Musk really went crazy with cutting staff, but I'm not sure if it was because he wrongly thought he needed to cut the moderation teams in order to support free speech or if he just did it because moderation is expensive.
Most of are just fine with limiting speech when it's for the public good. We don't want companies to be able to lie about their products, so we support laws against false advertising. We're okay with people getting arrested for making bomb threats. We even approve of compelling speech when it means forcing companies by law to label the ingredients of their products!
Left unchecked spam makes the services we love unusable. It can prevent us from having those same discussions we flock to social media platforms to try to engage in.
Social media platforms should provide a constructive environment where ideas can be freely discussed and that means moderation is necessary for things like keeping out spam, keeping discussions on topic, and even filtering out trolls.
Content moderation is essential to a healthy forum, but obviously care has be taken to maintain a balance between restricting and allowing content guided by what would best facilitate the constructive discussion of ideas, and not based on personal feelings about the ideas themselves. It's not an easy task, and it's thankless work, but if it wasn't for moderation none of us would be here talking about how spam should or shouldn't be allowed to ruin everything.
I'd edit this. "Most are just fine with limiting speech when it isn't them." The "public good" to, say, Andy Ngo is going to involve throwing a whole lot of leftists in prison.
This whole thing is just about having the guy you like be the one making the decisions.
At what point does it become spam and we restrict what these people view as free speech?
I have a stunning revelation to make:
I am not in favor of allowing all legal things on the principle that because they're legal, they should be allowed. In fact, given that the thing you're replying to is arguing in favor of moderating SPAM, I figured it would be apparent. Apparently, it is not.
Furthermore... Like SPAM, harassing someone in the DMs by simply calling them homophobic or racial slurs is not "free expression." It's harassment. Harassment, libel, etc. are not things that everyone (hopefully not most) who believe in free expression as a principle are trying to defend.
I'm mostly not going to address the "lots of people have told me" and disregard it, since it's probably made up for the bait. But if not, I mean... Good for all of those lunatics, I guess. I'm not associated with them, and I don't like Twitter or any social media platform to begin with.
I think you can meaningfully distinguish individuals expressing distasteful speech from coordinated campaigns and harassment, and spam falls under the latter.
The "oh but lefties are mean too" argument immediately retreats from the idea of free speech absolutism. I'm down for that.
That's not where I would draw the line against free speech absolutism. Insults or rudeness from individuals should be permitted, insults from groups/coordinated campaigns is where I would draw that line because that starts crossing into inciting a mob. Mobs of any political persuasion are undesirable.
Uncoordinated-coordination seems like an emergent phenomenon of social media though, which is why this is a tough issue. It's almost like we need some kind of back pressure against virality to keep mobs in check.
That all having been said... SPAM and harassment are not problems because of the expression itself, they're problems because of the disruptive patterns of behavior. The point is not that you can't say something, or have a given opinion, or etc.
I'm not really sure how this came to be everyone's ultimate catch 22 on free expression when there's more obvious caveats, such as how arbitrary the law is. But as arbitrary as the law is, it's like gofmt. Nobody's favorite, but everybody's favorite. (This is possibly one of the worst HN analogies this month, which now that I think about it, should probably be a thing someone tracks.)
Okay, but to ban speech on this is once again to pass judgment on its value to the contribution of the discourse or whatever avenue for communication is at issue. That's why the absolutist position is ridiculous. It isn't navigable from any perspective save for the very perspective they are already criticizing.
Also, I'm not sure why you chose the word arbitrary. That's not what arbitrary means. Obscenity laws aren't arbitrary at all, they are based in specific judgments related to a community's perception of what is and isn't acceptable. I'm not saying obscenity laws are good or especially well-reasoned, but they are clearly not arbitrary. Perhaps you meant subjective/un-objective?
> Okay, but to ban speech on this is once again to pass judgment on its value to the contribution of the discourse or whatever avenue for communication is at issue. That's why the absolutist position is ridiculous. It isn't navigable from any perspective save for the very perspective they are already criticizing.
The key point that I've been failing to convey effectively is very simple: with SPAM, the expression itself is not the problem. If you post it 10,000 times responding to unrelated people, that is a problem.
