Moderation is different from censorship

As I've said for a long time, I don't mind moderation, I just want to be in charge of what I see. Give me the tools that the moderators have, let me be able to filter out bots at some confidence level; let me see "removed" posts, banned accounts; don't mess with my searches unless I've asked for that explicitly.

Power to the people.

I've been a reader and participant of the Bogleheads forum (on investing and personal finance) for well over a decade, and I think it's a shining example of good moderation in practice. My observation is that the key is preventing discussion from getting heated; really moderating the temperature (or noise intensity, excitement, etc.) of the place. Threads on topics that are known to get heated (including topics that can be relevant to investing and personal finance, such as politics and macroeconomics and cryptocurrencies in recent times) immediately get locked. Threads on topics that start out OK but end up getting heated also get locked, or the heated content gets surgically removed if main discussion can be salvaged. So the focus is entirely on high-quality information and thoughtful, low-emotion points and counter-points to think about. The merits of the discussions continue to attract and retain new fantastic participants who make them even better. Edited to add: The practice of moderation here at HN is similar, and has similar effects, which is why I'm here.

If they started removing low-emotion information and discussions that just didn't fit the Bogleheads philosophy, I think that would cross the line into censorship.

Anyway, it's clear that the Bogleheads forum model is the polar opposite of where Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have gone to suck in the masses and increase their engagement by highlighting the most heated stuff and throwing gasoline onto the fire with likes, votes, and retweets. I think the mainstream social media companies have put themselves into a bind with this.

> And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now.

I highly doubt it.

I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out.

That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy.

That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…

It seems to me this piece makes lots of assumptions that do not really apply to social media, where I'll use Twitter as the example, just like the author did.

People don't really have "conversations" on social media. Most activity is posting updates about oneself, but the far bigger part is screaming at each other and playing engagement games.

The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded.

As such, Twitter is opposite to real life. If you'd talk and behave as people do on Twitter in the real world, you'd be ousted in a day or may even wake up in the hospital.

In a dynamic where bad faith is the default, you can't apply good faith principles.

It's massively complex to address. On the one hand, you have almost no accountability regarding your speech on Twitter, yet incidentally too much: mob attacks / cancel culture. Too free and too restricted at once.

Personally, I think what you can and cannot say is a massive distraction from the real issue: what gets amplified. Reasonable conversation is pointless and hot takes win. It should be the opposite, just like in real life.

I think this view is hopelessly naive in the real world. You could easily make "moderation" (as defined by the article) the same as "censorship" (as defined by the article) by producing a lot of false, semi-false and nonsense content to drown out the signal in the noise.

Our concepts of free speech, censorship and moderation are simply outdated on modern social media - when you have systems designed to encourage and spread low-effort, novel, emotional and manipulative content (e.g. twitter), no amount of "tweaks" to such systems can fix the problem.

Instead of trying to fix systems originally designed for marketing, why not actually design systems meant for disseminating and checking information from the ground up? I bet that would look way different compared to twitter or facebook.

It doesn't have to involve moderation or censorship - it could just mean giving disproporitonately more powerful voice to experts willing to explain disinformation, for example (rather than having their voice drown in the retweet popularity contest).

I'm not sure I buy that the MVP here is actually "viable". Suppose you're Reddit, and you have FatPeopleHate on your site, and you "ban" it, in the sense that you hide it from users who have not opted-in. Does that really provide the same level of enforcement as a true ban? It seems to me that the presence of that community on your site has effects that spread beyond the community itself, it shapes the way people interact even outside the soft-banned subreddit.

I'd be willing to bet that if you could somehow run an experiment in parallel where you had one Reddit with real bans, and one with soft bans, the quality and nature of interactions on the soft ban one would be much, much worse even outside of banned communities.

This very site is the closest implementation I’ve seen to what he described in the article. Moderation actions that are still visible for those who opt in.

I personally opt in to see all the flagged/dead comments. I would say 1-5% of them are mysteries as to why they are dead (meaning they have been automatically killed, not killed due to other users flagging).

But then the ones that deserve to be killed/banned are so, so egregious.

It’s just unfortunate that there will always be innocent people that get roped in with automatic moderation.

I don't want moderation OR censorship. I want proper labeling so that I can self-filter out things that I don't want to see. Just like the labels on cans of food tells you exactly what ingredients are found within the can so you can skip the ones with peanuts, gluten, or some other substance you don't want; I want labels (and levels) on data.

If I don't want to see profanity, I should be able to set my filter to exclude profane comments. If I don't want to see nudity, I can set that filter too. Just like movies get a certain rating (G, PG, R, etc.), we should be able to properly label data.

