23 ms·

> Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out... we need to let go of this mindset that there are undesirables

by aliqot 4y ago

> Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out... we need to let go of this mindset that there are undesirables in this world. there will always be a 'stable diffusion' seeking equilibrium between the places that censor and the places that dont, and the people impacted by those rule parameters will move to the places that dont censor, which will bring non mainstream ideals. Non mainstream ideals are the essence of what solves hard problems.

manholio 4y ago
> there are undesirables in this world. Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  There's a big difference between: > I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. and > Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Where pre listing categories and ideas that are explicitly wrongthink, versus people able to participate in a community following guidelines and an etiquette. It's not at all funny or surprising, that each community that adopts the latter, find the list growing until it's a niche community by exclusion. The idea that any meeting place that says it's for "free thinking" or "all ideas" is a mistake. Most communities want to stick to some niche topic and use the "open" phrasing to try to grow any participation at all.
  - manholio 4y ago
    You won't get to the point where neo-nazis demonstrate inability to participate in a civil community following guidelines and etiquette. The mere tolerance of them will drive legitimate users away, people by large DO NOT practice freedom of speech. Ignoring that reality is an ideological fantasy, you either blacklist or will be blacklisted.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Yes. Normally, I do not think it has to be explicitly said, but this time it may be necessary. Speech that is not offensive does not require protection. If I say sun is shining, people will not try to deplatform me. Offensive ( and legal ) speech might cause that to happen. This is not acceptable and not part of the promise of this nation. << Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users. And this is where some universal standards are necessary. But right now it is just wild west of internal guidelines and moderator's mood ( FB level 3 violent rhetoric or whatever Orwellian language they used to describe it comes to mind ). Parent is right. The idea of undesirables has to be let go. The public square belongs to everyone. Companies with a reach in billions can't pretend to not be a public square.
  - Hallucinaut 4y ago
    If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users. If one compels a Twitter to host things it has decided people don't want to see, why aren't we compelling the Kochs and Murdoch's of the world to support equally "leftist" positions? It's frankly an incoherent position that Twitter should be compelled to behave a certain way and yet Rupert can continue spouting his propaganda for literal generations unimpeded. It's still an absolute dumpster fire regardless.
    - brnaftr361 4y ago
      > If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users. I don't think that's the case, honestly, it's a pretty explanation, but people aren't on these platforms for that, they're on these platforms because it's where come critical mass was hit, and from that tipping point these apparati were ossified. And as they became a nucleation point for all of this, their volume grew, and with that so did the content - which is crucial if content generation on the platform respects the 1% rule. And that new content is what creates the feedback loop, which is also ostensibly directly proportional with the size viola, positive feedback loop to some arbitrary user saturation point. For example, some Youtubers have discussed it, but relocation would be a huge investment, and quite a bit of their data would be lost because they don't have archives that run back to the inception of the channel. In much the same way reputation, clout, followers and et cetera would actually go through translation losses as someone or some company transitioned from A to B, and servicing two platforms is more difficult than one (which will likely not be lucrative). It's a huge moat. >If one compels a Twitter... What is the actual end of this? You're not eliminating these people, nor their opinions. You're alienating them. The best case scenario is a dialectic which ultimately causes them to question their viewpoint, not to reinforce it by arbitrarily castigating them and exiling them from the public discourse. In the case where some platform does remove them, they'll find another with less criticism - an echochamber - which, to wit, only stands to exacerbate the problem. It seems less about some class of deplorables and more about their observers. As to their rationale, the primary motive I suspect, is profit via demographic sprawl, not some humanitarian concern. And this can be imputed to the individual as much as the corporation or institution. By my reckoning this is a hazard in and of itself because it's purely superficial and thus both misguided and misapprehended - one half of that becoming concrete realizations of naive intervention and the other setting some anti-human benchmark that doesn't actually make sense. And of course the feedback people and institutions read is from some extremely small proportion of the population so it's already set up for a form of extremity by default. And is anybody really defending ultrawealthy individuals in such a way? I don't know anybody that really condones the idea that wealth should be able to have a hard and cheap translation into hard power as it does in this instance. And there's also the fact that Twitter is a legal fiction, whose foundation is rooted in not just the concepts of property rights outlined and enforced by the US Government, but additionally is accessed and deployed through a heavily subsidized technology that was previously publicly owned and developed with taxpayer dollars. The Kochs are private persons, period.
asoneth 4y ago
I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. Given the paradox of tolerance, every community is faced with the binary choice between kicking them out or becoming nothing but them. (Like how a bar that is welcoming to Nazi patrons eventually becomes a Nazi bar.) But if people who are engaging in good-faith discussions get banned or downvoted simply because they have different opinions or perspectives then I agree that this produces a damaging homogeneity. Striking the right balance is critical but is also challengingly subjective, so I get why many people gravitate to extremes.
- brigandish 4y ago
  They're on a social media site, for chatting and expressing opinions - that's specifically not the paradox of tolerance. That, as Popper points out, is when speech and debate are given up in favour of violence.
  - asoneth 4y ago
    When it comes to the "the utterance of intolerant philosophies" Popper suggested that "we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force". Specifically if: "they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols" Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence. Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing? Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?
    - brigandish 4y ago

by aliqot 4y ago

manholio 4y ago

> there are undesirables in this world. Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.

