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> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasion

> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.

mrtksn 5y ago
> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that > expect no repercussions. The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness. I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff). If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police. edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.
- john_the_writer 5y ago
  So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    > So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users. Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner to engage in politics.
    - john_the_writer 5y ago
      How many gov's in the West are trying to remove E2E encryption? I know the EU is attempting it for chat tools. We have to "save the children". In Australia assisted Access means any encrypted data is not safe. (Because the gov could have required the introduction of a back door, without even telling the company in question.) I think Canada has something like that in place too. So if you take part in a protest, (even on twitter) be prepared to have your bank frozen. Anon is the only way to go.
- b112 5y ago
  The repercussion is civil court. Same as for bs in a newspaper, TV.
whitepaint 5y ago
> How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? They literally banned the President of USA. Are you seriously asking this question?
- throwmeariver1 5y ago
  They banned the personal account of the president not the official account. The official account was tweeting until after the election. I would have loved to see if they would have banned the potus account if he tweeted from there but we'll never know.
- postingawayonhn 5y ago
  Should the US president get some special protection because of his job? Surely the same standards should be applied to all users?
  - whitepaint 5y ago
    https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
  - roenxi 5y ago
    The US president has just won the largest popularity contest in the world, and by nature of the role has a mandate to bring ideas into the political discourse for a couple of years. It isn't so much that there should be special protection. If Twitter's policy bans the president it is way out of line with actual as-measured community expectations.
    - mickotron 5y ago
      The POTUS should be treated as just a person to Twitter. However, that person has the resources of the world’s most powerful government. POTUS doesn’t need Twitter to get a message out.
      - 5y ago
throwmeariver1 5y ago
The problem is not if there is free speech on the platform but how it's perceived you will always have an extrem loud minority (no matter what political orientation) that will drown out the rest of the platform just by crying about censorship. It will be interesting to see what will happen to them when there is nothing to cry about anymore.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Not banning and suspending people or hiding tweets for alleged violations of vague and arbitrary standards would be great, to start with. Go to any political tweet and you'll see countless hateful messages, why aren't they banned, yet others are? I've never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others. It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can't cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.
- themitigating 5y ago
  If that was true why are unregulated platforms, like 4chan, not popular?
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    If what was true?
    - themitigating 5y ago
      "...absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion." My claim is that (in the US) if a platform allowed everything that was legal it wouldn't be popular.
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        I don't see how a comparison with 4chan is any evidence for that. There are also heavily regulated forums which are not popular. So clearly that's not the reason for whether or not one is going to be popular.
        5y ago
CaptArmchair 5y ago
The problem with Twitter - and any social medium - is that moderation is very hard to scale. And that's exactly the trade-off big platforms have made in order to grow their userbase. That's just one problem. Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities. For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors. When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well. The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-about-twitter-lurkers/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
zakk 5y ago
Are you joking? You can easily find a very long list of conservative/right wing personalities banned from Twitter.
gwd 5y ago
> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions. You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected? He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional. So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter? I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.
- schleck8 5y ago
  > Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament I'm German and graduate with polish-german history as honors class. Where to even start..... First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed. The "democratic" approval you paint here happened while the SA, the NSDAP's personal thug squad, as well as the SS (no introduction necessary) had infiltrated the building and were "observing" the voting procedure. This was illegal, especially since they were uniformed for intimidation. You are also ignoring the fact that this "technically constitutional" decision was only possible because they spontaneously (same day) changed the legal framework in a way that meant that non-present (intimidated) representatives count as present. Only this way they achieved the necessary votes. What even legitimized this situation in the first place was an exploitation of the weak Weimar constitution (as in abuse of loopholes due to it's young nature of 20 years, same applies to the German democratic history as a whole, first time a democratic persistent government was in power was in 1918). You are completely ignoring the Reichtagsbrandverordnung which eradicated the fundamental rights as well as the divison of powers (!) which should not have been able to be touched. This was a breach of the Weimar constitution by the way, so the Nazi rise to power was 100 % not constitutional. And lastly you decontextualized the comparison since Hitler obviously did a lot more than just being a cheater in politics

mrtksn 5y ago

> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that > expect no repercussions. The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness. I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff). If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police. edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.