I found this unconvincing.

The article's distinction between moderation and censorship feels like the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist - i.e. if you are sympathetic to their cause you use the more positive euphamism, but there really isn't an objective difference.

At most the distinction the article seems to be making is that moderation should be optional and censorship forced - you should be able to choose to see the dead comments if you want (nevermind that that is hardly the norm for "moderation" on the internet).

All i can think, is under that distinction, the mccarthyism in the US would probably be considered "moderation" not "censorship" despite probably being one of the most egregious examples of censorship in usa in the modern era. So i have trouble accepting that definition.

No it isn’t different. At least it is not different in it’s mechanics. The activities of a moderator and a censor are identical. The intent and objective contain nuanced differences, but only of degree not kind.

Both moderation and censorship have the outcome of reducing what information parties are allowed to communicate, and a system is its inputs and outputs, thus they are the same thing.

This isn’t to say that it’s bad or good. The rhetoric of moderation is perceived better than censorship, but this is like the cops calling your interrogation an interview; it doesn’t actually change what’s happening.

That's a very thin line between moderation and censorship. When in doubt about which is which, think if if obeys freedom of speech or not.

Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation. Deleting a comment because you don't like it, it doesn't conform to your views or you find it outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake is censorship.

I feel like something happened when the Internet became more "mainstream" that meant that I couldn't simply accept walking away from a platform.

Back in the day we might have a forum or a number of forums on a topic. Let's say it's Nascar Forums or whatever. I might not like the opinions of the moderators and that'd be that, I'd leave the site. I'd recognize that it's not reflective of the wider world.

Somehow Twitter and Reddit and various other social networks don't feel like that. I feel quite often that some subset people around me take opinions from Twitter etc. as being reflective of mainstream thought. When really it's still just a tiny microcosm of humanity.

I don't really use them any more, but I still have the sense that all sorts of social movements and bizarre (from my perspective) opinions and value frameworks are being born and spread there.

This also presumes the site being 'moderated' is operating in a vacuum.

The reason why moderation exists on sites like Twitter / Facebook is due to: 1. Laws (e.g. child porn, abuse, harassment, illegal speech like Tiananmen square in China). 2. Advertisers - the real customers. 3. Public opinion

In that order, with a pretty big gap between #2 and #3. Don't comply with laws? Out of business tomorrow. Don't do what advertisers want? Out of business this year. Don't do what the general public wants? Maybe out of business in a few years, maybe not, it depends.

The methods proposed in this post are great for dealing with issues around public opinion, but do very little to appease governments or advertisers.

If it is not not on your server, than you don't get to complain.

Moderators were initially tasked with keeping threads on topic, enforcing predefined community standards, and parsing irrelevant detractors.

Dark patterns are now mostly just used to manipulate people, and attenuate conduct to fall into line with group think biases. This policy drives up engagement, traffic, and profits.

Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)

First: the dictionary defines censorship differently. AstralCodexTen's definition even seems to ignore the fact that e.g. Zuckerberg and Musk are very much "people in power". And it adds "customers" to the definition. In what perverse mindset is a speaker a seller?

Second: is this about freedom of speech? If it is, say so, because moderation nor censorship exclusively define that. Muddying the debate by giving some weird definition of two concepts isn't going to help that.

One thing I see missing from the conversation is that fact that large corporations are becoming agents of the state, via fear, regulation, and fear of regulation.

I can see Social Media CEO saying "well, I believe in free expression and I would otherwise want to allow this message, but I'm worried what the government will do to me if I do allow it. So instead I will block it."

When a platform blocks some content, some call it "censorship", while others say "hey, it's a private company and they can block what they want to. It's called 'moderation'" - but this may in fact not be something the platform wants to block - it's indirect government censorship.

I wonder how Elon will handle this. Will he be cowed by the government into censoring content they don't like? Or will he ignore them and take his chances?

In social media, moderation of this style is practically equivalent to censorship because the visibility of the content is determined algorithmically: if the algo decides to "hide" your posts they become invisible (or much less visible) in other people's feeds. The fact that they're still visible for the die hard followers that refresh your page to see them is mostly irrelevant.

Your speech is effectively censored by the moderators because you cannot use that tool as intended, to reach audiences with the same ease other types of speech can.

It's like requiring a newspaper to "moderate" all articles by a certain author publishing them in the form of a short notice "If you are interested in the writings of Mr. Smith, who may or may have not published an article for today's issue, then please send a self-addressed enevelope to PO-Box ....".

