20 ms·

Moderation is different from censorship

• datavirtue 4y ago
  I miss editors.
• Ptchd 4y ago
  Some moderation isn't censorship, but most is. Mostly only illegal content should be removed.
  • lesuorac 4y ago
    > Mostly only illegal content should be removed. And that's how you end up with a Nazi bar. Sure a swastica tattoo isn't illegal; nor is saying death to jews. But most people don't want to drink in that environment so if you don't kick (censor) the nazi's out then your business will not get non-nazi patronage (and maybe go under). The "free market" has determined that censorship is desired.
    • Ptchd 4y ago
      change the laws then...
      • krapp 4y ago
        [flagged]
        • brigandish 4y ago
        • Ptchd 4y ago
          > people like you I think that there is too many laws already... I was talking to someone else People like you are probably working for the Government Either way, you don't know what people like me are.
    • csande17 4y ago
      The entire purpose of the article is to refute this exact argument.
      • andrewflnr 4y ago
        Eh, kind of. The distinction between moderation and censorship he uses doesn't really exist in a physical space. You can't set a flag in your profile to not see Nazis at the next table in the bar. Also, he explicitly avoids the topic of whether Nazis should be censored so they can't spread harmful ideas rather than just because they're unpleasant to be around, which is also applicable to the bar situation even if GP didn't explicitly cite it.
        • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
          Nazi is a such an overused label that it is bordering hilarious. My personal experience shows that people wearing swastika tattoos are no more dangerous than those dressed openly LGBTQ+. Evil is more nuanced and resourceful than that.
          • smw 4y ago
            Is it possible that you're not in the groups that Nazis tend to discriminate against, and thus their behavior towards you doesn't feel dangerous?
    • akamaine 4y ago
      > Sure a swastica tattoo isn't illegal; nor is saying death to jews. Idk where u from, but here in Russia it's not only socially unacceptable but is also a literal crime which falls under incitement of violence and rehabilitation of Nazi ideology.
      • watwut 4y ago
        There are plenty of neonazi in Russia. White supremacy is not exactly uncommon there. (And I am not even speaking about what is done by that state abroad here. Just internal groups.)
        • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
          This is laughably incorrect. White supremacy is a Western concept. Russians looking top-down on Caucasians (from Caucasus, not in the American sense of the word) or Central Asians is a thing, but there are nuances, e.g. the relationship with Chechens.
          • watwut 4y ago
            Or gypsies or blacks (the few they met) or non Russian whites ... especially Ukrainians. And the straight up hate toward anything lgbt including whole imported cultural war rhetorics. There is quite overlap in ideology, except it whole deal is more aggressive in Russia. I mean, I am talking about people who self define as such. Like very seriously, I am not saying Russia has Aryan supremacists. But it has strong enough and big enough groups that are so similar in everything except who gets to be on top, that "white supremacy" is perfectly good descriptor in English speaking forum. And neonazi fits perfectly their group behavior. Down to similar symbolism and preferred music.
      • throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
        that's a great argument against such laws
    • inglor_cz 4y ago
      The difference is that a bar is a physical place, you cannot isolate yourself from the Nazi on the next stool and shut your ears against his tirades. In the digital space, filters work just fine. Your messages will live in the same database as the Nazi's, but you can be completely isolated from seeing them if you set up your filters accordingly.
      • watwut 4y ago
        This would work of nazi did not went out of their way to harass target groups. However, they do it constantly until those leave. And then they spread lied about those who left or attempt to move it into IRL. These groups really like to spread lies about people and events. They love to manipulate third parties or institutions into attacking you too.
        • inglor_cz 4y ago
          Active harassment should probably be a bannable offense, few people will dispute that. What they will dispute is the mechanism used for banning; AI is notoriously bad at discerning human intentions.
          • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
            Even humans are bad at this, what would you expect of the poor AI.
  • ordu 4y ago
    > Mostly only illegal content should be removed. Did you read the article? Removing illegal content (like how to make a bomb) is a censorship, because sender and receiver are happy with it. We need to bring arguments like "the good of a society" to justify removing illegal content. But harassment, threats and suchlike no one wants to get. Sender may be happy to send it, while receiver is not happy to receive. We need not to resort to a good for a society explaining, why these should be banned.
    • bawolff 4y ago
      > But harassment, threats and suchlike no one wants to get. Sender may be happy to send it, while receiver is not happy to receive. We need not to resort to a good for a society explaining, why these should be banned. How many people like getting criticism of any form? Should we ban all criticism?
      • ordu 4y ago
        No we shouldn't.
      • andsoitis 4y ago
        While “don’t like to get” isn’t the right principle to decide what to ban, suggesting an equivalence between harassment and criticism is not pretty.
        • bawolff 4y ago
          I don't think the difference is all that clear cut, or at least there is a lot of behaviour that has overlap where it is unclear which side things fall. Like take a protest (for whatever issue you want). Is that criticism or harrasment? Or both?
  • Lutger 4y ago
    It's the other way around, obviously.
    • Ptchd 4y ago
      You are probably right.... why delete illegal evidence
• lejind 4y ago
  • Georgelemental 4y ago
    Moderated. HN has a "showdead" option, I keep it enabled
    • josephcsible 4y ago
      That doesn't go quite as far as this article wants, since you still can't reply to dead posts even with that setting on.
• lejind 4y ago
  Is it possible to censor moderation or moderate censorship?
  • krapp 4y ago
    Yes and yes.
• AnnoyedComment 4y ago
• AnnoyedComment 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kmonsen 4y ago
  The article completely misses the point. Some middlemen like Twitter or Facebook does not want to be associated with certain images or point of view, perhaps because of advertising or user demographics or whatever reason, and they decide which content is ok or not. Both sender and receiver can want to have Trump tweets, but Twitter will not want that so they block it. I don’t think Twitter is wrong, and it is not really different from Apple not letting pornography into the App Store, but it is still deeply troubling to me at some level. And it is neither moderation like discussed in the article or censorship as discussed in the article.
  • brigandish 4y ago
    If they instituted the suggestions in the article and some journalist subsequently wrote a piece with "Anti-semitic tweets found next to Coke ads" or whatnot, wouldn't we all just shrug and say "then change your filters"? It becomes as much a non-story as "Children watching telly at midnight exposed to sexual content paid for by BigCo ads".
    • kmonsen 4y ago
      Maybe, but they are not taking that chance. Cancel culture is a real thing even if we think it only happens to people or companies that deserve it.
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > Some middlemen like Twitter or Facebook does not want to be associated with certain images or point of view, perhaps because of advertising or user demographics And that's the precise point at which they cease to be a "middleman" and become a publisher.
    • kmonsen 4y ago
      That’s maybe true but also outside the point of the article. I was actually thinking of another case, the Hunter Biden laptop. All major news publishers decided not to report on it just before the election even though the story was obviously true and newsworthy. This was actually done by publishers, but still the important point here is that a story did not reach audiences even though maybe at least some of them wanted to see it and some people wanted to tell it like journalists in nytimes. The blockade was so effective that I thought it was a hoax until recently.
• andrewflnr 4y ago
  Glad to see someone suggesting, or at least hinting at, competitive moderation over the same message stream. That's probably part of the future. However, > preferably by offering moderation too cheap to meter this is not happening. Moderation, at least good moderation, is inherently labor intensive. It requires judgment, especially when people start specifically trying to find your corner cases, which is basically as soon as you start trying to scale. So good moderation will always be expensive (for someone, if not directly to the bulk of users, thanks HN mods).
• s9w 4y ago
• brigandish 4y ago
  As I've said for a long time, I don't mind moderation, I just want to be in charge of what I see. Give me the tools that the moderators have, let me be able to filter out bots at some confidence level; let me see "removed" posts, banned accounts; don't mess with my searches unless I've asked for that explicitly. Power to the people.
  • cafeinux 4y ago
    So, basically, you want moderation as it's described in the article. So, arguably, you mind about moderation as much as it's author, since that's their point.
    • brigandish 4y ago
      I read the article and second it, but I want more than that, I want the tools the current moderators have, not just ones they provide me. If they give me a tool, I want it to be as powerful as their tool, not a compromise. If I'm to moderate my own feed then why do I not get the tools of a moderator?
  • bergenty 4y ago
    I disagree. Comments with a certain tone set the mood for the entire forum generally leading to a poor overall use experience.
    • Kinrany 4y ago
      In tree-style conversations (Twitter, Reddit) they are contained to subtrees of already banned posts.
    • andrewflnr 4y ago
      Is your concern answered by ensuring that the default experience of a forum is moderated, until someone explicitly takes off the covers? Otherwise I can't fathom where you disagree with GP.
