It all starts with images and video? Over simplification of course but leave off images, videos and make links not href. Would you be safer from this complicated mess? Then third party apps would probably come out enriching things. But not on our servers or under our moderation. Use a non-mono space font to cut down on ACSII art (^_^)b
90% of the problems come from laws not people. Except the CSAM laws (which are justified as they relate to real physical harm), I think all other laws shouldn't have existed. DMCA, hate speech, mocking presidents, it's all the same.
If you're dealing with law might as well just pay good lawyers and stick to your principles instead of gently bending over.
It's always fun to introduce glitches into the matrix of groupthink to demonstrate the futility of dogma veiling simple social power dynamics (aka "soft power")...otoh, HN has some great content. Like any platform with great content, people have to learn how to interact with each other in a pro-social way. People are just going to disagree at times on some subjects. And that's ok...These disagreements often lead to motivate one to create solutions which leads to innovation.
The "we don't like your kind round here" meme is backwards thinking & leads to the cloistered groupthink that is the subject of comedy. The game of "soft power" is a net-negative game so there are winners & losers. The losers don't just go away, so they need to advocate for their God given rights to survive. There is no option not to play the game because the game is ever expanding until the particular systems collapse.
What's the point in getting someone who already agrees to listen? You want to find those willing to listen that don't agree.
I don't want to reinforce my ego that I have people agreeing with me, I could get plenty of that if I wanted, I want those disagreeing and willing to listen to see the other side. I want to see what's actually a convincing argument that's changing opinion.
But hey, everyone's so used to the likes and points system, they forget that speaking is to covey a message, not to get internet points for your ego. If that's all free speech means to you, no wonder you give it away easily.
I happily paid those -5 internet points. If that surprised any of the downvoters, maybe they will think again what's the point of speech that does nothing. It's funny how none of them responded with actual speech, maybe because they think talking is about getting those downvotes and not about interacting with people.
> maybe they will think again what's the point of speech that does nothing
Downvotes are meaningful speech too. Usually people use them when they think your comment isn't worth a reply or doesn't belong here. They exist to prevent people from feeling like they have to reply to something that otherwise wouldn't be worth replying to, as a way of communicating to the poster that their post is extremely uninteresting. One thing they actually do is move your comment down the page.
That being said, since you hold this opinion so strongly, maybe it's reasonable for me to point out: although the article mostly covers real and hypothetical laws that could make Twitter harder to moderate, there's also the question of how Twitter is supposed to make enough money to stay afloat, and how it can continue to do that if advertisers would rather not advertise on a platform that might show their ad next to messaging they'd prefer not to be associated with. There's no silver bullet here even if they did ignore EU laws or whatever it is you find unreasonable.
"if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
The measure of intolerance is basically whoever tries censorship and violence first. Ironically they often justify it with one or two sentences cherry-picked from Popper.
Relative to other large social media sites (reddit, Tumblr, Twitter pre-Elon, etc.) HN is a bastion of free speech. Reddit being possibly the least free of them all.
HN is much more heavily moderated than those websites. Which is a good thing, it's why conversations here tend to be of a higher quality. I don't think the HN style of moderation would scale to places like Reddit even if they wanted it.
>HN is much more heavily moderated than those websites.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Reddit is orders of magnitude more heavily moderated than HN. Your average run of the mill subreddit has more moderators than the entirety of HN.
>Which is a good thing, it's why conversations here tend to be of a higher quality.
I think the conversations here are higher because of the userbase, not dang's moderation. The site doesn't lend itself to the toxic userbase that reddit and tumblr has.
>I don't think the HN style of moderation would scale to places like Reddit even if they wanted it.
There are subreddits with more scale than HN, with more moderation. Scale is definitely not an issue.
Don’t forget that HN is also self moderated through upvotes/downvotes (I’ve never used Reddit, does it have similar?). This does two things IMO—first, low quality posts become less and less readable which reduces incentive to make inflammatory posts, but second it also imposes self moderation (except for users that resort to throwaway accounts) since losing too many karma points removes some of your ability to participate on the site.
> but second it also imposes self moderation (except for users that resort to throwaway accounts) since losing too many karma points removes some of your ability to participate on the site.
Uh, absolutely not the case. All you need to do is to not post bullshit all the time to be in positive on karma.
It's even worse on reddit (if you want closest approximate it would be like HN instance-per topic(subreddit)) where karma is global so you could get karma on one subreddit and lose on another and be net positive even easier.
the up/down vote thing mostly works but in bigger communities it quickly turns from "quality/garbage comment" to "I agree/I disagree" button
Reddit is petty free speech from the site admin perspective. The vast majority of moderation on Reddit is done by the community (i.e. subreddit mods), no one is stopping you from creating your own free speech absolutists subs.
I wish some small country would promise not to interfere with content moderation. I'd host all my stuff there and maybe even move there
When I worked in a russian hosting provider a decade ago, I saw a glimpse of censorship, very small compared to current level. We received a message that some page on a small news website is illegal, because it "provides information on how to commit suicide", which was considered inappropriate information for kids. The page in question was a news report about a conscript who killed himself with an AK due to bulling.
The only things that are actively illegal in the US on the list in the article are CSAM and copyright infringement. There are examples that are illegal in other countries, but in the US, vanishingly little speech can be illegal.
I think "freedom of speech" is used in two senses, generally without qualification. The post above references freedom of speech with regards to what is illegal by the government and is, so far as I know, correct. There is almost no speech that is illegal by force of law in the United States.
The other usage of the term is more of a principle. That citizens of the United States expect its various institutions to uphold the spirit of the First Amendment even though it isn't a legal requirement. That, in an ideal place, your Twitters and Facebooks would adopt a stance similar to the federal government.
There are factors that complect it. Social media platforms are basically entertainment sites and so need to attract advertisers which is at odds with that thinking. Users of the site often want others deplatformed. Standards of legality vary. Then you have cases where the government attempts to influence the moderation standards of a platform, blurring the lines farther.