I think something that really bothers me about this discussion about moderation is how many people approach this debate like a new born baby. They have an idea and then speculate on how it fixes everything. There's never any discussion of what exists in the real world. ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing.

So let's look at what happened in reality. Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole.

The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship.

I also think that this article completely mischaracterizes what the free speech side of the debate want.

I always thought the original moderation method of Slashdot better; a simple slider that adjusted the thread based on the quality of conversation you desired.

I feel this piece, like a lot of moderation/censorship rhetoric, starts from a disingenuous place.

Free speech, moderation, editing, censorship, propaganda, and such do not have clear definitions. The terms have a history. Social media is new, and most of the nuance needs to be invented/debated. There aren't a priori definitions.

This article is defining censorship as X and moderation as Y... Actually, it provides 2 unrelated definitions.

Definition 1 seems to be that moderation is "normal business activity" and censorship is "abnormal, people-in-power activity" on behalf of "3rd parties," mostly governments.

Definition 2, the article's "moderation MVP" implies that opt-out filters represent "moderation" while outright content removal is, presumably, censorship.

IMO this is completely ridiculous, especially the China example. China's censorship already does, work like this article's "moderation MVP". Internet users can, with some additional effort, view "banned content" by using a VPN. In practice, most people use the default, firewalled internet most of the time.

Youtube's censorship is, similarly, built of the same stuff. Content can be age-gated, demonetized or buried. Sure, there is some space between banned and penalized... but no one is going to see it and posting it is bad for your youtuber career to post it. This discourages most of it.

IMO, the difference between censorship and moderation is power, and power alone. A small web forum can do whatever it likes and it's moderation. If a government, medium monopoly, cartel, cabal or whatnot do it.... it is censorship. If a book is banned from a book stall, that's moderation. If it is banned from amazon... that's censorship.

If amazon have a settings toggle where you can unhide banned books does not change anything that matters. A book that amazon won't sell is a book that probably won't be printed in the first place. That's how censorship actually works. It's not just about filtering bad content. It's about disincentivizing it's existence entirely. Toggles work just fine for that.

No, it's not.

Moderation is a special case/form of censorship. In many cases, it's a desired or willful filter as the article suggests, but it is censorship of information.

Censorship doesn't have to be forced, it can be agreed to but it's still censorship. Rebranding things to look fuzzy and give positive perception doesn't change the underlying principle.

Manipulation of information be it omission, selection picking, burying in piles of noise, etc are all manipulative tactics most of which are used to follow the spirit/intent of censorship. It happens in restricted environments like China but also happens in less restrictive environments like the US, the method of approach simply changes around what's legal and possible. One could argue censorship approaches in free speech environments are the most resilient because they rely less on the difficult tight controls of information flow nation states like China leverage.

I am very bad at content classification on an open plattform. When i dont know the sender, i can barely tell about his or her intentions. Being bad at finding out about the intentions of a news article applies probably to you and everybody else as well. This is a big problem with social media that governments and companies are using to their advantage.

With classical media agencies you have a bigger chance at guessing their political views and intentions. Whether you like them or not is up to you. Most of these media agencies also take responsibility for the release of a piece of news.

This responsibility is missing with "individuals" who post on social media, they vouch for nothing and can only lose their account.

The right to post to an unlimited amount of people should be earned in my opinion. Right now the algorithms of the social media platforms even encourage controversial or aggressive posts which is the worst that can happen.

You can list 1000 reasons why moderation is different from censorship, but people in power can achieve the same censorship goal with tools provided by moderation.

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416424

So as a result they are practically the same thing.

The author of the article tried hard on distinguish Moderation from Censorship, here is something I want to point out:

When you talk about censorship, you must also talk about freedom of speech which usually is a well-defined legal term in countries that supports it. On the other hand, moderation is a form of management. Depends on why and how the action is carried out, moderation could be better or worse than censorship.

And,

> If the Chinese government couldn’t censor - only moderate

This is exactly how most censorship is implemented in China, through moderation. See the funny part there?

The point is, I don't think the word Moderation must inherently better than Censorship, it all depends on the why and hows.

There is another issue here which is the external pressures platforms face.

Platforms will always be judged by journalists based on their lowest common denominator of users. Journalists will purposefully turn off all filters, find the worst comments, and say X platform is all like that bad person

This behaviour is then happily used by politicians to push platform owners in certain directions, possibly with the threat of regulation.

It also might mean coordinated leaving of advertisers, killing the platform.

