Moderation is hard, genuinely hard, every order of magnitude increase in community size is not linear to the moderation requirement: it is factorial.
Why? Because every single communication has the potential for abuse, and the number of interactions on a platform do not scale linearly with the increase of users.
This is why things like the "Eternal September" exist, a deluge of new users is basically impossible to moderate at scale.
I think Twitter, Facebook and co. have done a fairly decent job of the mess they made, but crucially they decided that a walled garden where everyone exists together was their business model.
I think this is fundamentally flawed. "Back in my day" (I know it may be glazed with nostalgia, but) smaller close knit forums were much better at moderating communities, because it was still humanly possible.
There did exist some communities which became tyrannical; but the benefit of small communities is that people just go wherever it's "nice enough", and if you don't like the moderation staff or how they moderate you can move on with your friends.
I think people don't want this to be true, people are so financially invested in the centralised model; but ultimately you force a single set of potentially tyrannical moderators and a single culture. -- and people aren't willing (or able) to pay for the correct level of moderation.
It's Sisyphean and totally self-inflicted.
But who gets to decide what a heated conversation looks like and who should take a breather? This is the fundamental problem that we can't seem to agree on as a society.
Great reference. I used and liked Usenet a lot in the early 90s. I lurked in the comp.* and sci.* groups among several others. Sure, I knew there were nasty crazy things on alt., and as a 13 year old I looked at some porn in there.
Usenet was not "centrally" moderated, and it was fine. There was spam sure, but with a suitable client with spam filter, things where good.
In my view, moderation has to happen at the edge, and not in the center. People should be able to post whatever legal stuff they want in those type of services, in the same way anyone can go to a public park and shout/speak whatever crazy things they want. Now, if you start to pee* in public (illegal) or post something illegal, then the police should investigate and get you for committing an illegal act, but there's not reason why there should be censorship of everyone for the possibility of someone committing a rime.
> Why? Because every single communication has the potential for abuse, and the number of interactions on a platform do not scale linearly with the increase of users.
I'm not sure this is correct. It sounds like your underlying model is "number of users N, number of potential interactions N x N." But people have finite time and resources. Every user can only post a maximum of T times a day, where T is some constant. So I think the number of actual interactions is linear in N.
In reality twitter is 1:n relationships.
Content that is interacted with may lead to new interactions from unrelated people. So it’s really n:n.
A persons posting time, in any event, easily approaches one’s ability to moderate it. It’s very easy to spew content and requires much more effort to analyse and weight it.
I sincerely believe it’s not in step with the growth of users, instead it is exponential.
Everytime some idiotic thread shoots up with 1500 comment I just assume it can all be summed up with a line like this.
So many Silicon Valley companies launch products designed to scale without any regard for social impact - it's time to move beyond that myopic pov. It's not someone elses problem.
To many, reddit is just as unpleasant, and in some cases worse than twitter.
Twitter receives something like 500 million tweets per day. So if you had a million paid moderators, maybe they would be able to keep up with the sheer volume. And then you'd still get people arguing either side, too much or too little moderation/censorship. Corporate bias would be attributed, rightly or wrongly, just as it is now.
That is just not true. That's a count of possible relationships. There is a limit to how many interactions a human will perform in a day, and it's not related to how many other users there are on the platform.
If someone posts a hateful tirade on twitter, it's no one else's responsibility but twitter's really. It's their account, and Twitters platform.
Of course, if you gave Twitter uses the ability to self moderate, it would be an absolute mess.
C'mon. You know this.
Plus, Musk tweeted that he's eliminate bots or die trying. If he really means this, it would be a truly great contribution to twitter -- free speech is one thing, but amplified disinformation is another. But, this apparently requires levels of effort beyond all the social media today, especially when it is not just automated bots, but also paid troll farms grinding out disinformation and deliberately undermining communications.
Twitter's true customers are its advertisers. It's who pays. And they are even less likely then the normal person to want an "everything that isn't illegal is allowed" approach. Advertisers don't want their ads seen next to hate speech and certain other types of speech.
It's been clear that Reddit and YouTube have been censoring at the behest of advertisers for years, and I don't think Twitter is or will be any different.
