Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to know that @emmanuelmacron and @emmanuel_macron are both real persons but I’d also want to know that @emmanuelmacron is the famous one while the other is just an homonyme. Blue Check symbols are also a lot useful to distinguish real brand accounts from fake ones.

> Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out.

See @yishan’s thread on moderation [1]. Moderation is a hard issue, "consistent moderation" is not achievable because the hardest decisions are made based on the personal feeling of the moderators (that’s also why FB has tons of humans moderators: you can’t just automate it beside obvious spam content). You can’t have rules for everything and you will ALWAYS have people whose behavior match the 'rules' but are still problematic. I guess that to have a good opinion about moderation you must work as a moderator for some time.

[1]: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440

Moderation is a solved problem. Replace the entire team with dang. Bam. Good forum.

What is the scalability of dang?

For deeply indebted and cash-flow poor companies like Twitter is about to become (at the surprisingly high--and positive--$1.5B EBITDA, interest is going to erode that by upwards of 60%), is there an equivalent service offering? dang-as-a-service, or "daas", if you will?

I guess the real question is: are dang's parents still alive or do we have to clone him? Hopefully Twitter can wait for the minimum 18.75 years it'll take to scale out.

That's a super interesting question. In my idealist mind, if one person can do something, anyone can do it (given reasonable levels of teaching and learning ability).

I don't think it looks like DaaS -- each company must curate their own "dang" group that has an almost gut-level understanding of the site's "sinew", or the ideals that it lives by come hell or high water.

Maybe Twitter doesn't even have a philosophy. Maybe it ought to.

Nope. I can't be dang.

I can learn the tools he uses. I can learn the procedures he follows. But I don't think that I can learn his patience and his charity toward people who are being flaming trolls. I mean, I've seen him model it. But I can't imitate it for long.

Train AI model based on HN moderation by dang

Sell high quality moderation as a service for other plaforms

Profit?

"Assume good faith" is one of the HN Guidelines[1].

I think dang walks the walk and applies that principle himself during moderation, to a rather amazing degree considering how long he's been at it and the challenges of the job.

My sense is that Musk earnestly wants to do something similar at Twitter, and that he's motivated by a kindred idealism.

However, assuming good faith on the part of forum participants means that outgroups end up having to tolerate a lot of unpleasantness, so long as that unpleasantness is couched civilly enough and could possibly be interpreted as well meaning. (For example, whether women are biologically predisposed to be less ambitious than men is considered fair game on HN and gets debated ad nauseam.)

It's obvious that dang passionately wishes for people from all backgrounds to feel welcome, but that wish exists in tension with the lenient moderation philosophy.

I've come to believe that HN's demographic skew is a direct and predictable consequence of the moderation philosophy, and that ultimately the skew is endemic and won't budge over time. I'm occasionally troubled by my own participation here because of it, as much as I enjoy and appreciate the positive aspects of the site.

I expect something similar will play out at Twitter, with outgroup participation waning as Musk shapes it according to his utopian vision of what he calls "free speech".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes but isn't that a good thing for a public forum/town square, given the alternatives (censorship, politicization, etc.)? Shouldn't it be exactly the sort of place that people feel unafraid to discuss controversial subjects?

If the choice is between some outgroups feeling uncomfortable with civilly-expressed criticism of themselves and their worldview, and draconian, politicized, highly subjective, moderation foisted on everyone, I know where I stand.

And private fora are not town squares. The rules for actual town squares have to be lenient because government suppression of speech is problematic. The relevant freedom for private fora is not freedom of speech, but freedom of association.

Why not? At what point is it OK to let people exclude each other? We don't all have to be friends and play together, do we? We're discriminatory, hierarchical, social animals. Some people will always be excluded. Using authority to try to solve this problem is futile and draconian.

> And private fora are not town squares

I agree, but the question here is whether it's worthwhile for this particular private forum to operate under the same principles of free speech. Certainly some people seem to think so.

> the sort of place that people feel unafraid to discuss controversial subjects?

> If the choice is between some outgroups feeling uncomfortable with civilly-expressed criticism of themselves

So this is the key tension. Outgroups get criticism of themselves every-bloody-where. As you noted, "We're discriminatory, hierarchical, social animals". One more place doesn't make the difference. What good moderation does is provide an opening for an outgroup to issue its own civilly-expressed criticism, with a chance of being listened to instead of reflexively ridiculed and dismissed.

I'm not sure that's true at all, lots of fringe views gain traction on Twitter. I'd imagine more of them still are moderated out of existence.

> So this is the key tension. Outgroups get criticism of themselves every-bloody-where

Yes, and by being a digital town square, Twitter, or any similar platform, would become part of everywhere, with the same consequences for outgroups.

> provide an opening for an outgroup to issue its own civilly-expressed criticism

I agree that outgroups should have this opportunity, but it must be applied to all the outgroups, including those who have a mutual loathing for each other, and those whom we loathe ourselves. Fairness dictates we shouldn't play favourites, in the same vein that the ACLU defended the a Nazi group's right to march through Skokie.

If an outgroup wants a private, safe space to express themselves, that place cannot also purport to be a public square of free expression. It's one or the other.

That's not particularly close to what I said. I am talking about the outgroup being able to participate in the "public square of free expression", in a way that is actually free for them to speak to the ingroup.

These conditions do in fact represent "actual" freedom. Basically if you support people insulting and ridiculing Nazis (which I do), you should support them insulting and ridiculing anyone else on the same principle.

> civilly-expressed criticism of themselves and their worldview [0]

or where they should expect to be ridiculed and insulted? And why would anyone sane want to regularly participate in the latter?

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31167326

As to why people would want to participate, I suspect it's for the usual reasons: to accomplish a goal, or to gain influence and social status.

Edit: Surely you agree that sometimes rudeness is warranted, and that people in fact are rude on Twitter?

Also, it's not clear how to do it well. I do have some ideas which I'd like to try someday. Here's one: people work well with feedback loops, so telling them that they're penalized and giving them a way to fix it could be a good thing. Unfortunately, it could also just be awful. This place is always one step away from sudden decline, and when walking near a precipice one wants to step carefully.

I've been a moderator before, within a team of moderators. There were varying views within that group from 'ban the slightest aggression or just disliked person' to 'give people as many chances as can be afforded, ban is last resort (my view).'

Members got 'banned for nothing!' or regarded as 'why is that person still here?' Depending who you asked both statements were wrong...

It just doesn't scale massively without something like Reddit's subsite moderation structure. FB, Twitter, etc all can't do it at scale across one public community and algorithms can never be nuanced enough and are extremely vulnerable to political/ideological bias ('misinformation' labels are a simple example of this, regardless of what you think of their accuracy or usefulness).

It’s quite possible that an AI could learn to do all this but I suspect that a big part of modernism that participants in a community know and respect the moderators. Not many humans respect AI in the same way.

An algorithm can't ask itself for feedback. I hope Musk does make the Twitter algorithms open source, that would be fascinating and put pressure on other platforms if it turns out to be eye opening or useful

But I think a more refined version of my initial comment is that if the users respect moderators, then moderation will be much more cohesive and well received.

Twitter clearly has utility. But it will never be a nice place to hang out except in some very localized parts of it.

It was built in America, by Americans, and now, is about to be owned by an American. And like America, everyone is (should be) welcome... provided you honor our Western traditions of free speech.

I like what Musk said about free speech within the limits of the law. I think that's a good place to settle things.

A lot of stalking and harassment laws are state level and not the same in every state. Since online harassment is a common problem on Twitter, which state’s laws would you like to apply?

Spreading misinformation that results in violence towards an individual is not governed by federal laws unless it falls under the definition of a hate crime.

Spreading misinformation about results of elections isn’t illegal but is very obviously quite damaging and has real world consequences. How do you tackle this issue?

That’s just a very very small sample. The problem you are going to face with your approach is that the US laws were not designed with the idea of governing stuff on Twitter.

You don't. People are legally allowed to spread misinformation.

> The problem you are going to face with your approach is that the US laws were not designed with the idea of governing stuff on Twitter.

Yes they were... you just don't like the way American laws handle these things.

Difference.

Twitter is not purely a US forum. In some places the law may say that "hate speech" is illegal, or that politically dissident speech is illegal... what then? Are you presuming that US jurisprudence should be the standard for all of humanity, worldwide?

"We" is only "citizens of the USA". Other countries have quite a different tradition regarding this, and citizens of such countries often quite a different understanding than USA citizens of what is considered as "free speech" in the USA and what does not.

How do you avoid the problem of thousands of accounts from Russian-funded troll farms pumping out millions of disinformation tweets on everything from vaccine conspiracy theories, Ukraine wars, lies about elections and so on? Do you just accept that Putin gets a free ride to influence public opinion, destabilise the liberal democracies and nudge close elections in his favour?

Muting accounts might be good for my blood pressure (if I can mute thousands of accounts) but it doesn't fix problems like the above or interesting people getting bullied off the platform (it's bad enough already).

> No mora bans on so called "hate speech"

Why is hate speech "so-called" hate speech rather than just hate speech? Do you think Twitter would be a better forum if anyone can e.g. bombard a Black professor with racist abuse when they share some research?

Do you think HN would be better with no moderation?

> or politically dissident speech

This is not banned.

So why are you panicking just because Musk bought the company?

This is laughable gaslighting. That whole thread is misdirection. Yishan is a liar and should be called out on it.

Moderation is not "easy" because it requires careful design and effort, but it is not "hard" in the way he describes it.

None of the major social media companies made any real effort to make moderation transparent.

None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.

How can they claim this stuff is "hard" when they never even tried to take the most obvious measures to re-establish some level of trust in their companies? Trust that they've had initially and squandered though their actions, BTW.

Edit:

Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life. It's about medium structure, not people. The vast majority of people are fine.