(I realize that commercial SPAM is possibly what you are referring to here but... That sort of SPAM is more or less permitted on social media, so it's kind of neither here nor there.)
This generally follows: if you DM someone to yell racial slurs at them, you are harassing them. It's not about the platform banning naughty words, it's about banning disruptive conduct. The conduct is about the behavior, not the ideas or expressions expressed in them.
The "absolutist" position is basically never actually "absolutist". I initially thought people were interpreting it literally as a joke or something, but it seems like it has been taken pretty seriously. Yet, there are exceedingly few people who think that unprotected speech like CSAM should just be allowed. They DO exist, but I have a feeling the speech absolutists you are referring to do not. Doesn't that already make this discussion moot?
>The key point that I've been failing to convey effectively is very simple: with SPAM, the expression itself is not the problem. If you post it 10,000 times responding to unrelated people, that is a problem.
You have conveyed that but it is not a useful metric by which to filter things from an absolutist standpoint because you have to make a value-judgment on the worth of the speech in regards to the venue... exactly what I said before.
>This generally follows: if you DM someone to yell racial slurs at them, you are harassing them. It's not about the platform banning naughty words, it's about banning disruptive conduct. The conduct is about the behavior, not the ideas or expressions expressed in them.
It's not that its disruptive... its that its harassment which is already a civil action and likely criminal in your jurisdiction as well. If you are gonna talk about how arbitrary laws are... maybe know a law or two?
>The "absolutist" position is basically never actually "absolutist". I initially thought people were interpreting it literally as a joke or something, but it seems like it has been taken pretty seriously. Yet, there are exceedingly few people who think that unprotected speech like CSAM should just be allowed. They DO exist, but I have a feeling the speech absolutists you are referring to do not. Doesn't that already make this discussion moot?
I'm not Elon Musk saying Im buying Twitter in order to support free speech... so don't look at me! I don't have problems with content moderation because I'm not naive.
You might have wanted to say that no one can agree on what speech is trolling and what speech isn't, but that's not because the word is vague. It's because people disagree on the deliberate and the upset part.
There may be a good moral argument to draw that line differently when the consequence is a ban from a commercial platform vs being locked in a prison.
No definition is as concrete, unmallable, and unchanging as you seem to imagine.
Truthfully, the two observations are related: The word "trolling" being kind of vague is probably the main reason why people do not agree on what actually constitutes it.
what then, in your mind, is the clear, precise definition of spam?
I am kind of surprised at how many different ways people have interpreted what I said. I'm frankly feeling a little defeated.
How is that not trolling?
Argueing that something is trolling because it solicits a reaction, or that because it's disruptive it counts as trolling, doesn't make sense. You can't distinguish trolling without knowing someone's motivations. Posts that could be trolling could just as easily be venting, or bringing up a genuine concern that just happens to be contentious, or etc.
Otherwise, flaming people in general is obviously trolling. That's not the way the word trolling has been used historically.
I have thought about this before and I get kind of annoyed when people assume spam is a given exception to free speech. Free speech by itself doesn't imply a limit. So I think you have to carefully design around this issue or just let it happen and maybe it dies off on its own since too much spam chases everyone away and then what's the point of spamming?
edit: drowning out other people's speech may be allowed by total free speech but it's also contrary to the intention I think. I think free speech means that any speech someone wishes to make, they may do so without restriction or censorship by the medium. This isn't a completely satisfying definition though.
Most of the problems that seem to justify prior restraint come from poor source identification. If it's illegal, deal with it through the legal system, after the fact.
Facebook may have had the right idea with their "real names" policy, if they'd stuck to it and required strong authentication.
There is no reason to assume that this theory would fail to be legitimized in courts. Spam is not legal in other arenas, i.e. phone calls & texts.
The fact that the operators of spam bots are difficult to prosecute does not mean what they are doing has legal grounds.
Can clarify what it is this means?
> Spam restrictions aren't generally applied by the government, and therefore don't fall under the constitution.