So while in theory this article is right, there’s external power games that really play into the free speech issue.

One aspect of the "moderation is censorship" debate that I haven't seen discussed is that a lot of the time, what we're looking at is a campaign of targeted harassment against somebody. And then if they are blocked, the person doing the harassment will complain about censorship or sometimes "cancel culture".

But, the whole point of a harassment campaign is to silence someone- to intimidate or bully them until they shut up. What is that if not censorship by other means?

What I'm saying is that sometimes one person's freedom of expression has to be limited in order to protect the freedom of expression of someone else. And there's a balance to be struck there.

But the point is: there is no neutral position here. If you refuse to make a decision about when free expression become unacceptable harassment, you are still making a decision: you are saying that the person with the worst behavior will be the only one whose voice can be heard.

The same thing happens in the outside world, of course: deregulation, for example, does not generally bring freedom, it only shifts the power to whoever has the most money. The principle is the same. You either collectively make a decision about what behavior is tolerable, or you allow the person with the biggest stick to make all the rules. There is no opting out of the decision.

His argument that we should have opt in moderation rather than censorship is largely based on consent, but it misses a third category of communications which is where two parties are engaged in a consensual communication about a third party who does not consent. Basically the CSAM scenario, but also non consensual adult porn, snuff, libel etc.

There needs to be some way of dealing with this that respects the rights of the person who is being talked about, and that has to involve some censorship.

I'm hoping we'll get to a point where not making a good faith effort to be factually correct will be seen as equally bad as censorship.

They're both just tactics used to decieve.

The internet is this amazing tool for building knowledge and we seen to be arguing about who is allowed to tell lies rather than collaborating on how to discover truth.

It's simple basic things like citing sources that need to become norms.

I love showdead on HN, but I'd like to see this taken a step further on big networks like twitter, with user moderated blocklists where I could opt in or out, and also a way to see a list of blocklists I'm on.

Of course the real problem is that advertisers would probably bail if twitter had showdead, but maybe twitter can solve that problem with the new twitter $8 thing.

Here's a moderation idea: treat people as grownups and allow everything (everything permitted by the law, that is).

Just let individuals ban whoever they want from THEIR view.

If you want to be super-fancy, you could then see if some account X is banned by many of individual users from appearing on their feed, and give individuals an option to have those automatically banned from their own feeds after some threshold percentage.

So, if X is a jerk/spammer and individual many discussion group users have banned them (from their own view), give users the option to automagically have X banned from their own feed too once they hit say 10% of other members banning them.

This off-loads bannin a little, and as long as individual users have the option to check which those "auto-banned" are and e.g. except them from being auto-banned for them, it still maintains freedom.

In HN with showdead etc, I've never seen any "dead" comments that I couldn't just have as regular comments and just ignore on my own...

You have the theoretical and the applied. Moderators are people. Algorithms are obtuse and bias can be built in. The solution? Various different sites and outlets with different approaches to moderation (or lack there of) allowing for freedom of expression as well as ideologically "safe" areas in the aggregate.

The real threat and conflation of moderation and censorship is when centralized sites like reddit or facebook put a standardize layer that is enforced across topics and domains. When taken to the point of infrastructure removing site's abilities to exist (such as the stormfront having their domain suspended) then we've clearly veered into censorship. People can complain about moderation on a site or forum (I mean I have), but when the moderation is not contained to the forum, and the site seeks to supplant the distributed world wide web itself, then the line is an arbitrary one.

The way Scott is right is this:

We aren’t even having a candid, good faith public conversation about all this.

Nothing in content moderation would necessitate banning public figures with heterodox views from your platform. Hell, that’s not even a requirement for censorship.

Banning is for trolls and bots and bad faith actors, which is definitionally never someone with >1million followers.

That choice is about publicly punishing someone and most importantly, distancing yourself personally from that person and whatever they said so you don’t get confronted at a cocktail party.

So yea, when you open up a site to all legal content, you immediately are flooded with people at the very edge or just over every law.

Similarly, when you ban Alex Jones, you pretty soon end up banning everyone who you disagree with.

Most of what is going on right now in social media isn’t moderation or censorship. It’s just being lame and awful and lacking principles and self awareness.

This is a very shallow take on the subject, that glosses over some of the most contentious issues related to freedom of speech on private platforms and only presents the most clear cut cases.

There are many situations where a post being visible to anyone is harmful to someone else. We can rationally weigh the value of freedom of speech versus expected harm to that individual and come up on both ends, but we can't ignore this simple fact when discussing this issue.