Users matter the most because if non-toxic users flee the platform, Twitter has no value to advertisers.
So first, users are one of the major levers to keep valuable advertisers happy -- not the only one, but also not the only significant one, and they are purely instrumental. Second, Twitter does not want a negative public perception, along the lines of cable news, or much worse, 4chan. The former loses you a subset of a subset of the market and is a constant PR/lobbying headache, the latter loses most medium to high value advertisers altogether and is an existential regulatory threat. In almost no way is the worry that the toxic environment would be a subjectively bad experience for users.
Before Parler was banned from the App store (and before it was re-instated after more moderation was added), its stated policy was roughly to moderate strictly to what's within the bounds of the law, albeit with some significant inconsistencies especially around pornography and nudity. I used it during this time, and it was extremely common to see a lot of seemingly intentionally hateful but legal use of the n-word, etc. P&G, Nestle, etc., don't want to associate their brands with an environment like that. Obviously Apple didn't either.
It's important to always keep these realities in mind for all corporate action. Take Jack Dorsey's bluesky initiative[1], which many viewed in purely ideological or technical terms. My personal opinion is that it was either a way to counter negative PR ("Twitter is a moderated node that's profitable, but technically you can choose another node that's toxic and unprofitable but with less moderation, and good luck with that...", where Twitter gains all the "free speech" PR benefit with none of the significant costs), or a low cost self-soothing action to assuage pangs of guilt for instituting some policies he didn't personally agree with, with the important part that it is designed with a hard constraint to do nothing to negatively affect profits. So it's just an escape hatch for PR or personal angst.
Somehow other websites with copious amounts of pornographic content, like twitter and reddit, get a pass on this "sketchy" characterization.
Maybe, but twitter and reddit are not among them. Both are known for hosting very extreme content.
But I think this is all a distraction from what I was trying to convey -- my point doesn't depend on getting to the bottom of what is meant by "sketchy". Just define X to be some kind of website that has extremely low value advertisers (scammers, etc.):
> [X] websites do have advertisers, just extremely low value ones. Twitter wants to maintain a pleasant environment for the medium to high value advertisers, [...]
Then I opened /wg/ and there were anime porn ads.
> We don't want our advertisements to be shown next to posts that do X, Y or Z
That's effectively, the same as
> We want to see our advertisements by A, B and C
Just give advertisers different options.
Further, Twitter advertisements aren't much different than billboards. Do you worry about the politics / optics of the drivers or even protesters beneath the the billboards in a city? No, of course not, you just want people to buy your products. Do people care, no.
It's all fake outrage, trust me people will still buy Coke or Pepsi even if someone sees something distasteful while doom scrolling.
In terms of general "toxicity" there's already blocking users, but allow users to "avoid topics" if they need their safe spaces. Then as a business, let users "pay to avoid topics" as it'll require some hand curation -- boom. More money for twitter, more users on the platform, everyone wins.
And if an advertiser pays a service that, for example, shows terrorist propaganda, then they could be seen as funding and supporting terrorism.
Better to not take the risk. This was another reason why the credit card companies and / or payment providers pulled out (hehe) of Pornhub; they did not verify the age or consent of the people involved, thus were the payment providers complicit in perpetuating this. It would have been morally unjust to keep funneling money into PH if they didn't do anything against them. Not that the payment processors can claim much moral high ground, generally speaking, but you know what I mean.
This is a PR problem and fixable.
Further, this is an issue with advertisers. As Elon is proposing, have people pay to get verified ($5 / year or something). Further, as I mentioned, you can "pay to avoid topics" (have users label / flag stuff they don't want in their topic, like they do now generally for breaking the rules) and advertisers can select topics to promote on AND topics to not promote next to.
The reality, is Twitter would then get a large segment of revenue outside of advertising AND advertisers would feel more confident -- boosting revenue from both sides.
> This was another reason why the credit card companies and / or payment providers pulled out (hehe) of Pornhub
This is different, the advertisers didn't pull out of Pornhub, payment processors did. Twitter could probably lose half it's advertisers short term, but if they grew the user base they'd make more money long-term. Advertisers buy eyes not virtues. Yes, a bad post next to an ad is somewhat damaging, when your choices are literally: Twitter, Google, Facebook; are you really going to cut one of your 3 choices? Not long-term.
