14 ms·

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderatio

• pyaamb 5y ago
  Absolutely, well put.
• natly 5y ago
  Elon has never said this is what he wants to do with twitter. This is just something people keep assuming.
  • api 5y ago
    He said that moderation is working well if "the most extreme 10% of the left and the right are equally frustrated." That actually kind of mirrors my politics. I think freedom is what you get when every movement, crusade, and ideology simultaneously fails. This isn't nihilism. It's a belief that problems are best solved without force.
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > said that moderation is working well if "the most extreme 10% of the left and the right are equally frustrated." The problem occurs when those ten percents use the ensuing outrage to recruit.
      • hef19898 5y ago
        And those 10% are the most vocal and loud ones. So if your platform has those 10% on both sides pissed I don't want to see the results...
        • wtetzner 5y ago
          Maybe the reason they're pissed is that Twitter is downplaying their tweets, making them less loud.
    • IgorPartola 5y ago
      Sounds like enlightened centrism to me. Which is itself an ideology.
      • k1ko 5y ago
        I only see that term used by the left as an insult when it is a perfectly reasonable take.
        • IgorPartola 5y ago
          That is two unsubstantiated claims in one sentence :)
    • root_axis 5y ago
      That's a totally unquantifiable metric.
    • chasd00 5y ago
      > "the most extreme 10% of the left and the right are equally frustrated." yeah that sounds great but the devil is in the details and they have always been. I feel like Musk gets tunnel vision in his thought process. Like he goes "A leads to B, B leads to C, and then C leads to D and done." without contemplating the complexities along the way. It's interesting because he's not naive to business and how things work. He's certainly gotten things done in timelines that people thought impossible and even laughed in his face but other times he has wildly missed.
  • madeofpalk 5y ago
    At the very very terrible TED interview last week: Interviewer: You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist, but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay? Musk: Well, I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules. [...] No, I think, like I said, in my view Twitter should match the laws of the country
    • madeofpalk 5y ago
      Just to elaborate on how uneducated these people are on the topic of "free speech" and running something like twitter: Interviewer: Right. So you can't incite people to violence like a direct incitement to violence. You can't do the equivalent of crying fire in a movie theater, for example. Elon Musk: No, that would be a crime. Shouting fire in a crowded movie theatre is not, and never was, illegal. It was an analogy in a court case which was then overturned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... Interviewer: But here's the challenge, is that it's such a nuanced difference between different things. So there's incitement to violence. That's a no, it's illegal. There's hate speech, which some forms of hate speech are fine. I hate spinach. "I hate spinach" is not hate speech, and importantly, hate speech isn't even illegal.
      • A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        "hate speech isn't even illegal. " Well, in US there are certainly attempts to make it so. There is definitely framework in place and there is the mores. The time seems ripe too given how people seem afraid of what people might say if you let them. There are definitely hate speech laws in other countries. For the record, I am sympathetic to your stance, but I am not sure it is accurate.
        • madeofpalk 5y ago
          My stance is "these people don't know what they're talking about". I'm not actually American, but my understanding is that there have been prior attempts, especially in some US states, to make hate speech illegal, but each time it just gets knocked down because it violates that pesky first amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... Now, if you're saying "All twitter should just follow the laws of the country", now you've got to decide which country?, because most Twitter users are not in the US, and Twitter operatates - has business entities and employees - in other countries apart from US.
  • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    I'm quickly discovering that people see in Elon Musk whatever they want. Somehow he's going to both stop freedom of speech suppression AND shit-posting.
    • chasd00 5y ago
      he definitely has overly obsessive fans and critics. I suppose it's the perfect recipe for a social media addiction.
  • jmeister 5y ago
    Man, another million comment thread with the same arguments. Of course it can turn into a cesspool. Of course there are ways around that problem. Like allowing more customizability for users. For example: an ‘old Twitter’ filter that would only show content compatible with the old moderation norms. Use your imagination, intelligent tech folks, instead of airing the same hyperventilating opinions.
    • strofcon 5y ago
      But what if - and just hear me out here - there are not ways around the fundamental problems of social media platforms as they exist today? I think we've had plenty of years to demonstrate a way to make it work without the toxicity and damage to society, yet we've not done so - even with the most scrutinized platforms in history and the world's most capable software engineers. We are social creatures. Social media is not at all an incarnation of 'society' in which we can function.