One problem with moderation is that you have to choose somewhere on the continuum between (A) "Don't be dick (everyone surely knows when they're being a dick, right?)" and (B) Enumerating literally every possible rule violation.

You quickly learn that (A) doesn't scale and it gives your moderators maximum leeway, most of them having very, very, very different ideas of what it means to be an ass.

And with (B), you get into the business of rules lawyering where users will continually use your own rule list against. By trying to be comprehensive, you create leeway through omission. This reminds me of forums with 1000 rules. Nobody is going to read them, and the only people who do are the ones who will waste your time by finding the one obvious rule you left off. And with this, it seems even easier for bad users to rally the support of obvious ones because they seem to make a good point, and you have a weirdly bigger issue on your hands than you would have if your rules were less focused.

In other words, there is no way to make a set of content rules that people can agree with (in spirit not interpretation), else moderation would be easy.

You can try this yourself. Pick a hot topic like trans rights or racism, come up with tweets that you think are obviously unwanted and also tweets that come close to crossing the line. And then try to write a rule that encodes this sorting in a way that leaves no room for interpretation neither among users nor your moderators.

Because most people don't care about this. For most websites, making moderation transparent only opens you up to more abuse and does nothing good.

>None of the major social media companies made a real effort to come up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront (at least in principle) and that doesn't change after every major news story.

Because it's literally impossible to do this.

>Also, I am sick and tired of social media CEOs, VPs and founders pointing a finger at their users and saying "you, users, are the real problem here". This is bullshit. An average interaction on (moderated!) social media is significantly worse than an average interaction in (unmoderated) real life.

No it's not bullshit, I'm taking from this reply that you haven't spent any amount of time moderating an internet forum. (Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong there) The users are the real problem and it's the entire problem you're getting paid to solve when you work for these companies. Nobody would use these services if they weren't solving these problems. Real life interactions usually only involve a handful of people and don't require figuring out how to get everyone in the world to get along with each other. If the users were capable of "coming up with a solid set of content rules that most people can agree with upfront" they would've done so already and we wouldn't even be having this discussion because there would be no need to demand that Twitter try to do it.

I think Yishan was trying to say that moderation is hard not in a "This requires brilliant minds and hard effort" kind of way, but more in a "This will emotionally deflate you for years" kind of way*

Edit: *especially if you're the public figurehead who will receive tremendous heat for this.

This raises an obvious question. If the people hearing the ideas manifestly want to hear them, who is being served by the moderation?

One possibility is the moderator. It's evident that Twitter executives, or people who influence them, don't want certain ideas to spread. But why? One possibility is that they believe these ideas to be false or "harmful" (whatever that means).

They believe the the masses are easily duped and that counter-arguments are unlikely to be sufficiently persuasive. If only a minority of people are easily duped, then false ideas tend to burn out within a small radius as they are exposed to counter-argumentation and common sense.

But if the masses are putty in the hands of bad idea creators, then a wise and disinterested moderator has a role to play. He can spot the bad idea and cut it off before it spreads.

But can a wise and disinterested moderator exist? If company executives faced no outside pressures, then it's theoretically possible. But we can see clearly this does not exist in the real world. The US Congress and Whitehouse have not been shy about making very specific moderation demands of Twitter, backed by serious and credible threats. As a result, correct ideas are bound to be moderator out and bad ideas allowed to spread.

(A few hundred years of political philosophy, as captured in the founding documents of the US, make it clear why we don't want government to play any moderation role whatsoever.)

In my opinion, the wisdom of the masses combined with opportunities for vigorous counter beats centralized moderation by a very large margin.

How is it not both? Give people a medium wherein they can be semi-anonymous, or otherwise removed from the immediate social impacts of their actions and words, and they are awful. It seems to me that you need (a) distance from social impacts and (b) people willing to be awful.

How is it not both? How are people not responsible for their own actions online? I don't get what you're saying.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...

> Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests increase Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.

A twitter mob went after Shor, including people tagging the CEO of his company (who _is_ on Twitter, not sure what the confusion is there) and asking them to "Come get your boy." A few days later, he was fired. Four days after that[2], he was kicked off the Progressphiles list for being "racist."

If you don't like New York Magazine, here's a Vox article that goes over what happened[3].

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-... [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci... [3] https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow...

The culture didn't last long - people usually fight back at the mobs now, who have died off some. Now it only exists in minor extremist form where leftists (anti-Epstein conspiracists) and rightists (many other kinds of conspiracists) go around calling random people pedophiles. Twitter still doesn't ban them if you report them though.

Also, that research he quoted is from a Black researcher (Omar Wasow) who is still around tweeting himself and seems well respected.

And in the end nobody suffered as much as the folks living in these high crime neighborhoods. Not only is there evidence the riots increased homicides, https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-pr..., but also it created a backlash against police reform even in the most progressive cities in the country, like NYC and SF. Police budgets are now bigger than ever: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-po...

Bi-partisan momentum on police reform evaporated as Trump baited progressives into picking a self-destructive fight over the acceptability of rioting and the need for policing.

In our timeline he did, since I remember reading some followups he wrote about it.

It's not the real most annoying research you could post; that'd be the NBER paper finding protests reduced covid cases by getting uninvolved people to stay home.

I don't really care about the details of these stories, it doesn't affect me if the virus came from a lab or how deep the corruption runs in the Biden family. But any rational person without a political agenda has to agree that the censorship system as it exists is ripe for abuse by bad actors. These two examples in particular completely changed my viewpoint on moderation and I no longer see Facebook or Twitter fighting "misinformation" as a good thing given how easily they can be manipulated into denying valid information. They simply cannot be trusted to identify what is or isn't misinformation.

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC%20-%20Fin...

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son's business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the "public face of the administration's handling of Ukraine." The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. Six days later, on April 28, British officials seized $23 million from the London bank accounts of Burisma's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

The op made an accusation as if it was a fact

Any adult should have learnt that starting with a kernel of truth, or flooding the debate with accusations and demands, are effective methods to mislead and deceive people. It is a proven method for suppressing facts. It lacks integrity, and serves the goals of the corrupt.

It is strange to me that people perfectly aligned to the attack lines of corrupt politicians (in your case, the Republican flavour) bother pretending even to themselves that it is the corruption that really bothers them.

This is probably the most tribal thing I ever read here on hn.

So, I’m European, not American. I genuinely don’t care about your politics. My only interaction with it is news titles I inevitably run into. But I don’t have to be American, or Republican to notice your politicians ( and mine for that matter ) are deeply corrupt. From both sides. I think republicans are just as corrupt as democrats. I think Trump is just as corrupt as Biden as Clinton. I think they are all in it for themselves and will gladly sell their influence to the higher bidder, which is usually corporate interests.

And, yeah, I actually wish things were different. But they’re not. So all I’m left with is to point out how ridiculous people like themitigating are.

... That may be true for Twitter, but it's certainly not the case for IG and FB. Discussion of any sort was off-limits, based pretty much entirely on Daszak's letter (we agree that's batshit insane, right?). Millions of posts were deleted, and tens of millions got a little warning bar that dropped interaction by "at least" 80%.

Meanwhile back at Twitter, people who tweeted wrong-think of very mild varieties, such as anything but the current and official (and ever-shifting) stance on vaccine effectiveness were getting banned. While that's not super cool, you're right to point out that Twitter weren't quite as authoritarian as claimed.

Some people did that, sure. Others were genuine. For example, this tweet in cautious favor of a new vaccine development got a Professor of haemostasis and thrombosis at the University of Sheffield banned, and even on appeal they made him delete the tweet: https://twitter.com/ProfMakris/status/1474068222550884367/ph...

Many, many other cases of this sort exist, and there's no justification for it. Speaking of unwarranted - your assumptions about people's motives, to justify attacking and censoring them, are disturbing. Do you feel like that's a normal thing to do?

Trump has used this tactic effectively many times in the past: he says something that makes sense ("we need border security") in such a racist and distasteful way that causes the opposition to kneejerk react against whatever policy he's proposing, forcing them to take a position that's at odds with common sense ("border walls are racist!"). It's possible he may have had some classified information about the lab leak being a feasible story, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just one of the thousands of things he blabbers uncontrollably about and this particular one luckily happened to have some truth to it.

My theory is that a lot of people had an axe to grind, and that thread was sufficiently aligned with them.

Sounds like one to verify identity, one to verify a "position"

this used to be a big deal because people could steal celebrity handles. that's why many famous accounts start with @theReal...

celebrities being reachable on twitter is a big part of the appeal. anything that helps them to protect their brands is good for business

A lot of people get this mixed up! but it more adequately explains low-follower outliers.

[1] only-ish

You can make this argument about the extremists on either side.

There should be no doubt as to what is real and what isn't, independent of political ideology.

God damn Southpark Politics

The problem is people choosing emotions over rational discourse and establishing footing and common ground. A lot of commenting is in the vein of “I am right and you are going to hear me out (or else)!”

Tell me, which of our major modern divides can be solved by "rational discourse?"

Consider something like the coronavirus pandemic. Studying the virus itself is a monumental undertaking requiring the funding of states or large corporations. Laypeople must simply "choose sides" and pick the sources they like best. Suppose that you tell me the virus is killing X people a day and I claim it is only killing Y. How do we settle that via "rational discourse?"

We can't discover the truth by talking amongst ourselves like a couple of Greek philosophers using inductive or deductive reasoning.

Our choices are either to perform our own primary research (again, wildly impractical for an individual) or to point to sources we feel are credible.

So I would envision that it would mean people talking and finding out validity of statements made. If you come with a Mirror tabloid article that says that Coronavirus turned people into vampire zombies, that would be a much different discussion than discussing the minutiae of a topic.

The problem is “side thinking” and not enough “gradient thinking”

We might not know some of the finer details, but by inquisitive discourse we can come to a ballpark for your example, or identity problems with each method.

That's a really different concept. Either you have a strange definition of extremists, or you have a strange definition of "the middle".

