Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve

The rules will come down, because they have to. If it took "Ye" posting a Swastika and saying Hitler was awesome to convince Elon then so be it. Elon will meet many, many other people who will push the moderation curve towards where everyone else has settled.

Instead his "free speech absolutism" is a brand, it's there to signal what kind of person he is, it's not a set of principles and therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny.

He's been pretty clear that hated by ~50% and fine with the other 50% of the population is the old line, not the new one.

Where that puts the threshold is still an open question, and unfortunately one that will likely be answered somewhat capriciously. Then again, that's not really different from before.

The history of social media platforms shows that not moderating away, well, "hateful speech" tends to lead to it drowning out all the other voices.

In this particular context it's rather about commerce.

Kanye posted some really super antisemetic things. At one point, he posted a picture of a swastika overtop of a star of David.

Then he posted an unflattering picture of Elon Musk- and was banned within minutes.

When Elon Musk says "free speech" he means "free speech for me, not for thee". You can say anything you like, as long as Elon likes it too.

No, like the broader right, his whole “free speech thing” is nothing more than “speech I like should be more favored by private parties than it currently is”.

Free speech absolutism is illegal. There are laws you must follow or the FBI will come knocking on your door.

Whether free speech is appropriate on a platform like Twitter I don't know or care really. But surely Twitter can't promote itself as a free speech platform while banning Kanye for legal speech.

I view the boundaries of acceptable speech as a resource. And like other resources in which we need to allocate in society, we use the power of markets to come to the “fairest” allocation that we can.

I believe Elon could implement a “free speech market” on Twitter where Twitter creates an asset which gives the owner the right to ban or allow a particular controversial user. This asset is then auctioned off (providing revenue for Twitter) and then the users get the ultimate control over who is or isn’t allowed on the platform.

This also has the benefit of taking the decision making out of the hands of Elon and those at Twitter and giving power directly to the people.

Absolute free speech is an illusion that has never existed and never will. Our problem in society is that that we censor the wrong kinds of speech and tolerate the wrong kinds of speech. Overton windows aren't bad. Ours has just been corrupted. Musk explicitly said he wants to essentially broaden and fix the tolerance window, not abolish it.

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."[0]

Louis Brandeis did believe that context and specifics are important, so I think the technology of the online platform is significant especially with respect to the first part of that quote.

[0] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

It is. Mid 2000s 4chan and more recently 8kun found it immediately.

When you remove limiters people slap the rail immediately. What value does it add? No one is learning anything when posting anonymously without moderation, they're just lulling themselves into an easily manipulated state.

West tweeted an image of a swastika in a star of David - technically an obsolete symbol of the Raelian UFO cult, in practice it suggested Nazis vs Jews to any casual observer. In the context of West's long-simmering beef with Jewish people and current manic episode of shouting about his enthusiasm for Hitler from inside a ski mask, it was certainly meant to taunt and would fit most people's standard for hate speech.

But incitement to violence? Not exactly, and that's why I say Musk doesn't seem to know what he's doing. There is an indirect kind of incitement, in that it inciting people to behave like Nazis is synonymous with violence; neo-Nazis might deny the holocaust but are just as likely to follow up with the suggestion that it would be a good idea, and in conversation among themselves are a lot blunter about their desire to do violence, preferably on a grand scale. This is why Nazis complaining about free speech is a bad joke, since their gameplan for pretty much any speech they dislike is to simply kill the speakers.

But legally speaking, incitement to violence has a much narrower threshold; it has to be be specific and produce imminent lawless action. For a long time this meant internet speech didn't cunt at all, as jurists figured there couldn't be an imminent risk if the speaker and the recipient were in different places, and that electronic communication was too attenuated to inflame the passions of its receivers. Legislators and courts have somewhat caught up to the realities of the internet age and so things like SWATting or issuing threats by voicemail or online are taken much more seriously than they used to be (to a fault in some jurisdictions like the UK, whose legislators have a Canute-like fondness for prescriptivism).

In this sense, West's tweet absolutely is not incitement to violence, because while it endorses Nazism and Jew-hatred in a trollish way, it lacks the specificity (in action, time, or place) to merit a legal charge. It's not impossible that West might end up suing Twitter or Musk personally for defamation, given his wealth, mania, and apparent ability to hold a grudge.

Free speech advocates have long wrestled with the ramifications of declaring some speech to be 'hate speech' - I think myself that hate crimes are a legislative punt by making a new and scary-sounding law that doesn't mean very much, rather than clarifying existing law and letting juries weigh the significance of hatred as a possible motivation in the trials of violent crimes. Free speech absolutists, in whose company Musk previously placed himself, generally insist on the narrow legal standard of criminality as the only acceptable reason to inflict bans, and argue that all other speech should proceed unchecked. This argument generally arrives clad in the purple robes of Platonic idealism, though in practice totally un-moderated environments soon resemble an orgy of cynics behaving as obnoxiously as possible to maximize their sense of freedom.

