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Censoring and moderating and content, as it relates to this lawsuit, is very expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it ranks pretty high in their cost chart. The

Censoring and moderating and content, as it relates to this lawsuit, is very expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it ranks pretty high in their cost chart. The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk. Well, if the politicians and the courts tell them they can't moderate political stuff, then the political risk has been removed. All that remains is the financial risk. Advertisers aversion to controversy is based on, I assume, their adherence to cultural norms. These norms are fluid. So I actually think these laws will give them the cover they need to stop doing something that they would prefer not to do. I also believe that we'll be litigating this for eons.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  People say this, but not long ago Twitter/Reddit/Youtube were basically a free for all for anything except porn. And their user numbers were skyrocketing at the time.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    Exactly. The court isn't saying you can't moderate out the cesspool posts. They are saying that you can't choose political sides.
    - guipsp 4y ago
      Every decision is inherently "political"
      - andrew_ 4y ago
        I often see this sentiment associated with those who wish to regulate political speech they find offensive. It's convenient if everything is political so that everything said can be regulated.
        krapp 4y ago
        Regulating political speech for whatever reason (including offense), should be considered a legitimate exercise of moderation. It happens on Hacker News all the time - political speech is only considered on topic if and when it contains evidence of a "new or interesting phenomenon," and even then, users will mod down anything they don't like. And given the quality of most political threads here, I don't think many people here would prefer it if that were allowed to run amok. If I'm running a car forum, I should be able to ban pro-Nazi rhetoric if I want, regardless of whether I find it offensive or merely technically off topic. Not every space on the internet needs to be /pol/.
        andrew_ 4y ago
        MiddleEndian 4y ago
        Yeah, internet content laws are becoming increasingly conflicting. On one hand, you have places that are making it more difficult to legally moderate websites. On the other, you have legislation like SESTA and FOSTA where websites are being held legally responsible for content that others may post on the website. Section 230 was an unusually great piece of internet legislation, and it's not great to see it start to crumble with these new changes. Just let every site be its own site.
        SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        I think quite literally lots of things are political. This discussion is political. Anything to talk about h1b visa is political. Immigration is political. The most offensive speech is arguably political speech, such as advocating for genocide.
    - slavak 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        You get invocations of the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy.
        slavak 4y ago
        Firstly, that is _not_ what reductio ad Hitlerum means. More importantly, it's not a fallacy. It's pretty well documented by now that what you get when you have a social network with very little moderation is, almost inevitably, a social network for Nazis: https://www.newsweek.com/nazis-free-speech-hate-crime-jews-social-media-gab-weev-668614 https://www.newsweek.com/nazis-free-speech-hate-crime-jews-s... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/voat-the-alt-right-reddit-is-circling-the-drain.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/voat-the-alt-right-r... https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456415-founder-i-wish-i-could-uncreate-8chan-due-to-neo-nazi-users/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456415-founder-i-wish-... Just because people like bringing up Nazis a little too often doesn't mean every reference to Nazis is fallacious. Sometimes, it really is about [neo-]Nazis.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        The exact fallacy that occurs (almost all the time) when you invoke Hitler is called poisoning the well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well). You are trying to make a position indefensible by associating it with an indefensible thing, without properly justifying the connection. In this case, it might also be a slippery slope fallacy. The US has had unmoderated social networks, referred to as pubs, churches, clubs, and town squares, for the last few hundred years. Nazis never gained prominence in any of those fora. It is not a given that reducing the level of moderation leads to Nazis taking over. The truth is that Nazism is such a distasteful ideology that it pretty much never takes over the discourse in places where it is allowed. Rather, Nazis end up creating small hate groups in all sorts of fora, including the heavily-moderated ones (Facebook and Twitter) where they use euphemisms. Here are a few other sources for you about Nazi communities on mainstream social networks: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/neo-nazis-facebook-theyre-making-money-80225218 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/neo-nazis-facebook... https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/07/07/we-make-mistakes-twitters-embrace-extreme-far-right https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/07/07/we-make-mista... About the alternate platforms you cited: