Moderation's place is at the end agent. Period. I.e. it is the responsibility of people and end users to be aware of the actual physical world we share with others. To distort it is to do injustice to everyone.
I assure you. The poisoning of reality for "people's own good" leads to slippery slopes, and complete dysfunction and fraying around the edges which will always start targeted against undesirables, then be weaponized against everyone else by whomever happens to be in a position of power.
Either accept the world unfiltered, or don't try. Half efforts are doomed to abuse.
This actually isn't hard. Ban racial slurs, "doxxing," calls to genocide, and low effort provocations. Don't ban ideas because you're convinced they are wrong or dangerous.
Not what I said. If you care about speech, try to be careful about parsing, interpreting, and summarizing it. If something still doesn't make sense, try asking questions.
> More precisely: ideas are powerful, which means they can be dangerous.
> Anyone who doesn't understand that is actually a deeper enemy of discourse than a platform owner who says their forum is not a venue for topic X or opinion Y.
In order to have REAL FREE SPEECH (which you call DISCOURSE) we have to CENSOR BAD OPINIONS.
No. Stop playing whack-a-mole with "bad ideas". "X idea leads to Y bad thing" is almost always wrong, the world is chaotic, no one knows the result of a tweet, and people who claim to are just looking for excuse to shut down debates they're afraid to have.
Hey everyone, look here! We have the answer to the thorny issue of what governs free speech in clear black and white. Twitter, facebook, reddit execs, take note!
But my rate is quite high.
news.ycombinator.com does this right -- moderators rarely moderate based on the message or idea in a post and their opinion about its truth-value. Rather, posts are moderated for being provocative, overly rude, including slurs, low effort, and so on.
Not all of those things deserve the same level of reaction, but they are a disservice to useful conversation and should be moderated/downvoted accordingly.
I agree that HN does it correctly, so I wonder where our disconnect is.
How about lies like the Earth revolves around the Sun?
More precisely: ideas are powerful, which means they can be dangerous.
Anyone who doesn't understand that is actually a deeper enemy of discourse than a platform owner who says their forum is not a venue for topic X or opinion Y.
Some stop here at a dichotomy: "you want to ban ideas, I will be oppressed!" or "I must literally be allowed to put my words in your speech vehicle and be given full access to its audience without any abrogation of that privilege or I am being oppressed!"
Others start to understand what the legal system has with both weapons and speech: perhaps there are some activities or forms it takes that need nuanced consideration. Time, place, manner, associated behavior, fire in a crowded theater, threats, etc. You will find these considerations where people actually take speech seriously.
> Ideas are dangerous, people cannot be trusted to argue on the internet because it leads to violence
You seem to be merely summarizing with scorn here rather than actually addressing the situations where this happens.
It's not hard to find stories where distorted worldviews oriented around agentive threats regarding the pandemic have led to people threatening and even assaulting health professionals. I know some of these people.
You probably know families or acquaintances that have banned certain topics from dinner gatherings because they lead to heated conversations or even violence. It's not that they believe no one should ever talk about them. It's that they understand what Wong is talking about here: there's problem behavior and carving out a domain where the related topic isn't carried is one way of fixing it.
And when it's your house that people are yelling or coming to blows at, I'll bet you try the same solution.
Arguing on "the internet" is a freedom that has never been threatened by limitation that Twitter and Reddit have put in place. What's at stake with Twitter and Reddit is what Wong describes well here: they're stewards of the platform where this is taking place, they get to see the effects. They feel an obligation to do something about it.
And you know what? Their right to do so as stewards of the platform is also a freedom of speech right. And it's every bit as important as an individual's right to spout off about whatever it is they want.
The freedoms to watch more strictly are those where the state or other entities impose violence or loss of physical freedom as a consequence for touching a topic. Twitter and Reddit battles are about people's sense of privilege.