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> But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or eve

> But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]". ---- These debates are always tricky because as things start to get more polarized, people start to expect you to either be fully on board with Twitter as it was or fully on board with Musk's running of the place. Twitter did have moderation issues. And governments do try to weigh in on moderation decisions from companies, sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately. But all of Musk's takeaways about those problems are wrong. Twitter is a pretty good example of the difficulties of getting moderation to scale and how that can go wrong. They were in an unfortunate position of needing to figure out what medical debate was legitimate and what debate wasn't legitimate. And that was made more difficult because of the top-level executive decisions, because of poorly trained moderators, and because of a reliance on automated moderating that couldn't take tweet context into account. And those are all real problems! They're not surprising problems, they're not a revelation, they're probably not the biggest issue facing free speech today, but yeah, they're real problems. But what's Elon's reaction? Musk comes into this situation and slashes the moderation team, leans even more heavily into AI moderation, starts crowdsourcing decisions (because heaven knows random internet crowds definitely won't be vulnerable to group-think during contentious public debate /s), and pushing more moderation decisions to the executive level rather than into independent moderation boards that would be trying to resist personal bias in their decisions. He basically leans into every single decision up above that was problematic about how Twitter handled Covid moderation. Even where government involvement is concerned -- if you're concerned about government pressure on your moderation team, one thing you could do to combat that pressure is have a strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too. Because hey, who needs a bunch of lawyers who are specifically trained to respond to legal threats to free speech and who have a ton of practical experience arguing for those rights in court? They were probably Democrats or something, better to get rid of them. /s ---- The whole thing is just a bunch of people taking somewhat concerning but also relatively unsurprising information and treating it like it's the end of the world and the most important free speech issue of our time; and then... not doing anything to fix the problems. The whole story begins and ends at the outrage and the outrage is all that they're interested in. There's zero followup from Musk about actually solving any of these problems, he's gone in the opposite direction of a solution. There are real free speech advocates who took issue with how Twitter handled moderation; but my guess is that most of them have probably moved to Mastodon by now because the overall ActivityPub ecosystem is more censorship-resistant than Twitter is and is better positioned to reject government pressure to censor. Meanwhile Musk's strategy is that he'll be very mad about moderation going wrong, and that will somehow fix things. You literally have the person breaking this story calling out specific problems with Twitter's moderation process, and they're all problems that Musk has been doubling down on. I don't know how to take that response seriously.

andreyk 4y ago
Definitely agree wrt the last point. It's bizarre that one of the one hand as far as I know Twitter is still committed to moderating a wide range of content (hate speech, violent media, etc.) but on the other hand Musk has doubled down on bots and calling the shots in a top down manner (exactly what this article called out).
- nraynaud 4y ago
  And the “on the fly” policy changes at twitter probably have way less internal debate now than at the time.
concordDance 4y ago
Mastodon seems vulnerable to ideological splitting where you get two parallel worlds that don't talk to each other. E.g. one that believes that transwomen aren't women and that Africans are less intelligent and one that doesn't.
- timerol 4y ago
  "Vulnerable" is an odd word to use there. "Ideological splitting" is the way humans have interacted since the Tower of Babel. Forcing everyone into the same conversation is a guaranteed way to produce conflict. I would say "Mastodon facilitates ideological splitting as a way to have more pleasant conversations and less absurd arguments."
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Prolonged non hostile exposure is what prevents conflict. Otherwise you get radicalization.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the free speech debate? There are reasons to be worried about community silos, but my point wasn't that Mastodon is perfect, it was that it's more resistant to censorship than Twitter is (particularly government censorship). Having large community spaces where everyone interacts might be a worthy goal, but those spaces are often going to require a larger degree of moderation and policing to stay civil. It's a tradeoff that (as far as I can tell) Musk doesn't seem to advocate for -- his policy seems to be that people should block/mute whatever they disagree with, and the platform shouldn't make that decision for them. If that's someone's approach to free speech and they want individual or small-group control rather than platform-wide standards, then Mastodon is a pretty interesting implementation of that idea. Compare this with something like HN -- there's one feed for everyone and limited blocking tools. That forces everyone to interact with each other, but also means that HN mods and users are both a lot more involved in debating what stories are allowed and how discourse is conducted, and those decisions impact more of the community when they're made.

andreyk 4y ago

Definitely agree wrt the last point. It's bizarre that one of the one hand as far as I know Twitter is still committed to moderating a wide range of content (hate speech, violent media, etc.) but on the other hand Musk has doubled down on bots and calling the shots in a top down manner (exactly what this article called out).

nraynaud 4y ago
And the “on the fly” policy changes at twitter probably have way less internal debate now than at the time.

concordDance 4y ago

Mastodon seems vulnerable to ideological splitting where you get two parallel worlds that don't talk to each other. E.g. one that believes that transwomen aren't women and that Africans are less intelligent and one that doesn't.

timerol 4y ago
"Vulnerable" is an odd word to use there. "Ideological splitting" is the way humans have interacted since the Tower of Babel. Forcing everyone into the same conversation is a guaranteed way to produce conflict. I would say "Mastodon facilitates ideological splitting as a way to have more pleasant conversations and less absurd arguments."
- concordDance 4y ago
  Prolonged non hostile exposure is what prevents conflict. Otherwise you get radicalization.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the free speech debate? There are reasons to be worried about community silos, but my point wasn't that Mastodon is perfect, it was that it's more resistant to censorship than Twitter is (particularly government censorship). Having large community spaces where everyone interacts might be a worthy goal, but those spaces are often going to require a larger degree of moderation and policing to stay civil. It's a tradeoff that (as far as I can tell) Musk doesn't seem to advocate for -- his policy seems to be that people should block/mute whatever they disagree with, and the platform shouldn't make that decision for them. If that's someone's approach to free speech and they want individual or small-group control rather than platform-wide standards, then Mastodon is a pretty interesting implementation of that idea. Compare this with something like HN -- there's one feed for everyone and limited blocking tools. That forces everyone to interact with each other, but also means that HN mods and users are both a lot more involved in debating what stories are allowed and how discourse is conducted, and those decisions impact more of the community when they're made.