I signed up for Gab in 2016 (internet drama voyeurism can be fun), and I got off in 2017. Neo-Nazis on Gab were about as prominent as neo-Nazis on Twitter: a few small neo-Nazi communities existed on both platforms. Gab had a lot of right-wing/pro-Trump users, and was also weirdly Christian, but there weren't many actual neo-Nazis. A platform for right-wingers isn't automatically a social network for Nazis. The same is true of Voat, by the way. It was started when /r/fatpeoplehate and a bunch of racist subreddits were banned, and it attracted a ton of trolls and mean people, but very few actual Nazis. AFAIK /r/nazi migrated to Voat, so there were some Nazis there, but Voat was not a "social network for Nazis" by any means. Reddit still has many Nazi subreddits with far more users than Voat's Nazi groups at their peak. I know that /pol/ on 8chan, at least, was full of Nazis and I think it was one of the biggest communities on 8chan. That was a social network for Nazis. Gab and Voat (as well as other right-wing-focused social networks like Parler) ended up being the target of journalists and left-wing activists because there weren't many people they valued on those platforms, and a lot of people they wanted to hurt. They continue to largely ignore the presence of distasteful communities on Twitter and Facebook (see Jan 6 organizing as a good example of this - it was attributed to Parler, but most of it actually happened on Facebook and Twitter) and put other fora under a microscope to try to find Nazis - particularly if the forum has an overt right-wing bias. The presence of a small community of Nazis is then used to attack and take down the entire platform. Nazis are on every platform in small, niche communities. They are surprisingly hard to ban. They don't take over platforms no matter how free their speech is. They are shitty people and their ideas are wrong, and everyone knows that.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Where did they say you can't choose a side? It's also possible that I moderate content, the majority is conservative, and I'm not choosing a side.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    That’s just saying “until it became a problem, it wasn’t a problem”. Those sites were a free for all, up until it became a problem. And then they were no longer free for alls.
    - amatecha 4y ago
      Yeah, this is exactly right. Stronger moderation started happening because more and more toxic/abusive BS became prevalent. I only really experienced true "hostile attacks from a complete stranger" on Twitter in the last year or two, and I've been a heavy user of it since 2007. (tbh my usage has dwindled and I'm wayyy more focused on Mastodon now, which thus far fosters a stronger sense of community than Twitter will ever be able to)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mattnewton 4y ago
    And after they attempted to clean up, they were able to attract more advertisers and mainstream users the advertisers wanted to reach. Doesn’t the story of those sites back the person above you’s point?
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    > anything except porn That's moderation. Both because they are actively excluding certain content, but also because 'porn' can be subjective and so decisions have to be made about what does and does not qualify.
    - intrasight 4y ago
      Porn is and has always been very political
  - intrasight 4y ago
    Reddit is still a free for all - including porn
    - DuskStar 4y ago
    - philippejara 4y ago
      It's not even close, admins ban subs all the time, mods are under strict grip of admins on how they need to mod thing otherwise they get replaced, there are cases where admins straight up say that mod teams need to get more people in the team or they'll lose the sub, i've seen subs with automods straight up saying that they need to be careful with what is written otherwise they'll be banned. The huge Aimee Challenor thing, that lead to people being banned anywhere the name was uttered is just the super high profile example I know, i'm sure reddit users would be able to show more smaller cases. Just want to make it clear, I'm not claiming this control is good or bad, there are good reasons for and against moderation, but reddit is not even close to a free for all. [0]: https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired-hundreds-subreddits-private-protest-1578657 https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired...
- netheril96 4y ago
  Why not give users the power of moderation? Currently the website owner makes the decision for me about what content I should not be seeing. I want instead all or at least almost all content preserved and the ability to create and subscribe to blocklists. The website can have a default blocklist active to make it palatable for the majority.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    There's a weird bias towards "we need a daddy to tell us how to talk". Maybe it's because moderation is too hard for mere crowdsource+algorithms and maybe it isn't. I dunno. And maybe the owners just want to keep that sweet fascist option open.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      IMHO, the deeper aversion is because user-driven moderation goes hand in hand with user-driven ranking. Which is turn makes it harder to non-obviously put your hand on the scales and insert paid content into high visibility feeds. If TikTok inserts a well-matched piece of paid content into a feed, who would even recognize? If HN inserts a piece of paid content onto the front page, people tend to notice.
      - swayvil 4y ago
        I'm not seeing the hand-in-hand here. We're looking at 2 different moderation processes. Daddy Voting There is no necessary connection that I can see.