The only example mentioned in the post is child pornography, but there are more others: revenge porn, doxxing, smear campaigns to name a few. If my ex wants to send an explicit video of me, and someone else wants to view it, I am still harmed by the fact that the platform makes this possible, even if my moderation filters don't show it to me. Similarly, if someone is spreading my address or saying I eat children, the fact that I can choose not to see this doesn't protect me from the consequences of others reading these messages.

Again, not saying that I believe it obvious that such messages must be removed. My only point is that the "solution" that Scott proposes for avoiding harassment is a partial solution at best, but more realistically, entirely useless. It basically only helps for very low level harassment, such as not wanting to see someone cuss.

The irony of posters on here —a website that’s a pretty decent example of moderation leading to a better user experience — posting about how we must abolish the mods is never lost on me.

Shine on you crazy diamonds!

There are some interesting ideas here, but it leaves the actual problem unaddressed. Lots of people are instinctually drawn toward the "edgy" because of a very human instinct to seek secret knowledge. This completely overrides the part of the brain that asks, "Is it good for me or for society that I immerse myself in this environment?". We as a society have yet to find a good way to mitigate this "consumer of secret knowledge" cachet, which on the internet has created a conspiracy theory flywheel.

I can't believe I'm citing Techdirt, but, here we are:

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

Now, "just add a button marked 'see banned content'" to each of these cases. How much easier did Elon's job get?

> Spam is nothing close to either of those, yet everyone agrees: yes, itʻs okay to moderate (censor) spam. Why is this? Because it has no value? Because itʻs sometimes false? Certainly itʻs not causing offline harm. No, no, and no.

Yes, because it has no value, and because spam is basically financially motivated harassment, and harassment shouldn't be allowed.

Moderation on internet services is just to remove spam. People who think it's for something else are brain dead. Yes, 99% of internet services do think moderation is for whatever little idea they have, but 99% of internet services are poor quality services in the first place. We have never left the dot com bubble.

The problem with the big platforms applying platform-wide moderation is exactly that they are too damn big. Platform-wide moderation could as well be censorship in disguise, but hey it’s apparently ok, since it’s a private company (albeit an oligopoly) doing it. Censorship is only when government is doing it, right? Right?

> Proponents of censorship have decided it’s easier to conflate censorship and moderation, and then argue for moderation.

You know it’s a weak article from this strawman. The author could have addressed the ‘digital town square’ that was directly listed as the reason for Elon intervening in Twitter but has deliberately chosen not to.

The guy just won't shut up about his trees!

But I'm starting to get his point about moderation being based on repetitive behaviour, and not content. I wonder if that's why he keeps interrupting himself about his trees.

(For the record, I appreciate his trees project; don't see this as an attack on that.)

The problem with Twitter and Youtube, at least for me, is that they apply double standards so blatantly. I mean, how can you keep for years Khamenei's tweets that called for "eradicating" a people, while banning an account just because "language is violence"?

Moderation is what I do on someone's else posts. Censorship is what someone does in my posts.

Some moderation is the nobody wants to see this - spam and the like - and some moderation is nobody needs to see this.

The first one you can pass off to a third party - the seconds one is trouble that you can't avoid.

Even if there ends up being no difference between the two, being able to opt in to see more of the deleted material makes the moderators much more accountable.

I have no idea if this community would be improved with less moderation because I'm blind to most of its results.

People are acting like 20% of Twitter content is crap and it can be saved by moderating that 20%. This is incredibly naive.

99% of Twitter is crap and always will be. You can't moderate that away. The question is how to make the 1% discoverable.

Nice idea of having the opt-in option to see the content which goes against the provider policy. The issue with China however is that in that scenario, they would probably track who have this option enabled and then persecute them.

Some moderation isn't censorship, but most is.

Mostly only illegal content should be removed.

When thinking about how this landscape will evolve, you should think:

"A computer can understand the content as well as any person."

As this will be true in ~3 years. In that light, things are both better and more scary.

Goal. Silence people I don’t like.

Technique. Silence them using any tool available.

Justification. Whatever lie I can spin so if doesn’t seem like censorship.

Eventual goal. Censorship so complete that realistic justification is not needed.

Story time: Chinese Intranet has changed gradually from "hard" censorship to "soft" methods, posts still get deleted from time to time, but for a broader range of topics, gov't agencies choose to flood the social media with spam posts, mangling with recommenders and messing with sorting options. Technically the gov't didn't delete a thing, but yeah it will be PITA to find useful information and people can not formulate discussions.

