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"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.

"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person." This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.

paulgb 5y ago
It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?) Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.
bartimus 5y ago
Also makes it a lot harder to set up an army of bots.
- luciusdomitius 5y ago
  Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
  - pooper 5y ago
    > Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min. I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y. Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this". Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques. I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
    - luciusdomitius 5y ago
      I will be honest, my experience on 4c was 15+ years ago and only on /random. I just used it (most probably incorrectly) as an example of anarchy.
    - mbreese 5y ago
      > I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like. I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either. I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
      - pooper 5y ago
        > I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting. I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of? I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.
  - zppln 5y ago
    Meh, the "containment board" model used by 4chan and some other "freedom of speech" oriented forums work surprisingly well.
paganel 5y ago
> he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store? Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that. [1] https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817 https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817
criddell 5y ago
I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees. If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people? I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?
- paulcole 5y ago
  Of the fewer than 100 employees: • How many are engineers? • How many work in customer service? • How many are in compliance? • How many are in marketing? • How many are ICs and how many are managers? • How many are in HR? • How many are in finance?
  - criddell 5y ago
    Do you happen to know the breakdown of Instagram's 13 employees?
    - paulcole 5y ago
      No. But I know that Twitter today is a very different company from Instagram in 2012.
      - criddell 5y ago
        Definitely is. I'm just wondering if they can move closer to that model.
        paulcole 5y ago
        They can not.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  So to replace Twitter's current revenue at those rates, you'd need something like 170 million blue check marks or 3 million corporate accounts. How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.
GeekyBear 5y ago
> I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.
- icoder 5y ago
  I which counter?
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  That sounds like the opposite of free speech absolutism. This is the government silencing speech!
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    >This is the government silencing speech! Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed. We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government. >Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio I much prefer the rule of law to the rule of Twitter mob.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      But what about free speech absolutism! “Yeah of course the government can silence people” doesn’t sound like absolutism to me.
- clucas 5y ago
  Wait, just for clarification... do you believe a company should be allowed to censor speech on its own platform if it wants to do so? Or are you saying a business should not be allowed to remove any posts unless a court has given its approval?
banannaise 5y ago
> glorification of crime This runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of "crime". The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Any argument for legalizing something illegal can be seen as "glorification of crime".
kevingadd 5y ago
The assumption that cops in the US actually care about someone posting swastikas is questionable. We already have lots of people posting about crimes on twitter accounts under their real names, and the cops very frequently don't do anything about it. A sizable number of the swastika posters are cops, too, as demonstrated by the periodic investigations into police departments that reveal those sorts of things. P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?
rockooooo 5y ago
> I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship. No, this isn't free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.
113 5y ago

paulgb 5y ago

It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?) Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.

bartimus 5y ago

Also makes it a lot harder to set up an army of bots.

luciusdomitius 5y ago
Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
- pooper 5y ago
  > Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min. I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y. Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this". Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques. I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
  - luciusdomitius 5y ago
    I will be honest, my experience on 4c was 15+ years ago and only on /random. I just used it (most probably incorrectly) as an example of anarchy.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    > I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like. I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either. I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
    - pooper 5y ago
      > I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting. I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of? I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.
- zppln 5y ago
  Meh, the "containment board" model used by 4chan and some other "freedom of speech" oriented forums work surprisingly well.

paganel 5y ago

> he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store? Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that. [1] https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817 https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817

criddell 5y ago

I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees. If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people? I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

paulcole 5y ago
Of the fewer than 100 employees: • How many are engineers? • How many work in customer service? • How many are in compliance? • How many are in marketing? • How many are ICs and how many are managers? • How many are in HR? • How many are in finance?
- criddell 5y ago
  Do you happen to know the breakdown of Instagram's 13 employees?
  - paulcole 5y ago
    No. But I know that Twitter today is a very different company from Instagram in 2012.
    - criddell 5y ago
      Definitely is. I'm just wondering if they can move closer to that model.
      - paulcole 5y ago
        They can not.
saalweachter 5y ago
So to replace Twitter's current revenue at those rates, you'd need something like 170 million blue check marks or 3 million corporate accounts. How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.

GeekyBear 5y ago

> I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.

icoder 5y ago
I which counter?
UncleMeat 5y ago
That sounds like the opposite of free speech absolutism. This is the government silencing speech!
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >This is the government silencing speech! Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed. We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government. >Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio I much prefer the rule of law to the rule of Twitter mob.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    But what about free speech absolutism! “Yeah of course the government can silence people” doesn’t sound like absolutism to me.
clucas 5y ago
Wait, just for clarification... do you believe a company should be allowed to censor speech on its own platform if it wants to do so? Or are you saying a business should not be allowed to remove any posts unless a court has given its approval?

banannaise 5y ago

> glorification of crime This runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of "crime". The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.

BurningFrog 5y ago
Any argument for legalizing something illegal can be seen as "glorification of crime".

kevingadd 5y ago

The assumption that cops in the US actually care about someone posting swastikas is questionable. We already have lots of people posting about crimes on twitter accounts under their real names, and the cops very frequently don't do anything about it. A sizable number of the swastika posters are cops, too, as demonstrated by the periodic investigations into police departments that reveal those sorts of things. P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?

rockooooo 5y ago

> I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship. No, this isn't free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.

113 5y ago