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Elon Musk’s ‘Free Speech’ Twitter Risks Scaring Off Advertisers

fuckcensorship 5y ago
I have an overwhelming feeling that this is much less about advertisers not wanting their ads placed next to offensive content and much more about advertisers not wanting to see their status quo interrupted.
- hsn915 5y ago
  The whole "but advertisers" is an obvious red herring. It's never been about advertisers. It's just an excuse. Advertisers will advertise wherever they think they can reach an audience. No matter what or how you advertise, some peope will find a reason to object.
vmoore 5y ago
What about moderation vs free speech? Free speech is the ideal, moderation is the antidote to excessive and extreme forms of speech.
- fuckcensorship 5y ago
  I think the key is to programmatically design a moderation system that strikes a balance between free speech and censorship while empowering communities to moderate themselves as much as possible. HackerNews is a decent example of the latter. HN has systems in place [1] which allow for the community to moderate itself quite well without the need for intervention by a mod/admin. This is very important for shifting control/power towards the community rather than mods/admins. It's one of my favorite aspects of this site. Besides that, I think implementing elements of democracy into this system would also be very beneficial. Communities should be able to vote to elect, remove, or otherwise modify existing moderators. The issue will be doing this in a transparent and verifiable way that cannot be manipulated. [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
  - helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    > HackerNews is a decent example of the latter But HackerNews has a very narrow area of interest (“Anything that good hackers would find interesting“) and readership compared with Twitter or any other social media. Even pre school PTA message boards can become a fighting ground of alternate thoughts and political hate and when the readership is wider can be full of direct and indirect spam and product promotion that moderators can have difficulty keeping up with.

I have an overwhelming feeling that this is much less about advertisers not wanting their ads placed next to offensive content and much more about advertisers not wanting to see their status quo interrupted.

hsn915 5y ago
The whole "but advertisers" is an obvious red herring. It's never been about advertisers. It's just an excuse. Advertisers will advertise wherever they think they can reach an audience. No matter what or how you advertise, some peope will find a reason to object.

vmoore 5y ago

What about moderation vs free speech? Free speech is the ideal, moderation is the antidote to excessive and extreme forms of speech.

fuckcensorship 5y ago
I think the key is to programmatically design a moderation system that strikes a balance between free speech and censorship while empowering communities to moderate themselves as much as possible. HackerNews is a decent example of the latter. HN has systems in place [1] which allow for the community to moderate itself quite well without the need for intervention by a mod/admin. This is very important for shifting control/power towards the community rather than mods/admins. It's one of my favorite aspects of this site. Besides that, I think implementing elements of democracy into this system would also be very beneficial. Communities should be able to vote to elect, remove, or otherwise modify existing moderators. The issue will be doing this in a transparent and verifiable way that cannot be manipulated. [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  > HackerNews is a decent example of the latter But HackerNews has a very narrow area of interest (“Anything that good hackers would find interesting“) and readership compared with Twitter or any other social media. Even pre school PTA message boards can become a fighting ground of alternate thoughts and political hate and when the readership is wider can be full of direct and indirect spam and product promotion that moderators can have difficulty keeping up with.