From an advertiser perspective, if Twitter allows nazis, advertisers will be funding the distribution of nazi content — UI framing means nothing.
There's not a chart anywhere I can find that shows advertisers reducing their spending on youtube. I "articles" (potentially paid for advertisments) claiming that was happening; but as far as I'm aware, there's no evidence that it made a material difference.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289658/youtube-global-ne...
Unfortunately, the data wasn't public during the controversy; so it's not really clear besides anecdotal virtue signaling by companies.
It's hard to explain how much you're understating the difficulty in doing this. It would likely require AGI to do this well. Until then, advertisers buy ads on entire platforms (like a given TV network), and they have to rely on the platform to ensure that the content is advertiser-friendly.
Hell, advertisers don't want their ads to be seen next to Elon's current Twitter feed ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496 ), let alone what Twitter will look like in a year after everyone starts posting using the owner's timeline as example.
Looking back at Tumblr, I'd say that's not a rule.
You're basing your assumption that advertisers will be the main source of revenue in the future.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354
At this point, he sounds like a politician making conflicting promises that he can't possibly keep... And also like a politician, he probably has his own interests in mind ahead of your average Twitter user's.
So yes, free speech only applies to humans, lol.
Do you support spam bots having rights or are you just using that to try to win your argument?
"... holding that corporations have a First Amendment right to free speech because they are "associations of citizens" and hold the collected rights of the individual citizens who constitute them." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#:~:text=T....]
Actually, the Supreme Court established it no later than First National Bank v. Belotti (1978), despite the frequent claim that this was an innovation in the 2009 Citizens United case.
This is not only simpler for Twitter to implement, but provides a better level of due process and accountability. How many times has someone been 'abused' on social media and claimed XYZ company did nothing about it?
0: I don't agree with this vernacular, it's just what the kids say.
All he's really saying is he'd prefer to accept more shitty behavior from people who he aligns with and less from people who annoy him.
The US has more than 30% of its population on there, the third highest- India has about 20 million of its 1 billion+ people.
It says there are 206 million active Twitter users, 77 million of them in the USA. That’s less than half of them.
Of my family and friends I only know of 2 who use it actively though most have an account.
From my small Eastern European country - no one I know uses Twitter, Reddit is more popular than it. That’s anecdotal, of course.
It's easy to point to 'oppressive' countries like China (where twitter is banned), or Turkey[1], or India[2] as examples of where speech can be severely limited, but there are many limitations to speech in other countries like Germany, Canada, France, Australia, UK.
When you make a globally available website, how do you "follow the law" when the laws of various countries are not compatible with each other? Do you geolock all tweets - Canada twitter is vastly different to US twitter? That doesn't sound scalable good!
[1]: https://www.article19.org/resources/turkey-twitter-becomes-l...
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/6/22564768/twitter-india-leg...
Musk's Twitter is certainly going to clash hard with Europe's recently adopted Digital Services Act.
Is there a reason you can't turn all of the bans (of legal stuff) into filters? Then users could turn on and off nazis, Q, sex, porn, etc? People could turn them all off and get the same experience as today.
That said, they are already auto-flagging posts to some extent.
Want to keep the default list? Good, just do nothing and you will see what Twitter wants you to see. Want to see unfiltered? Just turn the blocking off. Want to add a filter just for yourself? Easy. Upstream that filter such that it eventually becomes the default? Go for it. Have different filters to cater to different cultures? We've got the different lists for you to subscribe to.
They should be made so that you can algorithmically pick whatever subset you want. If you just want Parlor content, go for it. If you want everything except Parlor content, just flip that flag.
Something literally illegal? That gets deleted and removed from everything.
And I haven't seen a reason that this is any more tedious work on Twitter's part than the work they do blocking it. Maybe one argument is that Nazis are more likely to post illegal stuff, so banning them early preempts the work of looking for reasons to ban them later.
Among other reasons, because Twitter is a brand with an image to maintain. They don't want to be known as a safe hangout for Nazis and other unsavory content.