From my point of view, individual users wanting the opinion of others banned and government influence are the ones that are the most worrying, not least because of what they potentially signify for the future. No right will be maintained if the populace doesn't value its protection.
GP is complaining that the problems are because too much speech is illegal, whereas most of the items on the list are pretty explicitly because of unwanted, but legal, speech. Although a lot of the back half of the list is dealing with conflicts with international speech laws, to the point that you can get speech that is illegal to host in one country and illegal to take down in another country.
Incidentally, is there anyone on the compliance teams left at Twitter?
They are justified only up to the point where Apple starts scanning your personal photos and then the EU joins in requiring everyone else to do that too?
There are politicians constantly testing their legislation boundaries all over CSAM. It's getting abused to make proof of concepts that companies are willing to implement something, and then they extend it to other shit every time. You can't just slap the "for CSAM" label on increasingly ridiculous things. It needs to actually make sense.
> They are justified only up to the point where Apple starts scanning your personal photos and then the EU joins in requiring everyone else to do that too?
Interesting view. There was a time, not too long ago, when photos were developed in labs by actual people. I remember vividly when some photos just came back blank, until I learned that the people at the photo labs used to "censor" content they deemed problematic and that could get you in trouble.
Back then, one option was to simply develop the photos yourself (major PITA, never did it myself, but I knew a few people who actually went down that route). Today, it's the data storage providers who do the censoring and with much more dire consequences (e.g. police showing up at your residence and charges being pressed).
The option you have nowadays is to simply not use these online services and use an offline storage solution (even if it's just a thumb drive on your desk) while taking photos the old-fashioned way (e.g. not with a smartphone).
The problem isn't so much legislation itself, it's that modern technology is a massive enabler for this kind of crime on a scale that simply hasn't been possible before and cannot be managed by any methods that may have worked in the past.
> It needs to actually make sense.
I agree, but the problem is immense pressure from all sides while being a truly Herculean task that unfortunately has no simple and effective solutions. So what do legislators tell people then? Just let it go and accept that thousands of children have to suffer? Or rather live with the looming threat of your life being ruined by an innocent holiday picture your phone mislabelled?
I honestly don't have an answer to that I don't know there is a good one either.
Doesn't banning Kanye West from the platform go against his whole "free speech" thing? The absolutists say that there should just be more free speech to drown out the hateful speech. Why isn't he just encouraging people to drown it out instead?
I find the unlimited free speech arguments to be disingenuous and lazy most of the time. There's always a limit to speech, and it's not easy to find. That doesn't mean we shouldn't explore the space to find it (and that we'll have to acknowledge it's a dynamic and changing boundary).
> I imagine he determined that free speech has limits in other parts of the world
How unfortunate that we're left to imagine this, rather than having the new ownership articulate a content moderation policy that reflects their curation decisions.
But Twitter has long supported allowing speech in different regions based on local laws.
For example, I had set my region to Germany because Twitter would automatically block more content for German users (due to Nazi content being illegal in Germany).
So, is your imaginary conclusion that Elon has changed Twitter's policy from: "speech is restricted for users in a locale according to the local laws" to "speech is restricted platform wide according based on the most restrictive laws that exist in the world"?
It would seem very anti-free speech to me if this new system allows China to determine which content is available on Twitter, or we impose the UK's onerous libel laws on all American users.
I believe he's changed it based on whatever he is feeling at the moment is the best choice, which could change tomorrow. I honestly don't think he has a clue what he is doing or what free speech actually is.
The picture Ye posted is not illegal in the United States and so therefore it appears he no longer supports free speech.
We all know Elon Musk is going to relearn the entire moderation curve. We're just amused that the dude thinks he is a genius, but is unable to think a step or two ahead.
The rules will come down, because they have to. If it took "Ye" posting a Swastika and saying Hitler was awesome to convince Elon then so be it. Elon will meet many, many other people who will push the moderation curve towards where everyone else has settled.
Anyone who has ever moderated knows that allowing a free-speech-for-all, while seemingly a noble ideal, turns into something that nobody needs nor wants. Communication becomes noisy, the topics tend to favour a lowest denominator of quality, and more akin to a soapbox arena then a place of pure speech.
The solution it seems to me is in the name : moderation.
Instead of unfiltered thoughts, we moderate so we can more clearly communicate. In that sense the word censorship loses all meaning : because meaning should be conveyed carefully, especially when topics are sensitive. And so often online people aren’t sensitive at all, for many reasons that seem evident.
Source : moderated several chatrooms for many years.
>Anyone who has ever moderated knows that allowing a free-speech-for-all, while seemingly a noble ideal, turns into something that nobody needs nor wants. Communication becomes noisy, the topics tend to favour a lowest denominator of quality, and more akin to a soapbox arena then a place of pure speech.
That was the case before acquisition. Just the lowest common denominator biased towards whatever political views twitter mods held
It only goes against his "free speech thing" if his "free speech thing" was actually a coherent ideology.
Instead his "free speech absolutism" is a brand, it's there to signal what kind of person he is, it's not a set of principles and therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny.
Musk has repeatedly said that inciting violence will be banned while other forms of speech will be allowed. So I think he has a coherent ideology, but it still depends on a judgment call. When Kanye says he "loves Nazis" one could make the judgment he's endorsing violence against Jews because the context involves the history of what Nazis did.
When Trump said on Jan 6th he wants his supporters to "fight" to "stop the steal" a lot of people took that as endorsing violence to storm the capitol. I think that's less clear-cut than Nazi endorsement, but other people disagree.
Main thing I care about is "covid misinformation" is no longer banned. So Twitter won't ban an epidemiologist who posts a clinical study saying mRNA vaccines lower sperm counts anymore. https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-... Bans like that were just absurd.
There is a legal definition to fall back on in the case of inciting violence, and what Kanye said doesn't come close. Not that Twitter is obligated to hold to that definition, but I think it's pretty misleading to say you are for "free speech" and then define "inciting violence" so broadly as to have virtually no meaning.
Incitement AFAIK requires eminence, it would not include publicly declaring a fondness of certain people, even if those people were violent. If that were so everyone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt or declaring a fondness for The Communist Manifesto would also be incitement.
