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> Do you honestly believe I should instead just take your word for it and ignore both personal evidence and studies? That would make no sense. No. Also, maybe

> Do you honestly believe I should instead just take your word for it and ignore both personal evidence and studies? That would make no sense. No. Also, maybe this is unclear, but I am questioning your decision when you posted your original comment (when my anecdote was unavailable). If I were you, I would hesitate from making broad generalizations like “[hateful content] is typical content on Twitter”. A very strong statement, but sensible given your unusual access patterns. I would not make the general claim about Twitter that way (other than what studies mention), but seems like you are generalizing your cherry-picked experience. I actually concede the points about the objective increase in hateful tweets on the site. It would be odd for them to not increase, given that all the banned accounts were reinstated; this is obvious. Similarly, we would reasonably expect less hate speech in countries that penalize them. Free speech was espoused in spite of these increases (for deeper, second/third-order consequence reasons). To make it clear: I never said Twitter adopting free speech would lead to less hate speech on the platform. I am merely responding to your incendiary generalizations of the platform without having seriously used it. There’s a sense in which we vary in our sensitivity towards strong moderation and limiting freedom of speech. I think freedom of speech is a hard-won right of history, something preserved for us by our ancestors so that we may enjoy it. It is also fragile, and the default human state is to diminish freedom of speech for exploitation. To me, it’s precious and serves as a backbone of a truly democratic society, but perhaps you may differ. This leads to an interesting difference between HN and Twitter; I enjoy HN and its strongly moderated nature (there are several other strongly moderated platforms I enjoy). But Twitter seems different. It acts as both a personal and commercial outlet for news. Personal identities are far stronger; silencing an account is silencing an identity. The consequences of limiting free speech differ. EDIT: I also took a more careful look at your original comment with the Twitter accounts. I honestly cannot find any problematic accounts after having looked through maybe 30 posts on Top. Did you take most of them from Latest? That would make sense, but you are basically giving Twitter a very short window to respond to things. Besides, it’s not the *existence* that matters, it’s whether they are promoted or not. Because for the average user, they will see tweets with much engagement. I would be happy to see any studies on the average Twitter user’s feed, and see the amount of hateful content. If you can demonstrate that (by some sensible definitions) the average Twitter user sees a lot of hateful content, I would gladly change my mind.

jonathanstrange 3y ago
I have used it for more than a year, that's serious enough in my book to come to a reasonable verdict. I'm not going to engage more than I want with a website just to find its flaws when I think it already has plenty of them anyway. My initial statement wasn't intended as some sort of strong moral claim, it's just my personal opinion that Twitter / X brings a huge negative net effect on society. You disagree, fair enough, but all you have presented so far in this lengthy discussion was your personal experience to the contrary of mine. That's not a very convincing or strong argument that would make me reconsider my assessment. Two more points: First, you seem to make similar generalizations as you accuse me of making, based on your personal experiences with the platform. I see no problem with this, after all we can only judge these kind of platforms by testing and using them. It's futile to get into discussions about "how much bad content" there is, these are empirical issues and we seem to disagree about them. Elon Musk has been accused of blocking access of third-party researchers, if that's true than I'd say that's a bad sign. Second, that it's not the existence that matters is Twitter / X's rationale. This might be a reasonable take on moderation issues but it is absolutely not adequate for the legally relevant cases. Whether it's illegal hate speech, child pornography, copyright infringement, or other illegal content, the "it's hard to find and we're demoting this kind of content" defense does not hold and will lead to fines. The content needs to be removed from the servers, and it's also not a bad idea to permban users posting it repeatedly (rather than, as indeed just happened, allowing someone like that who was banned in the past back to Twitter and even paying him money). Anyway, nice discussion. Have a good weekend!

jonathanstrange 3y ago

I have used it for more than a year, that's serious enough in my book to come to a reasonable verdict. I'm not going to engage more than I want with a website just to find its flaws when I think it already has plenty of them anyway. My initial statement wasn't intended as some sort of strong moral claim, it's just my personal opinion that Twitter / X brings a huge negative net effect on society. You disagree, fair enough, but all you have presented so far in this lengthy discussion was your personal experience to the contrary of mine. That's not a very convincing or strong argument that would make me reconsider my assessment. Two more points: First, you seem to make similar generalizations as you accuse me of making, based on your personal experiences with the platform. I see no problem with this, after all we can only judge these kind of platforms by testing and using them. It's futile to get into discussions about "how much bad content" there is, these are empirical issues and we seem to disagree about them. Elon Musk has been accused of blocking access of third-party researchers, if that's true than I'd say that's a bad sign. Second, that it's not the existence that matters is Twitter / X's rationale. This might be a reasonable take on moderation issues but it is absolutely not adequate for the legally relevant cases. Whether it's illegal hate speech, child pornography, copyright infringement, or other illegal content, the "it's hard to find and we're demoting this kind of content" defense does not hold and will lead to fines. The content needs to be removed from the servers, and it's also not a bad idea to permban users posting it repeatedly (rather than, as indeed just happened, allowing someone like that who was banned in the past back to Twitter and even paying him money). Anyway, nice discussion. Have a good weekend!