That's the actual problem with algorithmic feeds; they want to find ways to put things you don't subscribe to into the your view and the views of people you follow. You can't opt in to the content you see. Even if you studiously avoid algorithmic feeds, the people you follow won't, and they'll share that content onto your feed anyway. Even if you and the people you follow avoid them, nothing's stopping the algorithm from putting you into others' view and effectively inviting them into your feed.
Thus blocking/muting going from being primarily a self-moderation tool against abuse, to a necessity to stop the endless stream of algorithmic content and commentary coming from people you don't subscribe to, or who don't subscribe to you.
Plonk! [1, 2]
There is a fundamental asymmetry in harassment.
My account is important to me; I don't want to abandon it or give it up. If my account is under attack I cannot continue to use the site as I would like.
The accounts used for harassment are either disposable and it doesn't matter to the harasser whether they get blocked or banned. And non-disposable harassing accounts that get blocked can either just move onto the next target or continue to direct the harassment through screenshots etc which encourage the disposable accounts to do the dirty work.
The cost to the victim can be meaningful, but the cost to the harasser is non-existant.
And this isn't just applicable to concerted harassment campaigns. There is also a lot of "drive-by" harassment from accounts who will just reply to any black/trans/queer/woman who posts online.
It's also bullshit. In the old days people used to file complaints with your ISP or uni or get you removed from distribution on the server. But usually newcomers were brought in line by the community. Now, we have eternal September and it's simply not feasible to educate the hundreds of millions of people who don't know how to behave.
Well, unfortunately we aren't on the old internet though, are we? Before we talk about this approach we would need the tools to take timeline and personal content moderation in our own hands. This, however, isn't in the interest of Twitter, algorithmic timelines and ad/outrage shoveling in general and thus it probably won't happen.
I wouldn't even be surprised if excessive blocking would lead to your account getting flagged.
You are basically criticizing people for not building their own functional shack while all they have at their disposal is a bunch of timber of varying quality and merely a few rocks as "tools".
Remember that we are talking about words on the screen 99% of the time. I would be willing to bet most of us are reading on a post by post basis and don't know the full spectrum of every given persons beliefs (in fact, I'm not sure this is healthy or desirable).
Perhaps because they realize it effectively boils down to thought policing at some level and do not want to undermine their own intentions.
Like... we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I never had a Twitter account, but isn't it still limited to some 200 characters and/or an image per post? And from what I've seen the "threading" of discussions also seems to make replies difficult to follow. Apparently, our society wants important social issues to be discussed in 200 character snippets. I'm going to go cry into my coffee.
I'm now imagining a medieval town in an all-out drunken brawl.
A lot of academics are on twitter, and it's a reasonably good way to find interesting new work. It has problems, but the character limit isn't one of them.
I certainly don't. But, I can see why an individual who owns Twitter would want it to be the place for important social discourse.
I personally don’t believe he means that he wants to turn Twitter into 4chan. Rather what he’s saying is that nobody should be censored on Twitter for the content of their (otherwise civil) speech. There is a wide gulf of possible moderation policy choices between current Twitter and 4chan that he could park it at.
We're about to see a digital clash of cultures.
The Internet was actually LESS free back in the day, in the sense that we hung out on tightly moderated Perl CGI discussion boards, where idiots and trolls were not tolerated. Usenet was great too, without moderation, as it required one to be pretty technical to get there.
It's not an easy system to develop and maintain, but Twitter pays well enough to afford people who can do it. The goal just needs to be set.
If Twitter goes private then maybe the income expectations change and therefore the platform algorithms can change. I don't use twitter but it seems like putting more moderation power in user's hands ( chronological feeds, easier management of what you see and what you don't, etc ) becomes possible when Wall St. expectations are no longer a part of the design process.
If you don't have a stock price to answer to then you can do things that create a healthier community but may not be the most profitable.
EDIT: You know, Musk be on to something about leaving a company private. Tesla is public and the shorters almost killed it, he really had to fight them and still does. SpaceX was left as private and is thriving. maybe he's taking lessons learned from both Tesla and SpaceX and trying to apply them to Twitter? just a guess
This won't actually happen though. Content moderation, censorship, and bans will continue on Twitter unabated.
