Dismissing "healthy speech" as a category is one thing, but let's not have any illusions about some of what falls outside of that category. Twitter has a problem with anonymous users sending mass quantities of death threats, racial slurs, and other horrible invective at anyone who says something controversial. Twitter has a problem with bot accounts that deliberately disrupt and overwhelm healthy conversations. Twitter has a problem with literal Nazis being all over its service.

So far Twitter has been pretty much unable to fix these issues. Now it's broadening what "healthy speech" means, looking at the problem differently, in other words flailing around and trying yet another strategy for fixing its mostly-toxic platform. I doubt it'll work, but I think it represents less Twitter trying to become Big Brother and more Twitter trying whatever it possibly can to fix these glaring problems in its service.

Twitter the company wants to be all things to all people. But the ruler of the kingdom shouldn't also be the judge, and Twitter's taking on of all the technical tasks leaves it both vulnerable to criticism, and the only solution, where every solution must be a twitter engineered solution, which means one shot, no variety, no multiple-bets, no creative destruction.

Examples:

A third party ecosystem designed around tasks like blocking content would also preserve free speech. A twitter run system never could.

A third party system around bot detection, tied in to paying for tweets from "influencers" (god I hate that term), would work well where twitter can't do that.

Twitter should abdicate from the multiple roles of sole judge, executioner and tech provider, and start to let others take up some slack. That provides a buffer, preserves all the rights people could want or have, and allows more tools that empower people while twitter focuses on the technical challenge of keeping the thing up, and being profitable.

I honesrly don’t understand why mainstream social media websites should be allowing that sort of thing. There are plenty of other places they can freely post, so they really are not being censored.

But we've seen a huge embrace of censorship on our dominant communication platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).

There was a time when Twitter prided itself on its commitment to free speech. They patted themselves on the back and chuckled as Twitter helped foment revolutions in other countries.

Now its caused a fair bit of political upheaval back in the good ol' USA, and the official line has become "we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences" of "public conversation."

Censorship culture.

But it seems like if that were to actually happen, it would make more sense for pushback to be aimed at those providers, rather than it currently being aimed at private social media companies out of a fear of what providers “may” do if people were to set up their own websites (or use one of the many existing ones).

If you want something a little more morally clear, take a look at what happens with Sci-Hub. They finally actually lost a court order (which led to the suspending of their hosting), but it doesn't always take that. They've been playing "domain whack-a-mole" for a very long time now: https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-battles-pirate-bay-esque-do.... And as that article mentions, less-savory sites such as The Pirate Bay get taken down without court orders all the time.

I also wasn't trying to attack the existing social media sites, either. I think it makes absolute sense for them to kick the trolls and hate crowds off their platform; strong moderation makes for strong communities (HN being one good example).

Mostly, I think I was trying to point out that "go somewhere else" is a solution that only works to a certain extent. Against a relentless enough opposition, there isn't really a true "public square" you can absolutely fall back to on the modern internet. I don't know what the actual argument behind my pointing that out is, just… contributing a fact, I guess.

Gab was banned from the Play Store. If you want to use their mobile app you have to flip extra switches and download it yourself.

Voat was the target of massive DDoS attacks. Also, apparently, people posting child porn there then immediately reporting it to their ISPs to try and get rid of them.

Quillette posted the views of 4 scientists on James Damore's memo and was DDoSd off the net for days.

You have to understand that this isn't a simple case of go get your own infrastructure. The sort of people who want to eliminate "unhealthy speech" on Twitter want to eliminate it everywhere, and will use whatever tools they can get their hands on to do so. Including attacking whatever is set up to support those who are getting booted off other platforms.

Serious question: If people want to post blasphemy, what's preventing them from doing so? [...] I honestly don’t understand why mainstream social media websites should be allowing that sort of thing.

Hosting companies that decide what is and isn't acceptable speech just like Twitter and Google are doing right now.

I'm not sure I see a huge difference, in practice.

"But if you don't like Twitter's policies, you can just make your own app." Sure, like Gab, which was subsequently banned from both the Google and Apple app stores for not itself censoring. Not a lot of breathing room when the modern communication mediums are dominated by a duopoly.

But that's all tangential to my point, which was referring to the cultural appreciation of free speech.

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when site's like Twitter claimed to be strong supporters of speech as both a principle and a practical reality to strive for.

Nowadays, the more common attitude is, "if we allow people to speak freely, they will spread conspiracy theories, fake news, and hateful thoughts harmful to society, so these ideas must be suppressed."