>>avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting,

I don't think it actually would make them happy or happier

This group has a problem with the content existing at all, self moderation tools have been suggested and implemented in other contexts, and in a limited degree on twitter today (mute and block) and that is not seen as "good enough"

The group that opposes free speech does not just want to be in a self guided safe space no they want to ensure no one can says things they have deemed hate speech or misinformation. Many of this group also want to go further and punish people outside of the platform they spoke incorrectly on

So to imply self moderation tools is the solution completely misunderstands the goals of the "avoid-harassment side" which is to control and narrow the Overton window

I find the distinction between moderation and censorship helpful.

I'm more sympathetic to censorship than the author--I've seen what e.g. vaccine misinformation can do to radicalize the average person.

One valuable tool the author doesn't spend much time on is defaults. We can have a heavily moderated, uncensored platform which still prevents mis/disinformation for the vast majority of users. E.g. HN hides all sorts of nonsense by default, but still allows you to reveal it with showdead. The same folks who are prone to disinformation are often too unsophisticated to dig into their settings, and having only a single "showdead" filter means you not only see your favorite Lizard People posts, you also get inundated with all the other nonsense.

"Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that’s censorship."

Meh. It's full of loaded terms. "Abnormal": if you engage in it regularly, then it's normal, not abnormal. "People in power": you mean like moderators?

Moderation is a form of censorship. Is moderation good? Well, it's a question of degree. Some moderators become gatekeeping Nazis, just as some posters become raving lunatics. So it's a question of finding a BALANCE between freedom of expression and letting the clowns run amok.

The article completely misses the point. Some middlemen like Twitter or Facebook does not want to be associated with certain images or point of view, perhaps because of advertising or user demographics or whatever reason, and they decide which content is ok or not. Both sender and receiver can want to have Trump tweets, but Twitter will not want that so they block it.

I don’t think Twitter is wrong, and it is not really different from Apple not letting pornography into the App Store, but it is still deeply troubling to me at some level. And it is neither moderation like discussed in the article or censorship as discussed in the article.

just give me a switch to turn off all moderation. i want to see all messages, except spam/scams.

They got close to the mark, but missed it here:

> A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now...but have an opt-in setting

There's one problem with that. Often times, the product itself is the moderated version.

Letting users use a product with moderation turned off would be giving them what they want, but it would not be giving them "the product".

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For example, people want a space where they can talk about mechanical keyboards. So they go to https://old.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards/

Some people want to sell their custom mechanical keyboards. They think, "I know where a bunch of potential customers are, /r/mk/!"

Queue the sub getting flooded with sales posts, and the moderators banning such posts. Now they have rule #2 and moderate accordingly.

OP's solution is to castrate the moderators by instead of allowing them to remove posts, only allowing them to hide posts. Then users who want to break the rules can simply toggle them.

But we already have a better solution: Just go somewhere else! Right there in the text of rule #2, there is a link to /r/mechmarket/, which is its own subreddit, moderated for the buying and selling of mechanical keyboards.

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But, of course, that doesn't work with social media. There is only one Facebook. Only one Twitter. They are global namespaces. There is no room for traditional moderation. And that is its own problem.

It's hard to have meaningful conversation when every participant in your social circle, or even in the world is standing at their own soapbox. It's as useless as a daily company-wide meeting.

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We don't just need to fight disinformation. We need to fight for information, for discussion. We need to show people who are busily engaged in identity politics that there are more interesting conversations to be had. Social media is a really poorly equipped space for those conversations, because it isn't moderated.

IMO being informed is about your own research. Either making sure you follow trustworthy people and/or checking their sources.

Wondering if the account is real or fake? Check the person's website, wikipedia page, look if there are more accounts with this name.

People are willfully disinformed. Do you trust information just because it's being liked many times? Well, being popular doesn't mean it's right or healthy.

In Russia many people don't think their government is doing anything wrong. Why? TV says so. Their coworkers do. But you have Youtube, Telegram. Most media who's websites are blocked have YT channels or their articles can be read on Telegram with quick view. No VPN needed.

In my POV many moderation/censorship arguments boil down to the desire to be walled off from bad info vs being able to make individual choices. Russian government is doing the former by blocking independent media.

What this whole debate totally misses in the USA at least, is that it even only exists because of a bigger violation and distortion of the Constitution, the freedom so implicit that it crossed the minds of the founders of America even less than having to protect the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free association, being allowed and able to chose who one wants to associate with and who one does not want to associate with. We are not able to do such a fundamental thing in America today, by law (de jure, Sotomayor), as it has been prohibited through perversion and in violation of the Constitution, through the amendment of that very Constitution the prohibition is a violation of.

