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I don't buy this line. Twitter used to be "the free speech wing of the free speech party." So your theory is that this happened: 1. Twitter is totally open f

I don't buy this line. Twitter used to be "the free speech wing of the free speech party." So your theory is that this happened: 1. Twitter is totally open free speech 2. This scares people away and user counts drop 3. Twitter censors and users come back But this didn't happen. Twitter and other, at the time, free speech platforms like Reddit were experiencing rapid user growth throughout their free speech phases. The "this will scare away users" justification for censorship is used entirely as an ex post facto justification.

fzeroracer 5y ago
No, this is the route that literally every popular social media platform goes through if they want to make money. Having an 'absolutist' stance on free speech is only tenable at smaller scales. As your platform scales up and more people join, so does the amount of people posting things that are borderline illegal, chase off advertisers/other users and so forth. There's a reason why none of the other purported full free speech platforms ever taking off and it's because they end up so odious that advertisers never go near them and the userbase stalls out. Personally I think most of the people that believe full freedom of speech is possible have never been a moderator of even a small social media platform. If you have two users and one of them is harassing, stalking etc another user you eventually have to make a decision which of the two you want to keep around, and it inevitably involves you censoring one of them.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  This is not the argument I was responding to. That was the argument that the platform will lose users, which objectively didn't happen. You are talking about losing advertisers, which is a reasonable theory, but also incorrect. Twitter and Reddit to this day are full of content, e.g. porn, that is absolutely toxic to advertisers, but it doesn't drive advertisers away from the platform as a whole because they have segregated their platforms and allow advertisers to pick and choose where they advertise. An example of this is Google search and Youtube demonetization of controversial videos. Advertisers are certainly an explanation of those policies, but it doesn't explain outright banning content from the platform.

fzeroracer 5y ago

No, this is the route that literally every popular social media platform goes through if they want to make money. Having an 'absolutist' stance on free speech is only tenable at smaller scales. As your platform scales up and more people join, so does the amount of people posting things that are borderline illegal, chase off advertisers/other users and so forth. There's a reason why none of the other purported full free speech platforms ever taking off and it's because they end up so odious that advertisers never go near them and the userbase stalls out. Personally I think most of the people that believe full freedom of speech is possible have never been a moderator of even a small social media platform. If you have two users and one of them is harassing, stalking etc another user you eventually have to make a decision which of the two you want to keep around, and it inevitably involves you censoring one of them.

fallingknife 5y ago
This is not the argument I was responding to. That was the argument that the platform will lose users, which objectively didn't happen. You are talking about losing advertisers, which is a reasonable theory, but also incorrect. Twitter and Reddit to this day are full of content, e.g. porn, that is absolutely toxic to advertisers, but it doesn't drive advertisers away from the platform as a whole because they have segregated their platforms and allow advertisers to pick and choose where they advertise. An example of this is Google search and Youtube demonetization of controversial videos. Advertisers are certainly an explanation of those policies, but it doesn't explain outright banning content from the platform.