On the one hand, in context, it makes a little sense; you can understand it as saying that objective reality is an orthogonal concept to political extremism.

On the other, it's hard to imagine an "extremist" who's "in the middle".

I suppose you can picture a few things though:

1. A "delusional centrist". Here you get the severed connection to reality, but also the political moderation. Some "End of History" person with 90s-era thinking might be like this -- maybe what you think of when you hear "Krugman" or "Fukuyama" (though I think both have been shaken, actually).

2. A "radical moderate". Here, "moderate" is a little different from "centrist". I hear "centrist" and I think a Clintonian foreign policy hawk with liberal social policy; I hear "moderate" and I think more of a cultural stance. Nowadays "moderate" might connote breaking cultural taboos. It seems like male comedians end up in this category a lot. I don't think he'd use this description for himself, but I once heard someone describe Slavoj that way. "Radical" somehow connotes a connection to academia and to certain philosophers more than it does any specific conclusions (which may not be extreme at all).

Overall this maybe just what you get when you play with two words neither of which means a ton.

Yes, extremism to me does feel orthogonal to political orientation. "Delusional centrist" is closer to what I had in mind.

Here's the thing that I think is important: you can't talk to extremists rationally. Their mental world model doesn't match reality in big chunks, so there's no shared world view to agree on.

Perhaps I am redefining "extremist" but that's just my mental model.

This is my exact point.

>I'm now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit):

>Are you ready?

>Here it is...

>They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.

>That's all.

Yeah, as if 'users squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama' did not result in higher engagement rates and these platforms did not exploit that for their own gains.

To me, this is proof that verification isn’t about security feature, just social status. It’s been exploited by hackers to mimic famous accounts, including Musk himself https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46097853.amp

A name is not a unique identifier. Full stop. If you expect a specific name to refer to a specific person just because it's public, you're glossing over a lot of details which just plain don't make that work.

To some degree, this is not a problem with the social media network, it's a problem with people not realizing that a name on a social media network doesn't necessarily have to be the first person you think of when you see that name, and some personal responsibility to know who you're contacting is expected. There's things social networks can and should do to make this easier, but ultimately the problem will persist until people change their behavior.

@willsmith is clearly not the Will Smith that slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. He isn't claiming to be, but he could change his profile photo and all of a sudden the world would think he was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The blue checkmark adds some validity to that claim.

Some account handles will match real names. People make assumptions on that. At the current time, no matter of locking down profiles so they don't change will solve the problem of people assuming an account name must match the famous person with the same name, because names are not only not unique, collisions are common enough that famous people share names all the time. People don't do the barest amount of verification of what they are seeing compared to what they assume, so nothing you add that they have to look at to fix that will actually fix it.

Or repurpose the misinformation banners to make it clear that this is a person with the same name not a person with the same position/title. Maybe the long-tail gets messy but that's where implicitly or explicitly linking to external sources is valuable. Or just trust twitter to be that external source (maybe with 3rd party alternatives via "open sources").

By "missing some of the nuance", I meant of the example presented earlier (https://twitter.com/willsmith), which is not someone impersonating Will Smith the actor, is someone somewhat famous in their own right (even if much less so than the actor), and has the name because they were on Twitter first. They go out of their way to state who they are and to disambiguate themselves from the actor Will Smith, but are also verified as Will Smith. Guess what? They got a lot of hate tweets recently from people that didn't bother to actually look whether @willsmith was the actor or not and just blindly assumed so.

Perhaps you missed some of the nuance in that as well?

To deal with harassment and SPAM, there are perfectly functional tools like rate limiting and user-initiated blocking. These don't need to be applied based on post content. Note that saying something unpleasant once isn't harassment, and that posting something people disagree with isn't SPAM.

The problem is that the most dangerous content is appealing to people on a very low emotional level, it's called "stochastic terrorism" for a reason. Just take the QAnon crap about children being held hostage and mined for adrenochrome in the basement of a pizza parlor. Yes, the dude deciding to shoot up a pizza parlor [1] should be punished for his actions - but should those who published the crap or hosted the crap be allowed to get off without consequences? What about the baseless claims of a "stolen" election that led to a putsch attempt and the deaths of seven people [2]? Neither of what was published was illegal, even under European laws, but nevertheless real, actual people died.

99.9999999% of people won't fall for QAnon content to the degree they get violent over it, but it only takes one gullible-enough person and suddenly something that most (>50%) of the population would dismiss as crap becomes an actual cause for massive harm. If hundreds are gullible enough, you get a Jan 6th-scale event. And if millions are gullible enough, you get Trump, Orban, Kaczynski or Brexit (as well as, again, an accompanying rise in violence, murder and terrorism based on these people and their ideologies).

In my opinion, actions have to be taken against the peddlers of QAnon, election fraud and other propaganda before the stochastic terrorism principle applies and people get killed as a result. And the worst contributor to that is unmoderated and undermoderated social media, no matter if it's 4chan and the other chans that gave rise to QAnon, Facebook and Twitter that gave rise to Trump or Telegram that gave rise to the corona deniers and anti-5G conspiracy peddlers.

Democracy is not something that is god-given, democracy is something that has to be fought over to obtain it (and in every country, that fight cost millions of deaths) and has to be fought over to keep it alive - sometimes bloody (e.g. in Ukraine), sometimes at the election campaigns, and always at a legislative level. Democracy needs the attention of everyone and the counteraction against threats - including curbing the freedom of speech, where proven to be necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...

YES. The people who published the nonsense are in no way responsible for the actions of the murderer. Neither are the people who manufactured the hardware, mined the raw materials, ran the cabling, or built the datacenter. Responsibility for action must terminate at the actor.

Liberty basically decentralizes power as much as possible. The inevitable consequence of this is that individual people are powerful. And if they happen to be gullible or stupid, they can exercise that power to do stupid things. The alternative is taking away power from individuals and concentrating it in authority. This inescapably carries a much higher risk of the power being corrupted and abused, since there are fewer actors who wield more of it.

I'm glad to suffer the occasional school shooting or laughably ineffective putsch, if it means I will never be subjected to a Kristallnacht.

> actions have to be taken against the peddlers of QAnon, election fraud and other propaganda before the stochastic terrorism principle applies

This is basically precrime/thought crime. I just don't trust any authority with that much power over any period of time. Following Blackstone's formulation, I would rather 10 dangerous lies spread unchecked, than be censored for promoting one truth.

This would limit the population of "people who can trick others that they are Emmanuel Macron" to people named Emmanuel Macron, which is such a small edge case I don't think it's worth considering. Add photo validation to ensure that a profile picture is actually you and the problem is pretty much solved.

For brands, it doesn't seem impossible to do verification for any brand through DNS proofs or something like that.

Also, the more transparency you have the more you get things like "but you did this and that for Alice last time, that's so inconsistent with your decision about Bob today!!1!". Yup, it's not consistent because it's human and constantly evolving, people get better with experience, cases are never 100% the same, etc.

You'll never stop the banned person from being angry. The point of transparency is so that you provide something to make the mob think twice about grabbing pitchforks.

It's the same reason we have a justice system, to stop vigilante justice from tearing apart society. You have provide the illusion of justice or people make their own judgements based on limited information. Of course it won't be perfect every time. You just have to persuade _enough_ people.

If there is an emotionally resonant argument that can be made in favor of the banned user, then a mob will form.

Procedure, objectivity, precedent be damned.

You are essentially describing the court of public opinion, which is governed by deeper rules that are hardwired into our social brains.

Big Tech is extremely political, practically ruled by politics, and those politics - as of 2022 - are almost exclusively left-wing.

Twitter's response to everything they don't like is to construct a rule forbidding both sides to do anything that goes against Twitter's politics. Truth, public interest, and freedom of speech do not factor into the equation.

And this is one of the things that are broken on the large social media platforms. I mostly use FB, so that's what I know about. But what they do is so ridiculous, that I started to collect their decisions. I've been banned for a week for calling a politician, a public figure (with 50k followers) "braindead" in response to a really stupid comment he made publicly under news article. (That's all I said. It's a widely used expression in Hungarian for saying that someone is an idiot. It's the exact same term as the medical one for someone being in the state of brain death. Not exactly a nice thing to say someone but not over the top either.)

He used his public profile (not his personal one, but the FB page). I got blocked 20 minutes after making the comment for harassment . Their policy explicitly says that public figures should accept more than ordinary people. And this is what the law says as well. At the same time I keep reporting people making homophobic, racist comments or simply just being flat out rude, using obscene remarks (addressing me or others) and they almost always get rejected after 3 days.

But since transparency is non-existent, no one really knows what's acceptable and what's not, what the consequences are (it seems that the penalties get longer and longer, doesn't matter how serious the violation is, but there might be an expiration, so maybe only the last year counts).

At the same time what I found to be working (which is the same I see here) is that instead of deleting, which is inefficient for a lot of reasons, you should issue warnings, explaining what is not OK with the comment. This seems inefficient at first, but it works because it adds transparency and helps everyone understand and internalize the rules. It also helps people to calm down because they'll see that if others misbehave they won't get away with it either.

But yes, algorithms don't work (yet), especially not in non-English languages. Underpaid, invisible, who-knows-whos might be cheap, but they don't cut it either.

Honestly, Elon Musk along with the team at OpenAI using things similar to what has already been accomplished with GPT-3, can make a real improvement in AI based moderation, at least in terms of being able to understand the differences in messages and their meanings. Everything from hate speech to terroristic threats to suicidal messages can at least be accurately measured and scored by AI to move up to a human moderation queue. AI based moderation in a transparent way would really help the current opaque, biased, politicized moderation that currently exists on twitter and most other large platforms.

There are multiple, ever-shifting layers of references and sarcasm and irony and slang and so on.

Check out some of the more notorious places online - r/pol, Kiwi Farms, etc. Even for humans that stuff is extremely dense and bordering on incomprehensible unless you have seriously spent some time diving into it.