Almost all other arguments over moderation v. censorship are a derivative of the most fundamental freedom, freedom to choose, control over one’s own life. That natural human right simply does not exist in America (and moist western places) anymore, effectively all the “civil rights amendments” have done the opposite of their stated objectives, they have institutionalized federal government enslavement, total domination of federal government control over your life. You no longer get to choose who you associate with, your slave master federal government decides on who you are allowed to associate with. You are as free as you are permitted; an inherent contradiction.

All this other debate of moderation and censorship is meaningless noise, merely beating around the bush to discuss rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

And for all our foreign friends, whether they are in America acting as if they are American or outside of America, all of these matters related to the US Constitution are very relevant to you too, whether you understand it or not, because all the freedom you have and think you have is a direct derivative of the founders of the USA creating the Constitution and declaring themselves free of the slavery of monarchy. Most people have just taken things so for granted or it is all so abstract that they do not understand any of it, because not even a person of European background can be American without understanding these things properly, let alone someone without European ethic, historical, and cultural background.

That may offend people hearing it, but it does not make any of it less true. In fact it is the “moderation” that is inherent censorship, which even prevents the system from self-correcting, i.e., moderating, because it is really just perversion, i.e., distortion, being called moderation.

There would be nothing to discuss about this topic if the world dominating tyrannical evil of forced association did not exist. So I propose we address that instead unless there point is just making noises as the titanic sinks and we are heading back towards what is effectively neo-monarchy.

moderation is when the user can select what he wishes to see, everything else is censorship, you could see it among ops on irc, reddit mods and platform algos

Elon is clear moderation will continue. It's quite obvious and simple to provide examples where twitter did censor subjects. Hunter biden laptop, freedom convoy, or babylon bee?

This censorship is what forced conservatives to build new platforms. In so doing they discovered far greater censorship. Google, Apple, and Amazon all responding within the day to deplatform parler? The only entity large enough to make those 3 entities jump within a day is the US government.

The "Hell", "nightmare", or "disaster" everyone is complaining about is the US government is who has been censoring speech. The reason there's a large delay on unbanning obvious accounts like babylon bee... twitter/elon can't do it.

Whatever happened to the standard definition of censorship?

Which is that it's decreed by a government or similar institution, and that it is enforced by law? That it's about suppressing ideas/material in a whole society?

Whatever privately run sites/newspapers/organizations do, it's other things -- editorial policy, moderation, curation. But by definition it's not censorship. In the same way that having a crappy job isn't slavery, and a serial killer isn't committing genocide. Privately banning certain content on a single site, or newspaper, is editorial policy, end of story.

Words mean things, and a lot of people have fought long and hard against actual censorship, such as the Comstock laws. Let's not cheapen freedom from censorship by turning it into "but I want to say whatever I want anywhere to anyone who wants to listen!", which is what OP is proposing. Freedom from censorship is about having the right to speak -- but it's not, and never has been, about making anyone else give you a platform for it. And this distinction is vitally important.

I miss editors.

Moderation is a subclass of censorship.

Riiiiight!

XKCD 1357 is how old? And yet people continue to get it wrong.

It’s not censorship unless the government itself is doing the censorship and making people face criminal consequences for disobeying.

If a private entity is doing it, even at the request of a government, it’s not censorship or a violation of free speech unless they were going to face legal consequences for ignoring the government’s request.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

I moderated r/electricvehicles for a year as a sort of benevolent dictator while all the other mods were more or less checked out.

Automoderator rules took care of 90% of the spammy issues. Some things were obvious and chronic, and like porn vs. art, "I know it when I see it." Incivility was pretty easy to identify and call out, but there were a few people that toed the line and would seep toxicity into the sub rather than dump toxicity flamewar-style. They'd never do any one thing to get themselves banned, as they'd very carefully adhere to the letter of the law (sub rules). For a while there was a lot of SPAC hyping, to the point that I had to create a rule just for that. More on that later.

Topic-wise, most of what people viewed as toxic was the drama around Tesla vs. the rest of the industry. There would be people wrapping around the pole on EPA range, charging infrastructure, fit-and-finish, software features, sound isolation, handling characteristics, straight-line 0-60, buying experience, their opinion of Elon Musk, FSD, the existence of a steering wheel, etc. etc. People would often appeal to the mods to try to either take sides or tone down the heat.

