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.
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.
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+.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
Apparently you've actually published work yourself? Did your publisher print, bind and release every single word submitted to it without any human intervention at all, and then ad hoc remove a small proportion of the content after objections and bar a small proportion of users from further submissions? If not, why are you pretending that two completely different processes are the same?
Nobody argues that owners of physical premises should choose between accepting full responsibility for every action on their premises or being utterly powerless to eject any person for any reason.
Hi, I’m a published author and I can assure you my publisher did not attempt to change opinions or other ideas, whether subjective or objective, in the resulting work. Rather they were concerned with brevity and storytelling.
So there was an actual editorial process before publication, not publication of everything submitted to it by default and subsequent ad-hoc removal of a few things that most offended its customers?
I'll take your word for it that none of your opinions or ideas were controversial enough to upset your publisher, but do you feel the editorial process would have been completely uninterested in removing opinions or other ideas before publication if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich or suggesting that the practice of software development would be greatly improved by only allowing men to participate in it?
Well, assuming we're still discussing the issue of whether removing a subset of user-generated content makes website owners publishers, then I think it's quite reasonable to ask whether your publisher would remain solely concerned with brevity and style if they received submissions incorporating the same range of opinions and ideas as social media.
The tendency of open internet discussion to inexorably tend towards talking about Nazis (and the Godwin corollary that when open internet discussion reaches Twitter-scale, it inevitably attracts participants wanting to defend the Nazis) was the point. Publishers don't have to deal with that bullshit, which is one of the reasons why publishing isn't remotely similar to forum moderation. If they did, they'd be a lot more censorious on the ideas and opinions side.
Sure, there are absolutely no neo-Nazis or kids cosplaying being neo-Nazis or else remotely analogous to neo-Nazism on social media. How silly of me to imagine that social media moderators were deciding if and how to deal with ideas and opinions more likely to be deemed hateful or objectionable by their customers and illegal by certain jurisdictions than the manuscripts your publisher solicits.
Right. Multi-billion dollar companies need to stop pretending they care about freedom of speech or user comfort. They care about money. What threatens their bottom line isn't allowed on their platform, fullstop. If that's ethnic slurs in the EU, they'll remove that. If it's pictures of a gay wedding in Saudi Arabia, they'll remove that.
I mean kind of, depending a bit what the mob get enraged over and they will do whatever to make the issue goes away ASAP.
More importantly I guess your main point is multi-billion dollar company mostly cares about money. To which I would say sure, what else is new? But maybe this is news to some people.
We are well beyond just twitter moderation now. Currently kiwi farms has several ISPs black holing traffic to the site. When the lowest levels of internet infrastructure are getting in to censorship, we have a major problem.
I took the opposite from the article. Twitter wants censorship but calls it moderation and never offers a choice. They put spam, harassment and Hunter Biden in the same category.
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).
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.
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.
What does that mean? Comments with certain tone set the mood anyway. That's how it works in general. It's just you'd prefer "certain" moods over others
Then pick a different medium. A single tabloid doesn't tarnish every single news industry. Rude mailing lists don't invalidate private email conversations. Also, conference calls are a thing.
Anyway, analogies are imperfect, please look in the direction where I am gesturing, not at my exact words.
The point here (and of the entire conversation) is that you shouldn't judge a medium by its worst imaginable actors as long as you're given the right tools that allow you to use that medium undisturbed, effectively putting them into a different silo.
Today twitter allows a very crude, imperfect approximation of this by following people that post decent content and setting the homepage to "latest posts" instead of "top tweets". Ideally we'd have better tools than that.
But the thing is, there's no "outrage Twitter" that's distinct from "calm Twitter." There's just Twitter. Since the value of a social network is in its population, the natural inclination will be towards a reduction of networks, not a proliferation of them.
So you want a moderator to moderate. but then you also want to have tools to see what has been moderated away and unlock those? Right? So moderate yes, but also unmoderate by the users.
I would say something more akin to SPAM scoring would be good.
Contextual filters/scanners would score a piece of content, give it a "score" based on what ever categorizations are being filtered (NSFW, Non-Inclusive Lang, Slurs, Disinfo, etc)
Then both the creator and the consumer should be able to see the score in transparent manner, with the consumer being able to set a threshold to filter out any post that is higher then what they choose
Free Speech Absolutist could set it to 0, Default could be 50, and go from there
I agree, this is the only part I'm doubtful upon whether I can see an individual's score, as it might create a prejudice against that individual that is felt by that individual ("I see you're a bot/troll/like hate speech…"). It also makes me wonder if individual centralised mods should be able to see more than that, but I digress.
Scores across a range of measures would be best, in my view.
I don't know if this is what OP meant, but I really like your interpretation
Mods exist and can ban/lock/block people and content but users can see everything that was banned, removed or locked, as well as the reason why; what policy did the user violate?
I think the only exception would be actually illegal content; that should be removed entirely, but maybe keep a note from the mods in its place stating "illegal content".
That way users can actually scrutinise what the mods do and one doesn't wonder whether or not the mods removed a post because they are biased or for ligit reasons, and opinions are not entirely removed, as they are still readable, but you can't respond to them
here is the thing. this has been discussed on fediverse before and the general consensus is, if a post is deleted by a mod or something, that is "gone". they record a log of "deletion" but not what because it should not exist.....
In addition crap floods? If I submit half a billion posts do you really want that handled by moderation?
Being a server operator I've seen how bad the internet actually sucks, this may be something the user base does not have to experience directly. When 99.9% of incoming attempts are dropped or ban listed you start to learn how big the problem can be.
Spam is advertising, right? That doesn't need special protection. Flooding is like the heckler's veto so that could also be against the rules, it doesn't need special protection either.
As to moderation, why not be able to filter by several factors, like "confidence level this account is a spammer"? Or perhaps "limit tweets to X number per account", or "filter by chattiness". I have some accounts I follow (not on Twitter, I haven't used it logged in in years) that post a lot, I wish I could turn down the volume, so to speak.
What is spam... exactly? Especially when it comes to a 'generalized' forum. I mean would talking about Kanye be spam or not? It's this way with all celebrities, talking about them increases engagement and drives new business.
Are influencers advertising?
Confidence systems commonly fail across large generalized populations with focused subpopulations. Said subpopulations tend to be adversely affected by moderation because their use of communication differs from the generalized form.
That spam is advertising does not make all advertising spam.
We already have filters based on confidence for spam via email, with user feedback involvement too, so I don't need to define it, users of the service can define it for me.
Simply put we keep putting more and more and more filtering on the user with complete disregard for physical reality here, and ignore the costs.
The company that provides the service defines the moderation because the company pays for the servers. If you start posting 'bullshit' that doesn't eventually pay for the servers and/or drives users away money will be the moderator. There is no magic free servers out there in the world capable of unlimited space and processing power.
> Simply put we keep putting more and more and more filtering on the user
Who would be put upon by this? The average user doesn't have to be, they could use the default settings which are very anodyne. The rest of us get what we want, that's what the article stated. Who's finding this a burden?
As to the reality of things, Twitter's just been bought for billions and there's plenty of bullshit being posted there. That's the reality, and several people who've made a lot of money by working out how to balance value and costs think it can do better.
Spam can work the same way — that's how our email spam filters work. To use the OP's "censorship vs moderation" dichotomy, the current "censorship" regime would be like if your email filter marked an email as spam, and not only did not give you the option to disagree with the filter (i.e. mark as "Not Spam"), but didn't even give you the option to see the offending message to begin with.
Spam may still leak into our inboxes today, but the level of user control over email spam is generally a stable equilibrium, the level of outrage around spam filters — and to be clear, there are arguments to be made that spam filters are increasingly biased — is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship".
The old Something Awful forums did something similar. If someone posted something that was unacceptable, the comment would generally stay and the comment would get a tag saying “the user was banned for this post”. They also had a moderation history so you could go back and see mod comments on why they gave bans/probations.
Mastodon decided to go the guilt-by-assiciation route instead:
Instead of just leaving it to users or admins to block users or servers they didn’t want to deal with, a large subset decided to block for anyone who didn’t block certain other servers.
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.
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?
Vouching for a comment makes it visible for everyone else. That means that dang reviews whether the comment breaks the rules and if it does he'll take away your ability to vouch in the future. Therefore, vouching is not a way to continue commenting on a sub-thread that breaks the rules.
There's "breaking the rules" and then there's "breaking the rules according to a certain interpretation" and then there's "I don't like what he said, so I'm going to interpret the rules in a way that justifies removing his post".
It all comes down to some guy telling me how to talk. I don't like it. Anybody who likes it has rocks in his head.
You can actually email dang/the mods and make your case. Make sure to read up on the extensive documentation he shares for how he moderates and how he thinks about moderation right here on HN first, plus any discussion on past suggestions. Mastering the search box helps. A lot of modern HN policy and functionality started as recurring suggestions that became experiments.
Since I was not born with a language, yes I've been told how to talk for a sizeable portion of my life.
In fact learning things like tact and politeness, especially as it relates to the society I live in, has been monumental in my success.
Do you go to your parents house and tell them to screw off? Do you go to work and open your mouth like a raging dumpster fire? Do you have no filter talking to your husband/wife/significant other? Simply put your addition to the discussion is that of an impudent child. "I want everything and I want to give up nothing" is how an individual becomes an outcast, and I severely doubt this is how you actually live outside the magical place known as the internet, though I may be surprised.