  • stack_framer 5y ago
    In his TED interview with Chris Anderson last week, Elon said: "If in doubt, let the speech exist. If it's a gray area, I would say let the Tweet exist. In a case where there's perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not want to necessarily promote that Tweet. I'm not saying I have all the answers here, but I do think that we want to be very reluctant to delete things..." (Seek to about 19:40 in the interview: https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM)
• adamgordonbell 5y ago
  I like this article on the trouble with not censoring: But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. I would like to give people another perspective on events like Tumblr banning female-presenting nipples or Patreon dropping right-wing YouTubers or Twitter constantly introducing new algorithms that misfire and ban random groups of people. These companies aren’t inherently censorious. They’re just afraid. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
  • thejackgoode 5y ago
    thank you for the article!
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    Fascinating read. Thank you for sharing it. But in here, even the author seems to point to testimonials that indicate that value of unique discussions gained just by allowing the conversation to happen. It is sad that it ended partially because author was harassed for hosting it, but I suppose this is the price you pay in 2022. As it pertains to Musk and article linked to Musk, I am relatively certain he can handle the mob.
    • adamgordonbell 5y ago
      Yeah, maybe Musk can take it on. But I'm not certain. Tim Wu has a book "The Master Switch" also about this. I think his argument was once you become big enough, the rules change and you end up being forced to censor. You become valuable target for people who want censorship and close to a common carrier.
• madeofpalk 5y ago
  It also sounds great until you consider other countries. Most people on Twitter are not in the US.
  • akmarinov 5y ago
    They’re not? I feel like Twitter is wildly unpopular outside the US. The US has more than 30% of its population on there, the third highest- India has about 20 million of its 1 billion+ people.
    • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      What would make it more unpopular outside the US than inside the US?
      • akmarinov 5y ago
        It just never caught on outside the US like Facebook/Instagram did. From my small Eastern European country - no one I know uses Twitter, Reddit is more popular than it. That’s anecdotal, of course.
    • CharlesW 5y ago
      https://www.newsweek.com/countries-most-people-twitter-social-media-us-japan-uk-1631479 https://www.newsweek.com/countries-most-people-twitter-socia...
      • akmarinov 5y ago
        I was looking at this one - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...
        • Someone 5y ago
          That supports the claim “Most people on Twitter are not in the US”. It says there are 206 million active Twitter users, 77 million of them in the USA. That’s less than half of them.
• h2odragon 5y ago
  Yaknow, I've helped build sites for Nazis and furries and fisting fans and others who were not anticipating a broad welcome; and their boards were remarkably civil places. Even with the inevitable and never ending "yall are sinners and need jesus" crews such places attract. Just maybe its the enforcement of orthodoxy that makes "content moderation" so toxic?
  • zja 5y ago
    The Nazi's boards were remarkably civil?
    • Closi 5y ago
      I assume they are referring to the word to mean 'courteous and polite'. I personally believe you can hold abhorrent views and still be polite, so I don't see why there is a necessary contradiction here.
      • h2odragon 5y ago
        Yes. The discourse was courteous and polite, usually; folks would calmly discuss the most heinous horseshit and could actually in that setting be open to education about facts where available. Its very hard to get people to learn things by shouting at them
        • ssully 5y ago
          It's hard to give a shit about educating people when they openly discuss wanting to murder you or eradicate people like you.
          • h2odragon 5y ago
            Yes. But at that point either you change their minds, or you gear up to kill them first.
            • 5y ago
• contravariant 5y ago
  Personally I'd consider it an improvement, but that might be because of my naive assumption that people will finally stop mistaking twitter for a sensible way of communicating.
  • wonderwonder 5y ago
    Its not so much that twitter is a sensible way of communicating its that twitter gives you such wide access to such a massive array of people and topics. For example its how I get my news, I just follow a ton of journalists from different companies and countries. As 1:1 communication you are right its not built for that but it does what I use it for really well.