It never made sense why try to force me to use the same filter as the Karen that complains about kids skateboarding.
Interviewer: You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist, but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay?
Musk: Well, I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules. [...] No, I think, like I said, in my view Twitter should match the laws of the country
Interviewer: Right. So you can't incite people to violence like a direct incitement to violence. You can't do the equivalent of crying fire in a movie theater, for example.
Elon Musk: No, that would be a crime.
Shouting fire in a crowded movie theatre is not, and never was, illegal. It was an analogy in a court case which was then overturned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Interviewer: But here's the challenge, is that it's such a nuanced difference between different things. So there's incitement to violence. That's a no, it's illegal. There's hate speech, which some forms of hate speech are fine. I hate spinach.
"I hate spinach" is not hate speech, and importantly, hate speech isn't even illegal.
> And in fact the line from Justice Holmes in Schenck v. United States is “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” That “falsely” is what’s doing the work, both in Justice Holmes’s hypothetical, and in how such a false shout would be treated by First Amendment law today. Knowingly false statements of fact are often constitutionally unprotected — consider, for instance, libel, fraud, perjury, and false light invasion of privacy. That would presumably apply to knowing falsehoods that cause a panic.
Also see: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1038.
That said, this doesn't change your broader point that it seems that most people (myself included) are not very clear on 1A exceptions.
The whole difficult part of 'hate speech' is that it often is highly offensive and nasty, but what people find highly offensive and nasty differs (e.g. an atheist stating there is no god is deeply hateful and offensive to many people, or being pro-abortion). Ugh. I can't even.
Well, in US there are certainly attempts to make it so. There is definitely framework in place and there is the mores. The time seems ripe too given how people seem afraid of what people might say if you let them.
There are definitely hate speech laws in other countries.
For the record, I am sympathetic to your stance, but I am not sure it is accurate.
I'm not actually American, but my understanding is that there have been prior attempts, especially in some US states, to make hate speech illegal, but each time it just gets knocked down because it violates that pesky first amendment.
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
Now, if you're saying "All twitter should just follow the laws of the country", now you've got to decide which country?, because most Twitter users are not in the US, and Twitter operatates - has business entities and employees - in other countries apart from US.
You pose an interesting question and I might not have sufficient information to give you a full picture, but I might try to show a glimpse of what I think may be happening.
Someone somewhere decided it may be a good idea to expand existing framework ( hate crimes[1] ), which was relatively easily adopted in America due to historical ( slavery ) and political factors ( combating racism ).
[1] https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-and-policies
With that in mind, the first step is saturating the media with opinions indicating some sort of support for a policy/law change ( in this case hate speech - links with sample articles follow - note how old some of those are ):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...
https://newint.org/sections/argument/2012/12/01/is-hate-spee...
https://www.ihrb.org/news-events/press-centre/the-challenge-...
https://theconversation.com/the-idolization-of-free-speech-i...
Once the population is sufficiently primed, one can run it through congress. It is not a weekend project.
Note that it is exactly the same pattern with encryption battles, but at least that one has clear originators ( usually three letter agencies ).
If/when the Democrats restructure the Supreme Court to have a liberal majority, overturning Brandenburg with a single ruling becomes on the table, and the door is open for hate speech legislation.
I don't think any of the current sitting life time appointed supreme court justices have expressed any will at overturning that decision.
"If in doubt, let the speech exist. If it's a gray area, I would say let the Tweet exist. In a case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not want to necessarily promote that Tweet. I'm not saying I have all the answers here, but I do think that we want to be very reluctant to delete things..."
(Seek to about 19:40 in the interview: https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM)
Of course it can turn into a cesspool. Of course there are ways around that problem. Like allowing more customizability for users.
For example: an ‘old Twitter’ filter that would only show content compatible with the old moderation norms.
Use your imagination, intelligent tech folks, instead of airing the same hyperventilating opinions.
I think we've had plenty of years to demonstrate a way to make it work without the toxicity and damage to society, yet we've not done so - even with the most scrutinized platforms in history and the world's most capable software engineers.
