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I think we're looking at the issue in a completely wrong way. There's no objective definition of right or wrong in content moderation. Right and wrong is subje

I think we're looking at the issue in a completely wrong way. There's no objective definition of right or wrong in content moderation. Right and wrong is subjective, especially across cultures, and moderation should be subjective too. I believe end users should have the choice to adopt blocklists, Adblock style. Those lists could contain single posts, accounts, or even specific words. A lot of content (like flashing images or spoilers) does not merit deleting, but there are users with good reasons not to see it. They should be given such an option. There should be a few universal, built-in blocklists for obvious spam, phishing, child porn etc, but all the rest should be moderated subjectively. A Clubhouse-stule invite system (with unlimited invites) would also be a good idea. It would make it much harder for spammers, cammers and troll farms to make new social media accounts.

alex_g 6y ago
Clubhouse is not a great example of a platform that handles abuse properly. Putting the moderation burden on people is also not a solution, it's duct tape.
- simmanian 6y ago
  >Putting the moderation burden on people I don't think GP is saying we should put the moderation burden on people. When you accept that there is no objective definition of right or wrong, you begin to see that perhaps there are ways for people to self-organize on the internet according to their values rather than being shoved into the same box like we often do today. Many people are looking for ways to efficiently and effectively organize on the internet in a more sustainable manner.
  - alex_g 6y ago
    "Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered?
    - rocqua 6y ago
      > based on shared values and context. That's exactly the point GP was trying to make. That people should be able to organize in groups of shared values and context. Rather than there being a rather large rough mono-culture of moderation policies.
      - alex_g 6y ago
        They can organize by shared values and contexts. What moderation monoculture is preventing that?
        timeslip1523 6y ago
        Twitter's moderation team
    - Zak 6y ago
      You and the toplevel commenter may be talking about two different kinds of systems. You are describing "well managed communities". HN is arguably one of those. Many topic-specific forums, IRC channels, mailing lists, and communities on platformy things that seek to reinvent those are as well. They tend to be centered around a topic or purpose and have rules, guidelines, and social norms that facilitate that purpose. I think the toplevel comment is talking about global many-to-many networks where people connect based on both pre-existing social relationships and shared interests (often with strangers). Those require a different model, and centralized moderation based on a single set of rules is probably not the best one.
      - alex_g 6y ago
        I see the former just as a subset of the latter. ie Twitter is huge, but there are sub-communities that exist within it (some well managed, others not so much), and Twitter is building community features to that point. Twitter can certainly do a better job of moderating its sub-communities, taking into account shared values and context, but I still don't see how the solution is to have users deal with content moderation.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    And yet, HN operates on a (not "the") definition of right and wrong. Stepping outside the boundaries gets you a visit from the moderation fairy, and might end with you being ejected. That means the burden is not on "people" in the sense of individuals. You can expect a certain content and tone coming to HN because the moderators ensure that. Yes, they're people too, but not in the sense PP and GP used it. That was clearly an "each individual user should..." statement - and that's likely unsustainable for large user groups.
    - andrew_v4 6y ago
      Your HN example makes me think: if I'm talking to my spouse or close friends, we obviously don't have a moderation policy, we know each other well and share values well enough that any debates we may have are (almost always) focused on substance and not on conduct. In political discourse, and in debates on big platforms like Twitter, it's the opposite- most of the discussion is about people's or groups' conduct and substance takes a back seat. Because a heterogeneous group with different values is involved. So for social media and online forums, the question is, how big and diverse can the audience get while still supporting civil, substance focused discussion? HN does a pretty good job, and also has some obvious biases, scared cows, and weak spots. Online newspaper article comments probably have one of the lowest quality of discourse for a given participant size. What forum is best, I'm not sure, but its instructive to look at it this way, because it reflects politics generally, if we want to address real issues while maximizing participation.
      - groby_b 6y ago
        I have a sneaking suspicion that you can safely support tremendous community size if you don't have enragement-driven ordering of the feed. (I.e. strict chronological ordering only) We tend to pick our online friends according to mostly shared values, the same as real-life friends. Enragement ML then proceeds to amplify the differences instead of letting you experience that you're mostly similar, radicalizing both partners in the long term. A chronological order minimizes that experience simply by the probabilities - if most of your values overlap for everybody in the feed, the chances of you seeing a large chunk you do not want to see is small. You're occasionally reminded that you don't always agree, but it's in a context of lots of other posts that don't violate your values. (Part two of the problem are searchable feeds, where groups of people just wait to keyword-snipe)
