4 ms·
Nobody light a match. There's a lot of straw men in such a small space. Let's be clear: no one wants Nazis or advocates for pedophilia or folks fetishizing the
by ttfkam 5y ago
Nobody light a match. There's a lot of straw men in such a small space.
Let's be clear: no one wants Nazis or advocates for pedophilia or folks fetishizing the consumption of feces on their online platform. Because they hate free speech? No. Because they like censorship? No.
If you let Nazis and Flat Earthers hang out in your servers, most everyone else will leave; they don't want to listen to same old nonsense and bile when they have better things to discuss and share. That suppresses ad revenue, lowers profits, makes you lay employees off, etc.
Let's see examples like Parler and Gab. Launched as online communities free from censorship. Who went there? Folks who believed in free speech as a principle, some random other folks, and a few Nazis. Why would you want to go somewhere with folks constantly going on about Jewish space lasers? So random people leave. What's left? More Nazis per 1,000 users, which makes the platform more intolerable for non-Nazis who accept that The Holocaust actually happened and was unambiguously a BAD thing. So more free speech advocates leave because the Nazi rhetoric and other 4chan-like speech ceases to be worth it for them. Nazi per 1,000 user level continues to rise. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
It's not censorship to be denied a megaphone by Twitter when you'll gladly be given one on Gab. That's not censorship; that's simply folks not wanting to subscribe to your newsletter. There is no universal right guaranteeing that people must pay attention to you.
It should be noted however that many of the same people crying censorship are the same ones trying to get books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" removed from public school libraries. If you want to fight against censorship, I wouldn't start with Twitter.
- bediger4000 5y agoI'm getting ready to bail out on Twitter. After justifiably banning the Qanon violence types, Twitter has gone back to ignoring problems rapidly at scale. I don't care to be bombarded with Nazi or Qanon propaganda. Where do I go next? I've got no real commitment to Twitter, so I'm open. I looked into Parler, they seemed to want a huge amount of PII to get an account, so that's out on that basis.
- smoldesu 5y agoMastodon is nice. You have to put in a little work to find an instance that reflects your values, but I personally love the microblogging concept merged with the IRC crowd and moderation ethos.
- raxxorraxor 5y agoBut you don't argue that users have a choice to not pay attention to it, you want the platform to decide what people can pay attention to. This is a core point of the criticism the author wrote about. It is the other way around, you create the strawman with nazis, flat earthers or people advocating pedophilia and equate them with people concerned about freedom of speech. Pretty cheap to be honest.