      - kelnos 4y ago
        Perhaps that's how it should be, though? Paid content -- even if I'm required to see it in my feed and can't filter it out -- should be marked as such. HN has something similar to "paid" content: YC alum companies are allowed to post hiring notices that end up on the front page, and decay down the page according to a pre-determined algorithm. They're obvious in that you can't comment or vote on them, but HN does allow them to be hidden. I think that's the right way to do things; if HN allowed YC companies to post on the front page, and made it look like they were regular posts that got organically upvoted, it would reduce my trust in HN. Any social media platform that puts paid content in a feed, while trying to make it look like regular content, would also lose my trust.
- nomdep 4y ago
  Just don’t follow anyone on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram with those views, how is that a ceespool?
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Even if you don't follow people you still see user content
  - diydsp 4y ago
    Websites routinely disperse unconnected users' messages to encourage discussion. Hence the youtube alt-right indoctrination spiral.
- mrshadowgoose 4y ago
  A possible solution to this is to allow any user to be a moderator, and to allow other users who want moderation to subscribe to one or moderation "feeds" from other users. If one wants to wade through the degenerate cesspool of content, they'd have that option. If one wants to only see fluffy non-hateful things, they could subscribe to moderation feeds that achieve that. The notion that we can impose a single perspective of "good content" and "bad content" onto millions of people, with different perspectives, is simply asinine.
  - 8note 4y ago
    This solution would run into the same problem. X moderator doesn't give preferential enough treatment to conservatives, and therefore must be stopped
    - mrshadowgoose 4y ago
      On the contrary, moderation feeds would almost certainly be completely protected by free speech laws, as they would essentially be the expressed opinions of individual people.
      - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
        What free speech laws? Conservatives keep screeching free speech in the realm of a private entity and it simply doesn't apply.
        mrshadowgoose 4y ago
        This discussion is specifically scoped to the legal system in the United States. If you, as a US individual, express the opinion that "I do not like post with unique ID X on platform Y because of reasons a,b,c", that would be protected speech. A moderation feed would be equivalent to a series of such statements. If other users decide to subscribe to your moderation feed, and have matching posts automatically hidden, that would specifically be the choice of that individual user, and not a private company. One of the greatest scams governments around the world have managed to pull is making "free speech" a politically partisan issue. There are two sides to it though, but it's not conservative vs. liberal, it's the common people vs. governments and corporations.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk. What about the legal risk of hosting illegal content?
- intrasight 4y ago
  Yes certainly. But I was referring to moderation that is the topic of this lawsuit.
celestialcheese 4y ago
Hugely expensive. Zuck mentioned in the rogan episode they spend roughly $5b annual on "Defense" aka moderation and safety. To put it in perspective, that's roughly in line with what the defense budgets of Switzerland and Mexico.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.

fallingknife 4y ago
People say this, but not long ago Twitter/Reddit/Youtube were basically a free for all for anything except porn. And their user numbers were skyrocketing at the time.
- intrasight 4y ago
  Exactly. The court isn't saying you can't moderate out the cesspool posts. They are saying that you can't choose political sides.
  - guipsp 4y ago
    Every decision is inherently "political"
    - andrew_ 4y ago
      I often see this sentiment associated with those who wish to regulate political speech they find offensive. It's convenient if everything is political so that everything said can be regulated.
      - krapp 4y ago
        Regulating political speech for whatever reason (including offense), should be considered a legitimate exercise of moderation. It happens on Hacker News all the time - political speech is only considered on topic if and when it contains evidence of a "new or interesting phenomenon," and even then, users will mod down anything they don't like. And given the quality of most political threads here, I don't think many people here would prefer it if that were allowed to run amok. If I'm running a car forum, I should be able to ban pro-Nazi rhetoric if I want, regardless of whether I find it offensive or merely technically off topic. Not every space on the internet needs to be /pol/.
        andrew_ 4y ago
        MiddleEndian 4y ago
        Yeah, internet content laws are becoming increasingly conflicting. On one hand, you have places that are making it more difficult to legally moderate websites. On the other, you have legislation like SESTA and FOSTA where websites are being held legally responsible for content that others may post on the website. Section 230 was an unusually great piece of internet legislation, and it's not great to see it start to crumble with these new changes. Just let every site be its own site.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        I think quite literally lots of things are political. This discussion is political. Anything to talk about h1b visa is political. Immigration is political. The most offensive speech is arguably political speech, such as advocating for genocide.
  - slavak 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      You get invocations of the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy.