  - watwut 6y ago
    One big party of issue is people deliberately going out of way to harass those they want to leave. And it is not new tactic, or was going on for years.
- seriousquestion 6y ago
  The rooms aren't created by Clubhouse, so it makes sense for the creator of the room to moderate it according to the goals of their particular room. It's not a burden because it's not an open forum like HN or Reddit, where anyone can talk. The moderators have to specifically choose who gets to speak and can simply drop them back to the audience if a problem.
  - alex_g 6y ago
    Yeah but if the goal of the room is to foment hatred and target harassment at an individual who isn't in the room, that's still abuse.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - andrew_v4 6y ago
      Does this apply to a phone call? To a zoom call with five people in it? Should trying to stop someone from doing something, even if abhorrent, in private, really be a priority? I can only see this ending badly. If there is a link to real world crimes, sure, intercepting a discussion is one method available to detect / deter / deny / disrupt, just like a wiretap. But (and maybe I misunderstand your comment) beginning with the idea that we should try and prevent conversations we find abhorrent from happening is, well, abhorrent.
      - alex_g 6y ago
        No, and that's not what I said. Clubhouse is not just private phone calls. It's a social network.
        meowkit 6y ago
        What is a social network? Fundamental its a graph structure of human relationships. Humans are the actors/nodes and edges are the interactions. Two people chatting fits this criteria. You can have a private chat on Clubhouse between two people.
croutonwagon 6y ago
I think there a fine line between these and curated lists (which most would use) that create echo chambers and comfirmation bias (which many platforms have). I like the methods this site uses over others quite frankly and that seems to be quite a bit of human moderation to get to it. But i think scale also has something to do with it. Reddit was much like this site in its earlier days.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  In its earlier days reddit was a bunch of bots talking to themselves. HN works because the official moderation is more of a nudge than a fist, the community enforces its own standards, and it's a relatively small niche.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more important. However much pg wrote about being curious or “intellectual honesty” or whatever, it was the change in moderation (to dang) that saw changes. But that sort of thing doesn’t fit all communities. For one thing this one is basically public (there’s no shared-private things like subgroups or DMs) and tends to have reasonably highly educated members. For another, the volume is low enough that dang can deal with it all with only some automated tools, giving a reasonably consistent approach to moderation. Also I think he is paid much more like a software engineer in Silicon Valley than a typical social media moderator. There are certainly some other more general things though, like the anti-flame mechanisms, the lack of more inflammatory media like pictures or videos, the lack of printed comment score and downvote limits, and the generally public moderation trail (though moderator may privately email users too).
    - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
      I agree, I meant that dang and sctb have a style that is more about nudging people into better behavior than about demanding compliance.
rocqua 6y ago
We used to have editors at newspapers who did this. They had an opinion, tried to be objective, but called out excesses. Sometimes this went wrong, see yellow journalism. One thing that is different now is that you no longer have a say in who edits your newsfeed. You can't very easily switch news-feed. I feel like the variation in opinions in modern-day editors is much smaller than the variation in opinions in society. Or maybe it isn't but the editing, being done more implicitly, is not convincing the wider populace that this is the way. That is, content moderators have much less authority (in the sense of respect) than old newspaper editors.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cutenewt 6y ago
  Newspapers, which you point out used to moderate for us, don't want to play the moderation game in the Internet era either. Many publications have ripped out their Disqus, Facebook commenting plug-ins that used to accompany their articles. Internet moderation is too expensive. They'd be happy having Reddit and Twitter (users) do the moderation for them.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    They also do not like being questioned. That factor is as significant as the cost is.
    - seppin 6y ago
      This is a stereotype of journalists I have not seen confirmed. Most journalists I know are happy to admit when they are wrong, if it means they are closer to the truth.
      - ddingus 6y ago
        I know a few myself. To the point of having real conversations. Those who are working for smaller shops, or who are freelancing are in a very different place than people working within or dependent on the big media machine. What beat you cover matters too. Some topics come with more permissive norms all around. Contrast social issues with economics and foreign policy. How much agency one has to both report in an investigative sense and be questioned varies widely. There is wrong, as in not adhering to the orthodoxy and or established narrative, and there is wrong in a factual sense. There are also taboos. How many stories have you seen written from the labor point of view, or that question the growing Washington Economic Consensus, or even recognize it, for example? How often do you see major league corrections? Where are they placed, why? If you are reading overseas, indie, freelance work, you have seen some, and often the work is clear, solid, easy to