The real reason is that Kayne was booted is that he toxic waste and having him on Twitter would have damaged the Twitter brand and cost Elon money.
How was (paraphrasing) "going defcon on the jews" not inciting violence?
Edit: I want to add that I don't believe this is due to his manic depressive disorder but because he's a naraasstic asshole. Posting a picture of a swastika then saying how the Nazis and Hitler are great is the most obvious way to get attention.
I think they kind of have. Musk replied "that's fine" to Ye posting the Musk yacht photo and "that is not" to the Star of David Nazi symbol which suggests that was the final line for the ban. The "going deathcon one on the Jews", which led to the pre-Musk ban, is arguably a more explictly a violent threat than the symbol.
The swastika itself represents historical violence on the Jews. I would argue it alone is an explicit threat of violence because I can't see what other meaning today it could have?
My parents have a vintage carpet with some eastern (counterclockwise) swastikas on it. That said, the context around your comment is completely apparent and the downvote are troubling to say the least. I hope it's just unhelpful pedantry rather than pedantry as a cover for bigotry.
The swastiska has had a very long history, before the Nazis misused it for their purpose.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
So when kayne used it, of course he referred to the Nazi symbol and just wanted attention and strongly hint at his antisemitism.
But other people can mean something very different:
"In several major Indo-European religions, the swastika symbolises lightning bolts, representing the thunder god and the king of the gods, such as Indra in Vedic Hinduism, Zeus in the ancient Greek religion, Jupiter in the ancient Roman religion, and Thor in the ancient Germanic religion."
" I can't see what other meaning today it could have?"
Because I know people who are into germanic livestyle and they are NOT nazis, but they would like to use that old symbol freely. So that is one counterexample. There are people today who use the swastika who explicitley do not refer to the nazis.
But like I said, when people like kayne use the swastika, their meaning is very clear and different.
Should we be burning school books and cancelling movies about the Holocaust because they have swastikas? Like it or not it is free speech and shouldn't be banned.
If an individual book owner decides to have a backyard barbecue of all their pro-Nazi propaganda or an individual theater owner doesn't feel comfortable running Jojo Rabbit, that's up to them.
Yes, but when they claim to support free speech and then turn around and do the opposite it is best to call them out on it. The reason for my hyperbole response was because here we are talking about Twitter and free speech, and some people are avidly in support of banning things and people they don't like.
Oh don't get me wrong, they are both unacceptable and I haven't and don't want to see the symbol tweet. I personally find words more impactful, revealing of intent and suggesting action than symbols. I say arguable because I don't which was worse, or if it's a worthy discussion, but the deathcon tweet is enough for me to see an unwell/dangerous person that needs a ban just to save them from themselves let alone anyone else.
And yet humans aren't computers, and the meaning of phrases in popular culture isn't always determined by strict literal definition.
Most people would interpret the phrase "I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going (def) con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" to mean preparing to go to war or enter into conflict against, not preparing to defend against an attack from, jewish people.
No it doesn't. Defense implies that you are planning to be attacked. Regardless though, it is free speech because the word can mean a lot of things. There are countless videos of Democrats like Pelosi saying we are going to "beat" Republicans. I guess those Democrats should be banned from national television for inciting violence.
"I'm going to beat them in a race"? The word is commonly used to mean win a competition and in fact I'd argue it's use meaning physical violence is rarer.
Also being a republican (politican) is a choice and therefore valid to be a target of hatred. People aren't born Republican , however
bring Jewish is considered both an ethnic group and religion. This is the key to why it's acceptable to attack a political group verus an ethnic group.
Jews have different views, they don't act as one group, they don't have a hierarchy like republicans, nor don't put out group statements.
Beat is just the tip. There are countless videos of Democrat leaders saying people has to fight, that they're at war, etc. Kanye wasn't telling everyone to go Death (DEF) CON 3 on the Jews, he was saying he was. He could have literally said he hoped that people would die and it still isn't isn't inciting violence according to the law. Conservatives are good at that, where they are constantly advocating for the murder of trans people which according to Musk is okay cause I still see it frequently from many of the right-wing people he is now associating with and their followers. While I don't agree with his statement, it is far from inciting violence and doesn't break any laws in the US.
It's was death con 3 not 1. Which makes it even weirder since 3 is the middle. But that's also assuming he meant defcon which is something we probably shouldn't do. Should stick to the words he's actually saying and w.r.t. the "going death ... on jewish people" is pretty black/white on inciting violence. But it was only a temporarily ban that he got following that tweet (which twitter1.0 did claim to do )[1].
Afaik, nobody at twitter2.0 has made a clear statement as to what tweet caused the permanent suspension. Just commenting "that is not" is not at all the same as saying "and this will get you banned".
I'm referring to pre musk ban.
The exact tweet was “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,”
Someone was proposing incitement to violence has a threahold etc. This to me is clearly incitement to violence.
Some have claimed he didn't know what "death con" (defcon) means to which I say what could he have possibly meant. It's <something negative> on Jewish People.
Defcon is a defense term indicating a level of preparedness. I don't see how it could possibly be argued that preparation and an incitement to violence are the same thing. Words matter even if he doesn't know what they mean. Would be very interesting to see that attempted.
Personally, I think he probably meant something else that very likely could have been closer to an incitement of violence, but he doesn't have the vocabulary and we can't convict someone for what you think might be in their head.
It just plain reads as hostile to me, and hostile entities often claim they are just defending themselves (justified or not), whether people or countries. But I don't think anyone has mentioned convicting him of anything unless you're talking about a court of public opinion or something.
We can't convict them, but we can absolutely ban them from a social media network. The threshold for that is far lower than legal deprivation of liberties.
heh well i seriously doubt Kanye has the slightest clue about the actual meaning of defcon levels.
but i was thinking, does this tweet "I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE," incite violence? I don't think it does.
Now if he said "when i wake up i want to read on the news how all of you went death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE" that would be inciting violence to me. btw, i'm thankful Taylor Swift is mostly benign, her fans are fanatical to the point of acting like a brain washed cult. Anything she tells them to do is done.