I may be unique in this regard, but I am aware of the fact that sometimes I make mistakes, and I don’t highly value all of my conversation, sometimes I just rant, or enjoy engaging in more superfluous conversation. Sometimes the best conversations aren’t “highly valuable”!
I think it's possible to know how to control one's tongue and also not like being told what to say or how to speak, quite possibly because one knows how to do that and because they have their own mind.
I mean, I also don't like that I'm not infinitely wealthy, have a limited lifespan, and am subject to the cruelties of entropy. My like or dislike of these has little to do with addressing the problems by all the above situations in a rational and realistic manner while considering the outcomes in granting myself unlimited godlike power in doing so.
And by moving the goalposts you aren't addressing my comment, but still…
What "godlike power" are you referring to? The ability to moderate what turns up in your own social media feed? The ability to respond to comments someone else has deemed to break rules. I would hope for a bit more than that for godlike power.
I like it even less when 100 IQ people are not told how to talk, repeatedly - they render coherent conversation and decision-making impossible.
I'll give up some of my freedom, to limit everyone else's freedom every day of the week - the only concern I have is roughly the IQ of the people doing the limiting.
> It all comes down to some guy telling me how to talk.
Nobody is "telling you how to talk."
People are free to choose their terms for voluntary social interactions. You don't have a right to inflict yourself on others who wish not to interact with you.
I agree with the spirit, but I think we have to consider the structure.
>> Give me the tools that the moderators have
Whatever tools a site like twitter or youtube gives you, (A) most people will never use them and (B) they still control how the tools work. These two are enough to achieve any censorship goal you might have, and enough to make censorship inevitable.
I don't think we get power to the people while Alphabet/Elon/Whatnot own the platform. It's a shame that FOSS failed on these fronts. But, the internet has produced powerful proofs of concept. The WWW itself, for the first 20 years. Wikipedia. Linux/gnu. Those really did give power to the people, and you can see how much better they were at dealing with censorship, disinformation and other 2020s infopolitics.
Wikipedia is a terrible example for the "zero censorship" crowd because stuff gets deleted or locked all the time. It's an example of how you can produce something useful despite a raging ideological battleground over all sorts of topics.
I didn't say "zero censorship." I don't even know what that means for an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia have a model for user generated content. It's much more resilient, open, unbiased and successful than social media. This isn't because they have some super nuanced, single-us distinction between moderation and censorship. They never really needed to split that hair.
They have a model for collaboratively editing an encyclopedia, including lots of details and special cases that deal with disagreement, discontent and ideological battlegrounds.
They also have a different organisational and power structure. Wikipedia doesn't exist to sell ads, or some other purpose above the creation of an encyclopedia. Users/editors have a lot of power. Things happen in the open.
Between those two, they've done much better than Alphabet/FB/Twitter/etc. Wikipedia is the ultimate prize for censorship, narrative wars, disinformation, campaigning, activism and such. Despite this, and despite far fewer resources it outperforms the commercial platforms. I don't think it's a coincidence.
I can point to particular pages that have failed in providing an accurate representation of the subject and are under the control of activists or interested groups.
I also get a bit tired of looking someone up and it has "so and so says this person is <insert bad thing>", claims that usually stack up about as well as that SPLC claim against Maajid Nawaz[1] did.
Given this, I find it hard to see how they're doing better than the other companies you mention.
I agree. If Twitter reopened its API (properly) then "userland" moderation tools would (could) be easier to implement and that might tackle this problem.
If it's possible to train models that show people the exact ads they like, then I have absolutely no doubt one could do the same to only show the content you like. Learning from downvoted and reported posts, etc.
I don't think that really deals with beheading videos, incitement to terrorism, campaigns to harass individuals and groups, child porn, and many cases where online communities document or facilitate crimes elsewhere.
Child porn is illegal. Are beheading videos illegal? Incitement to terrorism is probably a crime (though I'd argue that it should be looked at under the imminent lawless action test[1] as it's speech). So all of these would be removed and are not part of a moderation discussion.
As to "many cases where online communities document or facilitate crimes elsewhere", why criminalise the speech if the action is already criminalised?
That leaves only "Campaigns to harass individuals and groups". Why wouldn't moderation tools as powerful as the ones employed by Twitter's own moderators deal with that?
It's the "documentation of the crime" aspect of child pornography that makes it illegal. It is still technically illegal in parts of the US to possess, say, drawn illustrations of pornography featuring minors (what 日本人 call "lolicon") but the legal precedents are such that it can't really be prosecuted.
That is, it's not clear in the US you can ban something on the basis of it being immoral, you need to have the justification that it is "documentation of a crime".
That's genuinely interesting (have an upvote) but a social media site's responsibility in a situation such as this is to assess legality, not prosecutability, hence it would be removed.
Anime image boards are not in a hurry to expunge "lolicon" images because they don't face any consequence from having them.
I wouldn't blame Tumbler from banning ero images a few years back because ero image of real people are a lot of trouble. You have child porn, revenge porn, etc. Pornography produced by professionals has documentation about provenance (every performer showed somebody their driver's license, birth certificate, probably got issued a 1099) if this was applied to people posting images from the wild they would say people's privacy is being violated.
I'm not here to debate the legality of child porn or lolicon images, and I fail to see the relevance of what you've written to the provision of moderation tools to the users of Twitter.
> Laws don't enforce themselves.
What has that got to do with Twitter? Please try to stay on track.
What makes child porn illegal is the argument that anyone who views or distributes it is re-abusing the victim. Otherwise, it would be justifiably illegal to create but not to view, possess, or distribute. Yet all are illegal in the USA.
This does not stop the FBI from being a major child porn distributor, despite that meaning the FBI is re-abusing thousands of victims under this rubric.
> What makes child porn illegal is the argument that anyone who views or distributes it is re-abusing the victim.
That's what makes it illegal? What if it's done on a private forum that the victim never finds out about? What if the victim is, say, dead? I don't think those change the legality.
That's the rubric courts and legislatures in the USA have used.
It is, in general, really really difficult to pass speech laws in the USA because of that pesky First Amendment -- even if they're documentation of a crime. Famously, Joshua Moon of Kiwi Farms gleefully hosted the footage from the Christchurch shooting even when the actual Kiwis demanded its removal.
But if you can argue that procurement or distribution of the original material perpetuates the original crime, that is, if it constitutes criminal activity beyond speech -- then you can justify criminalizing such procurement or distribution. It's flimsy (and that makes it prone to potentially being overturned by some madlad Supreme Court in the future with zero fucks to give about the social blowbacks), but it does the job.
In other countries it's easy to pass laws banning speech based on its potential for ill social effects. Nazi propaganda and lolicon manga are criminalized in other countries, but still legal in the USA because they're victimless.
If this makes you wonder whether it's time to re-evaluate the First Amendment -- yes. Yes, it is.
I'm in favor of the First Amendment remaining at least this strong. None of the above things strike me as nearly as dangerous as "the ruling party being able to suppress criticism and opposition by claiming that their opponents' words have potential for ill social effects".
Here's there's a major difference between USA and EU law, and I daresay culture as well: how private information is viewed.
As far as I understand in the EU private information is part of the self. Thus, manipulating, exchanging, dealing with private information without the person's consent is by itself a kind of aggression or violation of their rights. Even if the person never finds out.
In the USA however private information is an asset. The aggression or violation of right only happens when it actually damages the victim's finances. So if the victim never finds out about discussions happening somewhere else in the world, well… no harm done I guess?
Both views are a little extreme in my opinion, but the correct view (rights are only violated once the victim's own life has been affected in any way), is next to impossible to establish: in many cases the chain of events that can eventually affect a person's life is impossible to trace. Because of that I tend to suggest caution, and lean towards the EU side of the issue.
Especially if it's the documentation of a crime as heinous as child abuse.
Well, based on https://cbldf.org/criminal-prosecutions-of-manga/, it seems you probably can beat the charges, but it will take years and an expensive legal defense. People have been prosecuted and usually take plea bargains, so some amount of jail time can be expected. Simple cases of "manga is child porn! yadda yadda" can probably be overlooked but if the police don't like you for some reason, getting arrested is definitely a risk. Although there is supposed to be "innocent until proven guilty" even getting arrested can disqualify you from many jobs.
> even getting arrested can disqualify you from many jobs.
That's something that I think is seriously wrong with the USA right now: the idea of an "arrest record", or at least the idea of it being accessible by anyone other than the police.
There are a number of situations where it is perfectly reasonable to arrest innocent people, then drop all charges. Let's say the cop arrive at a crime scene, there's a man on the ground lying in a pool of blood, and another man standing with a smoking gun holstered at their hip. Surely it would be reasonable to arrest the man that's still standing and confiscate their gun, at least for the time necessary to establish the facts?
But then once all charges has been cleared (say the dead guy had a knife and witnesses identify him as the aggressor), that arrest should be seen as nothing more as either a mistake or a necessary precaution. It's none of potential employer's business. In fact, I'd go as far as make it illegal to even ask for arrest records, or discriminate on that basis.
The problem here is that the default assumption is that everyone on the internet is under the jurisdiction of US law, when the majority in fact are not.
These are global platforms with global membership, simply stating that “if it is free speech in America it should be allowed” isn’t a workable concept.
How about saying that if it is free speech in America it should be allowed in America, but censored in countries where it is against the law? It seems very easy to say.
So different users aren’t able to see full threads based on their location? You’re seemingly randomly able to respond in some circumstances and not others?
