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It would be fascinating to read a deep dive from you on your thoughts on all the thorny questions that always come up with respect to this. You seem all in on
by sanderjd 4y ago
It would be fascinating to read a deep dive from you on your thoughts on all the thorny questions that always come up with respect to this.
You seem all in on the idea that Twitter should be stamping out nasty speech, and I can certainly respect that philosophy for a private company. I certainly wouldn't want to personally work to support the aforementioned shitheels. But I'm curious what you think of the broader ethics that people often bring up in these discussions. Is it bad that the contemporary "public square" is dominated by private companies that get to determine the rules? Should there be a real digital public square that isn't dominated by private companies? Could such a thing even work?
I dunno, maybe you're tired of this so uninterested in writing such a thing, but I feel like so many people act like the answers to this stuff are both obvious and easy to implement, and I know that's not true, and would be interested in the view from the front lines.
- wpietri 4y agoThat sounds like several books worth of writing, so I'll pass, but I'm glad to take a quick swing at the points you mentioned. There is a real digital public square: the internet. Anybody can publish anything. Anybody, private companies included, can help people publish. But all of those people have freedom of association. Nobody has to use a particular publisher, and none of those publishers have to publish anything they don't want to. Many popular platforms have started out with a "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos. I was part of one of those, bianca.com, which won a webby in 1997 and was gone by 2000. The lesson of every one of those, ours included, is that you can't have all the kinds of speech in one place. E.g., Twitter can have black people or people who shout abuse at black people. So the question for any platform is: who are you ok excluding? This is not a new lesson: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522 https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952... I think it only feels new in the digital context because people often start from a assume-spherical-cows perspective. Which can be adequate if you're building an ecommerce system or something. But when building tools to shift society online, it's hopelessly naive. So I'd be interested to read a "real digital public square" proposal that started from actual human behaviors. Say, people who studied physical public squares, their impacts, how they're regulated, and the social, non-legal mechanisms that keep them from just being filled with nazis, spam, and porn. But the ones that come out of the same naivete that we had in the mid-1990s or that Jack and Zuck had a decade later? We know what happens, and it never works out well.