So because he said death con (instead of DEFCON), it had some secret meaning that meant something entirely different and you have proof of this where? I am no fan of Kanye, but people see what they want to see. Maybe he was making some trope about the holocaust, but even holocaust denial isn't illegal in the US.
It's probably reasonable to assume Kanye doesn't have a good understanding of Defcon levels though, right? He called it "death con", after all. I think to most people, it's a phrase uttered in movies before war begins.
When the government speaks of defcon levels, they don't speak of going "defcon X on somebody". This template is borrowed from expression like "going medieval on your ass", which is clearly not about preparing for defense. What would it mean to prepare for defense on somebody?
When you combine that with him using "death con" instead of "defcon" and the tenor of his comments both before and since (posting a swastika?) it is a little hard to imagine he meant he was preparing to defend himself from an attack rather than going on attack. "I'm a little sleepy, but after I wake up I'm going to prepare for an attach By JEWISH PEOPLE." Is this seriously what you think he was saying?
I wish more people would understand this. For people like Musk, his personal brand is extremely important and they spend a lot of effort portraying and selling a specific image. It is an important part of his success as a businessman. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative.
Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does. In his view Twitter is free speech. An attack on Twitter (as he alleged Apple was doing) is an attack on free speech. Twitter dying means the death of free speech. To claim that a company is the embodiment of free speech is ridiculous yet so many people buy into it.
Elon Musk becomes a Fox News darling right before he launches an electric pickup truck. He obviously doesn’t want Tesla to be a brand associated with left wing politics.
Which way around is cause and effect? An ex of mine is a literal communist, and her beliefs about Musk 5 years ago appear to have made their way to people I assume to be mainstream American left-wing (hard to be sure as I’m not American, but it’s the vibe I’m getting).
That is the idea, you lose some left supporters of your brand in exchange for some right leaning supporters. Elon Musk believes this trade off is neutral to positive. Maybe he is wrong, but the anecdote about your communist ex doesn’t amount to much other than the brand has become less liked in your circle.
If he manages to get conservatives to buy EVs to own the libs, that will be awesome. It's a pretty weird theory though: make yourself anathema to your core market, liberals with money, in hopes of winning over the anti-environmentalists. It's even weirder seeing as its timed to coincide with every other car manufacturer in the world entering the market and gunning for your market segment.
The stock price agrees with you. I’m not convinced because the environmentalists may care more about environmental performance than his antics. Those indifferent to personal impact on climate change, which is economically rational, can rationally buy the Tesla truck based on operating cost economics… it just can’t be seen as a “libtruck for libs”.
Weird theory, but it points to Elon not being quite as foolish as the left would believe.
People aren't as stupid as HN wants to think they are. Twitter will be judged based on how it actually evolves, not Musk's brand. Time will tell.
Let's not pretend the site wasn't an absolute disaster before the acquisition though. If I clicked on even a single trending topic about a game or news item I'd often be presented with unfiltered hardcore porn. Then there would be topics of innocent things like landscapes that get filtered. It was a complete joke and harmful place to visit.
I've also had this happen to me. It doesn't happen every time, but I've had Twitter show me graphic penetration on topics that are just, like, a city name. (I've never seen it on the homepage or in someone's replies, only topics from the trending bar.)
Apparently, there was a spam/reader DoS attack during the last few days associating porn to Chinese cities, in an effort by PRC's government to disorganize demonstrations against the government and the Zero Covid policy.
The last time I saw it was a couple months ago. (I can't say whether or not it continued, I stopped clicking into the trending bar around that time as a matter of unrelated principle that I didn't want my attention to be controlled by Twitter's idea of what's trending.)
Disagree. I've come across numerous examples of people getting themselves or others off, usually spamming local area hashtags or trending topics. Seemed like exhibitionists/trolls as opposed to sex workers (who usually just tweet store-window erotica to promote their onlyfans and don't want to get banned).
Another data point: Been using Twitter daily within the past two years and I’ve never encountered anything remotely close to the filtering blunder you describe.
Adding a tiny Gladwell: I've been using Twitter since 2007 and pretty much daily for probably 10 years and same, never accidentally encountered "unfiltered hardcore porn" clicking on trends or pretty much anything.
As time goes on, it turns out that pre-Elon Twitter is becoming more and more of a disaster. Now it turns out it was full of porn, and especially child porn which previous leaders didn't care about.
Also instead of a company struggling to be consistently profitable it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future if not for the timely intervention
Well, it never had a ban on porn as such, did it? Although I'd venture "full of porn" is an exaggeration. Do you have numbers?
> and especially child porn which previous leaders didn't care about.
Got a source for that? As best I know, they weren't considered a problem by the authorities. Unlike now where they have one (1) moderator (thanks to Musk's firings) for the entirety of Asia (tens of millions of users.)
> it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future
Their 2020 figures show that, apart from an unfortunately timed $800Mi settlement, they'd have made $580Mi profit. Now that's not a great profit on $5Bi revenue but it's definitely not "a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail", is it?
> if not for the timely intervention
Which has added $1Bi a year debt payments. Now that is "a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail"...
Pre-Elon Twitter was quite bloated in terms of assessing it as an organisation. Tons of pointless meetings, massive amount of time spent tweaking icons, and a shitload of DEI mandates. The fact that it's now faster and less hateful with half the employees is telling.
> Let's not pretend the site wasn't an absolute disaster before the acquisition though. If I clicked on even a single trending topic about a game or news item I'd often be presented with unfiltered hardcore porn.
Settings | Privacy and Safety | Display media that may contain sensitive content
Anecdata: mine has always been enabled, and I've been a user since 2007, yet I never encountered any kind of porn (except from some random replies or follow-spams from obvious bikini girls).
I don't object to porn in principle but you are right about it being an inconsistent mess, plus most/all of the porn I've unwillingly encountered there was from people who should stick to radio.
> FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative.
> Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does.
The models here are the guru/savior/grifter, which encompasses and goes beyond just "brand".
