Re:The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed ...
by davvolun on Friday January 29, 2021 @01:13PM
(#25960419)
As is nearly always the case with these types of conspiracy theories, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
More charitably, you can explain most of these actions (maybe excepting Robinhood's actions) by the mods of these platforms and locations being roughly as surprised by things as Melvin Capital.
Re:The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed ...
by dublin on Friday January 29, 2021 @05:16PM
(#25963424)
On the other hand, you could just allow free speech and expression, a strategy that has worked extremely well in western civilization for at least the last 500 years.
For instance, I have no problem with letting Nazis present their views - it only makes them look as ridiculous as they actually are, and tyranny by Nazis is no better than tyranny by Socialists/Communists, so reasonable people who are not ignorant of history should strongly oppose both. (Although, arguably, the Nazis were far less effective at killing millions of people than the Communists were...)
Re:The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed ...
by Tenoke on Friday January 29, 2021 @10:14AM
(#25958025)
This is pretty much it rather than coordinated tech action. I support WSB and am not even remotely a Trumper but what happened to Parler was a much better example of a Big Tech shut down.
For example, the WSB Discord was basically such a trainwreck that the WSB mod team themselves admitted they had significant problems keeping it under control. We can extrapolate that to Facebook as well. Hell, the WSB mod team even locked /r/WSB for a few hours to try and figure out a moderation plan. Most online platforms either rely heavily on community moderation (Discord, Reddit) or a small army of employee moderators that have to be rotated out frequently for the sake of their own mental health. Neither of these models work well for an already-rowdy community suddenly 10xing themselves in both scale and frequency of rules violations. It's basically uncontrollable and the only option is to shut it all down until you have a chance to cool off. (Again, that's why /r/WSB was locked yesterday.)
As for Google, they took a third approach: heavy automation. They have shittons of antispam systems specifically targeted to prevent review spamming. A sudden burst of 100k negative reviews from legitimate users angry that they can no longer participate in a financial flash mob is technically indistinguishable from someone who bought and compromised 100k accounts and decided to threaten Robinhood with negative reviews. Your antispam system isn't going to understand context (e.g. Robinhood fixing the books in a particular direction) but it is going to understand timing.
There isn't really a good way to handle this. The null option of "do nothing and let the problem fester" isn't a good option. This is because people will figure out that WSB is the server/subreddit/group you go on in order to break the rules and get away with it. Anyone with a chip on their shoulder about platforms having any sort of moderation rules will deliberately spam these corners of it, and normal people will assume that such behavior is now OK because there's no enforcement. This will spill over into other corners of the platform until everything is as bad as the lowest common denominator. (See also: what happens to subreddits as they grow, the entirety of 4chan, etc)