So if I go off about how awful the Jews and the gays are, is that a "diverse viewpoint"?
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.
Just FYI, the "fire in a crowded theater" is actually a widely-spread yet terrible example, as it was actually overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. So, yelling fire in a crowded theater is actually legally not addressed by either decision and the famous quote is part of an overturned ruling.
I don't think we should frame free speech standards based on Pakistan, if your bio is correct.
Remember, I am not talking merely about legally limited speech, I am talking about stuff that causes societal discomfort.
If it's a "diverse" council, then there are bound to be people from this part of the world. And if they give, with a straight face, the examples you see in the funzies link as example of hate speech they would like to be moderated....
How would you feel, if your tweet was blocked, and the reason given is something you, and any body from your part of the world, would personally consider to be as offense as not ending your sentence with a fullstop would be to a grammar nazi...but to the council it was considered as offensive as perhaps saying the N-word?
I am talking from a purely academic point of view, but you have to realise the scope of these matters. Pakistan might not be able to affect Twitter moderation, but India? definitely, too big a market to ignore. The Gulf Countries are already investors alongside Musk, so them too. EU has already given the halt signal.
My personal opinion and absolutely dissociated from my employer: I am not going to talk about economic decisions or market pressure, but free speech standards should also be not framed around India's standards. A diverse council shouldn't have to include viewpoints that are wrong. Defining wrong is certainly a difficult measure to elaborate, but free speech standards that include some religious persecution are definitely in that wrong category. Bigots will always say that they aren't bigots.
Real progress can then be made.
Try forcing your way in front of a camera at your nearest news station and see how that works out for you.
Twitter isn't providing you and a platform for free; it sells ads alongside it. And if its moderation is too strict, then it's not an effective platform.
which goes to my original question, strict according to whom?
"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...
(That's probably a big reason why he wants subscription fees to take over advertiser revenue dominance.)
I don't think it helps with any of either, as people's behavior, the context, the language used and sensibilities change across cultures and over time. What you call hate speech now may not be in the future and may not have been in the past.
The best you could hope for is creating a fuzzy representation of the most visible problematic behavior and try to outrun model-world dealignment by constantly updating it.
And, the agent is moved closer to the clusters they like tweets from, and further from the clusters they dislike tweets from.
The more diverse your likes (likes tweets in many other clusters), the broader and less restrictive your cluster weighting is -- the more variety you see. The more restrictive your selection, the less variety.
You decide how much of an "echo chamber" you're in. But, if you don't like $BAD_THING, and you downvote enough tweets of $BAD_THING, the less you'll see tweets by people in groups where they like $BAD_THING.
But large platforms have two massive problems:
(1) what people want is popular content, sometimes even content they would downvote. This destroys clustering by creating fuzzy centralized bridges and erodes the usefulness of recommenders
(2) people over time have lost trust and interest in highly personalized feeds, see facebook or the revolt against instagram's feed sorting.
Two cases that seem to work for now are music recommendation and tiktok. I'm not holding my breath though, because spotify might end up driving people away with too many monetized podcasts and tiktok could succumb to the generational migration. But we'll see!
And the second point was a mostly abstract intellectual debate in the early 2010s, but people have proven that they absolutely prefer to stick with their own, and have close-to-zero tolerance for dissent or disagreement (see, "the hivemind"). Twitter is far more prone to this than Facebook, since it's founded on communities (i.e. clusters) rather than just friends. Twitter just needs to stop putting junk into people's feeds; and silo them better to reduce harassment.
That would also reduce polarization, since a yuge cause for polarization (far-right, antifa) is a knee-jerk reaction to the very worst content from the other side. Stop promoting that, and you'll stop the "Brainwashing Of My Dad" effect (the film), where a conservative from Texas gets upset because of bathroom laws in California, or where a liberal gets upset because of a few 4chan trolls.
It's the psychological phenomenon of "enmeshment": remove the boundaries between people, and you make their relationship very toxic and conflictual. Enforce better boundaries, and their relationship will be far healthier. Twitter promoted the former; Musk can avoid most of the upcoming "hell" being predicted by doing the latter.
If you don't want people chuckling at you, don't talk crazy.
If you really, really get annoyed at something and mash the downvote button, it'll eventually go away, and you'll be left in your warm, cozy bubble.
Everyone wins!
Your delicate sensitivites about $SOMETHING don't affect anyone else.
Long Covid brain fog? Marijuana-induced schizophrenia? Has he just been stupid and lucky all along? I haven't spent enough time thinking about this to figure out why.
There are people who enjoy reasoned debate, even if they don't agree with the counterparty. They won't downvote those tweets. Their cluster weight will be gently moving in the direction of others like them, and its weight will let through a wide variety of other gently weighted groups.
Others are compelled to screech and foam at the mouth if someone argues for a $WRONGTHINK - even in jest or as a devil's advocate, and will downvote them instantly. Their weightings will be heavy, and will exclude most other groups. They will see only what they want to see, and won't see what they don't want to see -- reasoned debate from groups they disagree with, for example.
This is a personal choice, and mirrors physical group dynamics.
If someone "in your group" starts talking crazy, they will begin to separate from the group (by mutual down-voting), and migrate to a different group. You (and the rest of your group) won't be affected much.
Not all viewpoints are equally valid. Just finding the middle of the viewpoints that exist isn't moderate because you can't just pretend that all sides have equal numbers of extremists and that somehow their views automatically "cancel out".
Simply stating a council will have diverse views is enough for people to ring the fire alarm these days.
What makes you think your viewpoint is valid?
It's intellectually weak and morally dubious to take such a stupid position.
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.