Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.
4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
This is simply not true, because Twitter algorithmically pushes content you did not subscribe to in order to drive engagement. You do not have control over what you see, and are subject to the controversial subject of the day regardless of who you follow.
Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.
The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that people new to the site will be scared off by all the diarrhea mixed with the slowly disappearing amount of actual content to the point where the people being awful are the only ones left. Eventually they'll entrench their bullshit until that becomes the character of the whole site. Normal people are repulsed by it at first glance and those left only descend deeper and deeper into their own mad echo chamber.
> Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead
I mean you still need some moderation to push the community the right direction but give people ability to downvote toxic shithole to oblivion and block users and a lot of it is already done. The biggest problem is probably brigading and spamming the space with low effort content but first one is rare and second one don't need that much moderation work compared to trying to moderate every comment.
> sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.
This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that.
I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace.
Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election.
I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
> Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.
...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
> If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
And Twitter. Similarly if you don't like the filtered environment of these communities there is 4chan/8kun/etc. So then this is a solved problem and all the hand-wringing around the moderation on these platforms is unnecessary?
I think most people that are happy about Elon taking over aren't free speech absolutists in the sense of the term you're using it.
Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.
There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
Maybe they aren't but they are very vague and hand-wavy about the "blatant censorship". Without specific examples of what is being "censored" it's incredibly difficult to have a good-faith discussion on this. I'm much more forgiving of a handful of on-the-line or even "decent" content being removed if it's the exception not the rule. Like it or not a ton of moderation is fully or nearly fully automated since there isn't a viable alternative (You can argue that these companies should be allowed to exist if they can't accomplish human review/moderation, I'm speaking to the current reality).
I'll also be the first to say that Twitter (and most) moderation isn't 100% evenly handled. Just look at world leaders/political figures and what they can say that others cannot, I fully agree this is not ok and should not be allowed. My issue is that it's to the point that I can't hear "blatant censorship" in connection with social media without hearing the dog whistle. Those people who are so up in arms about FB/Twitter/etc "censorship" seem to be absolutely silent about the Gab/Parlor/Truth Socials of the world.
Unless you live in a cave you cannot possibly be ignorant of the multiple accounts of Twitter censoring people’s discussions. Examples? A quick search on Fox News:
As much as I dislike fox news (and virtually all news orgs now) they're probably among the only people actually tracking things like this. I understand if you dislike their political message, but the links the other commenter provided are all good examples of specific instances of the censorship we're discussing. That the organization as a whole is incredibly biased doesn't alter the fact that the people in those stories were actually silenced.
The fact that you can't easily find any record of these events outside of Fox News is a part of the issue and "mass scale" censorship.
Fox news, and other right-wing outlets, are the only ones who will report truthful negative stories on media companies or politicians that are Democratic party aligned. The centrists closed ranks as a result of what they consider the twinned media failures of Corbyn and Trump. They simply agree as a group not to report on things that are potentially damaging to Democratic centrist candidates or agendas, because they feel that truthful reporting is what sank H. Clinton.
Any of them will explain to you how reporting the facts created a false sense of equivalence between Clinton and Trump for voters. Voters couldn't understand how Trump bragging to a frat boy reporter that he could just grab pussy, his using a nonprofit as a vehicle to dodge taxes on a painting, and his denial that McCain was the best hero were far worse than the 1994 Crime Bill, superpredators, Clinton Foundation associations with dictators, the Iraq War, Russian uranium, Haiti, and Honduras.
That’s a fair criticism. I was looking for examples for my comment and knew that would be a good source for them knowing they are mostly politically right leaning. I just went to cnn.com to get some examples from them to kinda even it out for you. I used the same search criteria “twitter censorship”. I didn’t find a good example in the first 14 pages of search results.
And if you want a more direct analogue if you assume that the problem with 4chan is the culture and not the moderation that the absolute worst most vile Mastadon servers are no moderation to the point where major servers had to just completely blacklist them. If you want to lose all faith in humanity peruse the Gab database dump.
No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
Yep, I used to be a free speech absolutist when I was younger, back when I thought the world was black and white and that simple ideas could "solve everything". Then I participated in forums/groups that had zero moderation and it was hell. Even then I didn't recognize the issues fully. It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. I tried to be unbiased as possible but that lead to me silencing people who stepped over the line who I agreed with and me giving people I didn't agree with a ton of leeway to avoid seeming biased, it nearly killed the community. Once I started trying to enforce right down the center I got to experience the backlash of the people who I had given leeway to (not the same people, same group of people). Death threats, attacks, etc. It was not fun. I didn't want to be seen as a "dictator" but that experience taught me that if you want to have a good environment for discussion/community you have to crack down hard on the people who keep pushing the line. Short-term bans resulted in lots of complaining with zero change in behavior for 99% of the offenders. Permanent bans were the only useful tool, even then they'd still sometimes come back under new accounts but eventually get bored.
