4 ms·
I have no particular comment about Parler specifically, but in the general case: Suppose you're a single-person startup of an app called "Speak!". Speak! is pr
by newfeatureok 6y ago
I have no particular comment about Parler specifically, but in the general case:
Suppose you're a single-person startup of an app called "Speak!". Speak! is pretty niche, but one day, a group of the X-People are ostracized on all the popular forums: Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Because Speak! is the only remaining bastion for the X-People all of them flock to Speak!. Let's say the X-People say things that aren't exactly popular among those who are not X-People.
BigCo claims that Speak! is not properly moderated. You say that you're only a single person and a certain level of moderation cannot be expected given N number of employees.
If BigCo bans Speak! on the grounds that Speak! is not sufficiently moderated, would that mean that any small person operation who operates a surprisingly large userbase cannot operate?
I think there should be objective quantitative measures that any company can use that's applied evenly across companies. Should a company with 10,000 moderators be held to the same standard of moderation as an extremely popular forum with only a single moderator? You decide.
- spankalee 6y agoThis isn't "things that aren't exactly popular". This is organizing an insurrection against the government and advocating for violence against groups and individuals.
- newfeatureok 6y agoI understand, but that doesn't really have to do with the point I'm trying to make. Even if you use "organizing an insurrection against the government" as your baseline - is a single post on Facebook/Twitter enough to justify banning? Obviously not - the question is what metrics are acceptable given a certain level of capability by the forum/company. Only so much moderation is possible given a certain amount of moderators and company resources. Are these rules inherently biased against smaller companies?
- spankalee 6y agoWhat "single" post are you talking about? Parler had thousands of offending posts and users and refused to moderate at all after being told to to be in compliance with various ToS. It's no surprise that Amazon, Apple, Google, Twilio, etc., do not want to be associated with or support violent seditionists.
- shiburizu 6y agoWhatever metric you need to hit to be linked to a group of people who rioted in the capitol building of a superpower state I presume.
- xvector 6y agoAnd Twitter hosts leaders of terroristic regimes. It remains unbanned. What, exactly, is your point?
- city41 6y agoAs far as I understand, that is basically what happened to voat. Which (voluntarily) shut down about a month ago.
- fooey 6y agoParler got deplatformed more for a refusal to moderate than an inability to moderate. They explicitly chose to retain the content
- anigbrowl 6y agoIf you want to operate a social network (and can spin up to arbitrary user loads thanks to the magic of containers and cloud services), then you need to consider the possibility that your site might get jacked by a set of very difficult users. Unfair to smaller firms? Maybe, but the phrase 'don't bite off more than you can chew' comes to mind.