    • beebeepka 4y ago
• phpisthebest 4y ago
  >>avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, I don't think it actually would make them happy or happier This group has a problem with the content existing at all, self moderation tools have been suggested and implemented in other contexts, and in a limited degree on twitter today (mute and block) and that is not seen as "good enough" The group that opposes free speech does not just want to be in a self guided safe space no they want to ensure no one can says things they have deemed hate speech or misinformation. Many of this group also want to go further and punish people outside of the platform they spoke incorrectly on So to imply self moderation tools is the solution completely misunderstands the goals of the "avoid-harassment side" which is to control and narrow the Overton window
  • SilverBirch 4y ago
    Absolutely, and equally on the other side of things the free speech side don't just want to be able to say whatever they want - they want the right to speech in front of people who don't want to hear it. People who don't like moderation on Twitter can go off to gab, gettr, telegram, Truth, 4chan or a tonne of other venues. But they don't just want to say what they want, they want the people they hate to hear it. The person shouting slurs at AOC on twitter isn't satisfied with calling AOC names if they don't think she will see it.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      >>equally on the other side of things the free speech side don't just want to be able to say whatever they want - they want the right to speech in front of people who don't want to hear it. While I am sure that is true in some circumstances, I believe that is less common than my original statement >People who don't like moderation on Twitter can go off to gab, gettr, telegram, Truth, 4chan or a tonne of other venues. All of those sites have various moderation rules, the key difference here is the people that control the moderation are likely of a different political leaning to you so you view them as being "unmoderated" because you do not like the content that is allowed there. Gab as an example started out as a "free speech" platform, but now has pretty intensive moderation rules especially around Adult content. This cost them alot of good will from Free Speech Absolutists, and libertarians. >>The person shouting slurs at AOC on twitter isn't satisfied with calling AOC names if they don't think she will see it. AOC is somewhat of a different case, without addressing your red herring of slurs. AOC is an elected official, as such the bar should be set higher for elected official in that they have an ethical obligation to hear from the people they represent.
• etchalon 4y ago
  An easier distinction would be “censorship is when the government does it.”
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  That's a very thin line between moderation and censorship. When in doubt about which is which, think if if obeys freedom of speech or not. Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation. Deleting a comment because you don't like it, it doesn't conform to your views or you find it outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake is censorship.
  • andrewflnr 4y ago
    "Obeys freedom of speech"? What does that mean? Particularly, what does it mean outside the US? I don't think Scott's definitions are great, but they're at least cutting across the right axis.
  • dang 4y ago
    It's maddeningly difficult to distinguish those thin lines in oneself. I've been working on that for years and it takes all the self-awareness I have. This makes me happy that HN is small (by internet standards) because how do you scale self-awarness? It seems almost an oxymoron. Your comment brings this out because some subset of "outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake" is right on the cusp, and making those calls (to moderate or not to moderate?) puts tremendous pressure on one's own feelings and beliefs. What helps one do it neutrally is self-awareness, but that is the scarcest thing there is. It takes a decade of hard work to distill a bit more. (Edit: and I'm not claiming to have much; just that it's needed.) I'm uncomfortable with the "false" / "fake" end of your spectrum because we don't have a truth meter. Who am I to decide what's true or false or "mis" or "dis" for anybody else? I'm not taking on that karma. "Inflammatory" is easier to work with because it's about predictable community effects and one can moderate for community cohesion. Moderating that way ends up excluding truths that the community can't withstand, but such truths probably exist for any community. Groups may even be defined by what they exclude. We can try to stretch those limits but there's only so much elasticity available. I blanched when I read "Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product" in the OP, but actually that's basically saying moderation is about community cohesion and I can't disagree. But the secret agenda, on HN at least, is to stretch it.
    • 4y ago
• tgv 4y ago
  First: the dictionary defines censorship differently. AstralCodexTen's definition even seems to ignore the fact that e.g. Zuckerberg and Musk are very much "people in power". And it adds "customers" to the definition. In what perverse mindset is a speaker a seller? Second: is this about freedom of speech? If it is, say so, because moderation nor censorship exclusively define that. Muddying the debate by giving some weird definition of two concepts isn't going to help that.
  • neonate 4y ago
    I want to understand this but don't. Can you explain? Specifically I don't understand the bit about definitions and the bit about freedom of speech. Aren't all moderation and all censorship about freedom of speech, or the lack thereof?
    • meheleventyone 4y ago
      Everyone involved wants to characterise things their own way. For example this article says that it’s the “pro-censorship” side that conflates moderation and censorship. In my experience this also happens the other way around for similar but opposing reasons but this is ignored because the author has picked “a side”. So we get lots of local definitions of censorship and moderation depending on the flavour of views the writer wants to present. They all tend to be reasonable in context but mean everyone is talking passed one another. Essentially everyone is trying to argue over the ground of what moderation should be so it doesn’t get lumped into the “evil” censorship. But because this is largely just opinion everyone tries to make theirs look more official and factual.
    • groestl 4y ago
      > Aren't all moderation and all censorship about freedom of speech, or the lack thereof? Freedom of speech is a right that concerns you, a citizen, and public authorities. Censorship, in return, is when that right is interfered with by [the public authority] blocking your speech. Moderation is when a [private entity] is blocking your speech. There is no public right that is interfered with in that case. You have the right to say what you want without public authorities interfering, but you don't have the right to say what you want in my house. (Note: this definition is different from the one used in the article) Whether or not Twitter is infrastructure, and therefore moderation equals censorship would be different debate.
• lleb97a 4y ago
  I always thought the original moderation method of Slashdot better; a simple slider that adjusted the thread based on the quality of conversation you desired.
  • dang 4y ago
    What was the quality metric?
    • Natsu 4y ago
      The quality metric is your own view of the user-provided reasons for moderation. Posts on Slashdot have a score between -1 and +5. They can be modded up or down by randomly selected average users who get 5, 10 or 15 'karma' to apply. Karma is applied along with the set of negative or positive reasons (flamebait, troll, insightful, informative). You can tune the slider to show you posts rated in any range between -1 and +5, and apply special mods to certain reasons (e.g. make 'troll' mods drag things down more, or either get all the funny posts or push them down) to customize this further. All posts are visible if you browse at -1. Logged in users default to a score of 1, or 2 if they have a history of positive contributions and elect to check the box to add 1 to their score. Anonymous users (who are now required to be logged in as well, but who select 'post anonymously) start at 0 always. It's possible to have your account fall hard enough that your posts start at -1 as well. I believe they said they'd only ever actually removed a handful of posts due to some lawsuit or another (might've been that 09 F9 11 02 key? I don't remember any more). There's also meta-moderation, where anyone can vote on whether the mods that were applied are fair or not.
• bawolff 4y ago
  I found this unconvincing. The article's distinction between moderation and censorship feels like the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist - i.e. if you are sympathetic to their cause you use the more positive euphamism, but there really isn't an objective difference. At most the distinction the article seems to be making is that moderation should be optional and censorship forced - you should be able to choose to see the dead comments if you want (nevermind that that is hardly the norm for "moderation" on the internet). All i can think, is under that distinction, the mccarthyism in the US would probably be considered "moderation" not "censorship" despite probably being one of the most egregious examples of censorship in usa in the modern era. So i have trouble accepting that definition.
  • andrewflnr 4y ago
    His definition is tightly tied to digital messaging, where it's technologically trivial and cheap to undo the message-hiding, and scales badly if at all beyond that domain.
  • bryan0 4y ago
    > At most the distinction the article seems to be making is that moderation should be optional and censorship forced I don't think this is the correct distinction he is making. He defines moderation as a receiver being able to choose whether they want to see certain content. He defines censorship as a third-party deciding if a receiver can see certain content whether or not they want it. McCarthyism would be censorship under that definition.
    • bawolff 4y ago
      The aspect i was thinking of was how many artists were blacklisted, but still able to publish in less reputable places like playboy. You could say they were just blocked from high society but anyone interested was still able to read them.
• comex 4y ago
  > And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now. I highly doubt it. I’m pretty sure typical harassment comes in the form of many similar messages by many different users joining a bandwagon. Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that; indeed, Twitter’s current moderation scheme isn’t fast enough to stop it. But the current scheme is capable of penalizing people after the fact, particularly the organizer(s) of the bandwagon, and that creates some level of deterrence. An opt-out moderation scheme would be less effective as a deterrent, since the type of political influencers that tend to be involved in these things could likely easily convince their followers to opt out. That may be a cost worth paying for the sake of free speech. But don’t expect it to make the anti-harassment side happy. That said, it’s not like that side can only tolerate (what this post terms as) censorship. On the contrary, they seem to like Mastodon and its federated model. I do suspect that approach would not work as well at higher scale - not in a technical sense, but in terms of the ability to set and enforce norms across servers. But that’s total speculation, and I haven’t even used Mastodon myself…
  • andreyk 4y ago
    Isnt part of the appeal of federation that each instance/server can set its own rules and moderation teams? Much like Discord / reddit / etc.
    • ddalex 4y ago
      Isn't this just usenet with more steps?
      • bondarchuk 4y ago
        Well but that would be great, I'm too young to have been part of that magical usenet era that people talk about with such reverence, and these days I have no idea how to get on there, if there's anyone on there I might care about, or whether it even still exists. So a new usenet with extra steps (and, uh, accessible through the http protocol) sounds great to me.
• aaron695 4y ago
  There's a good article from early internet when China's firewall was very weak. Even though it was easy to get around the firewall and perhaps even legal at the time, barely anyone was. People weren't using proxies to know about Tank Man when China was arguably only "moderating". People called it censorship. I can't find the original article, maybe Wired? [edit] Might be this one - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-connection-has-been-reset/306650/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-con... This is just to point out the naivety of using it's possible but it's not default is not 'censorship' when talking China. Viewing shadow banned is a ok middle on HN, the obvious hole is you have to have a login. I don't want gore on TikTok but I do want guns. It's very complex.