understand. Side note: Investigative work is particularly troublesome right now, and where it is unorthodox, is being actively suppressed to an increasing degree. And I want to be clear here! This is not saying people in journalism are bad somehow, nefarious. No, they are working in a highly consolidated media environment, or they are out in the cold working hard to do the job, despite considerable pressure. Secondly, the entities they work for really do not want those questions at all. This may well be the more significant force in play. Doing real journalism these days is hard work that does not pay well. While that has generally been true, consolidation, which just got permission to contract even further, has made all this more difficult. Access journalism is a real thing too. Ask the wrong question, despite it being one very large numbers of people want asked, and boom. Gone. No access. Gonna need a new gig and potentially have it covering a new beat. Often, we see steganography more than journalism because of these things. People pointing that out in comments gets conflated with people being idiots, trolls and asses and it all gets shut down. Finally, old media is more like broadcast than it is Reddit, or even Substack. In broadcast, nobody actually cares to ask what people want, nor is there any real two way dialog. It is broadcast, focus grouped, researched all to the nines, very little actually being done ad hoc, or even outside advertisers interests, which are often the media entity interest, which makes it the journalists interest, or conflict of interest depending on where they are at personally. There are facts and there are opinions as to what those facts mean. Journalists who enjoy sufficient agency see it like you say and have no problem with critics. Many do not have that agency, and the entities who employ them much prefer broadcast rules and norms where their authority comes from size and position not so much performance. And those people will do what they can, but will also admit it often isn't much.
avs733 6y ago
[obvious disclaimer of I am NOT advocating for child porn] Why would spam, phishing, child porn be the 'universal' ones? If you are making an argument that it should all be opt in...then it should all be opt in. Otherwise, this is the same drawing of a moral line that we all tend to do where we call ours obvious and others subjective. Maybe some people want the spam? Shouldn't the spammers have the ability to share it in case people want it? My point isn't to argue for those things...its to say if we just accept that content moderation is subjective...we can't then label some things as subjective and some things as not, the framework should just be - laws of the state/country/equivalent structure. Those provide mechanisms (theoretically but more soundly) for feedback that corporations do not and frankly should not on the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable content. C.f., Nazi imagery in most of Europe.
- jp_sc 6y ago
  I think real child porn should be 100% on that list. However, even what child porn "is" sometimes depends of the culture or even the political climate. Like with the Japanese "lolis" (erotic drawings of fictional minor-looking girls), illegal in some countries but fine in others (so far).
dredmorbius 6y ago
Where nobody is willing to stand in on the editorial side, the decision is being made, effectively, by the submitter pool with the largest content creation capacity, and its interaction with algorithmic and promoted content dissemination. That is, the decision is already being made, the only question is whether or not the results have strong truth valance. The ship has, in a word, sailed. If you create a vast, global, instant, high-fidelity, interactive content dissemination system with a strongly aspirational and appealing audience, then parasitic opportunists who seek only to serve their own rather than others' interests will flock to it. And have, in spades. And I've seen this game play out repeatedly: in print, on radio, television, Usenet, email, and since approximately 1997, on the Web and mobile Internet. There are parties already making truth determinations, and their doing a demonstrably horrible job at it from a common weal perspective. And that is the problem. "Just don't use Facebook" doesn't work for two principle reasons: 1. Facebook is increasingly central to, or required for, numerous real-world interactions. 2. Even if, as I do, you don't use the service, you live in the world it creates. Facebook has massive negative externalities. Like, oh, say, civil war and genocide in Myanmar, to mention only one aspect. (There are others closer to home for most readers here. I'm hoping HN won't lose its collective mind if I don't mention these.) Another element that factors in is that Big Lie propaganda is reliant on disseminating the Big Lie. Scale is directly the problem, and offering unrestricted access to, choose the amplification metaphor of your choice, the printing press, microphone, camera, TV/Radio station, etc., has risks. Especially for those who would see the tools themselves burned down along with all else. In which case, drastically curtailing the spread of any content from identified actors and their associated networks responsible for spreading obvious and notable disinformation ... is highly defensible. I'm well aware of numerous arguments, predicated on or observing exceptions to free speech, which typically follow such statements. I find both the free-speech absolutist and the private property / private actor restriction privilege arguments tired and uninspired. The reality is complex, and I don't have either simple solutions or any which are conformant simultaneously with "free speech" or "property rights" positions. Both, to my mind, exist in a nexus and network of overlapping interests and rights. I've suggested "information autonomy" as an alternative to "free speech", though the expansion of that notion quickly points out internal conflicts. Common weal might offer one path out.

