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Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

That's a salient point. Biased, uneven, nontransparent moderation was always happening with weak justification, it was just done by unaccountable people and propagandized as righteous.

Remember people getting banned for saying "learn to code", disallowing certain news links even in DMs, shadowbanning undesirables with no transparency.

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"unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users. Each country has its own rules about which content you are allowed to post and it has its own regulatory agencies that may demand you behave in a certain way. Your moderators will all apply their own cultural norms to their own behavior as well.

I agree that it's not "righteous" somehow but the idea that Twitter could be moderated evenly in an "unbiased" way is incredibly naive and it seems to be one of the illusions Elon was under before he took over.

> unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users.

Especially given that the pool of California tech people from which Twitter might draw moderators are to the left of 99% of that international community of users.

You can bet that in many countries the conservative right is more the left that the Democrats.

Inter-cultural policy differences aren't new and being able to moderate on an international online forum like Twitter is pretty challenging.

It really depends on what metric you're talking about. That's not true of trans rights or abortion for instance.

We’re not talking about “democrats.” We are talking about college educated California democrats. On cultural issues—which dominate when it comes to moderation decisions—the Overton window of a typical Twitter employee is well to the left of people in most European countries, and far to the left of those in Asia or Africa or the Middle East. For example, center left Emmanuel Macron or solidly left Mette Frederiksen wouldn’t be able to express their views on immigration at a Twitter staff meeting: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221102-mette-frederi...

Contrast the recent post about Stanford’s language policing guide, with Macron calling such guidance “woke nonsense.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/emmanuel-mac...

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