We are social creatures. Social media is not at all an incarnation of 'society' in which we can function.
That actually kind of mirrors my politics. I think freedom is what you get when every movement, crusade, and ideology simultaneously fails.
This isn't nihilism. It's a belief that problems are best solved without force.
yeah that sounds great but the devil is in the details and they have always been. I feel like Musk gets tunnel vision in his thought process. Like he goes "A leads to B, B leads to C, and then C leads to D and done." without contemplating the complexities along the way. It's interesting because he's not naive to business and how things work. He's certainly gotten things done in timelines that people thought impossible and even laughed in his face but other times he has wildly missed.
The problem occurs when those ten percents use the ensuing outrage to recruit.
I keep hearing this, and it makes no sense.
1) Add a block button. 2) Don't surface random content to users. 3) (Optional) hard restrictions on private messages.
This solves the issue entirely, with no need to moderate anything that isn't illegal.
The simple fact is that this is a really easy problem to solve. Companies just don't want to implement 2).
Trending topics, your friend liked/replied to this, your friend follows this person, we think you'll like this tweet... all of these things show up in your Twitter timeline now, without having followed any of the people they're showing you.
But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces.
Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are.
I would like to give people another perspective on events like Tumblr banning female-presenting nipples or Patreon dropping right-wing YouTubers or Twitter constantly introducing new algorithms that misfire and ban random groups of people. These companies aren’t inherently censorious. They’re just afraid.
It’s been seen time and time and time and time again and I’m not sure there’s any real way to preserve it.
You have a similar thing with tiny tourist places - everyone wanting to go there forces it to change, it cannot remain a tiny tourist place and almost always ends up being a place that is “on show”.
But in here, even the author seems to point to testimonials that indicate that value of unique discussions gained just by allowing the conversation to happen.
It is sad that it ended partially because author was harassed for hosting it, but I suppose this is the price you pay in 2022.
As it pertains to Musk and article linked to Musk, I am relatively certain he can handle the mob.
Tim Wu has a book "The Master Switch" also about this. I think his argument was once you become big enough, the rules change and you end up being forced to censor. You become valuable target for people who want censorship and close to a common carrier.
The user should be the one who is given the tools of censorship.
What's wrong with this idea?
The obvious solution to me is just let people pick their own moderation tools, or at least configure it to how they would like. Moderation is great, but what I want moderated is different than what you might want moderated, and we should support broader implications.
This also allows Twitter to gain some independence from the wrath on both sides who want more or less moderation. They can respond by saying "Use the X moderation tool if you want more moderation or "Y if you want less".
And there is the other dimension where you actually want to remove the ability to block from some users, like public businesses and brands probably shouldn't be able to block complaints from customers and shareholders, politicians shouldn't be able to block their constituents, etc.
What you are describing is the heavily moderated, arbitrarily censored social media experience the entire planet experiences today.
> Unfortunately the result of that is a place that very few want to spend time in.
Perhaps social media is a place that we should not encourage people to spend inordinate amounts of time in. Perhaps the idea of combining all the world's people into a single centralized location to communicate with one another, should carry with it the very explicit notion that such a place would be chaotic, high-energy, and risky --- just like going to the casino for the night.
Regardless of how this goes, it'll go down in history, and Musk is well aware of that.
His point was that there's no conservation of energy on the internet right now. Requiring a small ransom for safe passage would fix that, retaining anonymity.
No, the problem is that determining bad behaviour (or at least, doing so in a way that is fair, just, and broadly accepted) is very difficult. There's no objective naughtiness meter that detects when someone's behaving in bad faith. There's no set of words that always, regardless of context indicate undue rudeness. There's no perfect demarcation between just asking questions, and harassment.
So basically any system is going to have to make a series of judgement calls, and those judgement calls are going to be specific to the context of the person (or people) making the judgement. And most importantly: other people will disagree with that judgement call! Not least the poor victim of your unfair banhammer (or the poor victim of the abusive spammer you choose to do nothing about).
Money's not going to fix that problem - if anything, it'll make it worse when people have more on the line.