Occasionally people would pop in with an opinion on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which to me seemed like a reasonable topic to discuss in a forum about alternative-energy propulsion systems for vehicles, and they'd get shouted out of the forum as not "EV" enough. (Or worse, "Hydrogen is a pipe dream that will never happen to shut up about it already!") Gatekeepers would insist that the only thing anyone could talk about was passenger vehicles with large battery packs, or maybe a picture of an electric bus every once in a while. Posts about electric bikes or boats would get ignored or called out as, "Not the right kind of vehicle for this sub."

Inevitably the mod queue would get filled up with reports for such topics the gatekeepers didn't think are "on-topic" enough. This was the grey area where I had to make a call as a moderator. If a SPAC hype post got downvoted about as much as an electric bicycle post, by what criteria could I justify removing the SPAC post and letting votes decide what happens with the e-bike post?

My solution was to pop it up to a meta-conversation in the forum. "Let's talk about the rules. I've noticed posts with this characteristic or that. What would we think of disallowing posts like this and allowing posts like that?" There would be opinions on both sides, but ultimately I had to rely on my own judgment of "What's reasonable?" when making the final call on the rules.

Moderation of a public forum is very much a human problem, and there will always be corner cases. It reminded me a lot of what I learned in a graduate class I took on intellectual property law back when I was in school. There will always be a contour, and there will always be "test" cases that push and pull on the boundaries. Having rules ("laws") that set the groundwork for decisions is important. The process for establishing (and changing) those rules should be transparent and inclusive. No rule is going to have 100% support from all sides, but to build a system that works, we need to be able to agree on the process, respect the rules that we converge upon, and challenge rules in a civil manner that become obsolete as the world moves forward.

Glad to see someone suggesting, or at least hinting at, competitive moderation over the same message stream. That's probably part of the future. However,

> preferably by offering moderation too cheap to meter

this is not happening. Moderation, at least good moderation, is inherently labor intensive. It requires judgment, especially when people start specifically trying to find your corner cases, which is basically as soon as you start trying to scale. So good moderation will always be expensive (for someone, if not directly to the bulk of users, thanks HN mods).

There's a good article from early internet when China's firewall was very weak.

Even though it was easy to get around the firewall and perhaps even legal at the time, barely anyone was. People weren't using proxies to know about Tank Man when China was arguably only "moderating". People called it censorship.

I can't find the original article, maybe Wired?

[edit] Might be this one - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-con...

This is just to point out the naivety of using it's possible but it's not default is not 'censorship' when talking China. Viewing shadow banned is a ok middle on HN, the obvious hole is you have to have a login. I don't want gore on TikTok but I do want guns. It's very complex.

Is it possible to censor moderation or moderate censorship?

So much cope; I'd rather this political faction was just honest and just admitted they'd want power over Twitter to ban Trump supporters because that is the sacrament of Democracy. It comes to that in final analysis, friend-enemy distinction.

An easier distinction would be “censorship is when the government does it.”

What this whole debate totally misses in the USA at least, is that it even only exists because of a bigger violation and distortion of the Constitution, the freedom so implicit that it crossed the minds of the founders of America even less than having to protect the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free association, being allowed and able to chose who one wants to associate with and who one fires not want to associate with. We are not able to do such a fundamental thing in America today, by law (de jure, Sotomayor), as it had been prohibited through perversion and in violation of the Constitution through the amendment off that very Constitution.

Almost all other arguments over moderation v. censorship are a derivative of the most fundamental freedom, freedom to choose, control over one’s own life. That natural human right simply does not exist in America (and moist western places) anymore, effectively all the “civil rights amendments” have done the opposite off their states objectives, they have institutionalized federal government enslavement, total domination off federal government control over your life. You no longer get to chose shoo you associate with, you’re slave master federal government decides on who you are allowed to associate with. You are as free as you are permitted.

All this other debate of moderation and censorship is meaningless noise, merely beating around the bush to discuss rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

And for all our foreign friends, whether they are in America acting as if they are American or outside of America, all of these matters related to the Constitution are very relevant to you too, whether you understand it or not, because all the freedom you have and think you have is a direct derivative of the founders of the USA creating the Constitution. Most people have just taken it so for granted or it is all so abstract that they do not understand any of it, because not even a person of European background can be American without understanding these things properly, let alone someone without European ethic and cultural background.

That may offend people hearing it, but it does not make any of it less true. In fact it is the “moderation” that is inherent censorship, which even prevents the system from self-correcting, i.e., moderating, because it is really just perversion, i.e., distortion, being called moderation.

There would be nothing to discuss about this topic if the world dominating tyrannical evil of forced association did not exist.