Agreed. This is so if they’re questioned by Congress at some point they can say “we regret our transgressions, and have reformed by asking the community what we should do better”

Almost like act first, ask permission later.

That's a point of view, and a pretty cynical one.

I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands.

All that make me think that even tough you're right that the end result will not be democratic, I wouldn't throw them the stone and accuse them of acting in bad faith.

Aren't these glamorous tech companies supposed to be employing from the pool of the highest echelons of intellectualism? How is it that they have such exceedingly large valuations but they can't manage to deploy a rationale by which to manage their user-based content?

That argument proves too much, I think. It seems analogous to the question of "Why would anyone ever want higher taxes? If they think the optimal tax rate is higher, they can just pay more taxes."

If one company takes a more principled approach to moderation, and that more principled approach is harmful to revenue, that company will be outcompeted by companies with whatever moderation policies optimize for engagement / revenue / growth. As a result, in the absence of legislation, you get adverse selection i.e. the dominant platforms will be the ones that optimize for engagement/revenue/growth, rather than the ones with good moderation policies.

If you instead have legislation for what "good moderation" looks like, it applies equally to all companies and mitigates the adverse selection problem.

Of course, it is still entirely possible for bad legislation to introduce worse problems than the adverse selection problem. It depends on the object level of what exactly the legislation is, rather than being a blanket "legislation bad" or "legislation good" sort of thing.

It is virtually impossible to not offend anyone, so they choose from the basket of all potential customers or products which they believe will be most profitable. If the ~~nazis~~ alt-right were making them more money than centrists and leftists, they wouldn't have banned them by citing freedom of speech and expression. However, their analysts probably deemed that losing the rest of the user base through the #cancel culture isn't worth it.

> they can't manage to deploy a rationale by which to manage their user-based content?

They do have a rationale. The issue is that it's biased.

Most tech company leaders achieved their positions through luck and hard work, not by being intellectuals.

I'm speaking less about the leaders, but more of the mass. Silicon Valley has practically been deified as the brain capitol of the US, if not the world, but they're unable to meaningfully address the question? I think not, they're not addressing it, but with a sleight of hand pretending action to subdue their consumer base with a sense of security and imply a democratic process. An act of vanity, which I hope will be seen through.

I like the comparison to unclaimed land. While other industries are heavily regulated, requiring legal compliance and investment, Internet publishing is still largely open. In my view this is one of the reasons why the online service economy is booming in the US, where others are in decline.

I'm curious because I didn't realize this was a trend. Can anyone share some more info/sources on the decline outside the US?

Please read it as the decline of other heavily regulated/unionized industries relative to the booming online service sector within the US.

Oh I follow now.. thanks for clarifying!

They banned a sitting president of the United States and yet have allowed for years known despots, genocidal regimes, and terrorists groups to operate with impunity. Bad faith is Twitter's modus operandi until they show otherwise.

> That's a point of view, and a pretty cynical one.

Twitter can and do ask for user feedback all the time, without making a press release about it.

I don't find it cynical to ask why they are doing this in public - it seems likely that the parent has hit upon a good part of the reason.

We can only know this for certain looking back. Knowing this looking forward is often cynicism, and it's a trap imho

EDIT: The above are mostly something I try to keep in mind with government public consultations. I acknowledge that cynicism is a little more understandable for private industry, as they are not even in theory rooted in anything but shareholder value-maximization, but gov is at least ostensibly aspiring for public good.

Seriously this is such a BS cover their rear-end from congress move. Now they want to poll the public, get feedback, and move in a democratic fashion? It’s now after the fact they selectively decided which US presidents can be on Twitter and which cannot with zero debate or thoughtfulness of consequences of free speech.

Also, if you phrase the question “should everyone follow the same rules?” in the right way, everyone is going to say “of course!”

That's where it gets interesting, though. Assuming you have a democratically elected official with progressive views in any direction, and they're telling people to act for their self-interest, but the current zeitgeist overall is the given idea is immoral or otherwise objectionable, then what process do you use to make the judgement other than an arbitrary one that supplants the "rule of law"?

Consider if Biden dropped a tweet saying "don't observe DST."

That could be dangerous, right? You've got two distinct groups of people that for some reason or another fail to coalesce, all "hell" breaks loose because some people are showing up to work at different times, logistical break down... Do you squelch him? And how does that compare to a non-violent break-in at the capitol to show congress that their representation of the general public is failing a given demographic?

Personally I think that the channel should be wide open to anything but the most unbearable aspects of communication, like child exploitation. You've got no chance of convincing a white supremacist that his worldview is askew without engaging in a conversation and logically defeating his assertions, not to mention the fact that publicly shaming the ideology (while jointly defeating it) in a widely available forum is certainly the best prophylactic. Instead the "acceptable" rhetoric is one-sided which alienates anybody that has the audacity to even ask the questions proposed, while destroying their ability to come about a rational conclusion through empirical observation. That channel should be equivalently wide for politicians which the people have elected to represent them up to the extent of tangible action to break the law up to the barrier of reason, e.g. meaningfully inciting violent actions against individuals or groups.

And this is all precipitated by the fact that Twitter and the like are commodifying speech, which is a genuine hazard as it creates a serious hurdle at the intersection of liberty and commercial interest. Commercial interests want inoffensive discussion which appeals to the widest possible band of individuals, meaning that the content and discussions are only allowed to span a narrow width, generally. It is not in any meaningful way acting in the public interest at that point, and only seeks to, through largely automatic processes, extend and crystallize the status quo which is genuinely harmful as we're doing little more than discussing how to spin in place at that point. This is driven even further through deplatforming (active or passive) extremist viewpoints, and exposing them disproportionately with algorithmic processes.

Twitch did this with some sort of committee late last year and it blew up in their faces.

The deer incident?

I think the streamer you're referring to was just the focal point and scapegoat for a lot of the outrage over the very unequal and sometimes disturbing way Twitch moderates content.

I agree people were already mad but you would have to go pretty far out of your way to find someone with worse optics, she definetely brought a lot of heat to it herself.

I think that was Twitch's intent. Why promote a basically no name streamer to a group made up mostly of very prominent people on the platform?

You think twitch purposefully nuked their own program? Wouldn't that just make both sides of the isle mad at them?

HR too. Makes your staff feel "valued" and listened to.