Re:Twitter locks WikiLeaks account days before Assange's ext...
by saurik on Monday February 17, 2020 @06:24PM
(#22351895)
> Almost no platform survive without a bit of moderation. If you don't moderate, you'll get any kind of content, including spam, troll, etc...
If you create your own Twitter account and post a bunch of spam there, no one will follow you; so it shouldn't matter. You can also limit someone's access to "discovery" mechanisms without deleting their content or preventing them from posting entirely so even their opted-in followers can't see their content.
The core problem is when social media companies create mechanisms for users to bother each other without knowing each other, and there "span" is the tip of the ice berg: people routinely abuse and harass other people--which should be construed very very broadly: if you had a child who died in a school shooting and someone likes to keep reminding you of it as they take glee in your pain, that is obviously abuse and harassment, and yet it isn't "illegal" and clearly isn't "spam", so is almost always considered "totally fair game"--these websites don't remove that content or punish people for it, and yet they remove photos of people breast feeding, as if that is some crime against humanity.
What forcing websites to be platforms would do is fix social media by causing the people who make these websites to reconsider features that should probably not have existed in the first place.
If you create your own Twitter account and post a bunch of spam there, no one will follow you; so it shouldn't matter. You can also limit someone's access to "discovery" mechanisms without deleting their content or preventing them from posting entirely so even their opted-in followers can't see their content.
The core problem is when social media companies create mechanisms for users to bother each other without knowing each other, and there "span" is the tip of the ice berg: people routinely abuse and harass other people--which should be construed very very broadly: if you had a child who died in a school shooting and someone likes to keep reminding you of it as they take glee in your pain, that is obviously abuse and harassment, and yet it isn't "illegal" and clearly isn't "spam", so is almost always considered "totally fair game"--these websites don't remove that content or punish people for it, and yet they remove photos of people breast feeding, as if that is some crime against humanity.
What forcing websites to be platforms would do is fix social media by causing the people who make these websites to reconsider features that should probably not have existed in the first place.