• manholio 4y ago
  In social media, moderation of this style is practically equivalent to censorship because the visibility of the content is determined algorithmically: if the algo decides to "hide" your posts they become invisible (or much less visible) in other people's feeds. The fact that they're still visible for the die hard followers that refresh your page to see them is mostly irrelevant. Your speech is effectively censored by the moderators because you cannot use that tool as intended, to reach audiences with the same ease other types of speech can. It's like requiring a newspaper to "moderate" all articles by a certain author publishing them in the form of a short notice "If you are interested in the writings of Mr. Smith, who may or may have not published an article for today's issue, then please send a self-addressed enevelope to PO-Box ....".
  • nobody9999 4y ago
    >Your speech is effectively censored by the moderators because you cannot use that tool as intended, to reach audiences with the same ease other types of speech can. But you can still stand outside your home and say whatever you want. You can print up and distribute flyers. You can set up your own web site too. While I despise the business models and actions of pretty much all the "social" media actors, they are not required to provide you with a platform. You can still say whatever it is you want to say, but those private actors have no responsibility to act as a megaphone for you.
    • manholio 4y ago
      True in the absolute, but irrelevant. Censorship is always contextual, in practice censors fall short of the 1984ish "ideal" of total domination of the individual. This dichotomy (free speech for all, but no one is required to offer a platform) works in liberal societies because you have a diversity of publishers.
      • nobody9999 4y ago
        Irrelevant to what, exactly? You can't come to my house, sit on my couch, eat my food and watch my television unless I say you can. If you try to do so without my permission, I'm within my rights to throw you out and, if you resist, use force to remove you. How is usage of a private company's private server resources any different?
• cloutchaser 4y ago
  There is another issue here which is the external pressures platforms face. Platforms will always be judged by journalists based on their lowest common denominator of users. Journalists will purposefully turn off all filters, find the worst comments, and say X platform is all like that bad person This behaviour is then happily used by politicians to push platform owners in certain directions, possibly with the threat of regulation. It also might mean coordinated leaving of advertisers, killing the platform. So while in theory this article is right, there’s external power games that really play into the free speech issue.
• braingenious 4y ago
  The irony of posters on here —a website that’s a pretty decent example of moderation leading to a better user experience — posting about how we must abolish the mods is never lost on me. Shine on you crazy diamonds!
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jtvjan 4y ago
    This site has exactly what the article suggests. You can select the "showdead" option in your profile to see posts that have been removed.
    • notahacker 4y ago
      It doesn't show users that have been removed though...
      • amadeuspagel 4y ago
        Yes it does.
        • notahacker 4y ago
          Showdead shows algorithmically shadowbanned accounts and domains and [most] flagged comments. It doesn't let accounts that Dang has withdrawn posting privileges from continue to post.
          • dang 4y ago
            Banned users can still post. Their posts are autokilled. There have been a handful (fewer than 10) extreme cases over the years where we temporarily blocked someone from posting, but that almost never happens—it's an emergency measure. For anyone wondering why we allow certain banned accounts to keep posting, even though what they post is so dreadful, the answer is that if we didn't, they would just create a new account and that new account would start off unbanned, which would be a step backwards.
• oxff 4y ago
  So much cope; I'd rather this political faction was just honest and just admitted they'd want power over Twitter to ban Trump supporters because that is the sacrament of Democracy. It comes to that in final analysis, friend-enemy distinction.
• est 4y ago
  You can list 1000 reasons why moderation is different from censorship, but people in power can achieve the same censorship goal with tools provided by moderation. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416424 So as a result they are practically the same thing.
  • groestl 4y ago
    That's why the distinction made by the dictionary definition AFAIK is not made by form, but by actor. Censorship is done by a public authority, moderation is done by a private entity.
    • dumpsterdiver 4y ago
      In this day and age when not only companies, but individuals command the wealth of small nations, is that truly a clear distinction?
      • groestl 4y ago
        I've said elsewhere that Twitter might be public infrastructure. The distinction is still clear though. (Me personally, I think it should not be allowed for individuals to own the wealth of small nations, much less command it. But that's a different topic)
      • triceratops 4y ago
        So...don't allow individual to command the wealth of small nations and all these problems go away.
    • whiddershins 4y ago
      Wait, really? Then why do we say 'government censorship' ... that would be redundant. I don't think that definition works.
      • groestl 4y ago
        Well, I didn't say 'government censorship', and I think it's redundant. Which might be just me, but you can Google "difference moderation censorship" and see that this is a generally accepted view.
• HPsquared 4y ago
  Moderation is a subclass of censorship.
• est 4y ago
  Story time: Chinese Intranet has changed gradually from "hard" censorship to "soft" methods, posts still get deleted from time to time, but for a broader range of topics, gov't agencies choose to flood the social media with spam posts, mangling with recommenders and messing with sorting options. Technically the gov't didn't delete a thing, but yeah it will be PITA to find useful information and people can not formulate discussions.
  • droidist2 4y ago
    Sounds like the direction Google's search results have been heading.
• r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  His argument that we should have opt in moderation rather than censorship is largely based on consent, but it misses a third category of communications which is where two parties are engaged in a consensual communication about a third party who does not consent. Basically the CSAM scenario, but also non consensual adult porn, snuff, libel etc. There needs to be some way of dealing with this that respects the rights of the person who is being talked about, and that has to involve some censorship.
  • nobody9999 4y ago
    >His argument that we should have opt in moderation rather than censorship is largely based on consent, but it misses a third category of communications which is where two parties are engaged in a consensual communication about a third party who does not consent. Basically the CSAM scenario, but also non consensual adult porn, snuff, libel etc. >There needs to be some way of dealing with this that respects the rights of the person who is being talked about, and that has to involve some censorship. IANAL, but isn't exchanging CSAM, non-consensual adult porn and snuff videos, in fact criminal action in most jurisdictions? If that's true, legal action can be taken against those involved. As for libel (let's call it defamation to make it more inclusive), there are legal avenues (civil litigation and, in very rare cases, criminal charges) which can be pursued there too. Are those avenues insufficient in your view? If so, what would you suggest, other than the current legal regime, in such situations?
    • Barrin92 4y ago
      >Are those avenues insufficient in your view? we demand reasonable levels of due diligence from owners of private businesses when criminal activity is concerned. If you run a business that sells stolen goods, someone runs a drug ring out of your restaurant or you serve alcohol to minors you have a big problem. This is so because law enforcement can only ever act after the fact and would of course be completely overburdened if every private actor was willfully ignorant of what goes on in their establishments. Not to mention that this is also to our benefit because without that level of civic involvement as a first line of defense the logical conclusion is a police/legal state involved in every transaction. Which is literally what you see in countries with weak civil societies but big tech firms. if neither the people nor business owners take responsibility, who is left?
• abigail95 4y ago
  Even if there ends up being no difference between the two, being able to opt in to see more of the deleted material makes the moderators much more accountable. I have no idea if this community would be improved with less moderation because I'm blind to most of its results.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    You can actually choose to see dead comments from your profile, which shows the results of some moderation decisions (I believe, but may be wrong, that some comments are also completely deleted, such as outright spam).
    • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      I use showdead and spam is there. I believe most spammers gave up on comments. Submissions may be another story, though.
• spion 4y ago
  I think this view is hopelessly naive in the real world. You could easily make "moderation" (as defined by the article) the same as "censorship" (as defined by the article) by producing a lot of false, semi-false and nonsense content to drown out the signal in the noise. Our concepts of free speech, censorship and moderation are simply outdated on modern social media - when you have systems designed to encourage and spread low-effort, novel, emotional and manipulative content (e.g. twitter), no amount of "tweaks" to such systems can fix the problem. Instead of trying to fix systems originally designed for marketing, why not actually design systems meant for disseminating and checking information from the ground up? I bet that would look way different compared to twitter or facebook. It doesn't have to involve moderation or censorship - it could just mean giving disproporitonately more powerful voice to experts willing to explain disinformation, for example (rather than having their voice drown in the retweet popularity contest).
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    > Our concepts of free speech, censorship and moderation are simply outdated on modern social media - when you have systems designed to encourage and spread low-effort, novel, emotional and manipulative content (e.g. twitter), no amount of "tweaks" to such systems can fix the problem. Hilariously enough, this is what people said about the invention of both writing and the printing press.
    • EricE 4y ago
      Not sure why you are getting downvoted since you are spot on.
      • ripe 4y ago
        No, he isn' spot on. Printing presses spread ideas and misinformation at a much more human speed than today's Internet based platforms. So, they're a poor analogy for the problem we're discussing. (I didn't down vote him, BTW. His comment is relevant)
        • 4y ago
• tsimionescu 4y ago
  This is a very shallow take on the subject, that glosses over some of the most contentious issues related to freedom of speech on private platforms and only presents the most clear cut cases. There are many situations where a post being visible to anyone is harmful to someone else. We can rationally weigh the value of freedom of speech versus expected harm to that individual and come up on both ends, but we can't ignore this simple fact when discussing this issue. The only example mentioned in the post is child pornography, but there are more others: revenge porn, doxxing, smear campaigns to name a few. If my ex wants to send an explicit video of me, and someone else wants to view it, I am still harmed by the fact that the platform makes this possible, even if my moderation filters don't show it to me. Similarly, if someone is spreading my address or saying I eat children, the fact that I can choose not to see this doesn't protect me from the consequences of others reading these messages. Again, not saying that I believe it obvious that such messages must be removed. My only point is that the "solution" that Scott proposes for avoiding harassment is a partial solution at best, but more realistically, entirely useless. It basically only helps for very low level harassment, such as not wanting to see someone cuss.
