News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private. Parent comment

Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by bko on Thursday April 14, 2022 @08:49AM (#31026247)
Thanks for clearing that up. Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible. Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation; its censorship. Creating customizable user filters or groups that hide these people is a better answer. Reddit has a lot of their own problems, but the federated model of subreddits works. The problem arises when some subreddits are banned or the overlap of mods on each subreddit, but in principal its correct.

I would love shared filters on twitter. For instance, if I don't want to hear things about topic X, I can download a topic X filter that's community maintained that hides posts from troll accounts or keywords. You can mix and match filters. This is better than banning people. Is twitter going to allow back all those people that were banned for discussing lab theory?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by coldpie on Thursday April 14, 2022 @09:52AM (#31026998)
> Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible.

That's your opinion, and you're absolutely welcome to hold it. I understand that position, but I don't agree, and I would prefer a more strongly moderated platform. That's my opinion. If a platform has too little moderation for my tastes, I may choose to leave it, and that would be bad for an ad-based platform's profitability, not to mention network effects, etc. Given enough users (and employees!) who think like me, the platform has an incentive to perform stronger moderation.

I think we should have more platforms to choose from, and maybe even require some kind of inter-operation between them. We should enforce existing anti-trust law on these big platforms, not try to force them to change their moderation policies.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by themitigating on Thursday April 14, 2022 @09:19AM (#31026598)
" apart from the obvious abuse.."

"Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation"

What if an offensive view creates abuse? Who defines obvious?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by bko on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:49AM (#31027742)
Abuse is spam, doxxing, fraud, etc. Very narrow. I don't think this should include something like banning someone for saying "learn to code" because its a "targeted harassment campaign" [0]. However you can pose with the severed head of a sitting US president and that'll be okay and still standing up today [1] . Come on.

[0] https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...

[1] https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private by philistine on Thursday April 14, 2022 @09:13AM (#31026531)
Show me people banned for only discussing the lab theory. There was a global mistake in harshly categorizing the lab leak theory as wrong, but the people who were banned were banned because they used the theory (which it still is) to advance dangerous views that Twitter decided not to engage with.

There’s the word media in social media. A newspaper will carry a theory, but not an article using the theory to spuriously decry public health mesures.

[ Parent | on HN ]