  • ragnese 5y ago
    I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" and his whole rhetorical take on it needing to be a place for free and open discussion as per the "market place of ideas" concept (I don't recall him referencing the quoted term directly- that's my editorial). Like... we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I never had a Twitter account, but isn't it still limited to some 200 characters and/or an image per post? And from what I've seen the "threading" of discussions also seems to make replies difficult to follow. Apparently, our society wants important social issues to be discussed in 200 character snippets. I'm going to go cry into my coffee.
    • orblivion 5y ago
      > I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" I'm now imagining a medieval town in an all-out drunken brawl.
      • totetsu 5y ago
        Musk's town square by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel
    • cle 5y ago
• papito 5y ago
  It's almost like this kind of thing does not exist. Just go to 8chan or whatever it is called now. You will want to pour Clorox in your eyes. Feel free - enjoy "free speech". The Internet was actually LESS free back in the day, in the sense that we hung out on tightly moderated Perl CGI discussion boards, where idiots and trolls were not tolerated. Usenet was great too, without moderation, as it required one to be pretty technical to get there.
  • mavhc 5y ago
    Until usenet got flooded with spam, and had no tools to deal with it and died
    • papito 5y ago
      Well, it's still there. Google's Deja probably did not help, "democratizing" Usenet. That said, here we go - another point in favor of strict moderation.
• DaltonCoffee 5y ago
  >“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. >obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff None of the preceding scoundrels' favorites should be illegal tho. The arbiter of the global soapbox should to be in favor of almost absolute free speech imo.
• mgdlbp 5y ago
  And the course of Web 2.0 so far makes for a perfect case study of this form of community dynamics. Regardless of how this goes, it'll go down in history, and Musk is well aware of that.
• root_axis 5y ago
  > Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed This won't actually happen though. Content moderation, censorship, and bans will continue on Twitter unabated.
• orblivion 5y ago
  I agree that people take for granted just how much spam there could be if the flood gates were opened. Is there a reason you can't turn all of the bans (of legal stuff) into filters? Then users could turn on and off nazis, Q, sex, porn, etc? People could turn them all off and get the same experience as today.
  • vlunkr 5y ago
    > Is there a reason you can't turn all of the bans (of legal stuff) into filters? Among other reasons, because Twitter is a brand with an image to maintain. They don't want to be known as a safe hangout for Nazis and other unsavory content.
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      At this time, however Elon is a populist and his “base” of fanboys do lean in that direction.
  • jordiburgos 5y ago
    Or do the opposite. Change the options to show only flagged content.
    • cxgjnli 5y ago
      This is a reality today in the Mastodon world where some self appointed hall monitors created Fediblock to create a list of bad instances which created a shadow network of instances on the list that subscribe to each other and discover new instances to federate with using the Fediblock list
  • oauea 5y ago
    Now you need to flag each post individually instead of just banning troublesome users.
    • orblivion 5y ago
      Or flag the users. Of course they'll complain about being painted with a label but it's better than being banned.
• dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  • sweezyjeezy 5y ago
    I could be wrong but I feel like Elon is a little more savvy than this
    • dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
      OK, before you go any further with that idea you should check this out: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496
      • hef19898 5y ago
        You got me to, literally, look at Musk tweet for the first time in my life. How old is he? Twelve?
        • bombcar 5y ago
          Twelve year olds would have much hotter memes. Musk’s are straight up boomer-class, it’s just rare you see billionaires fielding any memes at all.
          • hef19898 5y ago
            True, my 13 year old probably doesn't even recognize Bill Gates, or know who he is. And if I explained it to him, he wouldn't care.
          • drcode 5y ago
            He has 83M followers, mainly because of his memes. He isn't interested in your super hot memes that only 5 people in the world understand.
            • 5y ago
• ssl232 5y ago
  Michael Saylor had an idea he discussed on a recent Lex Fridman podcast. People should be able to post $10 collatoral via the Bitcoin Lightning network for safe passage on the web. This can be done by your browser via HTTP. Bad behaviour (such as causing abuse) results in a penalty being applied to the collatoral. You get what's left back when you leave. Because it uses Lighting, it's super fast and cheap, far faster and cheaper than a typical 2.5% credit card. His point was that there's no conservation of energy on the internet right now. Requiring a small ransom for safe passage would fix that, retaining anonymity.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ramesh31 5y ago
    That is my literal nightmare for the future of the web.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      It’s brilliant for people who think Twitter bans too much to … give them a monetary reason to ban more? Crypto won’t solve the problem only make it worse.