In just a few years, the zeitgeist has gone from valuing free speech as one of our most cherished ideals to valuing social cohesion as the most important good.

Pretty crazy.

But from a tech/convenience perspective, the web is pretty...janky. Native apps are where it's at. And those have centralized gatekeepers with absolutely no freedom of expression.

It's not just conservative-ish stuff like Gab that gets hit. Another example is Apple refusing to accept an app that sent notifications when the US assassinated people via drone strikes. I think this does real damage to the polity; this is an important political message that cannot be delivered by the most salient medium because of corporate censorship.

And in the artistic or gaming realm, there's all sorts of "adult themed" stuff that'll get you rejected from the store. It's like a return to the 50s before the various Ferlinghetti obscenity trials.

Do you think the app-equivalent of Lolita or Howl or the Tropic of Cancer of even American Psycho would ever make it onto the app store today? Highly unlikely.

(Maybe you don't think apps are as important as books, but I think they will be.)

(And again, more generally, the interesting thing is we seem to have rapidly culturally shifted, where many people value the desire to be protected from disruptive speech more than the freedom to speak without disruption.)

Sure, the web is pretty janky now, but it's the future (if we have one for apps). Native apps are doomed. Progressive web apps are catching up fast, and the good ones are already providing a more seamless experience, particularly on mobile, than native apps can. Ask yourself, how many users now, on average, install new apps on their device from an app store?

And your example of Apple, while true, only puts a fine point on this. What developer wants to write 3 different apps instead of just one that works across all platforms? And Steve Jobs knew this and pushed devs to build iPhone apps using standard web technologies.

I do think app platforms are natural monopolies, so I wonder if the best thing to do is regulate them somehow to ensure openness. E.g., require any app to be installable that does not actually do illegal things.

It's seems kind of heavy-handed, but the current situation of Apple heavily restricting the kinds of apps we can have seems very non-ideal to me, too...

(The web is a great escape hatch for all of this, as pointed out by some other commentators, but I think native is where the action is, and it'd be nice to have web-levels of freedom there, too.)

I think the key change here is how completely radicalized even the mainstream has become. This popular defense of actual neo-Nazis would be unthinkable even just 20 years ago. But now we see the power of common interests (ending all immigration) and the terminal logic of "the enemy of my enemy."

https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...

Then it’s not a “common carrier”, can’t have it both ways.

Truly free speech doesn't exist; there are always limits based on societal norms and convention.

I'm not sure if I should read your comment as some sort of meta-threat...?

If you're worried about communications going through a third-party, privately owned service getting censored, then you're communicating wrong.

Congress needs to look at extending First Amendment protections for users of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

People honestly can't even handle free speech in real-life, let alone anonymously on the internet. We literally have to create barriers around Planned Parenthood because people use free speech to berate women who are already suffering.

Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.

For most of modern history, speech has been censored in some form or another by governments. Naturally so, as any kind of divergent thinking can be dangerous to power structures (this hasn't gone away). In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people. The Sedition Act of 1798 was passed by the American Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. Namely, it prescribed fines and imprisonment for those who "write, print, utter, or publish... any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government. This was used to jail several members of Congress, among others.

Modern free speech jurisprudent didn't start to develop until as late as 1917. The Espionage Act of 1917 was enacted at the start of World War I to prevent actions that were seen as unfavorable to the war. The Supreme Court upheld the law as not violating freedom of speech in Schenck v. United States. I believe there was a subsequent 1917 or 1918 case that began to turn the tide (the reference escapes me at the moment and I'm at work), but it wasn't until 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the Supreme Court ruled that inflammatory speech is protected as long as it satisfies a two-prong test:

1. The speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action," AND 2. The speech is "likely to incite or produce such action."

The case concerned an Ohio Ku Klux Klan member who was recorded saying particularly horrid and denigrating things about African Americans, but, notably, nothing specifically threatening. The Supreme Court upheld your right to say things like "I think we should kill all Jews" because, although a terrible thing to say, statements like that aren't imminently encouraging lawless action and not likely to do so.

Past that point, the Supreme Court has regularly upheld this interpretation of the first amendment. The best argument against a more European, say, interpretation of the first amendment is that, simply: governments only ever censor speech that they don't like. That's why the Espionage Act was used to incarcerate the likes of Emma Goldman and not, say, the people who were helping organize lynchings. If you were to enact hate speech legislation, and history bears this out, the people most affected are the minorities: black people, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ people, pacifists, communists, anarchists, socialists, etc. Think about all of the police that shoot unarmed black men. Can you seriously imagine police forces across America protecting the speech of someone that calls for the abolition of the institution that person belongs to?

