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This is a strange [as in deceptively simple yet not that hard] question of externalities. Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. the
by pas 4y ago
This is a strange [as in deceptively simple yet not that hard] question of externalities.
Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side).
But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments.
Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch.
And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question.
The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies.
So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website.
Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
- ethanbond 4y agoWell, for what it's worth this conversation has nothing to do with state mandated moderation. I think it's completely defensible to have a strong stance against state moderation (given the various other forms of obscene power the state has) and have a fairly free-market view of service providers choosing to moderate what flows through their own servers.
- pas 4y agoright, let's replace (and/or expand) "state mandated" with "mob mandated", the result is still the same, we still have the meta problem of very different treatment of the same content based on a sudden attention surge leads to very sub-optimal moderation overall. (because it incentivizes stakeholders to dig in to either extremes if there's no way to smoothly transition between them. ie. Cloudflare can only drop someone once. similarly reputation of big companies/providers can only bear so much stand for principles, so they eventually just opt to filter out everything that's not super-safe, that's why YT is removing actual ITsec educational videos, etc.)