Like any subcultures with their own slang/lore/jargon/etc many of the statements cannot be understood on their own, only when the fuller context is understood. On top of the complexity, the meaning of everything changes unbelievably quickly. The meaning of many statements is the opposite of their literal meaning, or somewhere in the middle.

I've never seen ML/AI experiments that really grasp humor or other such metatextual type stuff.

you mean go on twitter? ew, no

This is one of those things that sounds great in theory. But in reality, it likely functions much more like any other adjudication system. People can break rules an infinite number of ways, so there are an infinite number of reasons to ban an account. Understanding many of them will require context that may be problematic to share (for ex: if it happens in DMs). So in practice, the shorthand public reason for bans will pretty much always reduce to "violated site policies."

The day Parlor was deplatformed - by all of big tech in an obviously coordinated action - the flimsy pretext was they weren't doing enough to curb hateful speach. Yet on Twitter you had the president of Iran shouting more death to America and China congratulating itself for repressing minorities within its boarders. Yet twitter didn't get booted in the same way. The hypocrisy is beyond blatant.

And that's the real reason for the outrage that Musk might force Twitter to actually move back towards a neutral balance and cease being part of the coordinated propaganda machine - the other services shenanigans are going to stand out even more starkly in contrast. Twitter is big enough and casts enough of a shadow that there is going to be some significant contrast. So much so that those filthy casuals are going to start noticing something different. They might actually start paying attention to everything else going on in tech and the media. Real horror of horrors - they might start asking questions! Uh oh! And if you think all of what I wrote above is conspiracy theory BS - great! Then what does it matter if Musk owns Twitter or not? The gate swings both ways. If everyone else is normal and he starts to bend twitter to his will, that will stick out like a sore thumb in contrast. Nothing to worry about, eh?

Second: let’s say it’s true. How would we know whether it’s because 90% of problem content is generated from participants with one political leaning vs a policy designed to discriminate politically?

I understand your point about being unfair. But wouldn't this solution just lead to people simply leaving the platform because of the increased toxicity?

Which end of the political spectrum do you mean? I've often heard of them being criticized for leaning too far to the liberal-left but the examples you gave are a little confusing.

The Chinese government is authoritarian left-wing so that kind of aligns with the anti-right sentiment but it goes against liberalism.

Parler is conservative/authoritarian right-wing, so that holds up but the Iran example is also conservative/authoritarian right-wing which contradicts that?

The biggest bias I see for the English language with foreign languages being poorly moderated. It is a business after all, so they probably only invest as much in moderation as they need to to keep their advertisers.

Then I tried the fediverse, and it was worse, except that it was much weirder overall and posts mostly concerned extreme fringe topics and opinions.

I like good blogs and I'm fine with some Youtube channels, even though the signal to noise ratio is high. But microblogs seem like a complete waste of time to me. Can someone explain the appeal of these sites to me? What do people get from them? What interesting things do you read on Twitter?

I agree with you in that, it sucks for content consumption, outside of keeping up with things in a shallow way.

I don’t know if you could rise to higher levels of understanding by continually using twitter, in the way you could by reading a lot of books.

I'm on fosstodon.org and don't really see this, I get presented with mainly FOSS related opinions/news/tech and cat pictures, I'm very happy with it.

I can't stand twitter which appears to want to bombard me with politics, popular culture and garbage.

Signal to noise ratio is indeed very high, and sadly I see too much content I don't care about, which makes me abandon Twitter for weeks, but I think that it could be fixed.

There are 3 feeds - (1) home, your personal follows, (2) local, the people on your local instance and (3) federated, the people followed by anyone on your instance (+ stuff they boosted).

If you join a server somewhat aligned with your interests, you'll have a much better time.

At least Reddit is easier to tune - you can get a great feed by joining a dozen subreddits, instead of following hundreds of individual accounts on Twitter.

They've had this for years. Press the "swish" (stars) button top right.

edit: to everyone saying that this doesn't happen anymore, thanks for the clarification! i guess i stopped fighting the algorithm back when this wasn't the case.

Of course, the main way they measure ‘liking’ the site is via engagement, which may actually just measure compulsion to use, not enjoyment. And, of course, the however small, cohort of people who genuinely ‘like’ chronological order are ignored.

I think the issue is a little deeper: it's not that people want chronological vs. non-chronological timelines, it's that they want a way to get the "best", "most relevant" content to be surfaced from those timelines and presented in a sane way. Non-chronological timelines are better at producing the "best", content (for some relative definition of "best", at least), but by presenting it out-of-order, it requires more of the user.

Maybe to improve profitability you'd want to improve how much you can serve out of memory, but I think Twitter has more than enough compute to just generate your page for you when you visit. (I haven't seen a fail whale for over a decade!)

My understanding (from a watching a Twitter Tech talk, maybe about redis?) is that that is actually how it is (was) implemented. They were so focussed on time to first render, they took the efficiency hit.

But algorithmic feeds are endlessly unique and composing them is vastly more difficult than doing chronological order.

Suppose that your feed refreshes itself while you're trying to read a particular tweet. You go back looking for it--now badly ordered, irrelevant content is positively correlated with your amount of scrolling and time spent in-app.

So the app isn't just optimizing against your lazy attention, it's probably in some cases also rewarding itself for actively hindering you.

These software patterns are anti-human. Imagine using a hammer that is trying to maximize your engagement with the hammer itself. Well, I know I'll be more engaged with the hammer if the head keeps falling off, but that isn't what a hammer is for.

It usually takes me a few minutes to notice. I'll see a tweet that I recognize from a previous session, or from someone I don't follow, or something like that.

Perhaps I'm on the wrong end of Twitter's A/B testing.

Click the "Sparkle Button" to change the timeline sort algorithm. Right, totally obvious...

Holy crap, I can actually use Twitter again. Thanks.

b) The icon is exactly the same style as all of the other icons in the app. If you couldn't work out that the picture is clickable how did you know how to search or access messages. I'm actually confused how you use any mobile app given they mostly all have this style.

c) It is not a traditional sort ordering though. Using the curated mode brings in entirely new content into the feed that is not in chronological e.g. followed topics, recommended topics, greater emphasis on retweets.

I think in this case it might be that you clicked through a pretty hard to miss box.

It also appeared on multiple of my accounts that were made before the switch, so this hypothesis also seems wrong.

This happens so often with so many things.

Facebook: "I haven't used Facebook in 10 years, and never bothered to unfollow things on my feed back then, but it sucks! The feed is just garbage!"

SNL: "I haven't watched SNL since the 90s. It hasn't been funny in years!"

Expensive restaurants: "I went to one Michelin star place in 2007 and it was like 3 bites of food! I don't know why people bother!"

I do occasionally have the misfortune of using twitter - sometimes a link is posted or sent to me, or I am curious if something specific is trending. It sucks ass and is unenjoyable in my opinion - the worst when someone tries to use it as a full blown blogging platform. It seems designed to exploit certain triggers for compulsive content consumption.

There are numerous similar testimonials of people that still regularly use twitter if not compulsively, so the straw men are irrelevant.

Twitter users follow people and see their posts. Their feeds are mostly their followers posts.

You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.

Can you actually back this up with any evidence, because I don't buy it off hand. You're saying it's uncommon for a huge long tail of rare users and lurkers that just casually drop in to twitter to see some one off post/conversation from an aggregator or their friend sent them, or post/DM bitch to a company that fucked them? I have a twitter account, I have a handful of followers (all likely from more than 5 years ago), but I hardly use twitter enough to even care. And I don't think this is that rare.

> You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.

I don't follow your point. Most people use youtube by following links from aggregators such as reddit or here. They don't actively participate in the youtube "community" with its cesspool of comments nor even subscribe (what is it - like 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views) - that is hardly the "vast majority".

That's a strong assertion. You have any data to back it up?

> They don't actively participate in the youtube "community" with its cesspool of comments nor even subscribe (what is it - like 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views) - that is hardly the "vast majority".

I think you're right about the comments and even subscriptions, but you're entirely skipping the "algorithmic" way of using YouTube, which is using the suggested videos on the homepage like the person you were replying to alluded to, as well as the related videos. Also, searching.

YouTube can and will suggest new videos from channels it has decided you like on the homepage whether you're subscribed to them or not. It will also put them in the related videos, even if they're unrelated to the video you're currently watching.

Huh? This is blatantly false. Link aggregators are not as large as you think. People go on youtube.com and watch the videos there, or check out their subscriptions, or use the search bar in youtube.

And yet its influence on media I do consume is undeniable. I dont think there are many journalists not on twitter

Defaults matter! Most people will just see the default state of things and not be too curious about ways they could change things, and never even notice this sort of setting.

And on top of that, like Facebook did long ago with its chronlogical timeline setting, it resets itself back to the algorithmic timeline periodically.

The one thing that is mighty annoying though, is how it keeps pushing "recommendations" on you. The "someone liked", "someone follows someone", this kind of stuff. If only there was a dedicated button to make someone else's tweet appear in your followers' timelines... I somehow managed to break that misfeature by muting a bunch of "words" that are apparently contained somewhere in the recommendation objects because apparently the mute feature checks not only against the text of the tweet but against some kind of serialized form of it. So I no longer have these neither on the web nor in the Android app.

I would also add ability to privately mark people as "Friend", "Collegue", "Trusted" etc so that I can influence algos to show more stuff from people I care. Facebook has this feature to mark friend as "Favorite" and it has seriously improved my newsfeed. Unfortunately, they limit it to 30 and it's just nonsensical.

Also doesn't following 5k people make your timeline way too chaotic?

We should debate idea's not authors. Anonymous Speech enables idea's to be spread not personality cults, one would thing those opposing Elon believing that people just support him because of his personality and fame would want more Anonymous Speech not less

This only works if you guarantee that both sides are going to argue in good faith and, well, gestures at the world, that just isn't realistic right now?