alex_g 6y ago

Clubhouse is not a great example of a platform that handles abuse properly. Putting the moderation burden on people is also not a solution, it's duct tape.

simmanian 6y ago
>Putting the moderation burden on people I don't think GP is saying we should put the moderation burden on people. When you accept that there is no objective definition of right or wrong, you begin to see that perhaps there are ways for people to self-organize on the internet according to their values rather than being shoved into the same box like we often do today. Many people are looking for ways to efficiently and effectively organize on the internet in a more sustainable manner.
- alex_g 6y ago
  "Right or wrong" maybe not, but for well managed communities on the internet, there are objective definitions for appropriate and inappropriate, based on shared values and context. If you leave it up to each individual to decide what is appropriate or inappropriate, and provide them with the tools to block content they consider inappropriate, that's a burden on them, because you're not taking care of it at the community level. And if the community's strength comes from shared values, and you leave that up to each individual to decide, what's shared, and what sort of "community" is actually offered?
  - rocqua 6y ago
    > based on shared values and context. That's exactly the point GP was trying to make. That people should be able to organize in groups of shared values and context. Rather than there being a rather large rough mono-culture of moderation policies.
    - alex_g 6y ago
      They can organize by shared values and contexts. What moderation monoculture is preventing that?
      - timeslip1523 6y ago
        Twitter's moderation team
  - Zak 6y ago
    You and the toplevel commenter may be talking about two different kinds of systems. You are describing "well managed communities". HN is arguably one of those. Many topic-specific forums, IRC channels, mailing lists, and communities on platformy things that seek to reinvent those are as well. They tend to be centered around a topic or purpose and have rules, guidelines, and social norms that facilitate that purpose. I think the toplevel comment is talking about global many-to-many networks where people connect based on both pre-existing social relationships and shared interests (often with strangers). Those require a different model, and centralized moderation based on a single set of rules is probably not the best one.
    - alex_g 6y ago
      I see the former just as a subset of the latter. ie Twitter is huge, but there are sub-communities that exist within it (some well managed, others not so much), and Twitter is building community features to that point. Twitter can certainly do a better job of moderating its sub-communities, taking into account shared values and context, but I still don't see how the solution is to have users deal with content moderation.
- groby_b 6y ago
  And yet, HN operates on a (not "the") definition of right and wrong. Stepping outside the boundaries gets you a visit from the moderation fairy, and might end with you being ejected. That means the burden is not on "people" in the sense of individuals. You can expect a certain content and tone coming to HN because the moderators ensure that. Yes, they're people too, but not in the sense PP and GP used it. That was clearly an "each individual user should..." statement - and that's likely unsustainable for large user groups.
  - andrew_v4 6y ago
    Your HN example makes me think: if I'm talking to my spouse or close friends, we obviously don't have a moderation policy, we know each other well and share values well enough that any debates we may have are (almost always) focused on substance and not on conduct. In political discourse, and in debates on big platforms like Twitter, it's the opposite- most of the discussion is about people's or groups' conduct and substance takes a back seat. Because a heterogeneous group with different values is involved. So for social media and online forums, the question is, how big and diverse can the audience get while still supporting civil, substance focused discussion? HN does a pretty good job, and also has some obvious biases, scared cows, and weak spots. Online newspaper article comments probably have one of the lowest quality of discourse for a given participant size. What forum is best, I'm not sure, but its instructive to look at it this way, because it reflects politics generally, if we want to address real issues while maximizing participation.
    - groby_b 6y ago
      I have a sneaking suspicion that you can safely support tremendous community size if you don't have enragement-driven ordering of the feed. (I.e. strict chronological ordering only) We tend to pick our online friends according to mostly shared values, the same as real-life friends. Enragement ML then proceeds to amplify the differences instead of letting you experience that you're mostly similar, radicalizing both partners in the long term. A chronological order minimizes that experience simply by the probabilities - if most of your values overlap for everybody in the feed, the chances of you seeing a large chunk you do not want to see is small. You're occasionally reminded that you don't always agree, but it's in a context of lots of other posts that don't violate your values. (Part two of the problem are searchable feeds, where groups of people just wait to keyword-snipe)
- watwut 6y ago
  One big party of issue is people deliberately going out of way to harass those they want to leave. And it is not new tactic, or was going on for years.
seriousquestion 6y ago
The rooms aren't created by Clubhouse, so it makes sense for the creator of the room to moderate it according to the goals of their particular room. It's not a burden because it's not an open forum like HN or Reddit, where anyone can talk. The moderators have to specifically choose who gets to speak and can simply drop them back to the audience if a problem.
- alex_g 6y ago
  Yeah but if the goal of the room is to foment hatred and target harassment at an individual who isn't in the room, that's still abuse.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - andrew_v4 6y ago
    Does this apply to a phone call? To a zoom call with five people in it? Should trying to stop someone from doing something, even if abhorrent, in private, really be a priority? I can only see this ending badly. If there is a link to real world crimes, sure, intercepting a discussion is one method available to detect / deter / deny / disrupt, just like a wiretap. But (and maybe I misunderstand your comment) beginning with the idea that we should try and prevent conversations we find abhorrent from happening is, well, abhorrent.
    - alex_g 6y ago
      No, and that's not what I said. Clubhouse is not just private phone calls. It's a social network.
      - meowkit 6y ago
        What is a social network? Fundamental its a graph structure of human relationships. Humans are the actors/nodes and edges are the interactions. Two people chatting fits this criteria. You can have a private chat on Clubhouse between two people.