  • dalbasal 4y ago
    The proposed solution also doesn't do much for free speech. It's still censorship, IMO, for any definition of censorship that matters. Content A is filtered-by-default, demonetized or otherwise discouraged and distribution-suppressed. Content B is not. That's effectively how all propaganda works. Even a totalitarian state can't really prevent access to content. They make inconvenient to access, and unwise to produce. That's enough. In fact, modern propagandists intentionally leave a "steam valve." China isn't that worried about shutting down VPNs or whatnot. Firewalled-by-default is enough and overdoing it can be counterproductive. I think the solution is awful. It doesn't work at all for the most important cases. If someone is being abused, libeled & harassed by a belligerent ex... hiding revenge porn behind and "adult content" filter isn't good enough. If a platform is filtering political content, the fact that it can, technically, be accessed by enabling "harmful content" does not make it less censorious.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
• dalbasal 4y ago
  I feel this piece, like a lot of moderation/censorship rhetoric, starts from a disingenuous place. Free speech, moderation, editing, censorship, propaganda, and such do not have clear definitions. The terms have a history. Social media is new, and most of the nuance needs to be invented/debated. There aren't a priori definitions. This article is defining censorship as X and moderation as Y... Actually, it provides 2 unrelated definitions. Definition 1 seems to be that moderation is "normal business activity" and censorship is "abnormal, people-in-power activity" on behalf of "3rd parties," mostly governments. Definition 2, the article's "moderation MVP" implies that opt-out filters represent "moderation" while outright content removal is, presumably, censorship. IMO this is completely ridiculous, especially the China example. China's censorship already does, work like this article's "moderation MVP". Internet users can, with some additional effort, view "banned content" by using a VPN. In practice, most people use the default, firewalled internet most of the time. Youtube's censorship is, similarly, built of the same stuff. Content can be age-gated, demonetized or buried. Sure, there is some space between banned and penalized... but no one is going to see it and posting it is bad for your youtuber career to post it. This discourages most of it. IMO, the difference between censorship and moderation is power, and power alone. A small web forum can do whatever it likes and it's moderation. If a government, medium monopoly, cartel, cabal or whatnot do it.... it is censorship. If a book is banned from a book stall, that's moderation. If it is banned from amazon... that's censorship. If amazon have a settings toggle where you can unhide banned books does not change anything that matters. A book that amazon won't sell is a book that probably won't be printed in the first place. That's how censorship actually works. It's not just about filtering bad content. It's about disincentivizing it's existence entirely. Toggles work just fine for that.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Nursie 4y ago
    I think that approach overemphasises and embeds the power of these platforms. Twitter (let’s face it we’re talking about Twitter) is not the world. It’s certainly a popular place for people to yell at each other and increase the general level of aggravation in the world. But it isn’t the world. If someone is moderated off twitter, their ability to speak is impacted, but only to one audience and in one way. Their ability to speak to me is unaffected entirely because I think Twitter is a giant waste of everyone’s time and energy. They can speak elsewhere, other platforms can serve their needs, and if they are popular enough then they’ll take the users and the attention from Twitter. Regulation here would only entrench the platform. Twitter it not the public square, it’s some private company’s arguing arena.
• sixstringtheory 4y ago
  This very site is the closest implementation I’ve seen to what he described in the article. Moderation actions that are still visible for those who opt in. I personally opt in to see all the flagged/dead comments. I would say 1-5% of them are mysteries as to why they are dead (meaning they have been automatically killed, not killed due to other users flagging). But then the ones that deserve to be killed/banned are so, so egregious. It’s just unfortunate that there will always be innocent people that get roped in with automatic moderation.
  • bondarchuk 4y ago
    >I would say 1-5% of them are mysteries as to why they are dead (meaning they have been automatically killed, not killed due to other users flagging). Some of these are people who have been shadowbanned, you can check by looking at all their comments in their profile and if they're shadowbanned (almost) all of them will be dead.
  • 6stringmerc 4y ago
    I agree with you and thats why I’m very interested in a job opportunity that sells moderation as a service. As a former die hard member of [R]age Board for the Elites, I remember the use of the N-word being so prolific a moderator changed it to display “ice cream” with no work around. Seeing a post suddenly pop up calling somebody a stupid ice cream was hilarious. I was a teenager in the wild days and Chan doesn’t disturb me even, I just don’t go there. Borderland Beat is real enough. As an adult I feel that the ban hammer is an absolute necessity.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > I would say 1-5% of them are mysteries as to why they are dead (meaning they have been automatically killed, not killed due to other users flagging). More than likely shadowbanned accounts. Some green accounts also seem to be automatically [dead] until they get couch’s, but I’m not sure the exact situations around that.
• thot_experiment 4y ago
  I love showdead on HN, but I'd like to see this taken a step further on big networks like twitter, with user moderated blocklists where I could opt in or out, and also a way to see a list of blocklists I'm on. Of course the real problem is that advertisers would probably bail if twitter had showdead, but maybe twitter can solve that problem with the new twitter $8 thing.
• nmca 4y ago
  When thinking about how this landscape will evolve, you should think: "A computer can understand the content as well as any person." As this will be true in ~3 years. In that light, things are both better and more scary.
  • onion2k 4y ago
    "A computer can understand the content as well as any person." I agree with this, but only because I have so little faith in people.
• rspoerri 4y ago
  I am very bad at content classification on an open plattform. When i dont know the sender, i can barely tell about his or her intentions. Being bad at finding out about the intentions of a news article applies probably to you and everybody else as well. This is a big problem with social media that governments and companies are using to their advantage. With classical media agencies you have a bigger chance at guessing their political views and intentions. Whether you like them or not is up to you. Most of these media agencies also take responsibility for the release of a piece of news. This responsibility is missing with "individuals" who post on social media, they vouch for nothing and can only lose their account. The right to post to an unlimited amount of people should be earned in my opinion. Right now the algorithms of the social media platforms even encourage controversial or aggressive posts which is the worst that can happen.
• WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  The problem with the big platforms applying platform-wide moderation is exactly that they are too damn big. Platform-wide moderation could as well be censorship in disguise, but hey it’s apparently ok, since it’s a private company (albeit an oligopoly) doing it. Censorship is only when government is doing it, right? Right?
• bumblebritches5 4y ago
• pelasaco 4y ago
  Nice idea of having the opt-in option to see the content which goes against the provider policy. The issue with China however is that in that scenario, they would probably track who have this option enabled and then persecute them.
• nirui 4y ago
  The author of the article tried hard on distinguish Moderation from Censorship, here is something I want to point out: When you talk about censorship, you must also talk about freedom of speech which usually is a well-defined legal term in countries that supports it. On the other hand, moderation is a form of management. Depends on why and how the action is carried out, moderation could be better or worse than censorship. And, > If the Chinese government couldn’t censor - only moderate This is exactly how most censorship is implemented in China, through moderation. See the funny part there? The point is, I don't think the word Moderation must inherently better than Censorship, it all depends on the why and hows.
  • glenstein 4y ago
    Huh? China abducts and disappears human rights lawyers, activists, and sellers of banned books, to ensure that ideas are disappeared from the public sphere. You seem to be suggesting that that is one in the same as moderation and there's no distinction to be drawn. If there's no distinction to be drawn because you're asserting that moderation means that something different in China, I think that is you rather than the author that's using terms in non-standard ways.
• Zoadian 4y ago
  just give me a switch to turn off all moderation. i want to see all messages, except spam/scams.
  • dalbasal 4y ago
    The switch would have to write tweets and make videos that people would have made if not for the threat/cost of being moderated.
• nailer 4y ago
  > Proponents of censorship have decided it’s easier to conflate censorship and moderation, and then argue for moderation. You know it’s a weak article from this strawman. The author could have addressed the ‘digital town square’ that was directly listed as the reason for Elon intervening in Twitter but has deliberately chosen not to.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  I think something that really bothers me about this discussion about moderation is how many people approach this debate like a new born baby. They have an idea and then speculate on how it fixes everything. There's never any discussion of what exists in the real world. ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing. So let's look at what happened in reality. Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole. The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship. I also think that this article completely mischaracterizes what the free speech side of the debate want.
  • derlvative 4y ago
    I think a key problem with Reddit is that when you create a subreddit (and obtain the final say on all moderation decisions) you also get the name of the subreddit and URL forever. This means that early arrivers have the advantage of taking all the best subreddit names.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Well if you do leave it unmoderated for long, other users can appeal to admins to get control instead, assuming they have a plan on doing something with it. Not unlike a domain name in a way, just without the paywall.
      • richbell 4y ago
        > Well if you do leave it unmoderated for long, other users can appeal to admins to get control instead Historically the r/RedditRequest process only considered whether the moderator was completely inactive from Reddit. There could be a dead subreddit that hadn't been touched in years or a flourishing subreddit whose top mod was completely MIA, there was nothing you could do if the top mod was still active on Reddit — even if you could prove they were just squatting. Not unlike domain squatting.
• blippage 4y ago
  "Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that’s censorship." Meh. It's full of loaded terms. "Abnormal": if you engage in it regularly, then it's normal, not abnormal. "People in power": you mean like moderators? Moderation is a form of censorship. Is moderation good? Well, it's a question of degree. Some moderators become gatekeeping Nazis, just as some posters become raving lunatics. So it's a question of finding a BALANCE between freedom of expression and letting the clowns run amok.