So if Musk is just making it up as he goes along, then he's in the situation of alienating everyone to his left and right simultaneously. I don't know how closely he's supervising content moderation decisions, (probably not very) but the reappearance on Twitter of super far right figures like Brett Stephens and Andrew Anglin (currently evading a federal arrest warrant) suggests the 'public square' is going to see regular brawls for a while.

If because someone posted on a weird timewindow the article never make it to the front page it's fair to allow those article another go.

An ill intentioned actor also could use this as an adversial strategy. For instance by self publishing bad buzz stories at the worst possible timing to ensure it won't make it to front page and could then exploit the de-duplicating algorithm to reject the story if it get publish again on a more favorable timeframe.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea per se, but it should be extremely carefully though out. And I'm not sure it's more efficient that the organic downvote of called out duplicate by the human readers.

PS: Quite ironically by engaging discussion here instead of simply calling out the dupe we are actually boosting this story...

There was a time when it was pretty easy to set up an SMTP server, but, if you want your emails to actually get seen, it's non-trivial today.

What is scary to me is how censorship has become completely accepted by the new generation, including software engineers here in their 20s. No true hacker (this is Hacker News after all) would be OK with corporation or government censorship. Slippery slope is real.

Elon Musk lied when he said he's a "free speech absolutist".

In fact, email is more-or-less the most-used example of how a federated system deals with this: sloppily, one-at-a-time, generating a massive haves-and-have-nots Balkanization.

I can set up my own self-hosted mail server, but without some very careful configuration and planning good luck getting Gmail to forward its output to Google's users.

So my hypothesis is that, indirectly, the advertisers are helping represent the interests of the vast majority of users who don't want to see that crap, but are unable to have their voices heard over the clamouring minority who want to tweet out swastikas and misgender trans people for the lulz.

It seems that, similar to newspapers, purchasing ads is also in some manner purchasing control of the platform.

I think that 20% is coming from this:

"The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%"[1]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

"You could probably expand that 80% to 90% or even 95%. The extremists seem like they're more numerous than they are, because they talk so much and so loudly, but they're really a tiny minority." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1598720168737345539

I think he'll find that even if he complies with that rule people will still leave. Forcing an opt-in for one client doesn't prevent them from sending harassing messages to others.

The version of freedom of speech that is encoded in US consitutional law (the first amendment and the long history of supreme court judgements on the subject) is an example. There are forms of speech that are not protected and there is a mainstream interpretation of freedom of speech that does not see restrictions against defamation, incitement of violence, etc., as infringements of it. A "free speech absolutist" would see these as infringements of freedom of speech, so the term is useful to distinguish that particular view.

You're seeing the term used a lot on Hacker News because there are people here who routinely argue that any speech should be allowed on a platform that claims to support freedom of speech. These people are free speech absolutists (at least in the context of the debate about online platforms) and, if they feel their views on the matter are correct, shouldn't be offended to be called that.

Yes, you are exposing yourself to some liability.

But no, if you try to avoid that liability, you will run off all of your users.

How many memes have you seen today that are based on an image from a recent movie?

I'm exaggerating, but there is a reason that HN is not the most popular social media site in the world.

@dang is the GOAT.

I don't know what it will take for this lie to die. It has absolutely zero supporting evidence. The data suggests just the opposite.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...

> "There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content."

1. Provide a form for copyright owners to use to request a takedown of material they claim is infringing. When the form is submitted verify that all the required fields have been filled in.

2. Take down the content claimed by the form submitted, and notify the user who posted the content. The provider does not need to try to figure out if the material claimed really infringes the claimant's copyright.

3. Provide a form for the user to submit a counterclaim. If the user does not submit a counterclaim, there is nothing more to do.

4. If the user submits a counterclaim, restore the taken down content, and notify the party that requested the takedown. The provider does not have to try to evaluate the merits of the counterclaim, such as whether or not the use was fair use.

If the claimant still wants the material taken down they have to take it up with the user, such as by suing them. The provider, having followed the DMCA procedure given above, is protected by the DMCA safe harbor.

It only gets hard when a site wants to use some system of their own, like YouTube does, instead of DMCA. Due to the nature of user created content on YouTube and how YouTube is monetized it is better for them if something that infringes gets licensed and stays up, so they have deals with major content distributors to encourage that.

For a site like Twitter, where the user content is small text posts instead of longer videos that can have ads within them, I don't think they need more than the DMCA procedure.

They have gutted their moderation teams though - looks like there's one (1) left for all of Asia[1] - tens of millions of Twitter users.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-child-sexual-abuse-m...

When I worked in a russian hosting provider a decade ago, I saw a glimpse of censorship, very small compared to current level. We received a message that some page on a small news website is illegal, because it "provides information on how to commit suicide", which was considered inappropriate information for kids. The page in question was a news report about a conscript who killed himself with an AK due to bulling.

is constitutionally-protected free speech.

> mocking presidents

ditto.

The only things that are actively illegal in the US on the list in the article are CSAM and copyright infringement. There are examples that are illegal in other countries, but in the US, vanishingly little speech can be illegal.