croutonwagon 6y ago

I think there a fine line between these and curated lists (which most would use) that create echo chambers and comfirmation bias (which many platforms have). I like the methods this site uses over others quite frankly and that seems to be quite a bit of human moderation to get to it. But i think scale also has something to do with it. Reddit was much like this site in its earlier days.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago
In its earlier days reddit was a bunch of bots talking to themselves. HN works because the official moderation is more of a nudge than a fist, the community enforces its own standards, and it's a relatively small niche.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more important. However much pg wrote about being curious or “intellectual honesty” or whatever, it was the change in moderation (to dang) that saw changes. But that sort of thing doesn’t fit all communities. For one thing this one is basically public (there’s no shared-private things like subgroups or DMs) and tends to have reasonably highly educated members. For another, the volume is low enough that dang can deal with it all with only some automated tools, giving a reasonably consistent approach to moderation. Also I think he is paid much more like a software engineer in Silicon Valley than a typical social media moderator. There are certainly some other more general things though, like the anti-flame mechanisms, the lack of more inflammatory media like pictures or videos, the lack of printed comment score and downvote limits, and the generally public moderation trail (though moderator may privately email users too).
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    I agree, I meant that dang and sctb have a style that is more about nudging people into better behavior than about demanding compliance.

rocqua 6y ago

We used to have editors at newspapers who did this. They had an opinion, tried to be objective, but called out excesses. Sometimes this went wrong, see yellow journalism. One thing that is different now is that you no longer have a say in who edits your newsfeed. You can't very easily switch news-feed. I feel like the variation in opinions in modern-day editors is much smaller than the variation in opinions in society. Or maybe it isn't but the editing, being done more implicitly, is not convincing the wider populace that this is the way. That is, content moderators have much less authority (in the sense of respect) than old newspaper editors.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cutenewt 6y ago
Newspapers, which you point out used to moderate for us, don't want to play the moderation game in the Internet era either. Many publications have ripped out their Disqus, Facebook commenting plug-ins that used to accompany their articles. Internet moderation is too expensive. They'd be happy having Reddit and Twitter (users) do the moderation for them.
- ddingus 6y ago
  They also do not like being questioned. That factor is as significant as the cost is.
  - seppin 6y ago
    This is a stereotype of journalists I have not seen confirmed. Most journalists I know are happy to admit when they are wrong, if it means they are closer to the truth.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      I know a few myself. To the point of having real conversations. Those who are working for smaller shops, or who are freelancing are in a very different place than people working within or dependent on the big media machine. What beat you cover matters too. Some topics come with more permissive norms all around. Contrast social issues with economics and foreign policy. How much agency one has to both report in an investigative sense and be questioned varies widely. There is wrong, as in not adhering to the orthodoxy and or established narrative, and there is wrong in a factual sense. There are also taboos. How many stories have you seen written from the labor point of view, or that question the growing Washington Economic Consensus, or even recognize it, for example? How often do you see major league corrections? Where are they placed, why? If you are reading overseas, indie, freelance work, you have seen some, and often the work is clear, solid, easy to understand. Side note: Investigative work is particularly troublesome right now, and where it is unorthodox, is being actively suppressed to an increasing degree. And I want to be clear here! This is not saying people in journalism are bad somehow, nefarious. No, they are working in a highly consolidated media environment, or they are out in the cold working hard to do the job, despite considerable pressure. Secondly, the entities they work for really do not want those questions at all. This may well be the more significant force in play. Doing real journalism these days is hard work that does not pay well. While that has generally been true, consolidation, which just got permission to contract even further, has made all this more difficult. Access journalism is a real thing too. Ask the wrong question, despite it being one very large numbers of people want asked, and boom. Gone. No access. Gonna need a new gig and potentially have it covering a new beat. Often, we see steganography more than journalism because of these things. People pointing that out in comments gets conflated with people being idiots, trolls and asses and it all gets shut down. Finally, old media is more like broadcast than it is Reddit, or even Substack. In broadcast, nobody actually cares to ask what people want, nor is there any real two way dialog. It is broadcast, focus grouped, researched all to the nines, very little actually being done ad hoc, or even outside advertisers interests, which are often the media entity interest, which makes it the journalists interest, or conflict of interest depending on where they are at personally. There are facts and there are opinions as to what those facts mean. Journalists who enjoy sufficient agency see it like you say and have no problem with critics. Many do not have that agency, and the entities who employ them much prefer broadcast rules and norms where their authority comes from size and position not so much performance. And those people will do what they can, but will also admit it often isn't much.