• furyg3 4y ago
  This also presumes the site being 'moderated' is operating in a vacuum. The reason why moderation exists on sites like Twitter / Facebook is due to: 1. Laws (e.g. child porn, abuse, harassment, illegal speech like Tiananmen square in China). 2. Advertisers - the real customers. 3. Public opinion In that order, with a pretty big gap between #2 and #3. Don't comply with laws? Out of business tomorrow. Don't do what advertisers want? Out of business this year. Don't do what the general public wants? Maybe out of business in a few years, maybe not, it depends. The methods proposed in this post are great for dealing with issues around public opinion, but do very little to appease governments or advertisers.
  • hackererror404 4y ago
    moderation also exists for 4. political purposes and biases
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  If it is not not on your server, than you don't get to complain. Moderators were initially tasked with keeping threads on topic, enforcing predefined community standards, and parsing irrelevant detractors. Dark patterns are now mostly just used to manipulate people, and attenuate conduct to fall into line with group think biases. This policy drives up engagement, traffic, and profits. Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)
  • telmo 4y ago
    > If it is not not on your server, than you don't get to complain. That is a rather naive slogan to be repeating in 2022. Once your servers become the de facto public square, we absolutely get to complain. Not even talking about how your server is running on top of a huge amount of infrastructure that was created by our society, enabled by principles and laws that have been discovered and refined across generations. Your server does not exist in a vacuum. Democracy requires a healthy public square to survive and thrive, and that is more important than some overly simplistic notion of private property.
    • Joel_Mckay 4y ago
      There is a lot to unpack, but monopolistic competitive firms tend to consolidate markets. However, reducing all phenomena to a false-dichotomy is a common bias, as it ignores how some prefer an echo-chamber of sycophantic content. Have a wonderful day, and here is an up-vote... lol... =)
    • lm28469 4y ago
      > Once your servers become the de facto public square Twitter ? It's far from a public square, even in the US (outside of the US it barely exists) Also, if an online public square is a pre requisite for democracy: it should be a public utility, not something owned by a company who's incentive are diametrically opposed to the interests of the users
      • telmo 4y ago
• Apreche 4y ago
  XKCD 1357 is how old? And yet people continue to get it wrong. It’s not censorship unless the government itself is doing the censorship and making people face criminal consequences for disobeying. If a private entity is doing it, even at the request of a government, it’s not censorship or a violation of free speech unless they were going to face legal consequences for ignoring the government’s request. https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
  • rocqua 4y ago
    This xkcd is about the first amendment. The discussion here is about censorship. Infringing the first amendment is censorship, but the converse isn't true. Plenty of things are censorship without infringing on the first amendment. As an example, Bezos hypothetically preventing his newspaper from publishing negative stories about him is censorship. He is censoring his editors in this hypothetical. As another example, if Bezos says "everyone who calls me a stupid-head will get kicked of AWS", that would be an attack on free-speech.
    • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
      What you said, plus xkcd is a webcomic. I happen to enjoy it as much as the next nerd, but can you imagine saying "batman issue xyz exists, and yet we still have petty theft in the streets!"
    • Apreche 4y ago
      I’m not very concerned about the semantics of the word censorship. The definition of a word in the dictionary doesn’t also define the boundaries of what behaviors are acceptable. My point is that unless something violates the first amendment, I’m ok with it. If Bezos kicks people he doesn’t like off of AWS, I’m ok with it. It’s not a public space. The owner of the private space makes the rules. Just like I can kick people out of my house for similar reasons. Don’t like it? Host it yourself. If the government tries to censor your self hosted content, then I’ll get up in arms.
      • rocqua 4y ago
• nathias 4y ago
  moderation is when the user can select what he wishes to see, everything else is censorship, you could see it among ops on irc, reddit mods and platform algos
• nla 4y ago
  Riiiiight!
• Frost1x 4y ago
  No, it's not. Moderation is a special case/form of censorship. In many cases, it's a desired or willful filter as the article suggests, but it is censorship of information. Censorship doesn't have to be forced, it can be agreed to but it's still censorship. Rebranding things to look fuzzy and give positive perception doesn't change the underlying principle. Manipulation of information be it omission, selection picking, burying in piles of noise, etc are all manipulative tactics most of which are used to follow the spirit/intent of censorship. It happens in restricted environments like China but also happens in less restrictive environments like the US, the method of approach simply changes around what's legal and possible. One could argue censorship approaches in free speech environments are the most resilient because they rely less on the difficult tight controls of information flow nation states like China leverage.
  • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
    Agreed. Moderation is just censorship that tends to make the world look more like I want it to.
  • bkfunk 4y ago
    If Random House declines to publish your book because they don’t think it will sell, is that censorship? If I run a sci-fi bookstore, and I choose not to stock your book about political philosophy, is that censorship? If it write an article that reviews your book (wherein, necessarily, I pick and choose what parts of your book I talk about, and also paraphrase [is that the same as “manipulating information”]), is that censorship? When there is simply too much information for any person to consume, and even too much to be able to _evaluate whether To consume_, what does _not having censorship_ look like?
    • Frost1x 4y ago
      >If Random House declines to publish your book because they don’t think it will sell, is that censorship? Yes. You're being censored in this case by the will of markets or perception of the will of markets (consumers at large), less so by the store owner due to systemic constraints they must operate in. Markets indirectly represent the will of mass consumers. There's a reason we have minority protections in government and chose a republic structure over pure democracy, to prevent oppression of the voices of the few by the masses. >If I run a sci-fi bookstore, and I choose not to stock your book about political philosophy, is that censorship? If you intentionally chose to ommit the book and it wasn't due to chance omission, perhaps because you hate the author, then yes, it's censorship. >If it write an article that reviews your book (wherein, necessarily, I pick and choose what parts of your book I talk about, and also paraphrase [is that the same as “manipulating information”]), is that censorship? It depends on how you choose that information and present it. Is it a representative sample of the book or are you intentionally cherry picking pieces of information, especially out of context, to represent a preconceived opinion you want to portray and not an actual summary? If so, the yes, it's censorship. If not, then no, it's not censorship. I agree there are logistical constraints that makes reductionism a requirement. The key differences in all of these cases is intent. It's difficult to prove but the question isn't if you had to reduce information for logistic purposes but how and why you chose what to reduce. Did you reduce information for your advantage? Then chances are, it's censorship.
• treeman79 4y ago
  Goal. Silence people I don’t like. Technique. Silence them using any tool available. Justification. Whatever lie I can spin so if doesn’t seem like censorship. Eventual goal. Censorship so complete that realistic justification is not needed.
• frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  What this whole debate totally misses in the USA at least, is that it even only exists because of a bigger violation and distortion of the Constitution, the freedom so implicit that it crossed the minds of the founders of America even less than having to protect the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free association, being allowed and able to chose who one wants to associate with and who one fires not want to associate with. We are not able to do such a fundamental thing in America today, by law (de jure, Sotomayor), as it had been prohibited through perversion and in violation of the Constitution through the amendment off that very Constitution. Almost all other arguments over moderation v. censorship are a derivative of the most fundamental freedom, freedom to choose, control over one’s own life. That natural human right simply does not exist in America (and moist western places) anymore, effectively all the “civil rights amendments” have done the opposite off their states objectives, they have institutionalized federal government enslavement, total domination off federal government control over your life. You no longer get to chose shoo you associate with, you’re slave master federal government decides on who you are allowed to associate with. You are as free as you are permitted. All this other debate of moderation and censorship is meaningless noise, merely beating around the bush to discuss rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. And for all our foreign friends, whether they are in America acting as if they are American or outside of America, all of these matters related to the Constitution are very relevant to you too, whether you understand it or not, because all the freedom you have and think you have is a direct derivative of the founders of the USA creating the Constitution. Most people have just taken it so for granted or it is all so abstract that they do not understand any of it, because not even a person of European background can be American without understanding these things properly, let alone someone without European ethic and cultural background. That may offend people hearing it, but it does not make any of it less true. In fact it is the “moderation” that is inherent censorship, which even prevents the system from self-correcting, i.e., moderating, because it is really just perversion, i.e., distortion, being called moderation. There would be nothing to discuss about this topic if the world dominating tyrannical evil of forced association did not exist.