So that's a brief history and law lesson (caveat: I am neither a lawyer nor a historian). This is certainly a larger discussion to have, and I very much enjoy debating things like hate speech legislation and speech restriction in general, but I'll leave you with this for now.

Edit: I'm also wondering why the great examples of free speech that people reach for are always racism. It's not really surprising that racism is allowed in a country founded on racism. It might be more interesting to look at what has actually been banned in American free speech law over the years.

The "ag-gag" laws that were recently overturned are one thing I'm thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_libel_laws are another.

Grandparent was arguing that people can't handle free speech and that:

> Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.

I hear this a lot, particularly from the left (although the right does it too), on the grounds of protecting people from "harmful" speech. I disagree with that, which is why I responded, because I don't think enough people know about the modern interpretation of free speech and the long, storied history it has (not just in the US but everywhere). I certainly had no idea before I started reading.

> I'm also wondering why the great examples of free speech that people reach for are always racism.

It's not that they're examples, it's that the landmark Supreme Court cases that established our modern understanding of free speech typically involved the KKK and nazis (c.f. National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie). In other words, people with horrible beliefs are the only reason why you can stand on a street corner and preach about socialism, communism, anarchy, etc (which might be "horrible beliefs" too, depending on the individual). 100 years ago, someone distributed a gentle poem by a socialist and was put in jail, and it was legal. Do you want to go back to that? Because it is absolutely possible.

Some famous free speech cases have involved protecting the expression of 'horrible beliefs' (to use your phrase) but to suggest that all free speech jurisprudence stems from those cases is simply not true.

Pornographers of various kinds have made more (and better) arguments in favor of free speech than any political actors I'm aware of, and to cite the KKK as the harbingers of free political expression is to ignore the significance of cases like Cohen v. California (from 1971) where a man convicted of disturbing the peace for wearing a jacket bearing the words 'Fuck the Draft'in a court house had his conviction overturned.

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie isn't so much a landmark case as the most recent one, and one that punts on the fundamental issues at that. Terminiello (including the dissents) is a far better template to work from.

> In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people.

The alternative is that we end up with a future where more and more of life becomes privately owned and we end up either in online 'company towns' for our social interactions, or else we end up exiled to virtual ghettos where we are unable to interact with others if we go against whatever the dominant ideology happens to be.

I think it's workable. Once you both market yourself as an open platform for discussion (as Twitter and many other social sites have done) and reach a certain level of use (which I think we can debate on, but certainly Twitter who has world leaders making official pronouncements on it would clear that bar), some kind of oversight should kick in to prevent abuses.

Ignoring the moral implications of holding a gun to a business owner's head and forcing them to run their business the way you want, are we not opening up the doors for legitimate censorship down the line?

If we're concerned about world leaders making official pronouncements on Twitter, why not just dictate that they don't do that and instead utilize a different platform? Something decentralized preferably.

It wouldn't be that much of a legal stretch to say that the service is acting as a common carrier, and that they can either advertise honestly or be regulated. Twitter wants to have it both ways, where they can advertise as a space for public discussion when it suits them and fall back on the "private company, our back yard" defense when their behavior is questioned. This is the real problem.. there's nothing whatsoever wrong with operating a curated service as long as you are clear that's what you're doing.

As an alternative (and entirely off-the-cuff) legal theory, the communications decency act holds a provider harmless for what their users post, but critically, they lose that protection once they start exercising editorial control.

I'd aay that most large social networks already crossed that line. I also think most companies would ease up on the censorship if they knew that the alternative left them open to suit for libelous etc. content on their service.

I don't want to be mean, but the actual situation makes me think that they are sort of new parasites for the commons (seen as an organism), sort of a cymothoa exigua [0] of public speech.

Since a comment like yours is so rare, I tweeted it :) [1] and I plus it with a post [2] I wrote after looking for laws concerning cultural genocide. Because, dramatic or not, that's the reality of the phenomenon, sadly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua [1] https://twitter.com/mbuliga/status/969646621981138946 [2] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/genocide-as...

This makes me wonder if phone companies have the right to disconnect customers based on political speech they don't like.

If, say, Verizon decided they didn't want to "facilitate extremism," and decided to cancel the plans of politically unpopular organizations or its members, is that allowed? What if they decide that they don't want to have any of that 'filth' on their network, and disconnect anyone communicating to/from Verizon numbers if they are politically undesirable?

Also note that telecoms companies have the law on their side against "obscene" or "harassing" phone calls, in a way that doesn't seem to apply to other internet communications.