When there are people all over the globe participating in the same discussion, you can’t realistically have an odd patchwork of rules. It’s very common for people on this forum, for example, to be commenting on their experiences in Europe, where free speech is heavily curtailed in comparison to the states. How do you manage such threads?
> "So different users aren’t able to see full threads based on their location? You’re seemingly randomly able to respond in some circumstances and not others?"
Of course. That is what they've demanded, so that is what they get.
> "When there are people all over the globe participating in the same discussion, you can’t realistically have an odd patchwork of rules. "
On the contrary: You must have this. As a matter of law. There is no alternative, other than withdrawing from those countries entirely and ignoring the issue of people accessing your site anyway (which is what happens in certain extreme situations, states under sanctions, etc)
> " It’s very common for people on this forum, for example, to be commenting on their experiences in Europe, where free speech is heavily curtailed in comparison to the states. How do you manage such threads? "
Here are the options:
1) Do not do business in those countries.
2) Provide different services for those countries to reflect their legal requirements.
There is no way to provide a globally consistent experience because laws are often in mutual conflict (one state will for example prohibit discussion of homosexuality and another state will prohibit discriminating on the basis of sexual preference)
That's correct and that's actually how it works right now (Germany has different speech laws and Twitter attempts to comply with them[1]). However, it is an American company and it's not unreasonable to follow the American law in America. I would also think it's quite possible to use the network effect of the service to bully places like Germany into allowing greater expression, or simply providing it on the sly by making it easy for Germans to access what they want. Although, I do see the EU is trying to do the same in reverse, probably to (as is its wont) to create a tech customs union that allows its own tech unicorns to appear (something it has failed miserably at, in part because of its restrictive laws).
If I had a tool that could (at least attempt to) filter out anti-semitism or Holocaust denial, then Germany could have that set to "on" to comply with the law. I'm all for democracies deciding what laws they want.
'x is illegal' is a cop-out (albeit often unintentional) and I wish people would stop using it. anything can be made illegal, are you just going to roll over if expressing an unpopular idea becomes a crime? Conversely, illegality doesn't deter a lot of people and many are skilled at playing with the envelope of legality, so absent any moderation you'll get lots of technically/arguably legal content that is designed or degrade or disrupt the operation of a target forum.
It's unhealthy to just throw every difficult problem at courts; the legal system is clumsy, unresponsive, and often tends to go to unwanted extremes due to a combination of technical ignorance, social frustration, and useless theatrics.
We're talking about a social media service adhering to one of the most liberal set of speech laws and norms in the world, not the imposition on the population of an unjust law. Tell me I can't say the word "gay" on threat of imprisonment and I'll say it more but that's not relevant to this discussion.
The vast majority of moderator removed comments and posts on Reddit have nothing to do with the illegal activities you mention.
The vast majority of removed comments are made to shape the conversations.
I think most people would be ok with letting admins remove illegal content, while allowing moderators shape content, as long as users could opt-in to seeing content the mods censored.
This is a win-win. If people don't want to see content they feel is offensive, they don't have to.
Legal vs illegal cannot be enforced on a private platform because the truth procedure for "legal vs illegal" involves a judge, lawyers, often waiting for years.
What you can enforce is "so and so says it is illegal" (accurate 90% or 99% or 99.9% of the time but not 100%) or some boundary that is so far away from illegal that you never have to use the ultimate truth procedure. The same approach works against civil lawsuits, boycotts and other pressure which can be brought to bear.
I think of a certain anime image board which contains content so offensive it can't even host ads for porn that stopped taking images of cosplayers or any real life people because it eliminated moderation problems that otherwise would be difficult.
There is also spam (should spam filters for email be banned because the violate the free speech of spammers?) and other forms of disingenuous communication. When you confront a troll inevitably they will make false comparisons (e.g. banning Kiwi Farms is like banning talk to the effect that trans women could damage the legitimacy of women's sports just when people are starting to watch women's sports)
On top of that there are other parties involved. That anime site I mention above has no ads and runs at very low cost but has sustainability problems because it used to sell memberships but got cut off by payment providers. You might be happy to read something many find offensive but an advertiser might not want to be seen next to it. The platform might want to do something charitable but hosting offensive talk isn't it.
> because the truth procedure for "legal vs illegal" involves a judge
This part is not correct. Private companies block what they believe to be illegal activities in their systems constantly - in order to limit the legal liability of being an accomplice to a crime. This is the case in all industries - and is standard practice from banking, to travel, to hotels, to retail... it's commonplace for companies to block services.
For spam, I would recommend that it gets a separate filter-flag allowing users to toggle it and see spam content, separately toggled from moderated content.
> (should spam filters for email be banned because the violate the free speech of spammers?)
I submit that spam filters should be under the sole control of their end users. If I'm using a Yahoo or Gmail account (I'm not) I should have the option to disable the spam filter entirely, or to only use personal parameters that are trained on the mail only I received, and not email should ever be summarily blackholed without letting me know in some way. If an email bounces, the sender should know. If it's just filtered, it should be in the recipient's spam folder.
>>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
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.
>>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.
You went from asserting its uncommon for people to be advocating for a right to be heard at the beginning of your reply, to actually asserting that is your position at the end of it.
I just don't think it's a reasonable position, no one has an ethical obligation to make themselves endure racist and misogynist abuse. And you might call it a red herring, but there's overwhelming evidence that that's what AOC is exposed to under the system you advocate.
Free speech is a right to speak, not a right to insist other people listen.
>>but there's overwhelming evidence that that's what AOC is exposed
No there really is not because she and many others have the habitat of calling all criticism "harassment", and then posting a couple of example many of which are not even harassment
>no one has an ethical obligation to make themselves endure racist and misogynist abuse.
Sure, but we would first need to settle on a definition of what is "racist" and "misogynist" because if you use AOC definition of those word I can assure you we do not agree on what would be considered "racist" and "misogynist", because AOC thinks someone saying "We need strong border security" is racist.
I mean... if you want to try and claim that AOC hasn't been harassed, that's fine. But I don't think anyone is going to take you seriously, no matter your definition of racism or misogyny. I decided to go AOC's twitter page and view the replies to the first tweet I saw, I scrolled past 8 replies before I found the following
>How does it feel to know that in 2 weeks you will be voted out? What a loser you are. The People of NY hate you. After you lose the election, you should disappear forever. Go to Puerto Rico fix you abuelas roof and stay living there
Now, I personally think the racist trope of "go back to where you came from" is pretty obvious. I also think that the fact that I can find such comments so easily is fairly telling. But let's ignore that and just point out that people have literally been jailed for harassing AOC and sending her death threats.
So let's back up, you can make a judgement about the extent to which you value free speech, but you have to do that grounded in reality.
Yeah see I think you've sort of painted yourself into a corner with this, where the only way of defending your position is to pretend something obviously true isn't true. If you're going to define racism in a way that excludes comments that are so well established that they have wikipedia pages about them[1] and are literally listed in the category "Racism in the United States", then I think you've effectively said there's nothing that could possibly be said that is racist.
>Go to Puerto Rico fix you abuelas roof and stay living there
I don't think it's a leap to relate that to go back where you came from, and I don't think other people think that either - since the wikipedia page literally cites as an example of this racist trope.... Donald Trump saying
>Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came...
Who did he say that in reference to? AOC.
So it's not really a leap is it. But what I'm interested in, is that you claim to read a different meaning into this, so be specific, what do you think the person posting in reply to AOC meant by that?
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.
"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.
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, thanks.
"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.
By internet standards. We're 2 or more orders of magnitude smaller than the marquee names. My guess (which I don't want to find out by experience) is that the pressure scales non-linearly, so a hundred times the users would mean who-knows-how-many-zeros more pressure.
HN feels mid-size in a good way. Most forums are a lot smaller, and then there are the few famous ones that are much much larger. There aren't that many in HN's order of magnitude. The mid range is a nice place to hang because although the problems are impossible, they're not utterly impossible. You can work with them around the margins.
There's no stats page but last I checked it was around 5M monthly unique users (depending on how you count them), perhaps 10M page views a day (including a guess at API traffic), and something like 1300 submissions (stories) and 13k comments a day.
The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.
Thanks dang. Submissions not growing could mean the the users are already finding and submitting most of the interesting stories out there, and there's not much more to find.
> ... because how do you scale self-awarness? It seems almost an oxymoron.
Well, in very small doses numbers help. It is easier for a small group to watch the blind spots of each member. As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.
Which means that the sensible thing to do is to form a committee of intelligent people with good incentives, then go trustingly with what they suggest. Which is, coincidentally, a successful model that governments use. All the politics is generally a distraction from the real work being done by committees.
> It is easier for a small group to watch the blind spots of each member. As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.
I agree, but that's not self-awareness—that's seeing other people's blind spots, which is much easier, in fact it happens automatically.
You're right that it falls apart at scale. Somehow mass blind spots take over. Can that be mitigated? That is the question.
Group dynamics seem to change qualitatively at each order of magnitude. Maybe the problem of "social media", i.e. internet group dynamics, is that we're dealing with orders of magnitude we've never seen before. That doesn't get worked out in just 10 or 20 years.
>As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.
At the same time the hive mind is quite often a protective defense against insurgency in forms.