  • engineer_22 4y ago
    Slow down frankfrankfrank You didn't explain why Americans don't have the right of free association
• frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  What this whole debate totally misses in the USA at least, is that it even only exists because of a bigger violation and distortion of the Constitution, the freedom so implicit that it crossed the minds of the founders of America even less than having to protect the right to keep and bear arms, the right to free association, being allowed and able to chose who one wants to associate with and who one does not want to associate with. We are not able to do such a fundamental thing in America today, by law (de jure, Sotomayor), as it has been prohibited through perversion and in violation of the Constitution, through the amendment of that very Constitution the prohibition is a violation of. Almost all other arguments over moderation v. censorship are a derivative of the most fundamental freedom, freedom to choose, control over one’s own life. That natural human right simply does not exist in America (and moist western places) anymore, effectively all the “civil rights amendments” have done the opposite of their stated objectives, they have institutionalized federal government enslavement, total domination of federal government control over your life. You no longer get to choose who you associate with, your slave master federal government decides on who you are allowed to associate with. You are as free as you are permitted; an inherent contradiction. All this other debate of moderation and censorship is meaningless noise, merely beating around the bush to discuss rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. And for all our foreign friends, whether they are in America acting as if they are American or outside of America, all of these matters related to the US Constitution are very relevant to you too, whether you understand it or not, because all the freedom you have and think you have is a direct derivative of the founders of the USA creating the Constitution and declaring themselves free of the slavery of monarchy. Most people have just taken things so for granted or it is all so abstract that they do not understand any of it, because not even a person of European background can be American without understanding these things properly, let alone someone without European ethic, historical, and cultural background. That may offend people hearing it, but it does not make any of it less true. In fact it is the “moderation” that is inherent censorship, which even prevents the system from self-correcting, i.e., moderating, because it is really just perversion, i.e., distortion, being called moderation. There would be nothing to discuss about this topic if the world dominating tyrannical evil of forced association did not exist. So I propose we address that instead unless there point is just making noises as the titanic sinks and we are heading back towards what is effectively neo-monarchy.
• incomingpain 4y ago
  Elon is clear moderation will continue. It's quite obvious and simple to provide examples where twitter did censor subjects. Hunter biden laptop, freedom convoy, or babylon bee? This censorship is what forced conservatives to build new platforms. In so doing they discovered far greater censorship. Google, Apple, and Amazon all responding within the day to deplatform parler? The only entity large enough to make those 3 entities jump within a day is the US government. The "Hell", "nightmare", or "disaster" everyone is complaining about is the US government is who has been censoring speech. The reason there's a large delay on unbanning obvious accounts like babylon bee... twitter/elon can't do it.
• superb-owl 4y ago
  I find the distinction between moderation and censorship helpful. I'm more sympathetic to censorship than the author--I've seen what e.g. vaccine misinformation can do to radicalize the average person. One valuable tool the author doesn't spend much time on is defaults. We can have a heavily moderated, uncensored platform which still prevents mis/disinformation for the vast majority of users. E.g. HN hides all sorts of nonsense by default, but still allows you to reveal it with showdead. The same folks who are prone to disinformation are often too unsophisticated to dig into their settings, and having only a single "showdead" filter means you not only see your favorite Lizard People posts, you also get inundated with all the other nonsense.
• jwie 4y ago
  No it isn’t different. At least it is not different in it’s mechanics. The activities of a moderator and a censor are identical. The intent and objective contain nuanced differences, but only of degree not kind. Both moderation and censorship have the outcome of reducing what information parties are allowed to communicate, and a system is its inputs and outputs, thus they are the same thing. This isn’t to say that it’s bad or good. The rhetoric of moderation is perceived better than censorship, but this is like the cops calling your interrogation an interview; it doesn’t actually change what’s happening.
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    The point you're missing is that, as used in in this text, the reader can opt out of moderation.
  • LastTrain 4y ago
    The difference is in the who, not the what.
• andrewclunn 4y ago
  You have the theoretical and the applied. Moderators are people. Algorithms are obtuse and bias can be built in. The solution? Various different sites and outlets with different approaches to moderation (or lack there of) allowing for freedom of expression as well as ideologically "safe" areas in the aggregate. The real threat and conflation of moderation and censorship is when centralized sites like reddit or facebook put a standardize layer that is enforced across topics and domains. When taken to the point of infrastructure removing site's abilities to exist (such as the stormfront having their domain suspended) then we've clearly veered into censorship. People can complain about moderation on a site or forum (I mean I have), but when the moderation is not contained to the forum, and the site seeks to supplant the distributed world wide web itself, then the line is an arbitrary one.
• whiddershins 4y ago
  The way Scott is right is this: We aren’t even having a candid, good faith public conversation about all this. Nothing in content moderation would necessitate banning public figures with heterodox views from your platform. Hell, that’s not even a requirement for censorship. Banning is for trolls and bots and bad faith actors, which is definitionally never someone with >1million followers. That choice is about publicly punishing someone and most importantly, distancing yourself personally from that person and whatever they said so you don’t get confronted at a cocktail party. So yea, when you open up a site to all legal content, you immediately are flooded with people at the very edge or just over every law. Similarly, when you ban Alex Jones, you pretty soon end up banning everyone who you disagree with. Most of what is going on right now in social media isn’t moderation or censorship. It’s just being lame and awful and lacking principles and self awareness.
  • rat87 4y ago
    heterodox views like racism? fascism? violence? I'm not saying that every time I hear about someone being banned its for these reasons but its often enough that I become suspicious it may be someone trying to argue for "The Bell Curve" or that slaves were happy or some other ridiculous racist idea. Tons of people with >1Million views are trolls and extremely bad faith actors. That's often how they became so popular. Look at Tucker Carlson. If you don't ban them you may be encouraging others to act in bad faith to gain popularity. If you don't ban Alex Jones you are letting him spread his conspiratorial racist views and harassment campaigns on your platform.
• coldtea 4y ago
  Here's a moderation idea: treat people as grownups and allow everything (everything permitted by the law, that is). Just let individuals ban whoever they want from THEIR view. If you want to be super-fancy, you could then see if some account X is banned by many of individual users from appearing on their feed, and give individuals an option to have those automatically banned from their own feeds after some threshold percentage. So, if X is a jerk/spammer and individual many discussion group users have banned them (from their own view), give users the option to automagically have X banned from their own feed too once they hit say 10% of other members banning them. This off-loads bannin a little, and as long as individual users have the option to check which those "auto-banned" are and e.g. except them from being auto-banned for them, it still maintains freedom. In HN with showdead etc, I've never seen any "dead" comments that I couldn't just have as regular comments and just ignore on my own...
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Well it turns out, people aren't grownups. So your idea pretty much fails there. Wait, you think I'm wrong, well, prepare for a thousands of posts and flamewars on this discussion! Oh it's also going to spill over into the gardening discussion that generally gets 5 post a day, but now will see 600 because of our firestorm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law demands moderation. Community and society demand moderation. Hell, I'd even go as far and say physics demands it. The internet breaks our ideas of social norms on moderation by taking distance and anonymity and shoving them in the same place all at once. And much like if you take groups of conflicting fundamentalist religious groups and put them together, the enviable violence outbreak affects everyone around.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      I'm not sure where exactly you think my idea fails. I didn't say to expect they'll behave like grownups in that they wont post anything immature, bad, etc. I said "treat people as grownups", that is, as capable on seeing something they don't like or find offensive or whatever. And if they're not capable, that's on them. So, if a discussion becomes a flamewar with "thousands of posts", so be it. Members can always ignore it. So, if the thousands of posts are from the same small number people (over-posting) and others find those annoying, then can chose to invidividually to ban them, or snooze them, or not. But, if the thousands of posts are by thousants of members (and not bots), then why shouldn't they be left to continue to post and discuss this way, even if its a flame war? They're having fun, and others can ignore or ban them. Now, if they verbally abuse someone though (e.g. threaten their life, dox them, and such), well, that could be moderated and members who do that could be banned. The rest of opinion, whether deemed controversial, unpopular, misinformation, or bullshit, can stay. I don't care much about "Brandolini's law". Who is the arbiter of what's bullshit and why are they? The moderator? Well, that's tautological (they're arbiter of non-bullshit merely because they have the power to moderate).
• throwaway22032 4y ago
  I feel like something happened when the Internet became more "mainstream" that meant that I couldn't simply accept walking away from a platform. Back in the day we might have a forum or a number of forums on a topic. Let's say it's Nascar Forums or whatever. I might not like the opinions of the moderators and that'd be that, I'd leave the site. I'd recognize that it's not reflective of the wider world. Somehow Twitter and Reddit and various other social networks don't feel like that. I feel quite often that some subset people around me take opinions from Twitter etc. as being reflective of mainstream thought. When really it's still just a tiny microcosm of humanity. I don't really use them any more, but I still have the sense that all sorts of social movements and bizarre (from my perspective) opinions and value frameworks are being born and spread there.
  • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
    > Somehow Twitter and Reddit and various other social networks don't feel like that. I feel quite often that some subset people around me take opinions from Twitter etc. as being reflective of mainstream thought. When really it's still just a tiny microcosm of humanity. More and more often I find myself in conversations with people and suddenly I feel like I'm reading a reddit or twitter thread, and I'll see the conversation follow an exact path that I've seen before, only now in real life. It's a really strange feeling as someone who has been reading people's opinions on the internet for what feels like forever, and just recently seeing those opinions show up in everyday conversations with people I've known all this time. Edit: It's especially jarring when you see these people say things like "in my opinion" or "i think", because now I start to wonder "do you really? Or did you just see somebody else say that?" Not that all my thoughts are original, but I don't take credit for things like that.
• bobiny 4y ago
  IMO being informed is about your own research. Either making sure you follow trustworthy people and/or checking their sources. Wondering if the account is real or fake? Check the person's website, wikipedia page, look if there are more accounts with this name. People are willfully disinformed. Do you trust information just because it's being liked many times? Well, being popular doesn't mean it's right or healthy. In Russia many people don't think their government is doing anything wrong. Why? TV says so. Their coworkers do. But you have Youtube, Telegram. Most media who's websites are blocked have YT channels or their articles can be read on Telegram with quick view. No VPN needed. In my POV many moderation/censorship arguments boil down to the desire to be walled off from bad info vs being able to make individual choices. Russian government is doing the former by blocking independent media.