But I'm starting to think even that doesn't really get to the heart of the issue. I think there's something about the network effects that leads to a dumbing down even if everyone thinks they are arguing in good faith. I feel like I've noticed a negative difference in discussion quality even over the past year. I can read a reddit headline now and feel more confident I can predict the content of the top two or three comments, the lazy popular thoughtless replies. And I've seen emergence of widely upvoted opinions that you know people adopt not because they've thought through it themselves, but because they've seen it two or three other places and thought it sounded good, irrespective of truth or accuracy. So I think we're seeing behavior that appears trollish even though it may not have come from actual trolls. Call it structural trollism, maybe.

> reddit is a crazed totalitarian system with Red Guards on the loose all around the communities looking for wrong opinions to report

..they immediately think to themselves "right, there's another loon", and move on. At worst they get annoyed at their once-mature community getting infested with loons, and they downvote it.

If you want to have an interesting conversation, I would start with not moaning about 'totalitarianism' because you got downvoted on a social media site. You can just say that you're frustrated that the site is moderated by people who don't share your political views. That's all.

Assuming people don’t use multiple accounts and don’t share accounts with others, the current state of Twitter and all major social networks is pseudonymity, not anonymity: you know that all tweets by @someone were written by the same person. Their "real" name doesn’t matter as long as they always use the same pseudonym.

Yes, there are scammers and bots and a e-commerce platform would need to evaluate identities for transactional purposes. But to discuss ideas? Please more anonymity.

If your ideas can't stand up to anonymous criticism I'd postulate your ideas are the problem, not the anonymous speech.

Facebook pushes “real names” because Zuck thought it was a good idea, and it makes them more money.

To be fair Facebook started with the "(re)connect with your college friends" premise, so it made sense for them to push real names. Not that they couldn't have changed it later, though.

Sure, they may log your IP and your ISP could connect the dots, but it still provides privacy.

Although this will probably get derailed now by GPT3-esque astroturfing/trolling.

Anonymous speech is like graffiti, pseudonymous is like Banksy.

How can you cancel anyone with a better idea than you have if you don't know who they are?

The difference before the Internet is that if I found your idea odious I could punch you in the nose you even if you were "anonymous". And, in return, you were not likely to be attacked by a mob unless you actively did something really horrible.

There are two big problems with social media:

1) I have no way to directly punish you when I find what you are saying sufficiently irritating. You are unlikely to say something really nasty to my face if I could slap you for it. I am unlikely to slap you if you can do so in return unless there is a really good reason. I don't have a good suggestion as to how to implement something which works for this.

2) You have no way to defend against a mob who finds what you are saying sufficiently irritating. In the US, we, nominally, run on presumption of innocence before we punish someone, and the defendant has the right to confront their accusers. Mobs are anathema to both of these. The solution for this is that social media should not be granted safe harbor. If you need moderators, you should also be liable for what is being said on your platform. If you want safe harbor, you should only schelp electrons.

That is false, you do understand that many seminal works like the Federalist Papers where penned anonymously with attribution only coming by way of historians looking at other known works, the entire purpose of Publius was to ensure people were debating the IDEA's not the people.

You seem to be operating under the false idea that before the internet the only communication was in person verbally.

>I have no way to directly punish you

that is not a problem and you should not be empowered to "punish" anyone for their speech, it is very sad you do not respect the concept of free expression but people like you are the exact reason Anonymous Speech is required. You reject the premise of "I may disagree with you but I will defend your right to say it"

Respecting speech you approve of is easy, respecting speech you find offensive is what requires protection. We have lost that in principle in modern times

>You are unlikely to say something really nasty to my face if I could slap you for it.

if you did, you would and should be jailed for battery. Physical violence is NEVER an acceptable response to speech. This modern "punch a nazi" narratives prevent in the authoritarian left is an affront to the principal of free expression

Sorry. This is completely wrong. The GOVERNMENT must respect speech that people find offensive. And I will defend to the death the right of free speech to not be oppressed by the government.

I, as an individual, do NOT have to respect your offensive speech. It is, in fact, my DUTY to oppose your offensive speech, and I'm tired of people forgetting this. And, yeah, some of those reponses will be "against the law". Lots of people have been arrested for sit ins, protests, chaining themselves to fences, violent labor strikes, etc.

> if you did, you would and should be jailed for battery. Physical violence is NEVER an acceptable response to speech.

Sorry, my experience says you are wrong.

Racial slurs, for example, tamp down real fast after the first time someone gets a punch in the nose for slinging one. Been there. Seen that.

Might you be going to jail for battery? Maybe. But that's the risk you take. Might you take real damage getting your ass kicked? Maybe. That's the risk on the other side.

Far too many people are willing to say and do odious things simply because they never get any actual punishment for them. See: the disbelief of all the Jan 6 mob. A couple of those people having gotten their asses kicked might have caused their brains to process that what they were doing was wrong before it escalated to people getting shot.

You actually do, if by respect you mean that you are obligated to not engage in violent activities against someone for speech.

If you are going around doing that, then hopefully, other people will engage in their fully legal rights to self defense against you for such actions, or use the legal use of government force against to, to segregate you from society.

You don't have to respect what I say. You have to respect my right to say it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

First sentence clearly states that to adhere to the principle, retaliation is not to be feared or people will not speak up. This threat of violence is prevalent in dictatorships all around the world.

But for any intellectual dialogue the adherence to freedom of speech is a minimal requirement.

There is a difference of principle and requirements de jure.

If you go up to someone and call them a slur, then you have committed verbal assault:

"the use of offensive language directed at a person, where such language is likely to provoke a reasonable person to physical violence."

Also, that has nothing to do with making that response with physical violence legal. You can still only use violence when you are defending yourself against physical injury. Sure, provocation might be mitigating, or get you to a lower level of assault or murder (as the case may be), but it’s not a full defense.

No it can't.

There is a large group of people that is more interested in other people instead of ideas and to evaluate anything they need to check their trust in the person uttering it. I think they simply need different platforms.

Otherwise I 100% agree, there are good behaving anonymous platforms but I don't know if Twitter ever can become one. I would never register with my real name though.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40511058/most-twitter-execs-didn...

So Milo was hassling one of the actresses from ghostbusters. Her important notifications were full of insults. She complained to her talent agency.

Her talent agency reps a lot of celebrities. Their complaint was that they need blue check notifications to be civil because the talent has to look for questions from reporters and other celebrities.

Pulling Milos blue check was the easiest way for Twitter to fix the problem.

Well, then, here's the first half-truth. Milo may have roasted a celebrity who just made a bomb of a movie, but the complaints were largely about people responding to Milo who would also "@" the celebrity. So there really wasn't an issue that it was hard for this actor's staff to sort out questions from reporters, etc. She could have also simply blocked Milo. Problem gone!

The agency reps a lot of celebs who don't want to see insults in their blue check notifications.

Twitter wants those celebs to be active on Twitter and doesn't need Milo.

Keeping things as human only as possible means that you can't scale-up apparent vocality of opinion via automation.

Funny, I've also noticed this strategy is very common in the cryptocurrency space, especially in Telegram groups. Signal-to-noise is abysmal.

Twitter could verify that you're a human in order to let you use the platform, but they don't, they instead verify your identity. Google does the same thing, and Facebook, too. They want a phone number tied to real accounts with cell providers or photo IDs.

It's not just about bot prevention, it's about monetizing their user base.

At one point Facebook wanted my driver's license to use the platform after a while, so I just stopped using it.

There are some approaches that suggest something similar as you say, not for every post but an occasional proof that you're human, like once a month. Check out IDENA.

Of course, in practice they're just as vicious to each other under their real names.

I don't think the profit motivations on Twitter will be similar enough.

vs.

An application process, with identification verification. While optional, would allow any one who cares about their feed to completely turn off anyone who could be a scammer or bot. I don't remember that option in Facebook. I would definitely have it turned on.

Not sure how these are even remotely comparable.

twitter has 213 million active users. imagine if 20% of them want to get verified. it would take decades

> Coinbase has more than 89 million registered and verified users

https://earthweb.com/coinbase-statistics/#:~:text=4.1)%20Rel....

Authenticate the security features on the ID? There's a company for that.

Match the name / DOB on the ID against public record? Yep.

Check the ID against a list of known fakes? Ezpz.

Verify the format of the barcode on the back of an ID? There's another company that offers that.

You get the jist.

- More visibility to smaller tweeters. My feed is full of boring/dumb comments from "big tweeters" that get thousands of likes because of their large number of followers. Smart tweets from upstarts often get little to no viewings.

If it’s done YouTube style (thumbs down button) it just counts as engagement and promotes the post but without any visibility as to why.

> More visibility to smaller tweeters. My feed is full of boring/dumb comments from "big tweeters" that get thousands of likes because of their large number of followers. Smart tweets from upstarts often get little to no viewings.

Switch to the "regular" feed that shows only content from people you follow. That won’t help you discover small accounts but at least you won’t get the boring accounts.

I wouldn't have downvotes on tweets, only on comments. Yes, people would sometimes downvote things they just disagree with, but I'd rather have more containerization than endless flame wars.

If you want quality debate, find a tweeter whose followers want the same thing. Or have you debate off Twitter.

> Switch to the "regular" feed that shows only content from people you follow.

My main gripe is that I want more people to discover _me_ :-D But in general platforms like Tiktok make it much more inviting for new people to contribute. Being a low-follower-count tweeter is not fun.

2) I think this one is just a reflection of how you use Twitter. Besides people in my niche community, most of my timeline is random viral tweets from accounts with <100k followers.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90697826/the-top-25-most-active-...

They also let you block advertisers for some reason.

The last time the Twitter iOS app tried to force me into the algorithmic feed it was the straw that broke the camels back and I switched.

Also searching users with curl and the api works great too.