Why don't the followers see the contradictions in what the guru says and does? Some of them are truly deluded, but a whole lot of them understand it just fine and just want to see if they can get in on the action.
I agree. He's signalling a desired outcome: I'm your free speech champion. His actions do not need to reflect this as long as the intellectually lazy just accept this, and I mean rely on our lazy system 1 to judge and move on, vs. the work of cataloging and analyzing his actual past acts to see if they match his loud words.
Well his free speech thing was also stated alongside the fact that he wanted to authenticate everybody. Free speech can work if real identities and reputations are clearly visible. Anonymity combined with free speech is what creates the places most normal people don't want to be.
This isn't true. We've tried real-world identities on the internet numerous times, most broadly when Google merged G+ and Youtube, but also a lot of USENET identifiers and signatures included a person's real name, or easily identifiable version of it.
It accomplishes absolutely nothing - people are perfectly willing to put their real name and reputation behind their harrassing and toxic behavior. It does, however, make it easier to extend harassment campaigns to people's homes, businesses, families, etc.
Just like people are happy to have signs on the gardens or stickers on their truck they are more than willing to tell people their views online. Especially because they don't work for some multi-national that cares what their political views are. And so there are no consequences for whatever they say or do.
Precisely. My local NextDoor has a local business owner posting foul trolling pretty much nonstop. Under the same name his business operates under. Seems to do fine.
It is very relevant. His posts were blocked in every country (by removing his account). As an american, I dont expect to be banned from a social media company (ran in my country no less) because of a speech law halfway around the world. Elon isn't following policies, he is following his whim. The problem with that is all the previous moderation statements he made did not align with this banning.
> I dont expect to be banned from a social media company (ran in my country no less) because of a speech law halfway around the world
I expect that the whole account was banned worldwide, more because it made headline news (in the bad way) around the world. And so not banning Kanye's horrible, mentally ill, degrading and rather sad antics, would scare off the advertisers who pay the bills. I mean, the remaining advertisers.
> Elon isn't following policies, he is following his whim.
Agreed.
> The problem with that is all the previous moderation statements he made did not align with this banning
It's almost like it wasn't thought through. Like Elon still has no idea what he's doing.
That's what many have been saying for weeks now. But Musk has held to his "free speech except what's illegal" stance and accused advertisers who pulled ads of being against "free speech". If he's going to ban people for violating the laws of any country in which twitter operates then he'll effectively be turning twitter into disney and that goes against all of his claims.
He also appeared on Alex Jones and was accompanied by white supremacist Nick Fuente and decided to go all in.
The rapper said: “I see good things about Hitler … Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
Jones replied: “The Nazis were thugs.”
“But they did good things too,” Ye said. “We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
“Oh my goodness … just because you don’t like one group doesn’t mean –” Jones said, clearly uncomfortable. Ye interrupted: “I love Jewish people. But I also love Nazis.”
“I don’t think Hitler was a good guy,” Jones stated later. Ye replied: “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things.”
That is the same exact boilerplate response we get over here by extreme right wingers (assuming non extreme right wingers do exist, which over here is not the case) when talking about the atrocities committed by the Mussolini regime: "he did good things too". Yeah sure, like conscience is something that can be recharged like a cellphone battery: "Ok, I've helped 99 old ladies to cross the road, so now I'm entitled to beat and robber the next one!".
Those people are full of shit, period.
Utilitarianism doesn't say that you can store up moral chits and then cash them in to do some evil. It says an act should be judged by its net consequences. Basically, it says you can do some evil if, of the choice available to you in some context, it results in the most good (or the least evil, if no choice results in good). The evil in other words is inextricable from the good. It isn't just a lark you can engage in after you banked some good. Jabbing someone with a needle to administer a vaccine is allowed. Jabbing them with a needle after you gave them a cookie is not.
So no, whatever you think of utilitarianism, this is not its problem.
It's about money, not "free speech". Kanye posting hate speech drives away advertisers and twitter loses money. Musk is a grifter just like everyone else, his siren song being this "free speech" bullshit. The grift stopped working so he backpedaled. Seems fairly simple to me.
I don’t think I’m giving him any credit at all. I think, somehow, he’s currently acting even worse than I would if I somehow got parachuted into this position.
Which is really really odd because quite a lot of his previous PR stunts — the Easter eggs in the Teslas, the “ring of fire” SpaceX video, the trans-Martian Roadster, the announcement of the Cybertruck — are things I regard as pretty effective brand building.
But this? This is weirder than trying to build a civil engineering brand by labelling weed-removal-torches as "flamethrowers".
He backed away from unlimited free speech pretty quickly. Sometimes he's said it has to do with a legal boundary, but he hasn't had consistency about that.
He's been pretty clear that hated by ~50% and fine with the other 50% of the population is the old line, not the new one.
Where that puts the threshold is still an open question, and unfortunately one that will likely be answered somewhat capriciously. Then again, that's not really different from before.
It seems like he's going to establish two lines. One right and one left. The current line will shift to the right and allow more anti-vax/conspiracy garbage, but continue to disallow wignats and *nats. Meanwhile we'll get a new line on the left, so you can't say stuff like 'Whiteness is the root of all evil' anymore. At least that's how I'm interpreting his comment about 'being for the 80%.
That's a fair point, tbh. I probably shouldn't have defined it as hated vs fine. Its more like unacceptable to have access to twitter vs acceptable to have access to twitter.
Neither position necessarily implies approval of the person or content.
Twitter before Musk banned Babylon Bee, a Christian version of The Onion, for this:
"The Babylon Bee, was suspended by Twitter, after it had mockingly awarded transgender government official Rachel Levine the title 'Man of the Year.'"
This is the type of speech that Elon believes should be allowed, and I agree. He has repeatedly said freedom of speech absolutism is still subject to laws, and inciting violence past that line, but clearly not transgender satire.
Going back to 2005 style internet free speech (or even 2010) sounds perfectly reasonable.
No one complained about banning a dude posting swastikas unironically in 2005. The Overton Window has radically changed since then and not for the better.
> This is the type of speech that Elon believes should be allowed, and I agree.
