augustus.

For two weeks: ban every Blue checkmark. Evaluate.

The next two weeks: ban every reporter. Evaluate.

The next two weeks: ban every politician. Evaluate.

The next two weeks: ban anyone without a Ukraine flag, vaccine, or mask on their profile. Evaluate.

The next two weeks: ban everyone with a Ukraine flag, vaccine, or mask on their profile. Evaluate.

Make it interesting and never tell people what you will ban for two weeks this time, but leave it up to them to figure out.

Run enough tests and you'll find the magical blend. Or conclude that the best course of action is simply to ban everyone.

That sounds fine to me if there’s actually a diverse set of view points. Getting censored should require a wide swathe of agreement. Not just a vocal minority.

“I can build a twitter clone in a weekend” is famous for a reason.

If you view the 4chan forums, they're already plotting racist, anti-semitic content and rejoicing. Advertisers will not be happy real quick.

People get accounts banned every day here. Moderation on HN is imo heavier than it is on twitter. Topics and discussion are heavily controlled and removed if they become at all sensitive or aggressive. You can't call people names or make crass offtopic jokes (like people on twitter do constantly).

Moderation is quick and personal, but that doesn't scale to a site with the volume of twitter.

The moderation and thoughtful approach to community is undoubtedly the best I have seen on the Internet.

It's not for everyone, but it is for me, which is why I refresh the page more times than any other page during the course of the day.

I can't imagine another community that isn't specialist getting close to be honest.

But I would love it if the rest of the Internet were as intellectually curious - this is the core of HN.

Twitter is more like a utility, and if it wants to occupy that position it should be more open to content that people disagree with or don't like.

(dang does do a great job, and it's really remarkable how well HN has maintained its quality over many years. That it is not a commericial enterprise also helps a lot, I think.)

dang, if you're reading this, what's your motivation? It seems like a lot of work and somewhat thankless.

The most controversial topic here is emacs vs vi.

i, myself, almost never see what i consider hateful content.

Yet, there are viewpoints that would be considered so utterly innocent in the west as to be as unnoticeable as punctuation, that have led to actual mob violence and lynchings, and I am talking this decade, not some old era bygones.

Such speech is considered equivalent to yelling "Fire" in an open theater, to use a common internet retort on free speech, because of the effect it has on the masses, and we have laws on blasphemy specifically for this.

You would think, oh surely I would never say anything offensive to any group, but for Funzies, have a scroll here: https://twitter.com/search?q=blasphemy%20(from%3ASAMRIReport...

So, whose blasphemies are considered sacred, mine or yours?

Be careful when asking for diversity. You might get it.

----

Americans do seem to take free speech for granted.

"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.

But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated. Also, then the police and FBI could use all the evil content to "do their job" (but, I'm not holding my breath).

Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal. The algorithms are linear in complexity, so should be parallelizable.

I figure he might have thought this through...

I'm writing this from a country that currently has a giant nationwide chain store that has a public "No Whites, Blacks Only" hiring policy.

I think the crux of it for me, is that whilst Musk comes at this fresh, he's not proposing fresh solutions. He has repeatedly suggested things that people have already tried, and then pivoted away from - realising the mistakes. It's very difficult to see this news today and not say "Oh, ok, so you're going to replicate Facebook's oversight board?"

I agree with you, he's acheived a lot. At the end of the day though 2+2=4 no matter who you are, and if we're shooting for 5, I might hope Elon can produce 5, but if I hope he's going to produce 5, and his big idea is 2+2, then I'm going to be skeptical. it's not that I think he's an idiot, it's that he's proposing things that are well trodden paths.

It has been interesting to read it today.

Fundamentally elon has simply called for politically neutral content moderation. I expect he's never going to allow calls to violence or incitement type things; who exactly thinks this is a bad decision? This is to solve the ongoing problem of censorship.

Yet the people see the above as a nightmare scenario. So what exactly are we missing? Is giving the republicans their voice back and allowing them to speak really such a nightmare? I don't think these people are upset about this. I suspect it's not a nightmare scenario if the republicans getting the ability to speak back results in landslide elections in their favour. Like we are potentially seeing now in midterm polling.

What if that's not the case. What if this is indeed a nightmare scenario? What exactly is the unsaid explanation?

I don't see the cause for concern let alone it being a nightmare scenario.

Clearly Musk is in the latter camp.

I said earlier that twitter has been hemorrhaging money to tune of nearly 2 billion over the last 2.5 years.

While possible, its likely that Musk can't possibly do worse than the former leadership.

Obviously it is a gamble, but what isn't a gamble? And what do such men gain without nothing ventured?

People's complaints about Twitter moderation aren't about the law, they're about governments being able to indirectly make de facto, unconstitutional law through either informal demands and threats to, or overly chummy and profitable relationships with, media companies. It's not hard to figure out why media and payment consolidation and monopolies are allowed/encouraged. They're ideal for government.

I don't understand how orchestrated bans across media companies and payment processors can be allowed when price-fixing isn't. They're behaving as trusts.

Diversity is both of these things. It is true that you can have more diversity in a room of people of one race than a room of people of all different races, but it's more common that you will find diversity across lines like race, gender, age, etc.

Misinformation has real world impact

The violence and abuse many women experience on Twitter has a detrimental effect on their right to express themselves equally, freely and without fear. Instead of strengthening women’s voices, the violence and abuse many women experience on the platform leads women to self-censor what they post, limit their interactions, and even drives women off Twitter completely."

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-vi...

But look at the mass shooter Dylan Roof, among others. They targeted minorities and were solely radicalized in online forums according to their manifestos. Or, look at the strain on hospitals that anti-vaxxers put us through. These people were partly influenced by online misinformation.

Concerns about speech in the age of social media have little to do with A's speech impacting person B. It's A's speech influencing person X, Y and Z which then has an unpredictable negative impact on person B.

This wasn't a big problem 15 years ago before social media. It's a new problem and many people haven't updated their paradigm given the new environment we're now in.

Because falling afoul of them doesn't just make your tweets not show up in Discover to people who don't know you. It means you can't tweet to your friends either.

To be clear, your post has completely valid reasons to not care if moderation is too lax, but you do still need to care if it's too strict.