People complain about reddit moderation but I totally get it in most cases. If you let people push the line they will just keep going until it gets really bad, much better to nip it in the bud. Especially when we are talking about unpaid moderators. Moderation is not an easy or fun job.
> It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked.
The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things.
I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
It does seem like the problem with twitter is it is one big open subreddit, but that's sort of the vision too. The solution may be to find ways to segment twitter more, but does that fly in the face of the public square goal.
> The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things.
Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.
In traditional fora/irc/whatever or even reddit to some extent (subreddit moderators follow the pattern, admins do not) the moderators are the founders of the community or are selected by then community via social processes. The structure resembles a village. Mastodon is the most clear example. Mostof the small servers are their own community with a common interest, usually funded by its members directly or by someone doing it to henefit the members. 'If you don't like it, leave' is a valid sentiment because the moderators are not holding your social network hostage and don't get to choose which other communities you can see or participate in.
In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world.
HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.
Add to that, dang also has the power to unhide, unflag, etc. when he notices brigading. Giving the reins entirely to the community totally works for a very small community. Not the whole internet.
> I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
It's entirely fine. The problem YT/Facebook have is user's lack of control on what gets recommended. Play the "wrong" video once or twice and you will be flooded by stuff you don't want.
The fact someone somewhere on the site says something you don't like is not a problem. The problem is that it's kinda easy to go "you follow Xpotato12" -> "X potato12 is outraged by Y and hates it" -> click to see what is happens -> now YT recommends you Y because you "engaged" with it. There should be a better system to deal with that.
> It's entirely fine. The problem YT/Facebook have is user's lack of control on what gets recommended. Play the "wrong" video once or twice and you will be flooded by stuff you don't want.
This is the same problem I was describing...
Users have no control over what they see, and open communities have little control over where the bar for who should be banned is or what other communities they are in contact with.
The point of free speech is to push the line. Imagine if people stuck with the speech standards of the 1950s. There would be plenty of people here who would be disenfranchised.
With the government? Yes. Within a community? It's more complicated than that. Is someone coming into a community posting the n-word or just being incredibly abrasive/offensive "pushing the line" or just being a troll? Online communities get to set their own rules and if you want to buck that trend then try to get support to change those rules or create your own community where you can make the rules.
Initially, I was confused by what you meant by the word "community". Now that I see that you mean online community in the sense of an online forum, then yes, pushing the line may necessitate someone's removal. After all an online community is in almost every case hosted on private property.
However, there is a problem that mostly is evaded or goes unexamined with many of these arguments: Does a community (in the general sense of the word) have the right to actively police/censor the content of an individual or group of people on the Internet in their own community (such as in the case of Kiwifarms)?
> Does a community (in the general sense of the word) have the right to actively police/censor the content of an individual or group of people on the Internet in their own community (such as in the case of Kiwifarms)?
Does Facebook or any other community have a right to take KiwiFarms off the net? Obviously not. Is Facebook, Cloudflare or any other company allowed to decide that they want nothing to do with content like KiwiFarms and refuse to do business with them? Absolutely.
The point of free speech is to be free. Pushing the line constantly is a tactic that some argue (or rationalize) is a way to maximize that freedom, but it's not the purpose, any more than the purpose of a right to bear arms is to get as many questionable shootings as possible.
Now that I think of it, you're right. I shouldn't have used the word "purpose". A proper reformulation of what I meant would be that free speech will, as a property of its existence, push the line against someone's expectations somewhere at some point in time and that denying free speech many decades ago would have inhibited several rights and expressions of rights we take for granted today.
If you don't eject the extremist elements from your community, your community will be represented by them to outside world.
I do wonder what would happen with social media that had only the up/downvote system as soft moderation but without actual moderators smacking people around
So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it.
In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").
The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor.
As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
I have no specific love for Twitter but a platform is "absolute shit" if you can't make all the jokes you want to make? I mean is HN absolute shit because they ban excessive language, personal attacks, or reddit-style humor? I'd argue it's successful because it has these rules in place.
I also have seen incredibly too much "It's just a joke bro" "defenses" for saying certain things that I have little sympathy for it. Learn the bounds of the platform/community you want to participate in and either stay within those bounds or find somewhere else to participate.