And yet when the same satire it directed at Musk, he blows a gasket. Jeph Jacques[1] changed his profile picture and name to Musk's and tweeted (paraphrasing) "I like drinking my own piss first thing in the morning" and got permabanned for it. It was clearly satire to me, and broke no laws AFAICT.
Rules against impersonation had been on the platform since 2018. IMO if you can't do satire without making your self indistinguishable from the person you are satirizing, you suck at it.
That's not really what happened to the Babylon Bee, though. They intentionally named a trans woman as their "man of the year". That would be Level Three of this article:
> Level Three: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM and no infringement!”
> Power to the people. Freedom is great!
> “Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.”
> That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech.
Why did you feel the need to misrepresent what actually happened, then? The word "trans" is conspicuously absent from your original comment; you described it as "a satire article naming a national bureaucrat as man of the year".
Because it's not particularly relevant. Satire articles make jokes about all kinds of people. For example, SNL regularly has females portray cis males and males portray cis females. Politicians regularly (rightly or wrongly) attack their opponents as not living up to whatever gender ideals exist.
Yeah still not seeing it as something worth banning people over or having any actual harm. I didn't boycott the shop where cashier called me a girl either.
It was a satire on USA Today naming Levine as one of their Women Of The Year despite him not actually being a woman.
The message underlying this is: if men who, as the Bee put it, "dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman" are now eligible for women's awards, then what does that leave for actual women to be honoured as women?
On the contrary, the bee and others would argue that giving awards for women to biological males who dress like women is yet another form of discrimination against women. How can you honestly say that the bee should be banned for using satire to point out discrimination against women and compare that to Nazi germany? This is the moral bankruptcy I was talking about
“How can you honestly say that someone should be banned for using satire to point out Jewish control of the banking system and compare that to Nazi germany? This is the moral bankruptcy I was talking about.”
You see how that sounds? How do you think the Nazis treated trans people? You think it turned out any better for them than for the Jews?
Remembering the context of people being killed for being trans as a relatively common event. It hasn't reached the millions by any means but we'd like it stopped sooner than that.
The line couldn't get any blurrier. The Swastika is a symbol that's been in use for thousands of years in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. Its association with mass murder is so very recent, it's almost ridiculous that that's the first thing that comes to mind upon seeing one. Context and all that.
Same goes for deliberately mis-labelling a person. Ironically, the Nazis started their hateful propaganda in the very same way.
Over 2000 years ago, Ovid said "Principiis obsta. Sero medicina parata, cum mala per longas convaluere moras." - stop it at the beginning; a cure is attempted too late when, through long delay, the illness has gained strength.
The hypothesis is that hate speech is met with other speech in a free marketplace of ideas.
That hypothesis only functions if users are trapped in one conversational space. What happens instead is that users choose not to volunteer their time and labor to speak around or over those calling for their non-existence (or for the non-existence of their friends and loved ones) and go elsewhere... Taking their money and attention with them.
As those promulgating the hate speech tend to be a much smaller group than those who leave, it is in the selfish interest of most forums to police that kind of signal jamming to maximize their possible user-base. Otherwise, you end up with a forum full mostly of those dabbling in hate speech, which is (a) not particularly advertiser friendly, (b) hostile to further growth, and (c) not something most people who get into this gig find themselves proud of.
It is not false because elon said something else. Elon has been posting many false things on twitter the past few weeks. So I am sorry to say, his word isn't good enough. I mean, he is unbanning thousands of actual nazis as we speak, but bans Ye (who was just also unbanned for behavior that was worse than a picture of a swastika.) None of this tracks. He needs to put forth an actual moderation policy and stick with it. Thats what people want. But then he would actually have to do the hard work of drawing a line and defending it.
There's another more likely interpretation. Elon told Kanye to cut it out in private. Kanye said no and realized he was about to be banned. So he posted that picture because of the incoming ban. He even said it's his last post.
Seems like there’s multiple levels of trolling going on there… the “clarification” was added by readers, and the “link that contains an example of a Twitter suspension email“ links to the New York Post.
I've seen multiple people claim they've been banned for simply disagreeing with him in replies. Of course it could just be people clout chasing. I haven't seen any clear evidence, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's true.
To be entirely fair it was in twitter TOS before acquisition that comedy account should be clearly marked and that putting that info in the bio is not enough.
Just that Twitter didn't exactly consistently enforce it.
So sure the bans were just sad rich man being offended but they were still technically breaking TOS
> To be entirely fair it was in twitter TOS before acquisition that comedy account should be clearly marked and that putting that info in the bio is not enough.
Just that Twitter didn't exactly consistently enforce it.
The idea that Elon HAD to ban those people because of the TOS created by the previous ownership is absolutely hilarious.
> Doesn't banning Kanye West from the platform go against his whole "free speech" thing?
No, like the broader right, his whole “free speech thing” is nothing more than “speech I like should be more favored by private parties than it currently is”.
yes, it goes against. I think there are vanishingly few actual free speech absolutists, maybe none, and most who say they are actually draw the line somewhere around online harassment, hate speech, copyright, "when an angry mob pressures you", and "when you have no money because no one will advertise with you".
Free speech absolutism is illegal. There are laws you must follow or the FBI will come knocking on your door.
Agree this goes against free speech. Very disappointing he didn't do as he said and let the law and courts handle this question.
Whether free speech is appropriate on a platform like Twitter I don't know or care really. But surely Twitter can't promote itself as a free speech platform while banning Kanye for legal speech.
Agree with everything you said. Especially that what is acceptable speech is dynamic and it’s hard to define.
I view the boundaries of acceptable speech as a resource. And like other resources in which we need to allocate in society, we use the power of markets to come to the “fairest” allocation that we can.
I believe Elon could implement a “free speech market” on Twitter where Twitter creates an asset which gives the owner the right to ban or allow a particular controversial user. This asset is then auctioned off (providing revenue for Twitter) and then the users get the ultimate control over who is or isn’t allowed on the platform.
This also has the benefit of taking the decision making out of the hands of Elon and those at Twitter and giving power directly to the people.