• naasking 4y ago
  > Spam is nothing close to either of those, yet everyone agrees: yes, itʻs okay to moderate (censor) spam. Why is this? Because it has no value? Because itʻs sometimes false? Certainly itʻs not causing offline harm. No, no, and no. Yes, because it has no value, and because spam is basically financially motivated harassment, and harassment shouldn't be allowed.
• woliveirajr 4y ago
  Moderation is what I do on someone's else posts. Censorship is what someone does in my posts.
• Slava_Propanei 4y ago
• mmmpop 4y ago
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I'm hoping we'll get to a point where not making a good faith effort to be factually correct will be seen as equally bad as censorship. They're both just tactics used to decieve. The internet is this amazing tool for building knowledge and we seen to be arguing about who is allowed to tell lies rather than collaborating on how to discover truth. It's simple basic things like citing sources that need to become norms.
  • thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Citing sources doesn't solve the problem either. There will always be bias. The solution is for each participant to think critically of their beliefs. There is no way to make that happen. Moderation is the next best thing.
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Citing sources doesn't solve the problem on its own, but we're in such a poor state at the moment that it (and other very basic changed) would still be a massive improvement. You already get people citing things they clearly haven't read, but again, that's still better than not even citing something as it gives a basis to work towards the truth.
      • thomastjeffery 4y ago
        I've been in plenty of discussions where a cited source exists as a basis to work toward nothing. It's a common tactic to use citations to get the person you are arguing with to walk in circles. It's a war of attrition: eventually the other party gives up on deconstructing and criticizing your citations, and you claim victory. This is closely related to the "ball is in your court" fallacy. But if both parties are actually invested in critical thought, citations can be an opportunity instead of a roadblock. That still requires the effort of everyone involved.
• thomastjeffery 4y ago
  They got close to the mark, but missed it here: > A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now...but have an opt-in setting There's one problem with that. Often times, the product itself is the moderated version. Letting users use a product with moderation turned off would be giving them what they want, but it would not be giving them "the product". --- For example, people want a space where they can talk about mechanical keyboards. So they go to https://old.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards/ https://old.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards/ Some people want to sell their custom mechanical keyboards. They think, "I know where a bunch of potential customers are, /r/mk/!" Queue the sub getting flooded with sales posts, and the moderators banning such posts. Now they have rule #2 and moderate accordingly. OP's solution is to castrate the moderators by instead of allowing them to remove posts, only allowing them to hide posts. Then users who want to break the rules can simply toggle them. But we already have a better solution: Just go somewhere else! Right there in the text of rule #2, there is a link to /r/mechmarket/, which is its own subreddit, moderated for the buying and selling of mechanical keyboards. --- But, of course, that doesn't work with social media. There is only one Facebook. Only one Twitter. They are global namespaces. There is no room for traditional moderation. And that is its own problem. It's hard to have meaningful conversation when every participant in your social circle, or even in the world is standing at their own soapbox. It's as useless as a daily company-wide meeting. --- We don't just need to fight disinformation. We need to fight for information, for discussion. We need to show people who are busily engaged in identity politics that there are more interesting conversations to be had. Social media is a really poorly equipped space for those conversations, because it isn't moderated.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  One aspect of the "moderation is censorship" debate that I haven't seen discussed is that a lot of the time, what we're looking at is a campaign of targeted harassment against somebody. And then if they are blocked, the person doing the harassment will complain about censorship or sometimes "cancel culture". But, the whole point of a harassment campaign is to silence someone- to intimidate or bully them until they shut up. What is that if not censorship by other means? What I'm saying is that sometimes one person's freedom of expression has to be limited in order to protect the freedom of expression of someone else. And there's a balance to be struck there. But the point is: there is no neutral position here. If you refuse to make a decision about when free expression become unacceptable harassment, you are still making a decision: you are saying that the person with the worst behavior will be the only one whose voice can be heard. The same thing happens in the outside world, of course: deregulation, for example, does not generally bring freedom, it only shifts the power to whoever has the most money. The principle is the same. You either collectively make a decision about what behavior is tolerable, or you allow the person with the biggest stick to make all the rules. There is no opting out of the decision.
• tptacek 4y ago
  I can't believe I'm citing Techdirt, but, here we are: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you... Now, "just add a button marked 'see banned content'" to each of these cases. How much easier did Elon's job get?
• dqpb 4y ago
  People are acting like 20% of Twitter content is crap and it can be saved by moderating that 20%. This is incredibly naive. 99% of Twitter is crap and always will be. You can't moderate that away. The question is how to make the 1% discoverable.
• didgetmaster 4y ago
  I don't want moderation OR censorship. I want proper labeling so that I can self-filter out things that I don't want to see. Just like the labels on cans of food tells you exactly what ingredients are found within the can so you can skip the ones with peanuts, gluten, or some other substance you don't want; I want labels (and levels) on data. If I don't want to see profanity, I should be able to set my filter to exclude profane comments. If I don't want to see nudity, I can set that filter too. Just like movies get a certain rating (G, PG, R, etc.), we should be able to properly label data.
  • pksebben 4y ago
    I'm with you on this. It also occurs to me, though, that by rigorously labeling all offensive content, you give ai a huge boost in creating it with perfect fidelity. Which inspires another really weird, super uncomfortable thought. If the CSAM producers had cheap, reliable methods of creating their awful content without the use of real people, would that reduce the harm done? I can't remember the last time I felt so conflicted just asking a question, but there it is.
    • trekz 4y ago
      I hear you. But maybe AI shouldn't even be in the equation. It's expecting a robot to solve a people problem. We try to do this a lot in the technology industry. But no matter how great technology is, it's a mistake to think that it can fully solve social and communication problems.
  • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Labels themselves would become an ideological battleground. Imagine what reddit would look like if anyone could freely and publicly tag a post with something like "Libtard" or "Chud".
    • Ajedi32 4y ago
      Subjective labels being applied subjectively isn't as big of a problem though, since it'll probably be clear to most people just from the name that they're subjective. More objective labels will naturally be more useful, and therefore more popular. The only people who are going to use "Libtard" as a filter are those actively trying to create an echo chamber for themselves. If your concern is with the labels themselves being used to convey a (possibly offensive) message, I think you could just have a way for people to hide specific labels and never see them again. Or maybe a way to label the labels as subjective, or just delete ones that are obvious flamebait.
• elmomle 4y ago
  There are some interesting ideas here, but it leaves the actual problem unaddressed. Lots of people are instinctually drawn toward the "edgy" because of a very human instinct to seek secret knowledge. This completely overrides the part of the brain that asks, "Is it good for me or for society that I immerse myself in this environment?". We as a society have yet to find a good way to mitigate this "consumer of secret knowledge" cachet, which on the internet has created a conspiracy theory flywheel.
  • icedistilled 4y ago
    Any way to use big data to give a quick win on breaking out of the negative synergy that the negative flywheel causes?
• steelframe 4y ago
  I moderated r/electricvehicles for a year as a sort of benevolent dictator while all the other mods were more or less checked out. Automoderator rules took care of 90% of the spammy issues. Some things were obvious and chronic, and like porn vs. art, "I know it when I see it." Incivility was pretty easy to identify and call out, but there were a few people that toed the line and would seep toxicity into the sub rather than dump toxicity flamewar-style. They'd never do any one thing to get themselves banned, as they'd very carefully adhere to the letter of the law (sub rules). For a while there was a lot of SPAC hyping, to the point that I had to create a rule just for that. More on that later. Topic-wise, most of what people viewed as toxic was the drama around Tesla vs. the rest of the industry. There would be people wrapping around the pole on EPA range, charging infrastructure, fit-and-finish, software features, sound isolation, handling characteristics, straight-line 0-60, buying experience, their opinion of Elon Musk, FSD, the existence of a steering wheel, etc. etc. People would often appeal to the mods to try to either take sides or tone down the heat. Occasionally people would pop in with an opinion on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which to me seemed like a reasonable topic to discuss in a forum about alternative-energy propulsion systems for vehicles, and they'd get shouted out of the forum as not "EV" enough. (Or worse, "Hydrogen is a pipe dream that will never happen to shut up about it already!") Gatekeepers would insist that the only thing anyone could talk about was passenger vehicles with large battery packs, or maybe a picture of an electric bus every once in a while. Posts about electric bikes or boats would get ignored or called out as, "Not the right kind of vehicle for this sub." Inevitably the mod queue would get filled up with reports for such topics the gatekeepers didn't think are "on-topic" enough. This was the grey area where I had to make a call as a moderator. If a SPAC hype post got downvoted about as much as an electric bicycle post, by what criteria could I justify removing the SPAC post and letting votes decide what happens with the e-bike post? My solution was to pop it up to a meta-conversation in the forum. "Let's talk about the rules. I've noticed posts with this characteristic or that. What would we think of disallowing posts like this and allowing posts like that?" There would be opinions on both sides, but ultimately I had to rely on my own judgment of "What's reasonable?" when making the final call on the rules. Moderation of a public forum is very much a human problem, and there will always be corner cases. It reminded me a lot of what I learned in a graduate class I took on intellectual property law back when I was in school. There will always be a contour, and there will always be "test" cases that push and pull on the boundaries. Having rules ("laws") that set the groundwork for decisions is important. The process for establishing (and changing) those rules should be transparent and inclusive. No rule is going to have 100% support from all sides, but to build a system that works, we need to be able to agree on the process, respect the rules that we converge upon, and challenge rules in a civil manner that become obsolete as the world moves forward.