This seems to be a problem with the comments in this entire post. We're taking community as individuals doing individual things, and in small forums this is commonly true. But, when the group grows larger and money is on the line that assumption should be discarded. In astro-turfing for example, a seemingly large group of 'users' will direct communication on your forms via somewhat 'rational' communication, but possibly disliked by a lot of members. Then you'll notice a group that seemingly counters the astroturf to the level of absurdity that turns more 'hearts and minds' towards the astroturfers (guess what, the counter turfers were also the astroturfers).
You typically end up with one of two situations. The forum either takes on the ideas of the astroturf group and it becomes encoded in their ideals, or the fend it off, but in doing so embrace some of the extremism implanted by the astroturfing group in the first place.
Also, what happens to any group when 4chan decides to raid you for the lulz?
I'd be happy if folks just laid off their truth-o-meters as soon as breaking news erupts. Unambiguously inflammatory comments? Please moderate away. Fake news? Please slow right down until a single research cycle has possibly completed, and evidence can be provided based on rigorous studies (which take time).
> Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation.
Moderation is far more than that. Moderation depends on context - for example, deleting a comment like "$political-party is better than their opponents" from r/programming is "against freedom of speech", but is an example of good moderation, because political discourse is off topic on that forum.
Moderation is about setting the tone and scope of discussion. For many kinds of forums, this includes deleting comments that the moderators find outrageous, silly, inflammatory, and off-topic. Removing things that don't conform to their own views is however a faux pas, moderators are supposed to be neutral in the on-topic discussions, as their name suggests. False/fake are a more complex discussion, as there is no universal source of truth of course.
Now, for a completely open forum, such as Twitter or Facebook, moderation doesn't really make sense, since no discussion or tone is off-topic a priori (except of course for removing illegal speech).
But blocking political speech equally from one subreddit, is different then say blocking an article about a presidential son's laptop from multiple entire platforms.
As I said, I don't think this concept of moderation works when applied to an open discussion forum such as Facebook or Twitter, where nothing is actually off-topic, and where people generally feel that they are communicating with friends and followers and can thus set any tone their own community accepts.
But still, if the Hunter Biden laptop story were removed from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, from StackOverflow and from LWN.net (entire platforms), I wouldn't accuse these particular platforms of censorship.
> 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.
I can't help but think this comes down to, its censorship if i disagree, moderation when i agree.
If someone posts something like "Elon Musk is an idiot", would deleting it be censorship or moderation? Musk is a person after all, but i suspect that many people would say deleting such a thing is censorship.
To give a more realistic to hacker news example - if there was a story about some company reselling modified GPL software for profit without following the gpl license, i would probably call them "bad" people. This is clearly an insult. I still think it would be a reasonable comment to make (hopefully a bit more fleshed out then just calling them evil of course).
Moderators will delete comments or ban people for insults against people they like/support, but then cheer on more aggressive insults against people they deem bad (it's suddenly become very trendy to lash out at Elon Musk on Reddit, for example - you'll score upvotes rather than subreddit bans for doing that)
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
This is a very limited, legalistic point of view, and only applies in the USA.
In reality, freedom of speech is a principle that is more or less well-defined, and that is more or less codified into law in certain countries (the first ammendment to the US Constitution being the most famous example, but many countries have similar, though more limited, rights).
Viewed as a principle, it not only applies to the relationship between the individual and the government, it can be applied to all human groups. We can say that WeChat is worse for freedom of speech than Facebook, even though both are private enterprises and are not within the scope of any freedom of speech laws in most jurisdictions.
The reasons why freedom of speech is viewed as a virtue, at least in European-inspired thought, is not exclusively related to the relationship between the citizen and the state - it is about ensuring good ideas are heard even if that means bad ones are heard as well, ensuring that unpopular bad ideas of powerful people (within some group) can be challenged by the majority of the group, ensuring that minorities who are harmed by some decision get a chance to let everyone else in the group know about the harm.
These apply just as much to you vs the state as they apply to you vs your local church, your village, your tribe, your gaming clan, your company etc. For various reasons, each of these groups may decide that these reasons are not as important as others, while still wishing for some amount of freedom of speech (for example, a church will often not tolerate obvious blasphemy, but may still tolerate criticism of the church leaders, or vigorous discussion of the implications of scripture).
So, I am well within my rights to complain that my state or my company or my church or HN doesn't encourage freedom of speech enough, even though none of these institutions is bound by the freedom of speech clause of the US constitution. Also, I can even claim that the US constitution itself, or the SC interpretation of it, doesn't respect freedom of speech enough if I were to disagree with any decision on the matter - the principle of freedom of speech is separate from the US law.
> This is a very limited, legalistic point of view, and only applies in the USA.
I'm not an US citizen, and it applies to where I live as well, so there's that.
Within your framework, I agree with your views and conclusion though. My post was intentionally targeted as legalistic point of view, but I agree that this can be generalized.
I'll try to elaborate. The article distinguishes between moderation and censorship. It does so on the basis of two definitions the author made up. However, a discussion about either these definitions or the distinction between them doesn't make much sense per se, unless the elephant in the room is freedom of speech. So, I wondered: is this article really about that? The examples at the end would suggest it is.
But freedom of speech is not neatly defined by (the negation of) the definition of censorship, or moderation, either the one from the dictionary or the one from the blog post. It's a term that (in the USA) is defined by law and jurisprudence, and is open to some debate, and in other places is just missing and use losely in debates about reform.
If the author wants to use his/her definitions to state a position in one of those debates, fine, but say so.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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…
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.
USENET never really solved spam. I remember the statistic that at one point one third of usenet traffic was spam and another third was spam cancels. Here's what people felt at the time: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html
(the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed:
> Moderation wouldn’t really be fast enough to stop that
Social media keep using this excuse for not trying. We can moderate spam in emails with a simple naive bayes classifier, why don't we just do that with comments? It could easily classify comments that are part of a bandwagon and flag them automaticly hiding them or for human review.
We are able to moderate email but the concepts we use to do so are never applied to comments, I don't know why, this seems like a solved problem.
If you're trying to use the SPAM model as some kind of example of success I believe you may have already failed.
In SMTP servers I've managed for clients we typically block anywhere from 80 to 99.999% (yes 10000 blocked to one success) messages. I'd call that MegaModeration if there was such a term.
And if you think email spam is solved then I don't believe you read HN often as there is a common complaint of "Gmail is blocking anything I send, I'm a low volume non-commercial sender"
In addition email filtering is extremely slow to react to new methods, generally taking hours depending on the reporting system.
Lastly, you've not thought about the problem much. How are you going to rapidly detect the difference between a fun meme that spreads virally versus an attack against an individual. Far more often you're going to be blocking something that's not a bad thing.
Fair concerns but I have trained a Naive bayes classifier on twitter data in the past using [1] a social study of categorised tweet to train the classifier and got around 85% accuracy. It was able to detect and properly classify rape threats as abusive but conversations about rape seed oil as non abusive. Considering the small data set and how little entropy there is between samples I consider it pretty useful.
I get that no machine learning is 100% perfect which is why it should be used as an indicator rather than the deciding factor.
I have had issues with gmail blocking emails but as you point out it was always because of ip reputation not over zealous Naive Bayes.
Training classifiers can also go off the rails under adversarial attack. This commonly showed up in our systems when people sent short emails that were more ambiguous. For example this tends to cause problems where malevolent users adopt dogwhistles co-opting the language of the attacked group. The attacked group commonly becomes the ones getting banned/blocked in these cases
That's the current system. ML plus humans to remove harmful content. And people like Elon are extremely upset about this. Heck, you even see the GOP complaining about spam filtering on gmail. Hard to say that this is a solved problem that everybody agrees works well.
Okay, I actually did laugh out loud a little at the ‘we are able to moderate email’, bit.
Spam filters are probably one of the single most consistently unreliable pieces of software I ever have to use; regardless of the email provider; or email client I use.
I have to check my junk folder like it’s my inbox.
On both Apple Mail and Outlook; with two different emails - email money transfers (EMTs) will get shoved in my junk box; despite the dozens of times I have marked said emails as not junk.
I’ll get spam emails, but I don’t get mail from newsletters I’ve actually signed up for.
Like…if you’re trying to use spam emails as an example of success; and even a model we should follow for…anything else; I’m going to laugh you out of the room and tell you to keep me the hell away from whatever tools you want to use with that technology.
Spam filtering software for email is at best useless; at its worst; mind numbing log frustrating. It’s a tool I’ll never trust.
Yep. I've got a small number of friends who are regularly harassed on Twitter (and elsewhere). One for their professional work on climate change. One for their professional work on racial history. And one for their transgender status while being professionally associated with a field that attracts an unusual number of alt-right people.
There are occasional repeat harassers. But the usual situation is "somebody posts about one of my friends to their circle and suddenly a gazillion hate messages arrive from a gazillion different people." The only option to prevent this would be "see zero dms or comments on your posts by people you haven't explicitly allowlisted," which works badly if communicating with an ever-shifting professional network is a part of your job.
A somewhat flawed solution to a harassment campaign is whitelists.
This is also the approach celebrities in general need to take as they get drowned in messages (elon musk could spend 24/7 reading messages sent to him and read only a tiny fraction), so harassment can probably be solved by whatever solution we come up with for celebs.
Can make some fairly elaborate "allow" rules depending on why you might want to read messages from non-contacts like "this person is a contact of a contact" or "this person has "IT" in their Twitter bio or "this person is on the 'good person' white list that Mr. Whitelist maintains for the community".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ....".
>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.
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.
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?
> How is usage of a private company's private server resources any different?