avs733 6y ago

[obvious disclaimer of I am NOT advocating for child porn] Why would spam, phishing, child porn be the 'universal' ones? If you are making an argument that it should all be opt in...then it should all be opt in. Otherwise, this is the same drawing of a moral line that we all tend to do where we call ours obvious and others subjective. Maybe some people want the spam? Shouldn't the spammers have the ability to share it in case people want it? My point isn't to argue for those things...its to say if we just accept that content moderation is subjective...we can't then label some things as subjective and some things as not, the framework should just be - laws of the state/country/equivalent structure. Those provide mechanisms (theoretically but more soundly) for feedback that corporations do not and frankly should not on the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable content. C.f., Nazi imagery in most of Europe.

jp_sc 6y ago
I think real child porn should be 100% on that list. However, even what child porn "is" sometimes depends of the culture or even the political climate. Like with the Japanese "lolis" (erotic drawings of fictional minor-looking girls), illegal in some countries but fine in others (so far).

dredmorbius 6y ago

Where nobody is willing to stand in on the editorial side, the decision is being made, effectively, by the submitter pool with the largest content creation capacity, and its interaction with algorithmic and promoted content dissemination. That is, the decision is already being made, the only question is whether or not the results have strong truth valance. The ship has, in a word, sailed. If you create a vast, global, instant, high-fidelity, interactive content dissemination system with a strongly aspirational and appealing audience, then parasitic opportunists who seek only to serve their own rather than others' interests will flock to it. And have, in spades. And I've seen this game play out repeatedly: in print, on radio, television, Usenet, email, and since approximately 1997, on the Web and mobile Internet. There are parties already making truth determinations, and their doing a demonstrably horrible job at it from a common weal perspective. And that is the problem. "Just don't use Facebook" doesn't work for two principle reasons: 1. Facebook is increasingly central to, or required for, numerous real-world interactions. 2. Even if, as I do, you don't use the service, you live in the world it creates. Facebook has massive negative externalities. Like, oh, say, civil war and genocide in Myanmar, to mention only one aspect. (There are others closer to home for most readers here. I'm hoping HN won't lose its collective mind if I don't mention these.) Another element that factors in is that Big Lie propaganda is reliant on disseminating the Big Lie. Scale is directly the problem, and offering unrestricted access to, choose the amplification metaphor of your choice, the printing press, microphone, camera, TV/Radio station, etc., has risks. Especially for those who would see the tools themselves burned down along with all else. In which case, drastically curtailing the spread of any content from identified actors and their associated networks responsible for spreading obvious and notable disinformation ... is highly defensible. I'm well aware of numerous arguments, predicated on or observing exceptions to free speech, which typically follow such statements. I find both the free-speech absolutist and the private property / private actor restriction privilege arguments tired and uninspired. The reality is complex, and I don't have either simple solutions or any which are conformant simultaneously with "free speech" or "property rights" positions. Both, to my mind, exist in a nexus and network of overlapping interests and rights. I've suggested "information autonomy" as an alternative to "free speech", though the expansion of that notion quickly points out internal conflicts. Common weal might offer one path out.