The "free speech" constitutional amendment stipulates that the government can't restrict speech. It doesn't apply to a mail service provider, which is free to reject whatever it likes.
> The law doesn't require anyone to listen to someone else's speech.
Your freedom to speak to me ends when I decide I don't want to listen to you. I have a right to not listen, and I have a right to reject spam.
> It is not a violation of anyone's rights to discard their emails unread using an automated filter.
I don't know how to say that more clearly; using a spam filter doesn't violate the US constitution. Email would be unuseable without spam filters.
(Any given post of spam, basically just unsolicited peer-to-peer advertising, seems evidently an idea, IMO - it's very much something you are supposed to believe and act on. If it's a volume/repetition/thoughtlessness thing, how's that different from a wave of trolling posts?)
Or what about the threat examples, since you claim all those categories were subjective? You didn't engage with that one, or many of the others. "I know your kids go to [specific school], watch out"? Subjective? "I'm going to kill you and your family?" Subjective or straight up threat? How about mockery or insults? "Your post is stupid and you are stupid?" Is it subjective that that's insulting? So is it an "idea" or just a particular way of saying I disagree with you? "You are clearly politically motivated and not arguing in good faith?" Maybe that one is actually an idea!
Alright. Spam is when you post something to a space where it's not relevant (not really applicable to Twitter since it doesn't have topical spaces), or post something repeatedly without a good reason.
> "I know your kids go to [specific school], watch out"? Subjective? "I'm going to kill you and your family?" Subjective or straight up threat?
Those are specific threats, which are not protected as free speech.
> "Your post is stupid and you are stupid?"
Nothing wrong with saying that, aside from the fact that it's not constructive and you'd be better off explaining why you disagree.
> "You are clearly politically motivated and not arguing in good faith?"
Same as previous.
This is very clearly not just about "expressing ideas." There is very real behavior that is designed entirely to hurt other people and is 100% legal that is at the center of this discussion of online moderation.
It's not an idea, though I don't see a particular reason to ban it, unless you have a platform like Saidit that generally encourages constructive discussion over baseless insults (which I consider a great idea).
It's their platform and they want their users to be free in their discourse, they just don't want spam.
Determining those moderators which have been witting participants in the chilling of free speech is more difficult than axing a great many of them that underperformed and keeping the few with real tangible contribution.
Yes, bad things are on the internet.
That is in no way the content or information I'm describing, nor does it fall into the category of legal free speech.
Bringing up illegal things to argument the suppression of legal speech is, I don't know, moronic.
You are perpetuating a tired trope and I haven't the energy to persist with this discussion
This is where you get bent.
Your logical fallacy is detailed here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion
I hope that, despite what you are implying, this success by Musk is not upsetting to you.
He bought Twitter to stop that from happening.
So, it's safe to assume, in my opinion, that he fired a bunch of people that care more about their ideology than they care about fair or honest debate or acting in accordance with the principals of freedom or the United States
It's largely cost-cutting for sure, but I also think he believes he needs to start over in a lot of these departments, the entrenched beliefs of how things should be moderated was undoubtedly very deep. I suppose we'll see!
Spam in e-mail is a problem because spam consists of private messages sent to individuals, but public messages can be quickly categorized by a community, and ones own characterization of a message for the purpose of sorting messages for display can be based on a how whether it's chosen for retransission by people who who one oneself has a high trust in.
Imagine having a feed which is initially a horrible spam-filled mess, and then as you encounter things it you like, you upvote that, until your feed is resorted to include mostly quite interesting things. When you again find spam or uninteresting content you reduce the weight of the people who retransmit it.
Moderation always risks being political manipulation, and it's probably too dangerous to democracy to allow it. It's certainly too dangerous to accept foreign moderation (I'm from Europe).
July, 2021: https://archive.ph/VlpYI
> Defending and respecting the user’s voice is one of our core values at Twitter. This value is a two-part commitment to freedom of expression and privacy.
> This is a global commitment, and while grounded in the United States Bill of Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, it is informed by a number of additional sources including the members of our Trust and Safety Council, relationships with advocates and activists around the globe, and by works such as United Nations Principles on Business and Human Rights.