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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

> even though it's technically legal,

This hits home one of the things I consider to be a problem with the single platform approach.

Swastika's are actually not legal in some parts of the world, in others they're taken as a symbol of peace.

When there is content moderation it feels weirdly totalitarian because the political stances of (say: Europe) are wildly different than the polarised extremes of the USA.

A platform should not moderate content, twitter (and facebook) want the perks of being a platform (being not legally culpable for content moderation) and the perks of being a closed community (strict moderation on issues they perceive as problematic, usually to investors).

This is having your cake and eating it too.

Twitter should not be a platform, it is beholden to a global standard and rules and culture are too diverse.

The same is true with Facebook.

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They used to be a symbol of peace throughout the world (the Northern hemisphere at any rate), but then a genocidal madman abused them as a symbol of violence and hate. Unfortunately, most uses of that symbol even in present-day U.S. still come from idiots wishing to emulate the aforementioned madman in glorifying violence and hate. There are some highly notable exceptions, e.g. in Native contexts but they're not nearly enough to reappropriate the symbol to good use, and this will likely remain the case for the foreseeable future.

Also, rumor has it that what Kanye posted is actually the official logo for some weird UFO religion called Raelism. (Be warned that the Wikipedia article on them prominently displays that logo. You'll probably want to not look at it and/or engage at your own pace, so as to avoid any offense.)

Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis, but that is obviously more complicated and costly (but I think major platforms already do that to an extent).

Indeed, some things are perfectly legal in one country but illegal in another so an unique, global moderation policy would have to follow the smallest common denominator among all countries served, which would obviously minimise the extent of allowed content.

Twitter actually does hide tweets in specific countries based on local legislations.

> Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis

How do you feel about deleting post that criticise Iranian politics and ban accounts showing support to protests in Iran? Only for the Iranian audience of course. Then how do you feel providing the list of accounts who shared certain images and messages to Iranian courts, knowing that some of them would be executed?

Note: Twitter already does that in countries where operates. I guess they don't do it in Iran only because they can't operate in Iran as a business(sanctions) but they do it in Turkey since the Gezi protests in 2013. Turkey doesn't have capital punishment, instead they throw people in jail for years awaiting trail.

I don't feel anything about it. If you choose to operate in a country then you have to follow local law. If you don't want to do that then don't operate in that country. The site may still be accessible there of course, but you have no presence there and don't target that country so can ignore its laws, and if they are not happy they can block you.

But this is the whole thing about global social networks. The issues with jurisdictions and politics are nearly insurmountable - it's an impossible task - and somehow the old Twitter chugged along.

Musk never spent 30 seconds thinking about any of this.

I agree with this. It seems like the primary issue with content moderation on social media is structural rather than policy problem.

In the same way you have privacy setting, I think social networks need to enforce geographic settings too. If you want to publish tweets publicly to a global audience then you as a user need to ensure you're posting content that complies with all global speech laws, otherwise you can't complain if the platform is forced to censor or remove your content / account.

I think US citizens should be able post anything that's legal to other US citizens, but the idea that you should then expect Twitter to be forced to publish that content in all geographies because of the US free speech rights seems absurd. While I might personally I think "Ye" should be allowed to post Swastikas to Twitter, in reality that's against the law in many countries.

Then you have the advertisement issue. I'm not even sure how you build a platform that respects internal speech laws which would also be advertiser friendly. Again, it seems like the business model is structurally broken if we value free speech above advertiser friendly speech.

As soon as you have a form of editorial control ( which includes decisions about what to highlight and where to place it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editing ) you seize being a platform and become something else. One could argue that maybe twitter could become a platform by removing any form of recommendation engine (including likes) and simply acting as an aggregator of reverse chronological feeds, but then what would the business case be?

Social media has been eating up advertising by skirting in between the lines, acting as if they don't censor and are mere platforms (and thus aren't liable for falsehoods spread via them) while censoring and curating content heavily to ensure advertising cash keeps rolling in.

I think it is time for (and with recent legislation proposals in the EU, am hopeful for) changes that either severely limit the type of advertising and control these wanna he platforms can accept and exert or simply makes them legally for spreading falsehoods and endangering the public via users they choose to jot exert their editorial control over.

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