If you push that argument to the extreme, why should anyone be allowed to publish anything in our county? They can always go someplace else and speak their mind, but we don't want it around here.
What I'm saying is that exists a gradient of power between the dictatorial (state censorship) and inconsequential (your couch), and we have a social contract that allows the same suppression of speech in the latter but disallows it in the former. We call the consequential type "censorship" but it's the same basic action, there is a gray area where private agents working under the authority of the state can be just as powerful censors as the state itself.
For example, if private banks deny services to a newspaper hostile to the government, I could take your argument and spin it around, they are "free" to publish on their own pocket cash, private banks are not forced to "offer a platform". But we clearly understand that publication will lose advertisers, fail commercial and the interests behind the banking ban will have succeeded in suppressing free speech - suggesting them to distribute leaflets will not help.
The cut-off point where private suppression becomes consequential censorship is, in my opinion, when the gatekeepers of speech are centralized and oligopolistic, like for example social media and, unlike for example, traditional print media. A single publication denying publication is perfectly fine, as long as others exists and have reasonable similar access to distributions channels. With the death of traditional print media and the highly concentrated nature of the visual media and internet space, this less the case.
You can of course publish on your blog with zero traffic, but you are effectively shut out of the relevant distribution channels, you are effectively distributing leaflets in your corner of the street.
>You can of course publish on your blog with zero traffic, but you are effectively shut out of the relevant distribution channels, you are effectively distributing leaflets in your corner of the street.
Exactly. And no one. Zero people. No person or entity is required to provide you with a platform, megaphone or audience.
That doesn't stop you from saying what you want. Freedom to express yourself does not entitle you to an audience. Full stop.
Edit: To clarify, your free speech rights do not trump my free speech (which includes not hosting your speech on my private property). Yes, today's social media has inordinate influence due to network effects. But those are for-profit corporations who owe you nothing.
Get that through your head. They owe you nothing.
Personally, I despise those corporations. And I voted with my feet and wallet and left nearly a decade ago. But my distaste for them and their business models doesn't trump their free speech and property rights. Nor should it.
Your rights do not supersede those of others, except on your private property. Facebook's (or Twitter or YouTube, etc., etc., etc,.) servers are their private property.
Want a public square? Then set up a public square. Those corporate, for-profit entities are not that.
> Get that through your head. They owe you nothing.
If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...
>> Get that through your head. They owe you nothing.
>If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...
Abrasive or not, it's not a tangent. It's the central point.
I didn't disregard anything -- rather, I didn't address the tangent you were off on.
Yes, censorship is bad. There. I addressed your tangent.
However, mine is not an extremist position at all. Freedom of expression and property rights are core elements of Western civilization.
Clearly, we're talking past each other. Which is too bad.
But I'll restate my main thesis once more: You can say whatever you want. But you are not entitled to an audience. And here's the proof.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You do know that they actually permanently remove content on here sometimes, right? I love reading banned users posts! It is not the only tier of moderation at play though.
No, we don't. We only delete things outright when the author asks us to (and typically, when it didn't get any replies—otherwise we try redacting, reassigning to a different username, and/or other things).
I stand corrected! For whatever reason I remember seeing a lot of blanked-out flagged posts when kiwifarms went down, but I could be remembering things wrong.
The point of debate here is how to divide moderation from censorship.
I'd argue that size and power matter most. How you moderate is a technicality. It makes the difference between good and bad moderation, but it doesn't make the difference between moderation and censorship. This article's tips might make your moderation better. They will not make censorship into moderation.
HN's moderation is moderation because HN isn't a medium monopoly like meta, twitter or alphabet. If HN's moderation, intentionally or incidentally, suppresses negative opinions about tensorflow... that's still not censorship. It might be biased moderation, but the web is big and local biases are OK.
It's OK to have a newspaper, webforum or whatnot that supports the christian democrats and ridicules socialists. It's not OK if all the newspapers must do this. That's twitters problem. "Moderation" applies to the medium as a whole.
Anarchy does not want "no rules" it wants "no rulers."
I agree that moderation is necessary. That does not mean that "moderation" on youtube is not censorship. Both can be true. Maybe we can't have free speech, medium monopolies and a pleasant user experience. One has to give.
I don't understand the distinction. If you are on a tech-oriented forum and post some celebrity news with no tech angle and the mods remove it, is that censorship?
After reading Yishan's post this morning. I've been convinced to believe the same as GP. Censorship is about content; moderation is about behavior. These are orthogonal concepts and for reasons related to mod/user framing, not always distinguishable.
The hypothetical is too reductive to be helpful in making that decision. There are other datapoints and social framing that would be needed to answer your question. As it stands, it's like having one equation and ten unknowns and asking what the solution is - it depends.
HN works because it is a tech forum and can ban religion/politics as it sees fit. We get lots of signal and filter out what we'd otherwise consider noise.
The issue is this doesn't work in generalist situations. Where my signal is your noise, or vice versa, people tend to do one of two things. Filter your noise, or increase their signal.
And thus goes back to the problem of giants. The noise battles we see will use every tool available to attempt to win, legal, political, or illegal. This is where splitting up the giants into smaller control zones with varied views tends to help with moderation.
Which is why I’ve taken the view that the actual solution is in the antitrust space, and not the moderation regulation space.
The problem isn’t that Twitter, Facebook, etc moderate in a way that’s biased, it’s that no entity should be so powerful that their biased moderation becomes a problem for society as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
What you're talking about is clearly censorship and not moderation by the OP's definition - "blocking speech that both sides want to hear".
Your link is actually great for his point: people in power (OnlyFans and Meta) blocked something that both sides (their competitors, and their competitors' users) wanted to hear - otherwise they wouldn't have needed to block it. (For the sake of argument, I'm assuming that the lawsuit's claims are true - I have no idea if they are but it's not pertinent to this point.)
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.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadMostly 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.
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.
Evil is more nuanced and resourceful than that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These groups really like to spread lies about people and events. They love to manipulate third parties or institutions into attacking you too.
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.
How many people like getting criticism of any form? Should we ban all criticism?
Like take a protest (for whatever issue you want). Is that criticism or harrasment? Or both?
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.
And that's the precise point at which they cease to be a "middleman" and become a publisher.
The blockade was so effective that I thought it was a hoax until recently.
Nobody argues that owners of physical premises should choose between accepting full responsibility for every action on their premises or being utterly powerless to eject any person for any reason.
I'll take your word for it that none of your opinions or ideas were controversial enough to upset your publisher, but do you feel the editorial process would have been completely uninterested in removing opinions or other ideas before publication if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich or suggesting that the practice of software development would be greatly improved by only allowing men to participate in it?
Do you think that’s what we’re discussing here? Fascinating.
More importantly I guess your main point is multi-billion dollar company mostly cares about money. To which I would say sure, what else is new? But maybe this is news to some people.
> 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).
Power to the people.
Don't trivialize it as some personal preference around moods. It's much more than that.
Stuff like death threats, doxxing, child porn, harassment are not just "moods you don't like".
That is the wrong view on a global communication platform. It's like saying "a certain tone sets the mood for the entire telephone system".
These things should be seen more as silos, subcultures or whatever.
Unless you expose yourself to the firehose of globally popular content.
Anyway, analogies are imperfect, please look in the direction where I am gesturing, not at my exact words.
The point here (and of the entire conversation) is that you shouldn't judge a medium by its worst imaginable actors as long as you're given the right tools that allow you to use that medium undisturbed, effectively putting them into a different silo. Today twitter allows a very crude, imperfect approximation of this by following people that post decent content and setting the homepage to "latest posts" instead of "top tweets". Ideally we'd have better tools than that.
So you want a moderator to moderate. but then you also want to have tools to see what has been moderated away and unlock those? Right? So moderate yes, but also unmoderate by the users.
Power to the people!
Contextual filters/scanners would score a piece of content, give it a "score" based on what ever categorizations are being filtered (NSFW, Non-Inclusive Lang, Slurs, Disinfo, etc)
Then both the creator and the consumer should be able to see the score in transparent manner, with the consumer being able to set a threshold to filter out any post that is higher then what they choose
Free Speech Absolutist could set it to 0, Default could be 50, and go from there
Scores across a range of measures would be best, in my view.
Mods exist and can ban/lock/block people and content but users can see everything that was banned, removed or locked, as well as the reason why; what policy did the user violate?
I think the only exception would be actually illegal content; that should be removed entirely, but maybe keep a note from the mods in its place stating "illegal content".
That way users can actually scrutinise what the mods do and one doesn't wonder whether or not the mods removed a post because they are biased or for ligit reasons, and opinions are not entirely removed, as they are still readable, but you can't respond to them
In addition crap floods? If I submit half a billion posts do you really want that handled by moderation?
Being a server operator I've seen how bad the internet actually sucks, this may be something the user base does not have to experience directly. When 99.9% of incoming attempts are dropped or ban listed you start to learn how big the problem can be.
As to moderation, why not be able to filter by several factors, like "confidence level this account is a spammer"? Or perhaps "limit tweets to X number per account", or "filter by chattiness". I have some accounts I follow (not on Twitter, I haven't used it logged in in years) that post a lot, I wish I could turn down the volume, so to speak.
What is spam... exactly? Especially when it comes to a 'generalized' forum. I mean would talking about Kanye be spam or not? It's this way with all celebrities, talking about them increases engagement and drives new business.
Are influencers advertising?