• khiqxj 4y ago
  Moderation on internet services is just to remove spam. People who think it's for something else are brain dead. Yes, 99% of internet services do think moderation is for whatever little idea they have, but 99% of internet services are poor quality services in the first place. We have never left the dot com bubble.
• fleddr 4y ago
  It seems to me this piece makes lots of assumptions that do not really apply to social media, where I'll use Twitter as the example, just like the author did. People don't really have "conversations" on social media. Most activity is posting updates about oneself, but the far bigger part is screaming at each other and playing engagement games. The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded. As such, Twitter is opposite to real life. If you'd talk and behave as people do on Twitter in the real world, you'd be ousted in a day or may even wake up in the hospital. In a dynamic where bad faith is the default, you can't apply good faith principles. It's massively complex to address. On the one hand, you have almost no accountability regarding your speech on Twitter, yet incidentally too much: mob attacks / cancel culture. Too free and too restricted at once. Personally, I think what you can and cannot say is a massive distraction from the real issue: what gets amplified. Reasonable conversation is pointless and hot takes win. It should be the opposite, just like in real life.
  • drc500free 4y ago
    As Mike Tyson said: "Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."
    • fleddr 4y ago
      Thank you for using that quote, it's one of my all-time favorites.
    • inspector-g 4y ago
      I would love to see/hear the original source for this
  • avivo 4y ago
    This is on point > The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded. > the real issue: what gets amplified But it can be (at least partially) fixed if you change the optimization function. I advocate for that here: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-ranking https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank... And Twitter's Birdwatch (that Elon recently got all excited about when it fact checked the White House: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1587884806020415491 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1587884806020415491) actually does this "bridging-based ranking" for adding context on tweets. Here's the paper with details on how it works for Birdwatch: https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_paper_2022_10_27.pdf https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_pap... (you can also check out the source code in that repo).
• Imnimo 4y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that the MVP here is actually "viable". Suppose you're Reddit, and you have FatPeopleHate on your site, and you "ban" it, in the sense that you hide it from users who have not opted-in. Does that really provide the same level of enforcement as a true ban? It seems to me that the presence of that community on your site has effects that spread beyond the community itself, it shapes the way people interact even outside the soft-banned subreddit. I'd be willing to bet that if you could somehow run an experiment in parallel where you had one Reddit with real bans, and one with soft bans, the quality and nature of interactions on the soft ban one would be much, much worse even outside of banned communities.
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    > It seems to me that the presence of that community on your site has effects that spread beyond the community itself, it shapes the way people interact even outside the soft-banned subreddit. Reddit, itself, is, or at least used to be, a variety of diverse communities. I don't care about either /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/FatPeopleLove I don't consider myself a part of those communities. I subscribe to subreddits I want to track, and I am not a member of the ones that I don't. Surely people on the disagreeable side of the psychological spectrum will gravitate towards some communities and people on the opposite side of that spectrum will gravitate towards other communities. Some communities are cross-cutting, and so have to be moderated in a different way altogether (which Reddit already accommodates). Other than that, communities have their own social protocols. Creating blanket rules / bans / restrictions across communities restricts the organic nature of human interaction and hamstrings it in a rather depressing way. Many problems arise in the battle for "front page" or "trending" screens that try to blend content from multiple communities and invite competition or "raids" or what have you from opposing sides. Personally I hate such things, I have no desire to be manipulated by them and use browser extensions to block them. But given that they exist, it's again mainly a moderation / preferences problem. Give the control to the user over what they want to see.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    > It seems to me that the presence of that community on your site has effects that spread beyond the community itself, it shapes the way people interact even outside the soft-banned subreddit. This is sort of talking around an argument. You could say the same thing about a subreddit dedicated to re-electing a local alderman because of his policy on the maintenance of public parks. Speech is meant to inform, or to affect change. The question is whether you're going to use an online annoyance argument to moderate controversy on a platform. If the justification for why you're going to moderate speech is that people who are not annoyed by that speech might react to it, you've moved squarely into making "genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear."
• crazygringo 4y ago
  Whatever happened to the standard definition of censorship? Which is that it's decreed by a government or similar institution, and that it is enforced by law? That it's about suppressing ideas/material in a whole society? Whatever privately run sites/newspapers/organizations do, it's other things -- editorial policy, moderation, curation. But by definition it's not censorship. In the same way that having a crappy job isn't slavery, and a serial killer isn't committing genocide. Privately banning certain content on a single site, or newspaper, is editorial policy, end of story. Words mean things, and a lot of people have fought long and hard against actual censorship, such as the Comstock laws. Let's not cheapen freedom from censorship by turning it into "but I want to say whatever I want anywhere to anyone who wants to listen!", which is what OP is proposing. Freedom from censorship is about having the right to speak -- but it's not, and never has been, about making anyone else give you a platform for it. And this distinction is vitally important.
  • emtel 4y ago
    That’s not the standard definition of censorship. From Wikipedia: > Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies I can paste more, but if you just google “define censorship” I don’t think there’s a result on the first page that supports your claim.
• mcv 4y ago
  The guy just won't shut up about his trees! But I'm starting to get his point about moderation being based on repetitive behaviour, and not content. I wonder if that's why he keeps interrupting himself about his trees. (For the record, I appreciate his trees project; don't see this as an attack on that.)
  • Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    At least he's likely to pass any interview questions about Red-black trees.
• warner25 4y ago
  I've been a reader and participant of the Bogleheads forum (on investing and personal finance) for well over a decade, and I think it's a shining example of good moderation in practice. My observation is that the key is preventing discussion from getting heated; really moderating the temperature (or noise intensity, excitement, etc.) of the place. Threads on topics that are known to get heated (including topics that can be relevant to investing and personal finance, such as politics and macroeconomics and cryptocurrencies in recent times) immediately get locked. Threads on topics that start out OK but end up getting heated also get locked, or the heated content gets surgically removed if main discussion can be salvaged. So the focus is entirely on high-quality information and thoughtful, low-emotion points and counter-points to think about. The merits of the discussions continue to attract and retain new fantastic participants who make them even better. Edited to add: The practice of moderation here at HN is similar, and has similar effects, which is why I'm here. If they started removing low-emotion information and discussions that just didn't fit the Bogleheads philosophy, I think that would cross the line into censorship. Anyway, it's clear that the Bogleheads forum model is the polar opposite of where Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have gone to suck in the masses and increase their engagement by highlighting the most heated stuff and throwing gasoline onto the fire with likes, votes, and retweets. I think the mainstream social media companies have put themselves into a bind with this.
  • jader201 4y ago
    To be fair, the general civility of the members of Bogleheads is the polar opposite of that at FB/Twitter/Reddit. Maybe moderation is part of that, but I’d argue the subject matter is already generally less polarizing/toxic than what’s on the other three platforms. But your point is still valid re: how Bogleheads does moderation.
    • warner25 4y ago
      You're right, the people who are generally attracted to Bogleheads in the first place, and furthermore the people who are able to participate there without getting removed, are probably quite civil under their FB/Twitter/Reddit handles too. Or they're people who won't go anywhere near FB/Twitter/Reddit. What's obviously very hard is allowing discussion of politics, macroeconomics, religion, race, etc. without it getting heated. Bogleheads doesn't even try.
• Nifty3929 4y ago
  One thing I see missing from the conversation is that fact that large corporations are becoming agents of the state, via fear, regulation, and fear of regulation. I can see Social Media CEO saying "well, I believe in free expression and I would otherwise want to allow this message, but I'm worried what the government will do to me if I do allow it. So instead I will block it." When a platform blocks some content, some call it "censorship", while others say "hey, it's a private company and they can block what they want to. It's called 'moderation'" - but this may in fact not be something the platform wants to block - it's indirect government censorship. I wonder how Elon will handle this. Will he be cowed by the government into censoring content they don't like? Or will he ignore them and take his chances?
  • LightHugger 4y ago
    It's not just the government companies need to fear, it's also other companies. Kiwifarms wasn't taken down by government action, there's been a massive conspiracy between a combination of criminals and infrastructure providers to try to kick them off the internet on the orders of journalists.
    • Nifty3929 4y ago
      I think this is different. I hadn't heard of Kiwifarms before, but I looked it up in 10sec. Looks like they were a forum for people to actively harass others - which has always been and should remain illegal. "Specific Person is a real jerk! And they probably eat live frogs for fun too! What a loser!" - As long as Specific Person can effectively ignore this - meaning it's not forced into their feed, overwhelming their inbox, etc - then that's probably fine, even if untrue. "Specific Person might live near XYZ. Definitely DON'T put any turds in their mailbox ;-) " - Pretty clearly an invitation to real-world harassment, which is not okay and should not be abetted by any platform.
• hintymad 4y ago
  The problem with Twitter and Youtube, at least for me, is that they apply double standards so blatantly. I mean, how can you keep for years Khamenei's tweets that called for "eradicating" a people, while banning an account just because "language is violence"?
• hackeraccount 4y ago
  Some moderation is the nobody wants to see this - spam and the like - and some moderation is nobody needs to see this. The first one you can pass off to a third party - the seconds one is trouble that you can't avoid.