I sort of admire the clarity of vision to take the current decade’s political subtext of “people with money should be allowed to dictate the values of society” and turn it into the supertext.
I’m just making the implicit, explicit. At least this way it’s not done in back rooms by power brokers, but out in the open in which everyone can participate.
Also, the People have money too. They can organize. I just want to give them a chance to organize and have a seat at the table.
1. It sort of is that insofar as advertisers (the actual customers) are free to stop buying ads, but when they do so Musk throws a conniption fit and says not giving him money is a step away from tyranny
2. If there's a tradable 'right to offend' asset then it will either be bought up by wealthy people who are assholes or assholes who raise money from other assholes on the promise that they will be bigger assholes (see also politics, US)
I mean, why not have a market for murder, and just limit the number of permits to 10% less than the current homicide totals? The government makes tax revenue and homicide falls by 10%, (almost) everybody wins! Vote for me in '24!
1. Yeah I agree, it is, albeit a bit more indirect. By making it more direct and explicit then content moderation can be more granular and have a tighter feedback loop and ultimately controlled by users—which I think is a win
2. If there’s one thing I know about wealthy people, it’s that there’s wealthy people on both sides of any given politcal/social issue. So for every one that wants to allow certain speech there will be one that wants to ban it. Also people can organize from the grassroots to form large pools of capital and have their voice heard if the issue is important enough.
3. Although your hypothetical is a bit sensationalist and off topic, I’ll entertain it. If the outcome of such a scheme really did lower the homicide total by 10%, then it’d be hard to argue against it vs. the status quo as it is an objectively better outcome.
Except Musk was never ever for absolute free speech. Also, the free speech absolutists have it wrong. Read speechless: controlling words, controlling minds for a much better and more coherent conservative philosophy on free speech.
Absolute free speech is an illusion that has never existed and never will. Our problem in society is that that we censor the wrong kinds of speech and tolerate the wrong kinds of speech. Overton windows aren't bad. Ours has just been corrupted. Musk explicitly said he wants to essentially broaden and fix the tolerance window, not abolish it.
How do we know what Musk is for, let alone what he has been "for" during his entire past life? Your last sentence implies that he "explicitly" says stuff and we should take that at face value.
He was openly crowing over being able to hoax/troll the media on Twitter as of just a few days ago. The off-the-wall idea that what he says represents what he believes is constantly promoted even by the people who supposedly are frothing with hatred for him.
As others have pointed out, blasphemy is illegal in many countries that Twitter operates in. Are you advocating that Americans who blaspheme should be banned from Twitter because it's illegal in Saudi Arabia? Because otherwise this weird apology for Musk's hypocritical actions doesn't make any sense.
Twitter respects the EU laws more than KSA. In Germany, this type of thing is illegal for a computer network to host. In KSA it’s the individual that is subject to blasphemy law. If someone were to break that law and go to KSA then they would probably be tortured or killed.
Just for reference I believe that the "more speech" idea originated with Louis Brandeis, who was a brilliant thinker and one of the important liberal Supreme Court justices of the 20th century. The actual quote is:
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."[0]
Louis Brandeis did believe that context and specifics are important, so I think the technology of the online platform is significant especially with respect to the first part of that quote.
> "Whitney was one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party, which was a radical wing of the Socialist Party that split from the rest of the Party after a convention in 1919. When she attended a convention to organize a California wing of the Labor Party, Whitney exhorted workers to vote for its candidates in elections and advocated for taking political action in a resolution. The Party eventually adopted a more extreme program than what Whitney advocated in her resolution, and she protested to no avail. Whitney was charged with violating the California Criminal Syndicalism Act on the basis that she had helped to organize a group that sought to effect economic and political change through the unlawful use of violence.
She argued that she had not intended the organization to act in this way and did not plan to aid it in those objectives, so she should not be charged merely for attending the convention. Whitney claimed that the California law violated the First Amendment."
As usual, lots of nice things may have been said about free speech, but in the end she was convicted and jailed for organising a political party.
Did he say why he believes this is the best remedy, and is his position backed up by any evidence from psychology, memetics, etc? The evidence I'm aware of leads me to the opposite conclusion.
Also he wrote this before social media. He wrote that before fascism swept in on the back of free speech and public persuasion in the 1930s. We're in a new paradigm now and worldviews need to be updated to fit new information and new evidence than what was available during his time.
> There's always a limit to speech, and it's not easy to find
It is. Mid 2000s 4chan and more recently 8kun found it immediately.
When you remove limiters people slap the rail immediately. What value does it add? No one is learning anything when posting anonymously without moderation, they're just lulling themselves into an easily manipulated state.
I remember Splinter Cell multiplayer. Great map design and assymetrical loadout balance. I can't think of another game that even attempted to balance 1st person and 3rd person gameplay as hard requirements for opposing teams.
My favorite memory is playing carnival music through my mic while spinning a grabbed merc around. That and everything about aquarium.
Quite so, it renders the whole thing meaningless. Musk said he was banning West for 'inciting violence' which surprised me and affirmed my feeling that he's either a shallow thinker who doesn't really know what he's doing or is just play-acting.
West tweeted an image of a swastika in a star of David - technically an obsolete symbol of the Raelian UFO cult, in practice it suggested Nazis vs Jews to any casual observer. In the context of West's long-simmering beef with Jewish people and current manic episode of shouting about his enthusiasm for Hitler from inside a ski mask, it was certainly meant to taunt and would fit most people's standard for hate speech.
But incitement to violence? Not exactly, and that's why I say Musk doesn't seem to know what he's doing. There is an indirect kind of incitement, in that it inciting people to behave like Nazis is synonymous with violence; neo-Nazis might deny the holocaust but are just as likely to follow up with the suggestion that it would be a good idea, and in conversation among themselves are a lot blunter about their desire to do violence, preferably on a grand scale. This is why Nazis complaining about free speech is a bad joke, since their gameplan for pretty much any speech they dislike is to simply kill the speakers.