Confidence systems commonly fail across large generalized populations with focused subpopulations. Said subpopulations tend to be adversely affected by moderation because their use of communication differs from the generalized form.
No.
> Are influencers advertising?
That spam is advertising does not make all advertising spam.
We already have filters based on confidence for spam via email, with user feedback involvement too, so I don't need to define it, users of the service can define it for me.
The company that provides the service defines the moderation because the company pays for the servers. If you start posting 'bullshit' that doesn't eventually pay for the servers and/or drives users away money will be the moderator. There is no magic free servers out there in the world capable of unlimited space and processing power.
Who would be put upon by this? The average user doesn't have to be, they could use the default settings which are very anodyne. The rest of us get what we want, that's what the article stated. Who's finding this a burden?
As to the reality of things, Twitter's just been bought for billions and there's plenty of bullshit being posted there. That's the reality, and several people who've made a lot of money by working out how to balance value and costs think it can do better.
Spam may still leak into our inboxes today, but the level of user control over email spam is generally a stable equilibrium, the level of outrage around spam filters — and to be clear, there are arguments to be made that spam filters are increasingly biased — is much MUCH lower than that around platform "censorship".
My apologies.
> So you want a moderator to moderate.
I don't care whether they continue to moderate centrally but it would suit those who do.
> but then you also want to have tools
Yes.
> to see what has been moderated away and unlock those?
Yes.
If an app you download has settings but they are either:
a) only available to the developers or company
b) the defaults always override your settings
would you be happy? Why, you might ask, do you not get access to the settings and to set them as you wish?
Instead of just leaving it to users or admins to block users or servers they didn’t want to deal with, a large subset decided to block for anyone who didn’t block certain other servers.
This is what HN does with "showdead".
It all comes down to some guy telling me how to talk. I don't like it. Anybody who likes it has rocks in his head.
https://hn.algolia.com/help
https://hn.algolia.com/settings
dang often references past discussions with search links, so here's a good starting point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=7&prefix=true&que...
What you want is someone else's audience, and I'm not exactly sure what makes you think you have the right to that?
Since I was not born with a language, yes I've been told how to talk for a sizeable portion of my life.
In fact learning things like tact and politeness, especially as it relates to the society I live in, has been monumental in my success.
Do you go to your parents house and tell them to screw off? Do you go to work and open your mouth like a raging dumpster fire? Do you have no filter talking to your husband/wife/significant other? Simply put your addition to the discussion is that of an impudent child. "I want everything and I want to give up nothing" is how an individual becomes an outcast, and I severely doubt this is how you actually live outside the magical place known as the internet, though I may be surprised.
Let's assume that you are not a child, that you are confident in your ability to manage your snark and, most of all, highly value your conversation.
I'm going to conclude that yes, you definitely dislike being told how to talk.
Oops.
I may be unique in this regard, but I am aware of the fact that sometimes I make mistakes, and I don’t highly value all of my conversation, sometimes I just rant, or enjoy engaging in more superfluous conversation. Sometimes the best conversations aren’t “highly valuable”!
What "godlike power" are you referring to? The ability to moderate what turns up in your own social media feed? The ability to respond to comments someone else has deemed to break rules. I would hope for a bit more than that for godlike power.
I'll give up some of my freedom, to limit everyone else's freedom every day of the week - the only concern I have is roughly the IQ of the people doing the limiting.
Nobody is "telling you how to talk." People are free to choose their terms for voluntary social interactions. You don't have a right to inflict yourself on others who wish not to interact with you.
>> Give me the tools that the moderators have
Whatever tools a site like twitter or youtube gives you, (A) most people will never use them and (B) they still control how the tools work. These two are enough to achieve any censorship goal you might have, and enough to make censorship inevitable.
I don't think we get power to the people while Alphabet/Elon/Whatnot own the platform. It's a shame that FOSS failed on these fronts. But, the internet has produced powerful proofs of concept. The WWW itself, for the first 20 years. Wikipedia. Linux/gnu. Those really did give power to the people, and you can see how much better they were at dealing with censorship, disinformation and other 2020s infopolitics.
Wikipedia have a model for user generated content. It's much more resilient, open, unbiased and successful than social media. This isn't because they have some super nuanced, single-us distinction between moderation and censorship. They never really needed to split that hair.
They have a model for collaboratively editing an encyclopedia, including lots of details and special cases that deal with disagreement, discontent and ideological battlegrounds.
They also have a different organisational and power structure. Wikipedia doesn't exist to sell ads, or some other purpose above the creation of an encyclopedia. Users/editors have a lot of power. Things happen in the open.
Between those two, they've done much better than Alphabet/FB/Twitter/etc. Wikipedia is the ultimate prize for censorship, narrative wars, disinformation, campaigning, activism and such. Despite this, and despite far fewer resources it outperforms the commercial platforms. I don't think it's a coincidence.
I also get a bit tired of looking someone up and it has "so and so says this person is <insert bad thing>", claims that usually stack up about as well as that SPLC claim against Maajid Nawaz[1] did.
Given this, I find it hard to see how they're doing better than the other companies you mention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majid_Nawaz#Claim_by_Southern_...
On second thought.. I suppose that's Tiktok.
If moderation must be done then let me do it for myself. Give me the tools.
A central moderating authority cannot be trusted at all.
As to "many cases where online communities document or facilitate crimes elsewhere", why criminalise the speech if the action is already criminalised?
That leaves only "Campaigns to harass individuals and groups". Why wouldn't moderation tools as powerful as the ones employed by Twitter's own moderators deal with that?
[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...
That is, it's not clear in the US you can ban something on the basis of it being immoral, you need to have the justification that it is "documentation of a crime".
And protection of victim rights, I suppose.
Anime image boards are not in a hurry to expunge "lolicon" images because they don't face any consequence from having them.
I wouldn't blame Tumbler from banning ero images a few years back because ero image of real people are a lot of trouble. You have child porn, revenge porn, etc. Pornography produced by professionals has documentation about provenance (every performer showed somebody their driver's license, birth certificate, probably got issued a 1099) if this was applied to people posting images from the wild they would say people's privacy is being violated.
> Laws don't enforce themselves.
What has that got to do with Twitter? Please try to stay on track.
This does not stop the FBI from being a major child porn distributor, despite that meaning the FBI is re-abusing thousands of victims under this rubric.
That's what makes it illegal? What if it's done on a private forum that the victim never finds out about? What if the victim is, say, dead? I don't think those change the legality.
It is, in general, really really difficult to pass speech laws in the USA because of that pesky First Amendment -- even if they're documentation of a crime. Famously, Joshua Moon of Kiwi Farms gleefully hosted the footage from the Christchurch shooting even when the actual Kiwis demanded its removal.
But if you can argue that procurement or distribution of the original material perpetuates the original crime, that is, if it constitutes criminal activity beyond speech -- then you can justify criminalizing such procurement or distribution. It's flimsy (and that makes it prone to potentially being overturned by some madlad Supreme Court in the future with zero fucks to give about the social blowbacks), but it does the job.
In other countries it's easy to pass laws banning speech based on its potential for ill social effects. Nazi propaganda and lolicon manga are criminalized in other countries, but still legal in the USA because they're victimless.
If this makes you wonder whether it's time to re-evaluate the First Amendment -- yes. Yes, it is.
As far as I understand in the EU private information is part of the self. Thus, manipulating, exchanging, dealing with private information without the person's consent is by itself a kind of aggression or violation of their rights. Even if the person never finds out.
In the USA however private information is an asset. The aggression or violation of right only happens when it actually damages the victim's finances. So if the victim never finds out about discussions happening somewhere else in the world, well… no harm done I guess?
Both views are a little extreme in my opinion, but the correct view (rights are only violated once the victim's own life has been affected in any way), is next to impossible to establish: in many cases the chain of events that can eventually affect a person's life is impossible to trace. Because of that I tend to suggest caution, and lean towards the EU side of the issue.
Especially if it's the documentation of a crime as heinous as child abuse.
That's something that I think is seriously wrong with the USA right now: the idea of an "arrest record", or at least the idea of it being accessible by anyone other than the police.
There are a number of situations where it is perfectly reasonable to arrest innocent people, then drop all charges. Let's say the cop arrive at a crime scene, there's a man on the ground lying in a pool of blood, and another man standing with a smoking gun holstered at their hip. Surely it would be reasonable to arrest the man that's still standing and confiscate their gun, at least for the time necessary to establish the facts?
But then once all charges has been cleared (say the dead guy had a knife and witnesses identify him as the aggressor), that arrest should be seen as nothing more as either a mistake or a necessary precaution. It's none of potential employer's business. In fact, I'd go as far as make it illegal to even ask for arrest records, or discriminate on that basis.
Criminal records of course are another matter.
These are global platforms with global membership, simply stating that “if it is free speech in America it should be allowed” isn’t a workable concept.
When there are people all over the globe participating in the same discussion, you can’t realistically have an odd patchwork of rules. It’s very common for people on this forum, for example, to be commenting on their experiences in Europe, where free speech is heavily curtailed in comparison to the states. How do you manage such threads?
Of course. That is what they've demanded, so that is what they get.
> "When there are people all over the globe participating in the same discussion, you can’t realistically have an odd patchwork of rules. "
On the contrary: You must have this. As a matter of law. There is no alternative, other than withdrawing from those countries entirely and ignoring the issue of people accessing your site anyway (which is what happens in certain extreme situations, states under sanctions, etc)
> " It’s very common for people on this forum, for example, to be commenting on their experiences in Europe, where free speech is heavily curtailed in comparison to the states. How do you manage such threads? "
Here are the options:
1) Do not do business in those countries.