  • ansible 5y ago
    That may work. Though it will also exclude people that can't afford it. I'm thinking of poor people and children. The kind of people who use computers at the local library, because they can't afford their own device (and more expensively) the Internet connection to make it useful. And yes, I realize that some of the above groups are also absolute shits, who I would keep off the Internet (if I could) until they decided to grow up.
    • ssl232 5y ago
      It's not $10 per site, it's $10 one off. You would get the money back almost immediately if your request is not abusive. I'd be interested to know how many twitter users couldn't scrape together a once off $10.
• soabeb 5y ago
  The old tenant of the internet was “if you don’t like something, block it”. All of these people saying that this doesn’t work in practice on their social media websites have not provided an explanation as to why this is the case.
  • wurit 5y ago
    Simple asymmetry. Scammers can generate junk faster than I as an individual can block it. My choices are to either use a moderated platform or abandon social media altogether.
  • bob1029 5y ago
    > have not provided an explanation as to why this is the case Perhaps because they realize it effectively boils down to thought policing at some level and do not want to undermine their own intentions.
  • phphphphp 5y ago
    because community is defined by people not content. A person who posts overtly racist content probably also posts about visiting Disney with their kid, or how much they love Spider-Man. You can’t filter out certain aspects of a persons personality within a community. Either you want to share a space with people, or you don’t, you can’t share a space with people without knowing they’re there.
    • Karunamon 5y ago
      Why not? It seems like some kind of categorization system (even a really naïve keyword-based one) is already used for things like advertisements. If such a system was surfaced, and you can filter out specific categories, you are then able to see what the hypothetical racist $relation posts about the family, without having to see their hot political takes. Remember that we are talking about words on the screen 99% of the time. I would be willing to bet most of us are reading on a post by post basis and don't know the full spectrum of every given persons beliefs (in fact, I'm not sure this is healthy or desirable).
    • polski-g 5y ago
• TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Make it so people can say whatever they want, but it's easy to decide what level of discourse you're personally willing to listen to. You have the right to say what you want and other people have the right not to listen. It's not an easy system to develop and maintain, but Twitter pays well enough to afford people who can do it. The goal just needs to be set.
  • chasd00 5y ago
    i think a big problem is monetization. You have to identify the conversations with the most participants in order to get ads there for sales. You have to design feed algorithms and promote certain users to drive views and adclicks in order to sell more ads. If Twitter goes private then maybe the income expectations change and therefore the platform algorithms can change. I don't use twitter but it seems like putting more moderation power in user's hands ( chronological feeds, easier management of what you see and what you don't, etc ) becomes possible when Wall St. expectations are no longer a part of the design process. If you don't have a stock price to answer to then you can do things that create a healthier community but may not be the most profitable. EDIT: You know, Musk be on to something about leaving a company private. Tesla is public and the shorters almost killed it, he really had to fight them and still does. SpaceX was left as private and is thriving. maybe he's taking lessons learned from both Tesla and SpaceX and trying to apply them to Twitter? just a guess
• midislack 5y ago
  Twitter's already a huge shit hole, it's just that the fascists are going to rejoin the Marxists so everybody can excrete into the common hole together. Three is no reason to believe anything will happen other than more "journalists" getting abused, and let's face it - they deserve it. Learn to code being bannable was, for me, the last straw and I stopped using Twitter after being banned for saying it to a journalist.
  • VerminOctopus1 5y ago
    I’m not understanding your comment. You got banned for saying “learn to code” to “a journalist”? Surely there must be some missing context here.
    • nicky0 5y ago
      Some context: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
      • VerminOctopus1 5y ago
        I see. Sounds like they were cracking down on targeted harassment.
        • midislack 5y ago
          They failed to crack down on more than a mere fraction of it, however they did crack down on some.
• nradov 5y ago
  You don't have to follow anyone who tweets obnoxious content.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    Sure, because Twitter'll show it to you anyways. Trending topics, your friend liked/replied to this, your friend follows this person, we think you'll like this tweet... all of these things show up in your Twitter timeline now, without having followed any of the people they're showing you.