Supermancho 4y ago
There's a big difference between: > I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. and > Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Where pre listing categories and ideas that are explicitly wrongthink, versus people able to participate in a community following guidelines and an etiquette. It's not at all funny or surprising, that each community that adopts the latter, find the list growing until it's a niche community by exclusion. The idea that any meeting place that says it's for "free thinking" or "all ideas" is a mistake. Most communities want to stick to some niche topic and use the "open" phrasing to try to grow any participation at all.
- manholio 4y ago
  You won't get to the point where neo-nazis demonstrate inability to participate in a civil community following guidelines and etiquette. The mere tolerance of them will drive legitimate users away, people by large DO NOT practice freedom of speech. Ignoring that reality is an ideological fantasy, you either blacklist or will be blacklisted.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Yes. Normally, I do not think it has to be explicitly said, but this time it may be necessary. Speech that is not offensive does not require protection. If I say sun is shining, people will not try to deplatform me. Offensive ( and legal ) speech might cause that to happen. This is not acceptable and not part of the promise of this nation. << Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users. And this is where some universal standards are necessary. But right now it is just wild west of internal guidelines and moderator's mood ( FB level 3 violent rhetoric or whatever Orwellian language they used to describe it comes to mind ). Parent is right. The idea of undesirables has to be let go. The public square belongs to everyone. Companies with a reach in billions can't pretend to not be a public square.
- Hallucinaut 4y ago
  If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users. If one compels a Twitter to host things it has decided people don't want to see, why aren't we compelling the Kochs and Murdoch's of the world to support equally "leftist" positions? It's frankly an incoherent position that Twitter should be compelled to behave a certain way and yet Rupert can continue spouting his propaganda for literal generations unimpeded. It's still an absolute dumpster fire regardless.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    > If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users. I don't think that's the case, honestly, it's a pretty explanation, but people aren't on these platforms for that, they're on these platforms because it's where come critical mass was hit, and from that tipping point these apparati were ossified. And as they became a nucleation point for all of this, their volume grew, and with that so did the content - which is crucial if content generation on the platform respects the 1% rule. And that new content is what creates the feedback loop, which is also ostensibly directly proportional with the size viola, positive feedback loop to some arbitrary user saturation point. For example, some Youtubers have discussed it, but relocation would be a huge investment, and quite a bit of their data would be lost because they don't have archives that run back to the inception of the channel. In much the same way reputation, clout, followers and et cetera would actually go through translation losses as someone or some company transitioned from A to B, and servicing two platforms is more difficult than one (which will likely not be lucrative). It's a huge moat. >If one compels a Twitter... What is the actual end of this? You're not eliminating these people, nor their opinions. You're alienating them. The best case scenario is a dialectic which ultimately causes them to question their viewpoint, not to reinforce it by arbitrarily castigating them and exiling them from the public discourse. In the case where some platform does remove them, they'll find another with less criticism - an echochamber - which, to wit, only stands to exacerbate the problem. It seems less about some class of deplorables and more about their observers. As to their rationale, the primary motive I suspect, is profit via demographic sprawl, not some humanitarian concern. And this can be imputed to the individual as much as the corporation or institution. By my reckoning this is a hazard in and of itself because it's purely superficial and thus both misguided and misapprehended - one half of that becoming concrete realizations of naive intervention and the other setting some anti-human benchmark that doesn't actually make sense. And of course the feedback people and institutions read is from some extremely small proportion of the population so it's already set up for a form of extremity by default. And is anybody really defending ultrawealthy individuals in such a way? I don't know anybody that really condones the idea that wealth should be able to have a hard and cheap translation into hard power as it does in this instance. And there's also the fact that Twitter is a legal fiction, whose foundation is rooted in not just the concepts of property rights outlined and enforced by the US Government, but additionally is accessed and deployed through a heavily subsidized technology that was previously publicly owned and developed with taxpayer dollars. The Kochs are private persons, period.

asoneth 4y ago

I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. Given the paradox of tolerance, every community is faced with the binary choice between kicking them out or becoming nothing but them. (Like how a bar that is welcoming to Nazi patrons eventually becomes a Nazi bar.) But if people who are engaging in good-faith discussions get banned or downvoted simply because they have different opinions or perspectives then I agree that this produces a damaging homogeneity. Striking the right balance is critical but is also challengingly subjective, so I get why many people gravitate to extremes.

brigandish 4y ago
They're on a social media site, for chatting and expressing opinions - that's specifically not the paradox of tolerance. That, as Popper points out, is when speech and debate are given up in favour of violence.
- asoneth 4y ago
  When it comes to the "the utterance of intolerant philosophies" Popper suggested that "we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force". Specifically if: "they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols" Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence. Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing? Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?
  - brigandish 4y ago