      - slavak 4y ago
        Firstly, that is _not_ what reductio ad Hitlerum means. More importantly, it's not a fallacy. It's pretty well documented by now that what you get when you have a social network with very little moderation is, almost inevitably, a social network for Nazis: https://www.newsweek.com/nazis-free-speech-hate-crime-jews-social-media-gab-weev-668614 https://www.newsweek.com/nazis-free-speech-hate-crime-jews-s... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/voat-the-alt-right-reddit-is-circling-the-drain.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/voat-the-alt-right-r... https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456415-founder-i-wish-i-could-uncreate-8chan-due-to-neo-nazi-users/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456415-founder-i-wish-... Just because people like bringing up Nazis a little too often doesn't mean every reference to Nazis is fallacious. Sometimes, it really is about [neo-]Nazis.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        The exact fallacy that occurs (almost all the time) when you invoke Hitler is called poisoning the well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well). You are trying to make a position indefensible by associating it with an indefensible thing, without properly justifying the connection. In this case, it might also be a slippery slope fallacy. The US has had unmoderated social networks, referred to as pubs, churches, clubs, and town squares, for the last few hundred years. Nazis never gained prominence in any of those fora. It is not a given that reducing the level of moderation leads to Nazis taking over. The truth is that Nazism is such a distasteful ideology that it pretty much never takes over the discourse in places where it is allowed. Rather, Nazis end up creating small hate groups in all sorts of fora, including the heavily-moderated ones (Facebook and Twitter) where they use euphemisms. Here are a few other sources for you about Nazi communities on mainstream social networks: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/neo-nazis-facebook-theyre-making-money-80225218 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/neo-nazis-facebook... https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/07/07/we-make-mistakes-twitters-embrace-extreme-far-right https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/07/07/we-make-mista... About the alternate platforms you cited: I signed up for Gab in 2016 (internet drama voyeurism can be fun), and I got off in 2017. Neo-Nazis on Gab were about as prominent as neo-Nazis on Twitter: a few small neo-Nazi communities existed on both platforms. Gab had a lot of right-wing/pro-Trump users, and was also weirdly Christian, but there weren't many actual neo-Nazis. A platform for right-wingers isn't automatically a social network for Nazis. The same is true of Voat, by the way. It was started when /r/fatpeoplehate and a bunch of racist subreddits were banned, and it attracted a ton of trolls and mean people, but very few actual Nazis. AFAIK /r/nazi migrated to Voat, so there were some Nazis there, but Voat was not a "social network for Nazis" by any means. Reddit still has many Nazi subreddits with far more users than Voat's Nazi groups at their peak. I know that /pol/ on 8chan, at least, was full of Nazis and I think it was one of the biggest communities on 8chan. That was a social network for Nazis. Gab and Voat (as well as other right-wing-focused social networks like Parler) ended up being the target of journalists and left-wing activists because there weren't many people they valued on those platforms, and a lot of people they wanted to hurt. They continue to largely ignore the presence of distasteful communities on Twitter and Facebook (see Jan 6 organizing as a good example of this - it was attributed to Parler, but most of it actually happened on Facebook and Twitter) and put other fora under a microscope to try to find Nazis - particularly if the forum has an overt right-wing bias. The presence of a small community of Nazis is then used to attack and take down the entire platform. Nazis are on every platform in small, niche communities. They are surprisingly hard to ban. They don't take over platforms no matter how free their speech is. They are shitty people and their ideas are wrong, and everyone knows that.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Where did they say you can't choose a side? It's also possible that I moderate content, the majority is conservative, and I'm not choosing a side.
- mcphage 4y ago
  That’s just saying “until it became a problem, it wasn’t a problem”. Those sites were a free for all, up until it became a problem. And then they were no longer free for alls.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Yeah, this is exactly right. Stronger moderation started happening because more and more toxic/abusive BS became prevalent. I only really experienced true "hostile attacks from a complete stranger" on Twitter in the last year or two, and I've been a heavy user of it since 2007. (tbh my usage has dwindled and I'm wayyy more focused on Mastodon now, which thus far fosters a stronger sense of community than Twitter will ever be able to)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mattnewton 4y ago
  And after they attempted to clean up, they were able to attract more advertisers and mainstream users the advertisers wanted to reach. Doesn’t the story of those sites back the person above you’s point?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  > anything except porn That's moderation. Both because they are actively excluding certain content, but also because 'porn' can be subjective and so decisions have to be made about what does and does not qualify.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    Porn is and has always been very political
- intrasight 4y ago
  Reddit is still a free for all - including porn
  - DuskStar 4y ago
  - philippejara 4y ago
    It's not even close, admins ban subs all the time, mods are under strict grip of admins on how they need to mod thing otherwise they get replaced, there are cases where admins straight up say that mod teams need to get more people in the team or they'll lose the sub, i've seen subs with automods straight up saying that they need to be careful with what is written otherwise they'll be banned. The huge Aimee Challenor thing, that lead to people being banned anywhere the name was uttered is just the super high profile example I know, i'm sure reddit users would be able to show more smaller cases. Just want to make it clear, I'm not claiming this control is good or bad, there are good reasons for and against moderation, but reddit is not even close to a free for all. [0]: https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired-hundreds-subreddits-private-protest-1578657 https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired...