• make it so you don't have log in to view a single tweet

• de-monopolize the apis

id rather have a choice among several recommendation systems. chronological timeline is the simplest and the worst

would find it very informative about a tweeter

I'm not sure how that confers much useful information about a user.

Ideally the blocked list would be viewable.

I think it's important if you believe Twitter is 'the town square', people should be able to see who and who isn't allowed to enter that town square to respond.

This is a strange kind of town square.

First of all, it has to protect wealthy elites, emperors, and so on, in a society with appalling wealth inequality. All people who would be unable to enter a town square without elite soldiers / praetorian guard / varangian guard to protect them.

Secondly, this town square is not a public space, it's the wholly owned private property of a collection of ultra-wealthy people and institutions (or a single wealthy individual, who may as well be Caligula at this point).

Finally, the town square already isn't a great model: there were town squares during the reign of Caligula, the entire institution of serfdom, during slavery in the American colonies, during Jim Crow. What was discussed there? Whose "free speech" was protected there?

There are a lot of reasons a person may choose to block another account, from harassment to simply curating a better experience for themselves.

> people should be able to see who and who isn't allowed to enter that town square to respond.

Do you use Twitter? This isn't how Twitter works at all. The fact that a person blocks you doesn't prevent you from entering the "Town Square" in any way.

There are notable actors/actresses who've blocked me because of this. It just immediately makes me dislike anything they are in because I just can't think of them as a person worth respecting.

When Mark Anderson blocked Jack Dorsey was it because of harassment?

To me, something like that is a valuable piece of info. I wouldn't have known had Jack not pointed it out.

Why? We used to be able to import block lists, so I have 59,990 or whatever accounts blocked that spam.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

Trump 2024, here we go.

Wouldn't Trump tweets drive a bunch of traffic and therefore ad revenue to the platform? Seems like an obvious move just from a business sense.

They can have at it.

Freedom of speech also means freedom to leave.

It does but you could also not look at his tweets. Shouldn't other people on the platform be able to decide whether they wish to see (or not see) the tweets they wish to?

But I will not contribute 1 cent/penny/vote in advertising revenue towards a platform that hosts that horsesh!t.

I'm going to try my best to find a more matured and curated (and long lived) kind of horsesh!t that's closer to actual truths than the fresh and regular horsesh!t on twitter.

We should probably stop now. Good luck.

Twitter does put a lot of stuff from people one doesn’t follow in their feed though. I imagine the problem would be a lot less severe if they didn’t push for this kind of “engagement.”

it's also about public good and legitimate intention to stop attacks on the foundations of our republic and stop the spread of dangerous (imho should. be libelous under law to combat) lies.

complicated and can become paternalistic, deciding what is best for someone. but we do that (or used to, vaccines and mask pushback) all the time on other dangers.

You are able to block the account and then you wouldn't see retweets. If they screenshot something then you could shrug and get on with your day in the knowledge that you'd stopped most of the stuff, or block your friend. I'd give users more tools, like the one Twitter itself has, to rate accounts and shape the kind of tweets one can see.

> it's also about public good and legitimate intention to stop attacks on the foundations of our republic and stop the spread of dangerous (imho should. be libelous under law to combat) lies.

If stopping lies comes at the cost of undermining free speech for everyone, then it would be the thing undermining the republic, far more than a known liar lying.

I rely on Mill for my views on bad men speaking bad things:

> It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practise. This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness; and flatters itself by that means to escape the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions. But those who thus satisfy themselves, do not perceive that the assumption of infallibility is merely shifted from one point to another. The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion: as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as much, as the opinion itself. There is the same need of an infallible judge of opinions to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to be false, unless the opinion condemned has full opportunity of defending itself. And it will not do to say that the heretic may be allowed to maintain the utility or harmlessness of his opinion, though forbidden to maintain its truth. The truth of an opinion is part of its utility. If we would know whether or not it is desirable that a proposition should be believed, is it possible to exclude the consideration of whether or not it is true?

Trump & members of Congress's actions are not "opinion: disputable, open to discussion." Clear facts that actually happened.

The election was free and fair. Fact.

There was minuscule fraud which did not affect outcomes, even on the smallest level. Plus a decent chunk of the worst offenders were Republicans including the COS who actively engaged in this sedition. Fact.

Congress was violently attacked. Fact.

Trump & sworn Government Representatives tried to overturn the election, subvert democracy, and overthrow the Government. Fact.

That can not be supported and is a clear exception to free speech that is grossly & intentionally harmful.

Hence, those facts, as you assert, are moot. Additionally, as Mill wrote:

> Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Hence, the veracity of those facts is irrelevant.

> That can not be supported and is a clear exception to free speech that is grossly & intentionally harmful.

Here we find a limit - should speech that is knowingly wrong and malicious be allowed? We're back to infallibility. Are you going to prove to me that Trump committed mens rea, or do you think he'd be able to claim he really believes the election was stolen from him? You don't have the ability to read minds.

His actions are clear, direct, immediate threat and dangerous. Speech his says to support that should not be accepted.

Did you skip over the bit where Mill mentions infallibility?

> His actions are clear, direct, immediate threat and dangerous.

Not according to US law.

> Speech his says to support that should not be accepted.

As Chomsky would say, even Stalin and Goebbels were in favour of freedom of speech for speech they agreed with.

To the below comment, I do believe courts have interpreted and created law which applies to Trump's words and actions, specifically on reasonable restrictions to speech which incites, creates, has immediate danger.

Trump's actions and words fit that and he is culpable for the actions resulting from his words.

On the actual law surrounding the consequences of his speech and attempts to subvert our Government and Democracy

Fourteenth Amendment Section 3 No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Law specific says incites https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/par...

> But we should stop people from saying things we know are lies.

Paraphrasing the last bit.

The legal system is already adequate to deal with libel. If someone libels you then you can sue in civil court.

He can run for office. He can win office. But just no more chicken stuff please. It really upsets the community. It’s your chicken store and you can ban anyone you like, especially the weird chicken trash can guy.

That would seem a more accurate depiction. Regardless, Trump has not been stuffing chickens into bins, you're comparing speech to actions other than speech in order to justify that speech being curtailed because you don't like it. Are you okay with the Saudi royal family controlling Twitter too?

Did I write that? I find it endlessly fascinating when people think in black and white and come back with some kind of false dilemma because I was able to make an entirely legitimate and obvious criticism.

I've a better question: is there anyone worse to own Twitter than the Saudi royal family?

I think so but there aren't many.

That wasn't the claim, if it was one. This is what I wrote:

> A Saudi prince and his family control access to the square, along with a group of incredibly rich investors. Criticism of them is strictly controlled.

We know that certain critical speech is suppressed on the platform, part of the problem is we don't know how much (hence Musk's wish to increase transparency). That does not, however, mean that all criticism is stopped at source. Do you reject, for example, the existence of shadow bans? If not, do you think they are only used against trolls?

As to citations… I'm not giving a viva. If you want me to clarify things I write, you can ask in a normal way.

What makes you think that his ownership will increase transparency. He has sued whistleblowers, he has sued and insulted and bullied people he disagrees with, he employs gilded-age tactics against workers who want to unionise... Words are cheap (especially when you're virtue signalling about things which don't impact your bottom line), but actions speak louder.

Those aren't related to transparency.

> He has sued whistleblowers,

The logic is that Tesla/Musk are suing whistleblowers to silence them because of embarrassing information. Why would Twitter's algorithms be embarrassing to Musk? Or its moderation policies?

> Words are cheap (especially when you're virtue signalling about things which don't impact your bottom line), but actions speak louder.

Exactly, all the more reason to treat words as a special case and not restrict them.

Long live HN.

I think it's more than this. Trump's tweets have had significant real world consequences. Questioning the integrity of the US elections based on no real evidence eventually led to an insurrection at the US Capitol. When someone's speech is actively dangerous, it makes sense to block it, akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.

I can see a thousand ways that could be misused in the aid of authoritarianism. Try speaking it in a German accent, perhaps with "vhere iz your mister Churchill?", and I'm sure you'll see the problem.

> akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater

That was the example given by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr for the clear and present danger test[1] in Schenk vs United States[2]:

> The ruling established that Congress has more latitude in limiting speech in times of war than in peacetime and set out the clear and present danger test, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. indicated that the most stringent interpretations of the First Amendment would not protect a person who causes public panic by shouting “Fire!” in a theater when no fire exists.

I don't see how that test would apply to Trump, even in wartime.

[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/898/clear-and-prese...

[2] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/193/schenck-v-unite...

There is no reason to believe that he's changed.

But Trump broke the rules multiple times and then was trying to get around his first ban. Treating Trump differently would be giving him his account back, I don't see any reason that if you try to get around your ban you should get your account back.

Because there's a better than even odds chance he'll be the next POTUS and if you're a billionaire with a reputation (deserved or no) for sketchiness, why antagonise the party that explicitly supports sketchy billionaires?

"Fourteenth Amendment

Section 3 No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/sectio...

The supreme court, which is 6-3 conservative would not let Trump be disqualified like you are suggesting.

"I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."

which could imply that those banned for non-criminal speech would be reinstated.

specifically Trump's access to the platform is de facto supporting or implicitly allowing Trump's right to lie, attack our Republic, spread violence. (if don't agree crosses into violent words, at least should agree definition something like: suggestively, dog whistle, saying it without saying)

I don't believe anyone can make a good faith argument that his rhetoric did not incite violence. During the campaign, during BLM protests, and most important Jan 6

He was not convicted. That's the same as being tried and found not guilty in a court of law.

A republic isnt' based on "good faith arguments". There are 80 million people who will disagree with your "good faith argument".

This is why courts exist. A political impeachment is not an impartial legal system. What are you even talking about?

Your position of deciding for the public what the truth is is the biggest threat to the republic - not a single orange man.

But not convicted! Something you Trump obsessed seem to always leave out. So yeah, means nothing more than Clinton's impeachment.