john_the_writer 5y ago
So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  > So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users. Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner to engage in politics.
  - john_the_writer 5y ago
    How many gov's in the West are trying to remove E2E encryption? I know the EU is attempting it for chat tools. We have to "save the children". In Australia assisted Access means any encrypted data is not safe. (Because the gov could have required the introduction of a back door, without even telling the company in question.) I think Canada has something like that in place too. So if you take part in a protest, (even on twitter) be prepared to have your bank frozen. Anon is the only way to go.
b112 5y ago
The repercussion is civil court. Same as for bs in a newspaper, TV.

whitepaint 5y ago

> How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? They literally banned the President of USA. Are you seriously asking this question?

throwmeariver1 5y ago
They banned the personal account of the president not the official account. The official account was tweeting until after the election. I would have loved to see if they would have banned the potus account if he tweeted from there but we'll never know.
postingawayonhn 5y ago
Should the US president get some special protection because of his job? Surely the same standards should be applied to all users?
- whitepaint 5y ago
  https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
- roenxi 5y ago
  The US president has just won the largest popularity contest in the world, and by nature of the role has a mandate to bring ideas into the political discourse for a couple of years. It isn't so much that there should be special protection. If Twitter's policy bans the president it is way out of line with actual as-measured community expectations.
  - mickotron 5y ago
    The POTUS should be treated as just a person to Twitter. However, that person has the resources of the world’s most powerful government. POTUS doesn’t need Twitter to get a message out.
    - 5y ago

throwmeariver1 5y ago

The problem is not if there is free speech on the platform but how it's perceived you will always have an extrem loud minority (no matter what political orientation) that will drown out the rest of the platform just by crying about censorship. It will be interesting to see what will happen to them when there is nothing to cry about anymore.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Not banning and suspending people or hiding tweets for alleged violations of vague and arbitrary standards would be great, to start with. Go to any political tweet and you'll see countless hateful messages, why aren't they banned, yet others are? I've never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others. It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can't cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.

themitigating 5y ago
If that was true why are unregulated platforms, like 4chan, not popular?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  If what was true?
  - themitigating 5y ago
    "...absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion." My claim is that (in the US) if a platform allowed everything that was legal it wouldn't be popular.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      I don't see how a comparison with 4chan is any evidence for that. There are also heavily regulated forums which are not popular. So clearly that's not the reason for whether or not one is going to be popular.
      - 5y ago

CaptArmchair 5y ago

The problem with Twitter - and any social medium - is that moderation is very hard to scale. And that's exactly the trade-off big platforms have made in order to grow their userbase. That's just one problem. Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities. For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors. When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well. The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-about-twitter-lurkers/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...

zakk 5y ago

Are you joking? You can easily find a very long list of conservative/right wing personalities banned from Twitter.

gwd 5y ago

> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions. You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected? He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional. So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter? I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.

schleck8 5y ago
> Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament I'm German and graduate with polish-german history as honors class. Where to even start..... First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed. The "democratic" approval you paint here happened while the SA, the NSDAP's personal thug squad, as well as the SS (no introduction necessary) had infiltrated the building and were "observing" the voting procedure. This was illegal, especially since they were uniformed for intimidation. You are also ignoring the fact that this "technically constitutional" decision was only possible because they spontaneously (same day) changed the legal framework in a way that meant that non-present (intimidated) representatives count as present. Only this way they achieved the necessary votes. What even legitimized this situation in the first place was an exploitation of the weak Weimar constitution (as in abuse of loopholes due to it's young nature of 20 years, same applies to the German democratic history as a whole, first time a democratic persistent government was in power was in 1918). You are completely ignoring the Reichtagsbrandverordnung which eradicated the fundamental rights as well as the divison of powers (!) which should not have been able to be touched. This was a breach of the Weimar constitution by the way, so the Nazi rise to power was 100 % not constitutional. And lastly you decontextualized the comparison since Hitler obviously did a lot more than just being a cheater in politics