"Policy changes at Meta are deeply troubling" – Mastodon CEO | Hacker News Reader

"Policy changes at Meta are deeply troubling" – Mastodon CEO

mastodon.social

24 pointsSanjayMehta10 comments

I think the move to a community notes style feature is a positive. Fact checkers have shown themselves to be untrustworthy[1]

[1] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-would-i-possibly-trus...

The "community notes" on twitter have just become another ideology battle ground, if you have seen them from the contributor side of things.

Another major issue with them is they take to long to materialize, and by the time the note is added, most of the views on opinion formation has already happened.

I think a better option is to have both systems (professional and from the user base), and multiple groups of each, all in competition with each other. Then let users decide which one(s) they want to have in their feed.

This is how ATProto/Bluesky approaches the problem

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

(notes are an extension the labeller concept)

I’m on a Ex-Facebook employee group on FB. The amount of upset former employees is beyond belief.

Why should anyone care whether they're upset? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What are they even upset about?

I never understood this reasoning. Prior to X being purchased by Musk, every major social media platform had pretty much exactly the same speech policy. You'd see decisions made in unison.

For instance, this was the timeline for Trump being banned off social media

January 6-7, 2021: Facebook and Instagram initially suspended Trump's accounts for 24 hours, then extended it "indefinitely"

January 7, 2021: Twitch disabled Trump's channel

January 8, 2021: Twitter permanently suspended Trump's @realDonaldTrump acc ount

January 9, 2021: Several other platforms took action, including:

Reddit banned the "r/DonaldTrump" subreddit

Shopify removed Trump-related online stores

Snapchat disabled Trump's account

Various dates: Other platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and others implemented their own restrictions or bans around this time

Obviously this banning didn't occur due to actions on their platforms, but an organized effort was made to remove a person's digital presence from the internet. And it more or less worked for a long time.

Is a social media monoculture really a good thing? Nearly every other platform has pretty much the same policy on whatever the Mastodon CEO thinks is 'hate speech'.

I think in the case of X this wouldn't happen and this was political influence trying to silence him. Far more effective than Russian propaganda for that matter, here a presidential candidate was silenced. Fact checkers would make such phenomenon worse while community notes would just deliver more context.

Be that as it may, that is a positive side of Musks takeover of X.

I for one want to hear all sides (there can be more than two sides) of a polemic. I challenge myself to determine the best possible arguments in support of each side, even those with which I disagree.

Yet, here you are, happily posting on a platform that totally restricts what topics you are able to talk about.

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