BLM? The summer of love? Surely you jest!

And January 6 - sure you want to keep beating that drum? There is far more documented evidence of people on the FBI payroll inciting violence in the days leading up to January 6th than anyone in the Trump campaign, let alone of his followers. Indeed there is plenty of video of such wackos as Alex Jones and other right wing extremists telling people NOT to enter the capital. More video of capital police standing by or ushering people inside. I was watching it live on various live streams on January 6th because it smelled too good to be true. People being ushered inside by the capital police - that's one hell of an "insurrection". People walking between velvet ropes, not lighting shit on fire, spraying things with paint, knocking statues down. People walking inside of a public building and taking selfies. ZOMG! How will the republic survive?!?

How many convictions have they gotten - after more than a year - of these "insurrectionists"? Zero. A few plea deals that are now unraveling. But sure, keep bang that "insurrectionist" drum.

seriously? Where is this documented evidence that more FBI employees were violent leading up to Jan 6. More than hundreds and hundreds storming the Capitol?

You haven't seen the huge amount of footage of battering police, pepper spraying police, throwing spears at police, brutally beating a cop on the ground who now has long term head trauma, the death of police, ransacking, throwing over, messing with proprty.

crazy. flag.

The future causes me intense anxiety especially 2024 ;(

though i do work in politics so perhaps I think about it too much.

I have no idea how we can continue when such a large % of the country believes increasingly insane things

Nah, they all determined he did it. Republican Senators like Lamar Alexander were all quoted saying that both times, they just went on to say they didn't care or they think he learned his lessons.

> How many convictions have they gotten - after more than a year - of these "insurrectionists"? Zero. A few plea deals that are now unraveling. But sure, keep bang that "insurrectionist" drum.

Over 150 by my count. The Oath Keeper who was Roger Stone's bodyguard that day pled guilty to actual sedition!

It hasn't rolled up to Alex Jones and further up but it will, since he was intentionally leading people around to the east side for an attack on Pence by claiming Trump would "give a second speech" there.

https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1503855795951312898

If you wanted to actually follow this, which is kind of a waste of time but might be educational(?):

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/04/04/the-evidence-needed-fo...

> Trump's right to lie, attack our Republic, spread violence.

I'd be happy with a right to lie, because it implicitly protects the rights of all others to speak truth.

Would "attack our Republic" include via speech? Then I support a right to "attack" a republic, any republic.

How does one "spread violence" that one is not engaged in?

Intent can not be separated either.

What do you mean you support the right to attack a republic? You want to attack our government?

We have a means to make change in our country/government. It's called Democracy, activism, and yes through protected (non violence causing) speech.

Directly trying to literally overthrow a free and fair election & government by the chief executive and Members who are sworn to uphold the law and constitution is explicitly sedition and their 'speech' that caused and incited this should not be and is not protected. Trump's lies directly caused this and his actions were (and still are) a threat to the very foundation of law that protects our speech.

He WAS involved in violence and is 100% responsible for instigating it on multiple occasions. He directed his supporters to act multiple times during first election on through most important Jan 6 obviously.

Congress was attacked. People with guns and weapons broke into the Capital. I do NOT support the rick to literally attack our Republic/country it's crazy that people support this. There was permanent injury and death to multiple people. It was violence. Many explicitly intended to kill members of Congress.

Attack has a broad meaning and use, perhaps my hint as to the sense I was using was strong enough. I've seen it defined as violence and as words. I support words, not violence, if someone wishes to criticise any government then I would support their right to do that, even though that government's supporters would frame it as an attack.

> He WAS involved in violence

I didn't realise that. Did he use his bare hands or a weapon? How many people did attack? (not the words sense)

This is just like saying that Putin is not involved in war in Ukraine. He obviously is, and we have a name for this kind of involvement and it is called a "war criminal”. He didn't have to pull any gun triggers.

Additionally, the claim is that Trump enacted violence. Putin has not enacted violence, he's ordered it. Of course Putin is involved, and he's legally involved, and even though he's not enacting violence he is on the hook for that violence (or should be). I don't know anyone who wants free speech, even proper absolutists, who would make this case (that ordering military action is covered by free speech). Do you know of one?

Now, please tell me which violence Trump was either actually involved in by actually committing violence or by ordering violence, and by "ordering" I mean making an official, legally backed order in the course of his duties as president and commander in chief, because I'd really like to know or even better, knock these silly claims on the head.

I won't hold my breath waiting.

Citation needed - and be specific with how he, personally, was "involved in violence".

Beyond his words, there are huge amounts of convicts who told the police they acted bc Trump's words or even used Trump's words as an argument in court to attempt to show they weren't directly responsible/as culpable. Trump might not punch protestors in the face himself, but his words cause acts of violence.

--

Also given the topic twitter lays out specific examples on their platform.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

--

The clearing of lafayette square Trump said 'bust some heads' and reports of some blatant attempts to order the military to intervene inappropriately the entire summer.

Trump saying "Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. There won’t be so much of them because the courts agree with us,"

“when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

“I’d like to punch him in the face.” to a protester.

A funny gem: Wanted spikes on his wall that would 'pierce flesh' 'shoot migrants' build an 'alligator moat'.

Like, you can't make that up in a movie it would be too outlandish. Dr evil type contraption that can be easily overcome lol

BLM "“That will never happen with me. I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will. But that was a disgrace. … I felt badly for him, but it showed that he’s weak.”"

Thugs pissing on and beating homeless people: “I think that would be a shame. I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that,”

infamous "very fine people" (charlottesville)

Lots of reports of his wanting to use the military during the summer with clear tone and political intent. some reports of nebulous rants about doing the same after he lost to try and hold onto power.

"we’d like to get them out a lot faster, and when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?"

Gianforte body slam: “Any guy who can do a body-slam ... he’s my guy.” (wish we would have won that race Kathleen is great candidate...)

Lots of campaign rally examples.

“See, the first group, I was nice. ‘Oh, take your time.’ The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I’ll say get the hell out of here!”

“You see, in the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. A lot quicker. In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast — but today, everybody’s politically correct,”

Another video of Trump saying “Get him the hell out of here! Get him out of here! Throw him out!” to a BLM protestor while a member of the crowd physically beats protester

Edit: This is not about whether de-/replatforming is the right thing to do. Only about the fact that Musk can have (legitimate or illegitimate) reasons other than his political support of Trump.

Anything that is afforded to the public (for whatever price) is a public square, any ban or deprivation from it amounts to censorship and exclusion. This is unremarkable on the micro scale (e.g. a golf club or a coffeshop) because alternatives are plenty and easy to find, but when a huge corporation with effectively monopolistic control of a huge slice of some market does it it's worrying. And it should worry you even if you happen to like the effects of one particular incident, because the same machinery that allows such incidents to happen is bound to impact you someday.

I agree but the analogy is still a bad fit. A better one would be a phone company back in the days of of AT&T's monopoly. If they kicked you off of their service then you'd lose access, in practical terms, to all those people. This was considered enough of a problem in the past that you weren't allowed to lose your phone service for the content of your speech, on or off of the phone.

I think the analogy extends quite well when we consider the lengths other concerns have gone to in crushing competition, the Parler debacle being the most obvious.

The part of the analogy that holds, in my opinion, is the part where a monopoly concern can kick people off for the content of their speech. It wasn't right with telephone and it doesn't seem right with this but they are being treated differently. I'd say that's because speech is powerful so the logic goes that it must be curtailed, if you're against certain views.

I'm someone who's confident that truth will win the day given a fair hearing, hence, I want freedom of speech.

When you share something on Twitter, there is literally a script (executed by Twitter) that shares that same thing with all your followers. That's essentially the primary mechanism of Twitter, and I would argue that it's fundamentally very different than you choosing to call everyone to know to tell them something (at least for people with more than, say, Dunbar's number of followers). Because of the fact that it's automated, essentially instant, and essentially unbounded in its reach, it is mechanically much more similar to robocalling than to calling your friends to tell them something.

> I would argue that it's fundamentally very different than you choosing to call everyone to know

Okay, one is a broadcast to subscribers and the other is single calls to subscribers. The end result is the same, again, the difference is in implementation and convenience.

I think this is a 19th/20th century idea that generally held because of, and not in spite of, the natural barriers to mass communication. Those barriers were the "fair hearing" (an author needed to spend weeks/months/years on their work. They probably spent several years before that studying their topic, or journalism, or whatever. It needed to pass through editors, maybe peer review, etc. It had to compete with others working just as hard, etc.)

For the first time in human history it is easier to broadcast disinformation, lies, and propaganda than it is to broadcast accurate information. This form of truly unrestricted access to mass communications has nearly put a stake in the heart of western democracy in less than 20 years. I am not at all confident truth will win the day.

> I think this is a 19th/20th century idea that generally held because of, and not in spite of, the natural barriers to mass communication

I've heard this take a lot and I'm not sure I agree. The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg offered the same relative change in communication reach. Previously, only wealthy entities (nobles, ecclesiastical authorities, etc) could have the money to create actual written books to disseminate ideas. Literate non-wealthy people could only hope to make a sign and hope for the best. The monopoly on distributing ideas lay with the wealthy and the state.

> For the first time in human history it is easier to broadcast disinformation, lies, and propaganda than it is to broadcast accurate information.

The printing press led to centuries of chaos in the form of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther used the printing press to print several copies of his "99 Theses" and plastered them on the walls of churches, widely disseminating his ideas. Now, after a renaissance, an enlightenment, and an Industrial Revolution in the West, we have built the cultural norms in place to deal with the negatives of Print. We have social norms separating tabloids from newspapers. We understand that different newspapers have different biases.

Governments have tried to restrict what can and cannot be printed. Many Enlightenment-era empires (Empire of Russia, Austro-Hungarian empire, etc) restricted what can be printed by whom. The Soviets famously only allowed government-approved publications until Glasnost under Gorbachev. In the end, despite the dangers we've found in unfettered public speech, the benefits have proved more salient.