Saylor discussed this mainly in the solution of DDOS mitigation. Perhaps he didn't intend for it to extend as far as content moderation and I'm taking his idea too far, but I think he probably did.
Though it will also exclude people that can't afford it. I'm thinking of poor people and children. The kind of people who use computers at the local library, because they can't afford their own device (and more expensively) the Internet connection to make it useful.
And yes, I realize that some of the above groups are also absolute shits, who I would keep off the Internet (if I could) until they decided to grow up.
It's actually the sort of thing I could see CloudFlare etc. providing, so each website doesn't need to implement it themselves.
Cool. Who decides when I visit a random website that my request was abusive?
What if they deem me abusive after several months of using the website?
Actually similar happened to me recently. I woke up to find my PayPal account close and no one can tell me why.
Problem being that Metafilter is unpopular compared to many of the free alternatives. Correlation is not causation, but there is a plausible causation mechanism here.
Crypto won’t solve the problem only make it worse.
"Moderation lenses" would operate as follows:
Any person or entity can be a moderator. Moderation could be done manually or in an automated fashion, it doesn't really matter. Users would be able to opt-in (and later opt-out) of whatever set of lenses they want. The lenses they opt-in to would affect what posts they are able to see.
Online communities (for example, a subreddit), could have a default set of lenses applied to newly-joined users, but as with any other lens, they would be removable by the user. One would imagine that most users would leave a "spam" lens in place.
Governments would be able to produce their own lenses for things such as "misinformation", "hate speech", or whatever the evil-of-the-day happens to be. And if people want a government filtering what they see, they can add those lenses. And if they don't, they don't.
Human opinion is inherently subjective, and agreeing on what is "correct" or "appropriate" across large groups of people is rarely possible. Trying to impose a single viewpoint of "correct" across millions of people is laughable.
You seem to assume it's a binary answer. Either allow everything or nothing?
Just maybe its the enforcement of orthodoxy that makes "content moderation" so toxic?
I personally believe you can hold abhorrent views and still be polite, so I don't see why there is a necessary contradiction here.
Its very hard to get people to learn things by shouting at them
Very weird to lead with this and then expect anyone to take anything else you say seriously!
(Elon got a new transponder ID to hid from "me") are ridiculously self important, and a complete misrepresentation of what he is doing.
There's a couple of these "apparently" or he "maybe" shorted Tesla giving "context"
If you really want to offer context here it is:
- Gates asked Musk to meet up to discuss clime change philanthropy
- Musk asked if Gates still had a half billion Tesla short
- Gates confirmed he does
- Musk told him to screw off because he can't take philanthropy on climate change seriously with someone trying to cash in on the failure of Tesla
So, no, he didn't "maybe" or "apparently" short Tesla - he actively is shorting Tesla to the tune of $500 million as of a few days ago.
The irony is that Tesla worsens climate change by selling billions of dollars of carbon credits which enable polluters.
If it actually wanted to make a difference it would forgo those credits which would force polluters to actually reduce pollution. Instead it's just a wash.
This kind of thing doesn't give me confidence that Musk will respect differing opinions as the owner of Twitter.
Anybody is allowed to short TSLA, and yes, if you short them you want the value of the company to drop and you're trying to cash in on that. TSLA should continue growing if it's a successful company. I'm not aware of companies that lose stock value year after year and are considered successful.
>This kind of thing doesn't give me confidence that Musk will respect differing opinions as the owner of Twitter.
I don't think Musk's goal with the Twitter buyout is to respect opinions. He's buying Twitter so disrespectful opinions won't be taken down.
Now if he starts banning things he personally disagrees with, like the famous plane account, I'll turn on him and call him a bad guy. But I'm not going to speculate nefarious reasons he's buying Twitter because I have no reason to believe he'll do anything other than what he said he'll do.
Anyone else would just say "Great, I'm going to make you lose all your money!"
He could have just given the kid a car and been done with it.
>obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff
None of the preceding scoundrels' favorites should be illegal tho.
The arbiter of the global soapbox should to be in favor of almost absolute free speech imo.
Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site.
It seems so easy from a distance. Just let people say what they want to say, right? Unfortunately the result of that is a place that very few want to spend time in.