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Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? What good does it do? > The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that

• stale2002 4y ago
  > Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? To ensure that ideas that people want to be censored or deplatformed can be evaluated by others who want to see what they are. If people are not able to read oposing viewpoints, it makes them less able to understand them, and why they are wrong.
• shafyy 4y ago
  > Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? What good does it do? This is exactly the right question to ask. I'm convinced that it's not possible to have constructive "free speech" social media platform. There's always the need for moderation.
  • btbuildem 4y ago
    I agree, but I'd like to play with what "moderation" means. A great example of when moderation fails / is abused is Reddit, or the big socials like IG. The bots can be overly sensitive / have lots of false positives, and the individuals in charge of moderation are not accountable to anyone (except maybe advertisers, indirectly). I would like to see a platform where moderation exists, but it's "opt-in" only. Meaning, the mods / bots can tag / categorize user posts, and other users can control the visibility of tagged material. This way everything -- the most vile, twisted, hateful and disturbing things are still permitted a place to exist, but they're effectively shadowbanned by individual choice. Start with some sane defaults, and allow people to peel back the lid on the box of horrors if they want to. This could work with age-restrictions (users below a certain age cannot see certain tags) as well as satisfy advertisers that their ads are shown next to the most innoffensive, oatmeal-bland content (they choose tags next to which their ads are never shown).
  • mariusor 4y ago
    I think moderation should be about the words that are being said, not the ideas that are being discussed. A free speech platform should allow a wide range of topics, but it's not expected to stand for all manner of trolling and bad faith argumentation. I think that conflating the two is tripping a lot of people up in the debate about the topic.
    • btbuildem 4y ago
      So how does that work when a hip-hop artist says the n-word vs a neonazi says the n-word?
    • shafyy 4y ago
      I disagree. There are limits to what ideas constitute free speech in many modern countries. As an extreme example, an idea that puts forward genocide as acceptable form of action should never be allowed under "free speech", even if it's said with nice words. This and other examples are ruled under law in many developed countries.
      • francisofascii 4y ago
        > an idea that puts forward genocide as acceptable form of action should never be allowed under "free speech" See I have a problem with the word "never". How about "rarely" or at least "once". A terrible idea should be given an audience once. Let it it be quickly refuted, then go back to better conversations. If someone brings it up again, point them back to the earlier discussion. That way it is established why it is a bad idea.
        • themitigating 4y ago
          "That way it is established why it is a bad idea." Is that how most arguments on the internet end?
          • jat850 4y ago
            In practice, almost never. Internet arguments seldom result in both sides agreeing on a single outcome. Nobody is convincing anyone else of anything on the internet (most of the time).
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    > I'm convinced that it's not possible to have constructive I don't know that when the rubber hits the road people are meaningfully trying to make a constructive free speech platform. The nihilism is the point.
• mrtksn 4y ago
  I think the problem lies in the impunity, not in the free speech itself. IMHO people should be allowed to say everything but they must accumulate the reputation for saying it. If someone is a racist bigot, they shouldn't be physically restrained(deleting posts is like physically covering someones' mouth) from being bigots but they should definitely be known for it. Then it's up to the community to decide how to interact with those people. That's how we do it in real life and works pretty well. Another thing is the amplification: people pretending to be multiple people. This is also an issue, giving wrong impression about the state of the society and must be solved. Lastly, we need some kind of spread management. We have the problem of BS getting huge traction and the correction getting no traction. Maybe everyone exposed to something should be re-exposed to the theme once there's a new development. For example, when people share someone's photo as a suspect and it turns out that the person in the photo is not the suspect, the platform can say "remember this Tweet? Yeah, there are some doubts about it. Just letting you know". The implementation of it wouldn't need a ministry of truth but an algo to track theme developments. IMHO if Musk manages to solve these few problems, which I think he can, a free speech social media is possible.
  • madeofpalk 4y ago
    Please, deleting a tweet is hardly being 'physically restrained' > Than it's up to the community to decide how t interact with those people. Twitter is a private company, and it chooses to run it's service how it wants. The government avoids actually physically restraining racist bigots, and lets the community decide how to deal and interact with those people. Some may chose to harbor them (Parlor, 4chan, etc), and others (like twitter) may opt to not host them. It's not a huge social injustice if you're not allowed to tweet. Feel free to go to one of the millions of other websites, or your start your own (it's easier to do this than ever!) and see who's interested in what you have to say. > Maybe everyone exposed to something should be re-exposed to the theme once there's a new development. You're just reinventing content moderation!