2) Provide different services for those countries to reflect their legal requirements.
There is no way to provide a globally consistent experience because laws are often in mutual conflict (one state will for example prohibit discussion of homosexuality and another state will prohibit discriminating on the basis of sexual preference)
If I had a tool that could (at least attempt to) filter out anti-semitism or Holocaust denial, then Germany could have that set to "on" to comply with the law. I'm all for democracies deciding what laws they want.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-hatecrime-idUSKBN...
It's unhealthy to just throw every difficult problem at courts; the legal system is clumsy, unresponsive, and often tends to go to unwanted extremes due to a combination of technical ignorance, social frustration, and useless theatrics.
The vast majority of removed comments are made to shape the conversations.
I think most people would be ok with letting admins remove illegal content, while allowing moderators shape content, as long as users could opt-in to seeing content the mods censored.
This is a win-win. If people don't want to see content they feel is offensive, they don't have to.
Let the user decide.
What you can enforce is "so and so says it is illegal" (accurate 90% or 99% or 99.9% of the time but not 100%) or some boundary that is so far away from illegal that you never have to use the ultimate truth procedure. The same approach works against civil lawsuits, boycotts and other pressure which can be brought to bear.
I think of a certain anime image board which contains content so offensive it can't even host ads for porn that stopped taking images of cosplayers or any real life people because it eliminated moderation problems that otherwise would be difficult.
There is also spam (should spam filters for email be banned because the violate the free speech of spammers?) and other forms of disingenuous communication. When you confront a troll inevitably they will make false comparisons (e.g. banning Kiwi Farms is like banning talk to the effect that trans women could damage the legitimacy of women's sports just when people are starting to watch women's sports)
On top of that there are other parties involved. That anime site I mention above has no ads and runs at very low cost but has sustainability problems because it used to sell memberships but got cut off by payment providers. You might be happy to read something many find offensive but an advertiser might not want to be seen next to it. The platform might want to do something charitable but hosting offensive talk isn't it.
This part is not correct. Private companies block what they believe to be illegal activities in their systems constantly - in order to limit the legal liability of being an accomplice to a crime. This is the case in all industries - and is standard practice from banking, to travel, to hotels, to retail... it's commonplace for companies to block services.
For spam, I would recommend that it gets a separate filter-flag allowing users to toggle it and see spam content, separately toggled from moderated content.
I submit that spam filters should be under the sole control of their end users. If I'm using a Yahoo or Gmail account (I'm not) I should have the option to disable the spam filter entirely, or to only use personal parameters that are trained on the mail only I received, and not email should ever be summarily blackholed without letting me know in some way. If an email bounces, the sender should know. If it's just filtered, it should be in the recipient's spam folder.
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
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.
I just don't think it's a reasonable position, no one has an ethical obligation to make themselves endure racist and misogynist abuse. And you might call it a red herring, but there's overwhelming evidence that that's what AOC is exposed to under the system you advocate.
Free speech is a right to speak, not a right to insist other people listen.
No there really is not because she and many others have the habitat of calling all criticism "harassment", and then posting a couple of example many of which are not even harassment
>no one has an ethical obligation to make themselves endure racist and misogynist abuse.
Sure, but we would first need to settle on a definition of what is "racist" and "misogynist" because if you use AOC definition of those word I can assure you we do not agree on what would be considered "racist" and "misogynist", because AOC thinks someone saying "We need strong border security" is racist.
>How does it feel to know that in 2 weeks you will be voted out? What a loser you are. The People of NY hate you. After you lose the election, you should disappear forever. Go to Puerto Rico fix you abuelas roof and stay living there
Now, I personally think the racist trope of "go back to where you came from" is pretty obvious. I also think that the fact that I can find such comments so easily is fairly telling. But let's ignore that and just point out that people have literally been jailed for harassing AOC and sending her death threats.
So let's back up, you can make a judgement about the extent to which you value free speech, but you have to do that grounded in reality.
it is harsh sure, but if that comment falls outside your bounds of "acceptable" speech then your Overton window is VERY VERY NARROW
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_back_to_where_you_came_from
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Racism_in_the_United_...
No where did the person say "Go back where you come from", can you read it that you if you want to sure. but I can (and do) read it in other ways.
This is part of the problem where everyone sees every comment as a "dog whistle" to racism. Sorry I reject that reading
>Go to Puerto Rico fix you abuelas roof and stay living there
I don't think it's a leap to relate that to go back where you came from, and I don't think other people think that either - since the wikipedia page literally cites as an example of this racist trope.... Donald Trump saying
>Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came...
Who did he say that in reference to? AOC.
So it's not really a leap is it. But what I'm interested in, is that you claim to read a different meaning into this, so be specific, what do you think the person posting in reply to AOC meant by that?
Yes, they're zealots. It's similar to how religious zealots refused to simply "change the channel" when they found something objectionable.
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.
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, thanks.
"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.
...Is it? I mean, compared to Twitter, sure, but for a private forum I think of it as relatively large.
HN feels mid-size in a good way. Most forums are a lot smaller, and then there are the few famous ones that are much much larger. There aren't that many in HN's order of magnitude. The mid range is a nice place to hang because although the problems are impossible, they're not utterly impossible. You can work with them around the margins.
The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.
Make a post about celebrities, politics, or religion (that's not tech related) and see how long before it's flagged out of existence.
Well, in very small doses numbers help. It is easier for a small group to watch the blind spots of each member. As the numbers scale up to serious group sizes things seem to fall apart again as a hive-mind forms.
Which means that the sensible thing to do is to form a committee of intelligent people with good incentives, then go trustingly with what they suggest. Which is, coincidentally, a successful model that governments use. All the politics is generally a distraction from the real work being done by committees.
I agree, but that's not self-awareness—that's seeing other people's blind spots, which is much easier, in fact it happens automatically.
You're right that it falls apart at scale. Somehow mass blind spots take over. Can that be mitigated? That is the question.
Group dynamics seem to change qualitatively at each order of magnitude. Maybe the problem of "social media", i.e. internet group dynamics, is that we're dealing with orders of magnitude we've never seen before. That doesn't get worked out in just 10 or 20 years.
At the same time the hive mind is quite often a protective defense against insurgency in forms.
This seems to be a problem with the comments in this entire post. We're taking community as individuals doing individual things, and in small forums this is commonly true. But, when the group grows larger and money is on the line that assumption should be discarded. In astro-turfing for example, a seemingly large group of 'users' will direct communication on your forms via somewhat 'rational' communication, but possibly disliked by a lot of members. Then you'll notice a group that seemingly counters the astroturf to the level of absurdity that turns more 'hearts and minds' towards the astroturfers (guess what, the counter turfers were also the astroturfers).
You typically end up with one of two situations. The forum either takes on the ideas of the astroturf group and it becomes encoded in their ideals, or the fend it off, but in doing so embrace some of the extremism implanted by the astroturfing group in the first place.
Also, what happens to any group when 4chan decides to raid you for the lulz?
Moderation is far more than that. Moderation depends on context - for example, deleting a comment like "$political-party is better than their opponents" from r/programming is "against freedom of speech", but is an example of good moderation, because political discourse is off topic on that forum.
Moderation is about setting the tone and scope of discussion. For many kinds of forums, this includes deleting comments that the moderators find outrageous, silly, inflammatory, and off-topic. Removing things that don't conform to their own views is however a faux pas, moderators are supposed to be neutral in the on-topic discussions, as their name suggests. False/fake are a more complex discussion, as there is no universal source of truth of course.
Now, for a completely open forum, such as Twitter or Facebook, moderation doesn't really make sense, since no discussion or tone is off-topic a priori (except of course for removing illegal speech).
But still, if the Hunter Biden laptop story were removed from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, from StackOverflow and from LWN.net (entire platforms), I wouldn't accuse these particular platforms of censorship.
I can't help but think this comes down to, its censorship if i disagree, moderation when i agree.
If someone posts something like "Elon Musk is an idiot", would deleting it be censorship or moderation? Musk is a person after all, but i suspect that many people would say deleting such a thing is censorship.
To give a more realistic to hacker news example - if there was a story about some company reselling modified GPL software for profit without following the gpl license, i would probably call them "bad" people. This is clearly an insult. I still think it would be a reasonable comment to make (hopefully a bit more fleshed out then just calling them evil of course).
Moderators will delete comments or ban people for insults against people they like/support, but then cheer on more aggressive insults against people they deem bad (it's suddenly become very trendy to lash out at Elon Musk on Reddit, for example - you'll score upvotes rather than subreddit bans for doing that)
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.
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.
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.
In reality, freedom of speech is a principle that is more or less well-defined, and that is more or less codified into law in certain countries (the first ammendment to the US Constitution being the most famous example, but many countries have similar, though more limited, rights).
Viewed as a principle, it not only applies to the relationship between the individual and the government, it can be applied to all human groups. We can say that WeChat is worse for freedom of speech than Facebook, even though both are private enterprises and are not within the scope of any freedom of speech laws in most jurisdictions.
The reasons why freedom of speech is viewed as a virtue, at least in European-inspired thought, is not exclusively related to the relationship between the citizen and the state - it is about ensuring good ideas are heard even if that means bad ones are heard as well, ensuring that unpopular bad ideas of powerful people (within some group) can be challenged by the majority of the group, ensuring that minorities who are harmed by some decision get a chance to let everyone else in the group know about the harm.