I think it's a lack of norms. A lot of folks don't know how to treat the Web. They see a hot-take/dunk on Twitter and because they agree with the aesthetics of a person's post and some of their other content, they think of the poster as "correct" and retweet/share their content. That's how online tribes form. I'm confident that in a few generations, we'll all "know" much better how to navigate the online world. Until then, much like the aftermath of the printing press, there will be instability.

Completely unmoderated free speech is beneficial to them because regular people that can't even tell what's real or fake aren't ever going to organize to the point where the privileged positions of the elite are challenged.

Trump starting Truth Social and Musk buying Twitter are literally the same thing to me. They're both tying to prevent any kind of unison or popular movements that could de-throne them from their positions as the ruling elite. They both also want to ensure their status as the loudest voice in the room can't be taken away because they use that to convince the average person they "deserve" to rule the world.

So what you're saying is that whatever you or your party claims "threatens democracy" -- justified with some vague and arbitrary standards you just invented and that you judge -- is what threatens democracy. And anything anybody else thinks is wrong.

And by the way questioning election integrity and voicing concerns about that is not "threatening democracy" so that's just not some fundamental truth you've stumbled upon there either, other people can disagree about that. If your democracy is threatened by people voicing their concern about election procedures and results and must silence them to function, then it's not really much of a democracy.

What about people concerned about voter suppression or gerrymandering or whatever? Do we need to silence them too? I'm sure you're going to come up with some other vague handwaving as to why those don't meet your criteria for silencing your political opponents.

So now you see why pro-free-speech people don't like these kind of restrictions, because they can and are abused.

The asymmetry of the disinformation war markedly benefits the fascists. There is no need to bow down to them "because free speech."

That's a deeply depressing take.

He may not be a supporter, but certainly has similar methods. Using mobs of useful idiots to flaunt the law is a bad thing.

No. I think they've been frequent, intense subjects of government scrutiny, including antitrust litigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/business/elon-musk-politi...

Musk overtly uses his companies to retaliate against people who criticize him; he's not at all radically free speech in the sense of believing the owner of a company should not fully utilize the company to promote views that serve their interests and suppress others.

I still would be surprised if we saw Musk abusing his powers to make user-generated things disappear from Twitter.

Except the description of Musk as pro-radical-free-speech and the benefits supposed to result therefrom rely entirely on the definition (otherwise problematic, sure) that free speech means exactly that, and specifically that private actors will not use their own freedom to materially retaliate against you for your unwelcome speech.

Sure, you can maybe defend Musk being for “free speech” in exactly the sense that people claiming that Musk being for it will change Twitter say isn't “free speech”, and is the problem with the current approach at Twitter. But that...defeats the argument for Musk being a beneficial change.

For some insane reason in the US left and liberal have become synonyms. Now, I am both, but I want the separation to be there so I can be both and distance myself from the illiberal left.

What I find really scary is that since left-wing has become to mean the same as liberal, a large part of the US population has come to define themselves as anti-liberal when I really hope that is not true.

The first line of wikipedia for liberalism is: "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, private property and a market economy."

I sincerely hope that is something we can come together and agree are important in the US. Even though it sounds like you and me have very different political views it also sounds like we agree that all of these are good. That means we have a wide array of items we agree on, but that are in danger at the moment. It seems to me there is a common platform most of us could agree to, but both parties have been to some degree hijacked by extremist so both of us to some extent are supporting illiberal candidates when we really don't agree with that.

Which is also not much of a home, since it generally is inhabited by non-serious people- but at this point at least I can morally live with a platform of you stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours. The other options have too many compromises right now.

Replacing FPTP with RCV would elect more centrists, but without proportional representation there'd still be two parties I think.

I think the problem is not that the parties are too strong, but that are too weak to strong interest groups.

But liberalism is primarily about freedom, about equality under the law, but not necessarily economic equality. Low taxes, little social security, wealthy industrialists owning everything is still compatible with equality under the law. So there are economically right-wing and left-wing interpretations of liberalism.

Similarly, people who are for or against economic equality can have liberal or authoritarian views on how to accomplish that.

People have this idea that there are only two possible points of view.

You're actually advocating for the "other investors", like the Saudi Prince. Imagine being a real, actual liberal and advocating for a government that behead women for "cheating" on their "husbands" – OVER – a billionaire building EVs.

And if you are into words over actions, watch his TED talk. I don't see any reason why he would bring Trump back on. His main talking points were the invisibility of Twitter's algorithm. When pressed on being a "free speech absolutist", he conceded several points where it doesn't make sense to be an absolutist.

Citation needed. They aren't great but that isn't a punishment in KSA

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/woman-stoned-death-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Ar...

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/5/beheadings-fl...

> The use of public beheading as the method of capital punishment and the number of executions have attracted strong international criticism.[65] Several executions, particularly of foreign workers, have sparked international outcries.

"that isn't a punishment in KSA" – well, it actually is. Beheading is beheading. You're splitting hairs at this point. You didn't say "isn't a punishment for cheating", you said "isn't a punishment in KSA" period.

There's that accuracy you wanted.

It's possible, of course, to hold different political views on different aspects of society.

Musk might believe that we need to take better care of our planet, and also hedge against the possibility that we destroy it and need to find a new home.

He can also believe that freedom of speech should be near-absolute, and that Trump (et al.) deserve to be allowed to be on Twitter.

He can also believe that high taxes, large government, and business regulation of any kind is bad.

None of these views are necessarily in conflict with each other, and many of them might be considered liberal, but they can still result in a dystopian future.

>Less of [thing you like most]

How does that work?

It's a really hard problem IMO.

I've heard folks ask for less wokeness, but I don't know what that would look like.

At least it would make his social media scam/grift less valuable. but big societal damage imho

I felt like I had to say it because the people complaining the loudest about "wokeness" have no clue what they're talking about. It's just a label they co-opted for some other behavior they don't like, and they need to get more specific about it because they're arguing using a totally different definition of "woke" than everyone else is using.

I think you'll find most people who complain about wokeness have no issue treating others with respect and behaving with decorum. "Woke" people do not have a monopoly on kindness and respect.

I'll give my definition of wokeness, which I think is shared by a lot of people who complain about it. "Wokeness", to me, is divisive self-righteous zealotry. It's a way for a lot of people who claim to stand for inclusion and kindness to ignore all nuance and paint themselves as morally superior while openly despising anyone who holds different beliefs.

Do you think that there was "nuance" in the racism of the 18th and 20th centuries?

By taking this stance, you only increase the political division, make these topics the cleaving issues and do a very large disservice to the people you claim to care about.

I don't think you understand. I'm gay.

When you hate on gay people and call people who disagree with your bigotry "woke" then it has everything to do with your "stance", not mine. And I'm not the one 'cleaving' people apart. You are.

I can understand that LGBT issues are important to someone who's gay. But the people who define "wokeness" as a pattern of hateful and exclusive behaviours are not entirely, or I believe even mostly, comprised of bigots who hate people based on their sexual orientation. If you bring up LGBT issues in a discussion about free speech, for example, and claim anyone who believes one thing about free speech is automatically prejudiced against gay people, you redefine the political landscape to put LGBT issues at the center of every political issue and therefore in opposition with half the people who care about those issues entirely unrelated to LGBT rights. That is very counter productive, and not just for you personally.

I know discrimination, I suffer through it daily, and I really wish people would actually discuss the many important, contentious modern issues that affect everybody without forcing people into trenches and putting them in opposition to my personal identity even though they are completely unrelated.

I think you need to follow your own advice! You and those like you don't have a monopoly on what this term means either. In fact I'd argue the people who created the term have the right to define it.

To your point, right leaning people can also be woke! I.e. concerned with inclusion, kindness and equity.

Perhaps it's time to retire the word. It's become some off the cuff, ad hominem insult by right wing leaning people rather than retaining any of the original meaning.

What I gather is that you actually have a problem with something specific that isn't related to "wokeness" but to the tribalism and "othering" that is going on among some left leaning people. This can be talked about specifically without abusing definitions or changing the meaning of words.

I'd go further and argue using woke the way it is used currently by right leaning people is a form of othering in and of itself.

As for following my own advice, I gave you two very explicit disclaimers that it is solely my own definition of the term, as I understand its use by a significant part of the population. It is not a claim of ownership, but it is a useful definition, widely in use, if you wish to discuss wokeness with people who disagree with you.

Language is fuzzy and evolves on its own, the place of the author V.S the users is a discussion that's been had here a million times about many other terms far removed from politics. The term has shifted precisely because the people who exhibit these exclusive and unkind behaviours call themselves woke, in that sense it is related to wokeness. Both definitions exist concurrently, neither of us can change that, but if you wish to discuss wokeness you'll have to accept that it does have a cohesive meaning, different from your own, to a lot of other people, and not just deny the existence of this meaning.

(On a side note I'm a leftist and so are many of my friends who have issues with "wokeness", as we understand it.)

So basically make people's Twitter experience even more of a bubble than it currently is?

Not even going to address the issue of the "real person" filter not actually filtering out the realness of the person, but rather if they can afford to dox themselves to Twitter.

What problem does that solve? Nobody on Twitter sees or engages with posts without a blue checkmark anyway. Twitter is the Hollywood of social media. You're either an influencer or you're a lurker. There is no middle ground.

There's a reason people talk about "Black Twitter" and "Gay Twitter" and "Poll Twitter", etc.

There are massive ad hoc communities with the product.

I hate to break this to you, but Twitter is Elon's soapbox for raging against the SEC and swinging markets his way. You're basically telling me McDonalds has the best ice cream around meanwhile McDonalds couldn't care less about the quality of their ice cream. That is a loss leader for them. They don't even consider it a product. It literally just keeps the place stocked with followers for the influencers.

Not Musk specifically.