> I also have seen incredibly too much "It's just a joke bro" "defenses" for saying certain things that I have little sympathy for it.
People often seem to fail to understand that humor is inherently a complex system of shared values, consent, trust, and context. The personal jabs my gym bros and I make at each other would be near fighting words of said by a stranger. The sometimes off-color jokes made by my girlfriend and I to each other are understood to be parody, based on years of trust and context around who the other person is, while an outsider would have no way of distinguishing them from the real thing. A person going to a comedy show may well hear jokes they'd never tolerate in a work context. But a certain subset of the population seems to not understand this and think they can just shout out whatever terrible thing they want and everything it should be fine because it's a "joke".
Either that our they are just pretending not to understand to cover their own bad behavior.
I never said I demand that twitter allows anything and if not its shit.
I dont care if they ban jokes if they openly say so. Their platform their rules.
It's the completely arbitrary (or biased) interpretation and enforcement of rules that is the problem.
NH is not a place to make jokes (some still do it) but twitter was a place for jokes since day one. And like I said, even if the joke went over someones head the statement was factual correct and not inciting violence or anything like that.
"It was a joke" was not a defense but rather the reasoning why I would even make a so obviously factual statement.
Another difference is that the bans here are done by @dang and the rest of the mod team. They're not anonymous and they give ample warning in public, typically.
No offense, but I see this a lot from folks claiming they got banned but they never say exactly why and keep it as vague as possible while claiming innocence.
Did you read the post? I dont know why, they wont tell me.
Its just a generic "you violated our rules about offensive content/abuse/self-harm and suicide" or something like that.
Then a link to where you can get help if you have some kind of mental breakdown.
They actually twisted this as If I was suicidal so they can ban me for my own protection.
But I would bet a monthly salary some triggered long time twitter user with high reputation who just didn't understand the joke or does not have a compatible humor reported my tweet and the twitter admins just cater to these people and not to their own rules.
I read your post and it’s still vague as written so it’s not very convincing as an indictment against their policy. I’m not making a claim you are lying, it’s simply not enough to come to reach a conclusion it was all a big misunderstanding.
I'm sure you heard phrases like "Dead people don't lie" or "Dead people don't complain" These are so self-evident they pretty much can only be sarcastic.
Unfortunately (but probably intentional) they do not allow some way to publicly prove these cases of "bad moderation". Yet there is plenty evidence that they get it wrong all the time.
For example thebabylonbee is still banned.
can't wait to see the people advocating against fundamental freedoms to finally get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick.
Who is advocating against fundamental freedoms and how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick?
> how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick?
The companies they defended by going "it's private company, they can do what they want" (which I've seen a lot every time someone is criticizing what the big social media company is doing, especially on Reddit) will do what doesn't benefit the group that defends them.
Which companies were defended and for what? Those companies are going to seek retribution towards their defenders, why? I see a lot of Conservatives defending twitter right now, you think Musk is going to go after them?
Ah, but you see, my argument is that companies that big should be broken up or subject to government scrutiny, and if passing multiple threshold, nationalized (airports, railway, most infrastructure actually). And LLC shouldn't exist in its current form.
But i get shit from people pro-LLC (basically libs, neocons and fascists), so when one of those complain about a company banning them, i cannot resist saying "Companies do not have to respect the 1rst!" or something like this. Pure Shadenfreude, because i basically agree with the premise.
It's like anarcho-capitalists ("libertarians"). They have a good intuition about what freedom means, but either don't have to capacity, or the will to push the reasoning further, about what power is, what structured power looks like etc (i think it's the will, their subconscious know that if they reason further, it will cause some cognitive dissonance, so they don't).
By the way, if you're a conservative, you should read Baudrillard, in my opinion he is the only conservative who pushed the reflexion far enough (or rather, he is the only situationist who pushed his reflexion towards conservatism). And if you're leftwing (i mean, for european standards), you should too, to understand what conservatism can be if you help him think.
Somehow I don't feel bad about 4chan .. it's all just complete absurd mayhem but there's no agenda.. Whereas any twitter storm feels a lot heavier. Super strange.
ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
Right. It's going to fester with dark elements of the society and he's going to hire back all the content moderators he fired and then pen another open letter to advertisers.
There's a rich and beautiful irony in seeing a bunch of armchair libertarians gushing about the glories of unfettered speech on HN - a web forum that employs some of the most heavy-handed moderation in the biz.
Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...
There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.