    • chasd00 5y ago
      I mentioned this in another reply but maybe taking Twitter private enables Musk to make changes to the timeline that hurt profit (ad sales) but produce a better community or "public square". If you don't have to answer to a stock price then options open up.
  • wonderwonder 5y ago
    You are 100% correct and most of us think that way. There are some people though that think just the ability to say terrible things or even just things they strongly disagree with is proof of the collapse of society and will lead to the end of all things. This is not meant as an attack on these people that feel this way as I think they are just unable to control themselves, and I think have just never been able to adapt to the concept of social media. They ruin their lives obsessing over what others may be posting or saying and how dare the rest of us not be outraged as well. I had a sibling disown my entire family over something like this.
• AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
  > obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff What you are describing is the heavily moderated, arbitrarily censored social media experience the entire planet experiences today. > Unfortunately the result of that is a place that very few want to spend time in. Perhaps social media is a place that we should not encourage people to spend inordinate amounts of time in. Perhaps the idea of combining all the world's people into a single centralized location to communicate with one another, should carry with it the very explicit notion that such a place would be chaotic, high-energy, and risky --- just like going to the casino for the night.
• Miner49er 5y ago
  As another commenter pointed out, it actually doesn't matter too much what the users want, from a business perspective. Twitter's true customers are its advertisers. It's who pays. And they are even less likely then the normal person to want an "everything that isn't illegal is allowed" approach. Advertisers don't want their ads seen next to hate speech and certain other types of speech. It's been clear that Reddit and YouTube have been censoring at the behest of advertisers for years, and I don't think Twitter is or will be any different.
  • tested23 5y ago
    Twitter literally has hookers and other sex workers on the platform. If advertisers really cared about brand safety they would have already left.
    • richardwhiuk 5y ago
      Advertisers care that the market doesn't primarily see that as the point of twitter - i.e. the average user doesn't think that Twitter is primarily about that.
      • hanselot 5y ago
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      Incorrect, advertisers very much care about brand safety this is like saying mathematicians don’t care about numbers. It’s the foundation of the craft
  • CharlesW 5y ago
    > As another commenter pointed out, it actually doesn't matter too much what the users want, from a business perspective. Twitter's true customers are its advertisers. Users matter the most because if non-toxic users flee the platform, Twitter has no value to advertisers.
• mbar84 5y ago
  This is a straw-man argument. Everybody knows there is an issue with a deluge of spam, obnoxious, content etc. The issue is trust/control. Whom do you trust to have control over who sees what content? A public platform should be beyond reproach in terms of its political bias, which is not the case for Twitter. A way to get closer to that would be to devolve the control over content moderation as close to each user as possible.
• dfxm12 5y ago
  Surely, spam bots aren't illegal, are they? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354 At this point, he sounds like a politician making conflicting promises that he can't possibly keep... And also like a politician, he probably has his own interests in mind ahead of your average Twitter user's.
  • dbbk 5y ago
    They are not. His position is entirely contradictory.
    • tested23 5y ago
      Its not contradictory when you realize his rhetoric is about individual rights and not bot rights…
      • dbbk 5y ago
        So free speech only applies to humans? I thought in the US it also applied to corporations?
        • hunterb123 5y ago
          Corporations are just groups of humans represented by a legal entity. So yes, free speech only applies to humans, lol. Do you support spam bots having rights or are you just using that to try to win your argument?
          • jasonshaev 5y ago
            In the United States, corporations have 1st amendment protections. The Supreme Court codified this in CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/08-205.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/08-205.html) "... holding that corporations have a First Amendment right to free speech because they are "associations of citizens" and hold the collected rights of the individual citizens who constitute them." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#:~:text=The%20corporate%20personhood,who%20constitute%20them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#:~:text=T....]
• ekianjo 5y ago
  > It seems so easy from a distance You seem to assume it's a binary answer. Either allow everything or nothing?
• Spooky23 5y ago
  That obviously isn’t true. Musk already uses the platform as a tool for financial fraud.