These apply just as much to you vs the state as they apply to you vs your local church, your village, your tribe, your gaming clan, your company etc. For various reasons, each of these groups may decide that these reasons are not as important as others, while still wishing for some amount of freedom of speech (for example, a church will often not tolerate obvious blasphemy, but may still tolerate criticism of the church leaders, or vigorous discussion of the implications of scripture).
So, I am well within my rights to complain that my state or my company or my church or HN doesn't encourage freedom of speech enough, even though none of these institutions is bound by the freedom of speech clause of the US constitution. Also, I can even claim that the US constitution itself, or the SC interpretation of it, doesn't respect freedom of speech enough if I were to disagree with any decision on the matter - the principle of freedom of speech is separate from the US law.
I'm not an US citizen, and it applies to where I live as well, so there's that.
Within your framework, I agree with your views and conclusion though. My post was intentionally targeted as legalistic point of view, but I agree that this can be generalized.
But freedom of speech is not neatly defined by (the negation of) the definition of censorship, or moderation, either the one from the dictionary or the one from the blog post. It's a term that (in the USA) is defined by law and jurisprudence, and is open to some debate, and in other places is just missing and use losely in debates about reform.
If the author wants to use his/her definitions to state a position in one of those debates, fine, but say so.
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.
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.
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…
http://www.eternal-september.org/
(the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed:
https://www.templetons.com/usenet-format/cancel.html )
Also found https://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/NoSpam.html which is a great little time capsule site..
Social media keep using this excuse for not trying. We can moderate spam in emails with a simple naive bayes classifier, why don't we just do that with comments? It could easily classify comments that are part of a bandwagon and flag them automaticly hiding them or for human review.
We are able to moderate email but the concepts we use to do so are never applied to comments, I don't know why, this seems like a solved problem.
In SMTP servers I've managed for clients we typically block anywhere from 80 to 99.999% (yes 10000 blocked to one success) messages. I'd call that MegaModeration if there was such a term.
And if you think email spam is solved then I don't believe you read HN often as there is a common complaint of "Gmail is blocking anything I send, I'm a low volume non-commercial sender"
In addition email filtering is extremely slow to react to new methods, generally taking hours depending on the reporting system.
Lastly, you've not thought about the problem much. How are you going to rapidly detect the difference between a fun meme that spreads virally versus an attack against an individual. Far more often you're going to be blocking something that's not a bad thing.
I get that no machine learning is 100% perfect which is why it should be used as an indicator rather than the deciding factor.
I have had issues with gmail blocking emails but as you point out it was always because of ip reputation not over zealous Naive Bayes.
[1] https://demos.co.uk/press-release/staggering-scale-of-social...
Spam filters are probably one of the single most consistently unreliable pieces of software I ever have to use; regardless of the email provider; or email client I use.
I have to check my junk folder like it’s my inbox.
On both Apple Mail and Outlook; with two different emails - email money transfers (EMTs) will get shoved in my junk box; despite the dozens of times I have marked said emails as not junk.
I’ll get spam emails, but I don’t get mail from newsletters I’ve actually signed up for.
Like…if you’re trying to use spam emails as an example of success; and even a model we should follow for…anything else; I’m going to laugh you out of the room and tell you to keep me the hell away from whatever tools you want to use with that technology.
Spam filtering software for email is at best useless; at its worst; mind numbing log frustrating. It’s a tool I’ll never trust.
There are occasional repeat harassers. But the usual situation is "somebody posts about one of my friends to their circle and suddenly a gazillion hate messages arrive from a gazillion different people." The only option to prevent this would be "see zero dms or comments on your posts by people you haven't explicitly allowlisted," which works badly if communicating with an ever-shifting professional network is a part of your job.
This is also the approach celebrities in general need to take as they get drowned in messages (elon musk could spend 24/7 reading messages sent to him and read only a tiny fraction), so harassment can probably be solved by whatever solution we come up with for celebs.
Can make some fairly elaborate "allow" rules depending on why you might want to read messages from non-contacts like "this person is a contact of a contact" or "this person has "IT" in their Twitter bio or "this person is on the 'good person' white list that Mr. Whitelist maintains for the community".
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-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.
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.
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 ....".
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.
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.
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?
If you push that argument to the extreme, why should anyone be allowed to publish anything in our county? They can always go someplace else and speak their mind, but we don't want it around here.
What I'm saying is that exists a gradient of power between the dictatorial (state censorship) and inconsequential (your couch), and we have a social contract that allows the same suppression of speech in the latter but disallows it in the former. We call the consequential type "censorship" but it's the same basic action, there is a gray area where private agents working under the authority of the state can be just as powerful censors as the state itself.
For example, if private banks deny services to a newspaper hostile to the government, I could take your argument and spin it around, they are "free" to publish on their own pocket cash, private banks are not forced to "offer a platform". But we clearly understand that publication will lose advertisers, fail commercial and the interests behind the banking ban will have succeeded in suppressing free speech - suggesting them to distribute leaflets will not help.
The cut-off point where private suppression becomes consequential censorship is, in my opinion, when the gatekeepers of speech are centralized and oligopolistic, like for example social media and, unlike for example, traditional print media. A single publication denying publication is perfectly fine, as long as others exists and have reasonable similar access to distributions channels. With the death of traditional print media and the highly concentrated nature of the visual media and internet space, this less the case.
You can of course publish on your blog with zero traffic, but you are effectively shut out of the relevant distribution channels, you are effectively distributing leaflets in your corner of the street.
Exactly. And no one. Zero people. No person or entity is required to provide you with a platform, megaphone or audience.
That doesn't stop you from saying what you want. Freedom to express yourself does not entitle you to an audience. Full stop.
Edit: To clarify, your free speech rights do not trump my free speech (which includes not hosting your speech on my private property). Yes, today's social media has inordinate influence due to network effects. But those are for-profit corporations who owe you nothing.
Get that through your head. They owe you nothing.
Personally, I despise those corporations. And I voted with my feet and wallet and left nearly a decade ago. But my distaste for them and their business models doesn't trump their free speech and property rights. Nor should it.
Your rights do not supersede those of others, except on your private property. Facebook's (or Twitter or YouTube, etc., etc., etc,.) servers are their private property.
Want a public square? Then set up a public square. Those corporate, for-profit entities are not that.
If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...
>If you want to be abrasive on tangents, you can definitely be that guy, but that was not the subject, rather the nature of censorship. You completely disregard my example of iligitemate private censorship by the banks, intended to point out the problem, only to forcefully restate a extremist ideological position that doesn't really function in any true society. Ok...
Abrasive or not, it's not a tangent. It's the central point.
I didn't disregard anything -- rather, I didn't address the tangent you were off on.
Yes, censorship is bad. There. I addressed your tangent.
However, mine is not an extremist position at all. Freedom of expression and property rights are core elements of Western civilization.
Clearly, we're talking past each other. Which is too bad.
But I'll restate my main thesis once more: You can say whatever you want. But you are not entitled to an audience. And here's the proof.
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.
Shine on you crazy diamonds!
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.
The point of debate here is how to divide moderation from censorship.
I'd argue that size and power matter most. How you moderate is a technicality. It makes the difference between good and bad moderation, but it doesn't make the difference between moderation and censorship. This article's tips might make your moderation better. They will not make censorship into moderation.
HN's moderation is moderation because HN isn't a medium monopoly like meta, twitter or alphabet. If HN's moderation, intentionally or incidentally, suppresses negative opinions about tensorflow... that's still not censorship. It might be biased moderation, but the web is big and local biases are OK.
It's OK to have a newspaper, webforum or whatnot that supports the christian democrats and ridicules socialists. It's not OK if all the newspapers must do this. That's twitters problem. "Moderation" applies to the medium as a whole.
Anarchy does not want "no rules" it wants "no rulers."
I agree that moderation is necessary. That does not mean that "moderation" on youtube is not censorship. Both can be true. Maybe we can't have free speech, medium monopolies and a pleasant user experience. One has to give.
Moderation is about how things are said.
They are not mutually exclusive.
The hypothetical is too reductive to be helpful in making that decision. There are other datapoints and social framing that would be needed to answer your question. As it stands, it's like having one equation and ten unknowns and asking what the solution is - it depends.
HN works because it is a tech forum and can ban religion/politics as it sees fit. We get lots of signal and filter out what we'd otherwise consider noise.
The issue is this doesn't work in generalist situations. Where my signal is your noise, or vice versa, people tend to do one of two things. Filter your noise, or increase their signal.
And thus goes back to the problem of giants. The noise battles we see will use every tool available to attempt to win, legal, political, or illegal. This is where splitting up the giants into smaller control zones with varied views tends to help with moderation.
Which is why I’ve taken the view that the actual solution is in the antitrust space, and not the moderation regulation space.
The problem isn’t that Twitter, Facebook, etc moderate in a way that’s biased, it’s that no entity should be so powerful that their biased moderation becomes a problem for society as a whole.
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416424
So as a result they are practically the same thing.
(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)
I don't think that definition works.
Your link is actually great for his point: people in power (OnlyFans and Meta) blocked something that both sides (their competitors, and their competitors' users) wanted to hear - otherwise they wouldn't have needed to block it. (For the sake of argument, I'm assuming that the lawsuit's claims are true - I have no idea if they are but it's not pertinent to this point.)