    • mrtksn 4y ago
      I don't accept that content deletion is a way to go. When an offensive content is deleted we lose the ability to jude it for urselves. The content must remain but be strictly attached to a persona so the persona can be "judged" rightfully. In real life, when we deal with these people we want to know what they did. It gives fidelity, unlike "the person said something that violates rule 4 section 3". We should stop pretending that we are not humans and embrace the human ways of dealing with human problems. There's nothing human in undoing speech. And no, attaching follow up to organic content is not moderation.
• tlb 4y ago
  A platform that hosted both objectionable speech and regular speech together might be tolerable to read. But the most of the regular speech ends up on popular platforms than ban objectionable speech, so the free-speech sites are left with mostly the objectionable stuff, which makes them pretty unpleasant to read. It makes it hard to start a new platform. People start free-speech platforms with good intentions of having open debate about controversial topics. But they quickly get overrun by hate mongers and trolls, and become too noxious for most people to read. Intentional or not, it's a good strategy by the existing platforms to kick out the nasty people, ensuring that they're first to sign up for every new social network.
  • shadowgovt 4y ago
    The hidden piece of the puzzle here is that objectionable speech pushes regular speech out. Most users don't want to wade through toxicity to get to signal. If they're discussing a topic of interest, say baking, and someone comes in and starts ranting on how a vast global conspiracy made up of surprisingly-homogeneous ethnicity given its global scale is pushing up the price of yeast to weaken the market for white bread, either the moderators squelch that noise or people who want to talk about baking go somewhere else to do it. Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.
    • tlb 4y ago
      I don’t think bad speech pushes out good speech directly. Rather, it pushes out the audience, and the good speakers follow. The end result is the same, but it’s important to understand exactly where the mechanism is failing if you want to fix it.
    • fzeroracer 4y ago
      > Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true. This is true, but unfortunately the same mistakes keep being made because people don't pay attention to the history of the internet or didn't grow up during that era. We've known that completely unfettered discussion leads to self destruction since the Usenet era. But the lessons aren't heeded or ignored, so we get people that either stay ignorant or learn the hard way.
• dmix 4y ago
  When only the rejects use the sites of course it's going to be full of bad content. That doesn't mean there isn't value in free speech being better valued on mainstream platforms.
  • pavlov 4y ago
    > “When only the rejects use the sites of course it's going to be full of bad content.” The problem with this theory is that 4chan is older than both Twitter and Facebook. If unmoderated speech created an inherently better platform, surely 4chan would have captured the market a long time ago and cut off commercial alternatives like Craigslist did.
    • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      …or capturing the market would have flooded it in inane speech, rendering it no better (or different) than anywhere else.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      And 4chan got much worse over time, there's no reason it had to be rejects at all. The toxicity was entirely self directed.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      Didn't 4chan start off largely as castaways from Something Awful? Your point is valid though. 4chan had an enormous amount of time to become the shining star of how great an absolute[1] free speech site could be, but still manages to be a cesspool. This should be a neon hint, but people keep thinking that they're going to invent the one free speech site that doesn't end up toxic. 1: Also as others point out, even 4chan moderates, however lightly.
  • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    When given the choice between platforms, why do you think the majority continues to congregate on the more restrictive ones?
• seti0Cha 4y ago
  > Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? What good does it do? I think the better question is, what harm does not having a free speech platform do? I think the answer is fairly evident when you look at how the ability to control speech has been used throughout history. The justification, I would also suggest, has always been the same as the ones being advanced now. People act like it was social media that revealed the fact that the masses will say terrible things when allowed, but in fact that was the common opinion for most of history.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    We have a free speech platform though. Practically everyone has decided not to use it. I think the echo chamber that self selecting which moderators you want has created huge problems, but we can't force people to use 4chan when they don't want to.
    • seti0Cha 4y ago
      I think you misunderstand my position. I'm not saying twitter should be unmoderated, I'm responding to the question as to why free speech is important. I would say that the internet itself is a free speech platform, and that's a very good thing. I'm perfectly content to let people converse under whatever rules they choose as long as there is choice. I will say in regard to twitter though that excessive policing of speech creates a segregation of audiences and consequently increases echo chambers, which is probably not what those speech police were trying to accomplish. I think it would be healthier for society if it were a little more tolerant, but that's not really related to my position on free speech.