• dijit 5y ago
  Well, I'm going to be somewhat controversial here and say: What the fuck were people expecting? Moderation is hard, genuinely hard, every order of magnitude increase in community size is not linear to the moderation requirement: it is factorial. Why? Because every single communication has the potential for abuse, and the number of interactions on a platform do not scale linearly with the increase of users. This is why things like the "Eternal September" exist, a deluge of new users is basically impossible to moderate at scale. I think Twitter, Facebook and co. have done a fairly decent job of the mess they made, but crucially they decided that a walled garden where everyone exists together was their business model. I think this is fundamentally flawed. "Back in my day" (I know it may be glazed with nostalgia, but) smaller close knit forums were much better at moderating communities, because it was still humanly possible. There did exist some communities which became tyrannical; but the benefit of small communities is that people just go wherever it's "nice enough", and if you don't like the moderation staff or how they moderate you can move on with your friends. I think people don't want this to be true, people are so financially invested in the centralised model; but ultimately you force a single set of potentially tyrannical moderators and a single culture. -- and people aren't willing (or able) to pay for the correct level of moderation. It's Sisyphean and totally self-inflicted.
  • elpakal 5y ago
    If moderators are good, why cant you just hire more moderators?
    • wffurr 5y ago
      As the GP stated repeatedly, it doesn't scale. Number of interactions scales with the factorial of users. The moderation team itself also doesn't scale. Good moderation is very difficult and requires trust. More moderators spreads the trust thin and greatly increases the chance that you end up with one or more bad moderators, who in turn damage that trust.
      • remram 5y ago
        > Number of interactions scales with the factorial of users. That is just not true. That's a count of possible relationships. There is a limit to how many interactions a human will perform in a day, and it's not related to how many other users there are on the platform.
• raverbashing 5y ago
  I just hope the free speech absolutists consume their daily dose of asbestos shavings to exercise their freedom
• cslarson 5y ago
  let people filter for themselves. someone is offended by pornography so chooses an algo that accounts for that, another is offended by anti-trans sentiment and another algo accounts for that. everyone should be more broadly free to speak but we are not all forced to listen.
  • mnd999 5y ago
    Then using the platform becomes work. People realise it's not worth the effort and everyone apart from the nutjobs quit.
    • cslarson 5y ago
      It does not need to be more work. There is a default algo. Users can also opt for alternatives.
• ChainReaktion 5y ago
  There’s one obvious flaw in “Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed”: determining what is illegal. Free speech laws are some of the trickiest legal issues we grapple with in the US, and many statues hinge on the intent behind the speech. How is Twitter supposed to implement this (hypothetical) new policy? Do they always give posters the benefit of the doubt? Seems ripe for abuse. Assume the worst? Probably more censorious than it is today. Punt to the courts? Great, moderation now takes years and costs thousands of dollars. What is the standard of proof to take down a tweet? Preponderance of the evidence? What evidence is admissible? Does Twitter just internally recreate the US trial court system to manage this? Do they do that for every country? The point is, the law on these issues is complex and frequently requires significant interpretation. Maximalism is no silver bullet.
  • rtkwe 5y ago
    They won't or if they do not for long. Gab, Parlor, and all the other right-wing "we're getting censored on Twitter come here where we won't censor anything (legal)" Twitter clones have all figured out rapidly why content moderation exists and that it's basically a necessity on the web as they get mercilessly trolled and spammed. All he's really saying is he'd prefer to accept more shitty behavior from people who he aligns with and less from people who annoy him.
    • alex_sf 5y ago
      The only reason those spaces implemented content moderation was because they couldn't get hosting anywhere. Not because of 'merciless trolling and spam'.
      • rtkwe 5y ago
        Hard to say exactly why it happened, but users of those sites were quite unhappy with the lack of moderation from what I saw at the time.
  • alex_sf 5y ago
    This isn't that complicated. Twitter can just take down content in response to court orders, unless their review team decides to fight it on whatever grounds. This is not only simpler for Twitter to implement, but provides a better level of due process and accountability. How many times has someone been 'abused' on social media and claimed XYZ company did nothing about it?
• rtkwe 5y ago
  Yeah it's not even a mysterious lesson. A handful of "we won't censor or moderate except illegal activity" twitter clones have popped up and rapidly learned why moderation exists.
• mchusma 5y ago
  Just because you want to allow people to speak, doesn't mean you need to force people to listen. The current moderation scheme, which is to provide essentially 1 moderator with no ability to customize it. The obvious solution to me is just let people pick their own moderation tools, or at least configure it to how they would like. Moderation is great, but what I want moderated is different than what you might want moderated, and we should support broader implications. This also allows Twitter to gain some independence from the wrath on both sides who want more or less moderation. They can respond by saying "Use the X moderation tool if you want more moderation or "Y if you want less".