netheril96 4y ago
Why not give users the power of moderation? Currently the website owner makes the decision for me about what content I should not be seeing. I want instead all or at least almost all content preserved and the ability to create and subscribe to blocklists. The website can have a default blocklist active to make it palatable for the majority.
- swayvil 4y ago
  There's a weird bias towards "we need a daddy to tell us how to talk". Maybe it's because moderation is too hard for mere crowdsource+algorithms and maybe it isn't. I dunno. And maybe the owners just want to keep that sweet fascist option open.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    IMHO, the deeper aversion is because user-driven moderation goes hand in hand with user-driven ranking. Which is turn makes it harder to non-obviously put your hand on the scales and insert paid content into high visibility feeds. If TikTok inserts a well-matched piece of paid content into a feed, who would even recognize? If HN inserts a piece of paid content onto the front page, people tend to notice.
    - swayvil 4y ago
      I'm not seeing the hand-in-hand here. We're looking at 2 different moderation processes. Daddy Voting There is no necessary connection that I can see.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Perhaps that's how it should be, though? Paid content -- even if I'm required to see it in my feed and can't filter it out -- should be marked as such. HN has something similar to "paid" content: YC alum companies are allowed to post hiring notices that end up on the front page, and decay down the page according to a pre-determined algorithm. They're obvious in that you can't comment or vote on them, but HN does allow them to be hidden. I think that's the right way to do things; if HN allowed YC companies to post on the front page, and made it look like they were regular posts that got organically upvoted, it would reduce my trust in HN. Any social media platform that puts paid content in a feed, while trying to make it look like regular content, would also lose my trust.
nomdep 4y ago
Just don’t follow anyone on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram with those views, how is that a ceespool?
- themitigating 4y ago
  Even if you don't follow people you still see user content
- diydsp 4y ago
  Websites routinely disperse unconnected users' messages to encourage discussion. Hence the youtube alt-right indoctrination spiral.
mrshadowgoose 4y ago
A possible solution to this is to allow any user to be a moderator, and to allow other users who want moderation to subscribe to one or moderation "feeds" from other users. If one wants to wade through the degenerate cesspool of content, they'd have that option. If one wants to only see fluffy non-hateful things, they could subscribe to moderation feeds that achieve that. The notion that we can impose a single perspective of "good content" and "bad content" onto millions of people, with different perspectives, is simply asinine.
- 8note 4y ago
  This solution would run into the same problem. X moderator doesn't give preferential enough treatment to conservatives, and therefore must be stopped
  - mrshadowgoose 4y ago
    On the contrary, moderation feeds would almost certainly be completely protected by free speech laws, as they would essentially be the expressed opinions of individual people.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
      What free speech laws? Conservatives keep screeching free speech in the realm of a private entity and it simply doesn't apply.
      - mrshadowgoose 4y ago
        This discussion is specifically scoped to the legal system in the United States. If you, as a US individual, express the opinion that "I do not like post with unique ID X on platform Y because of reasons a,b,c", that would be protected speech. A moderation feed would be equivalent to a series of such statements. If other users decide to subscribe to your moderation feed, and have matching posts automatically hidden, that would specifically be the choice of that individual user, and not a private company. One of the greatest scams governments around the world have managed to pull is making "free speech" a politically partisan issue. There are two sides to it though, but it's not conservative vs. liberal, it's the common people vs. governments and corporations.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk. What about the legal risk of hosting illegal content?

intrasight 4y ago
Yes certainly. But I was referring to moderation that is the topic of this lawsuit.

celestialcheese 4y ago

Hugely expensive. Zuck mentioned in the rogan episode they spend roughly $5b annual on "Defense" aka moderation and safety. To put it in perspective, that's roughly in line with what the defense budgets of Switzerland and Mexico.