  • throwaway82652 5y ago
    Except it already is exactly that way, anyone can block anyone else they want. It turns out blocking people does nothing when you're being harassed by big groups of people, the damage was already done before you got the chance to hit block. And also it doesn't stop people from trash talking you behind your back and furthering the damage. And there is the other dimension where you actually want to remove the ability to block from some users, like public businesses and brands probably shouldn't be able to block complaints from customers and shareholders, politicians shouldn't be able to block their constituents, etc.
• dangerface 5y ago
  We could just filter that stuff the same way we filter email. Naive Bayes works at email scale why not comment scale? It should all be done on a per user basis so the filters only filter out language you personally find offensive. It never made sense why try to force me to use the same filter as the Karen that complains about kids skateboarding.
• zarzavat 5y ago
  Musk has a reputation for craziness but if you look at his engineering decisions at SpaceX his record there is highly pragmatic. So the question is: which Musk is buying Twitter? I personally don’t believe he means that he wants to turn Twitter into 4chan. Rather what he’s saying is that nobody should be censored on Twitter for the content of their (otherwise civil) speech. There is a wide gulf of possible moderation policy choices between current Twitter and 4chan that he could park it at.
• chrisstanchak 5y ago
  I'm old enough to remember that internet. It was better.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    It was smaller. That's the part that matters.
• thinkharderdev 5y ago
  Honestly, I think “Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” is fine as long as Twitter only shows me content from people I follow. I think the whole "content moderation" problem is something Twitter has brought on itself. I am perfectly happy moderating my own content if they would only let me.
  • psyc 5y ago
    This is all I've ever asked for. Just give me the tools to moderate for myself / choose my own filters, and I could not care less who deserves to have what sized megaphone FFS.
• mrshadowgoose 5y ago
  I believe there's a middle ground that doesn't involve the forced adoption of a single subjective viewpoint of "correctness", while preserving the benefits of moderation to whoever desires it. I refer to the following approach as "moderation lenses", although it's certainly been thought of before under some other name. "Moderation lenses" would operate as follows: Any person or entity can be a moderator. Moderation could be done manually or in an automated fashion, it doesn't really matter. Users would be able to opt-in (and later opt-out) of whatever set of lenses they want. The lenses they opt-in to would affect what posts they are able to see. Online communities (for example, a subreddit), could have a default set of lenses applied to newly-joined users, but as with any other lens, they would be removable by the user. One would imagine that most users would leave a "spam" lens in place. Governments would be able to produce their own lenses for things such as "misinformation", "hate speech", or whatever the evil-of-the-day happens to be. And if people want a government filtering what they see, they can add those lenses. And if they don't, they don't. Human opinion is inherently subjective, and agreeing on what is "correct" or "appropriate" across large groups of people is rarely possible. Trying to impose a single viewpoint of "correct" across millions of people is laughable.
• jandrusk 5y ago
  Isn't that what the block, mute, and muted wordlist options are for? If these were not available options I could see the argument, but they are, so why isn't this sufficient for users to moderate their own content?
• hemreldop 5y ago
• archhn 5y ago
  Then have filters that allow people to customize their experience. Don't want to see content about race? Filter it out. Only interested in science? Filter for only that subject. The user should be the one who is given the tools of censorship. What's wrong with this idea?
• whiddershins 5y ago
  It’s weird that no one thinks algorithms can make a big dent in this without banning people.
• alex_sf 5y ago
  > unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. I keep hearing this, and it makes no sense. 1) Add a block button. 2) Don't surface random content to users. 3) (Optional) hard restrictions on private messages. This solves the issue entirely, with no need to moderate anything that isn't illegal. The simple fact is that this is a really easy problem to solve. Companies just don't want to implement 2).
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dionian 5y ago
  Unfortunately moderation will always be abused
• WesleyHale 5y ago
  Twitter is already a cesspool. I doubt it could get any worse. The only real change I see is more users crying that theres more "transphobia" on the platform. We're about to see a digital clash of cultures.