But legally speaking, incitement to violence has a much narrower threshold; it has to be be specific and produce imminent lawless action. For a long time this meant internet speech didn't cunt at all, as jurists figured there couldn't be an imminent risk if the speaker and the recipient were in different places, and that electronic communication was too attenuated to inflame the passions of its receivers. Legislators and courts have somewhat caught up to the realities of the internet age and so things like SWATting or issuing threats by voicemail or online are taken much more seriously than they used to be (to a fault in some jurisdictions like the UK, whose legislators have a Canute-like fondness for prescriptivism).
In this sense, West's tweet absolutely is not incitement to violence, because while it endorses Nazism and Jew-hatred in a trollish way, it lacks the specificity (in action, time, or place) to merit a legal charge. It's not impossible that West might end up suing Twitter or Musk personally for defamation, given his wealth, mania, and apparent ability to hold a grudge.
Free speech advocates have long wrestled with the ramifications of declaring some speech to be 'hate speech' - I think myself that hate crimes are a legislative punt by making a new and scary-sounding law that doesn't mean very much, rather than clarifying existing law and letting juries weigh the significance of hatred as a possible motivation in the trials of violent crimes. Free speech absolutists, in whose company Musk previously placed himself, generally insist on the narrow legal standard of criminality as the only acceptable reason to inflict bans, and argue that all other speech should proceed unchecked. This argument generally arrives clad in the purple robes of Platonic idealism, though in practice totally un-moderated environments soon resemble an orgy of cynics behaving as obnoxiously as possible to maximize their sense of freedom.
So if Musk is just making it up as he goes along, then he's in the situation of alienating everyone to his left and right simultaneously. I don't know how closely he's supervising content moderation decisions, (probably not very) but the reappearance on Twitter of super far right figures like Brett Stephens and Andrew Anglin (currently evading a federal arrest warrant) suggests the 'public square' is going to see regular brawls for a while.
Is this the 12th time this article has been posted? @dang is there any chance HN will resume de-duplicating submissions in the future? Do you need a hand with anything? Don't tell my boss but I've got a few spare cycles this sprint. ;)
That's the point of limiting reposts. To reduce the resubmissions in case you get lucky to get into the front page. Everyone gets the same chances with time limited single shot. Otherwise, spamming will take over.
Not really. I just noticed that yesterday one of the top stories on HN was coinbase vs Apple. Yet earlier in the week there were hardly any stories of Elon vs Apple.
Obviously Elon declaring war on Apple was the much bigger story. People on twitter were ready to burn their iPhones in support. It even had politicians threatening to get congress to go after Apple on behalf of Elon.
Please however consider that tuning the system for this one time annoying doppelgagnger could have a global nefarious impact upon more modest stories.
If because someone posted on a weird timewindow the article never make it to the front page it's fair to allow those article another go.
An ill intentioned actor also could use this as an adversial strategy. For instance by self publishing bad buzz stories at the worst possible timing to ensure it won't make it to front page and could then exploit the de-duplicating algorithm to reject the story if it get publish again on a more favorable timeframe.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea per se, but it should be extremely carefully though out. And I'm not sure it's more efficient that the organic downvote of called out duplicate by the human readers.
PS: Quite ironically by engaging discussion here instead of simply calling out the dupe we are actually boosting this story...
I mean, I think it does have new relevance now, in that one of the stages has just symbolically been crossed (of course, there’ve already been lots of arbitrary bans apparently for making fun of Elon, so realistically twitter is not following the ordained path)
> People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads”
This seems to be, arguably, where the real problems start. I doubt many people expect Twitter to host actually illegal content. However, as long as a social media site is beholden to advertisers, it's going to have an existential requirement to pull certain content, irrespective of how they or anyone else feels about those restrictions.
Until Twitter can figure out a way to fund itself other than by advertising, the idea of it being a free speech platform is a pipe dream.
Advertisers are responding to the expectations of the public. "Brand safety" is an issue of public perception. If people didn't care about brands being side-by-side with white supremacist hate speech, there'd be no push from advertisers to remove it.
So my hypothesis is that, indirectly, the advertisers are helping represent the interests of the vast majority of users who don't want to see that crap, but are unable to have their voices heard over the clamouring minority who want to tweet out swastikas and misgender trans people for the lulz.
I do and don’t understand all the hubbub about “free speech” on Twitter and other social platforms.
I can understand the perspective that if someone is making claims that your platform / forum allows “free speech” then people are justified in being upset when this is not the case.
On the other hand the rule since the days of dial up BBSs is: the sysop can do whatever they want with their system, and you are owed nothing. If people do not like how they operate, then they migrate somewhere else. Sure it sucks when you get on the wrong side of a sysop and get banned from a popular board, but that’s just the game.
The era of mobile phones / internet is truly the eternal September. :)
"I don't understand why people are upset when they get banned from the 40% of all roads, parks, and sidewalks that are owned by GloboCorp. In the old days of private homes, sure it sucked when you got thrown out of a houseparty, but that's just the game. It's both private property, there is no difference."
Oh no, you got banned from those places for wearing a nazi armband, but there's multiple other roads, parks, and sidewalks, that allow that (e.g. 4chan), just as easily accessible.
Alternatively, oh no you got banned for spreading factual information like there is insufficient evidence to rule out the possibility of a lab leak, so now you'll be relegated to places where you can have no impact on the public discourse.
He probably got scared by advertisers or Apple or something.
Ideally in my opinion, Twitter should have a setting by default that hides all of that content, but if you disable it you get 4chan-like moderation (so anything that's legal). In countries with a lesser degree of freedom of speech (I think swastikas are illegal in Germany for example), you wouldn't be able to disable that setting.
My idea, which I've posted before, is that you require users to pay to turn off the filter. (After all, if they're bad for ad revenue, they can't be "the product".) This also mostly enforces region-locking, at least requiring some effort to bypass.
Usually your payment method is tied to your country of residence (bank/currency), and from the platform's perspective (as a business) region-verification locks on content/behavior are demanded by national governments.
But that leads to dog wagging. Twitter as a platform would be incentivized to encourage hate speech etc in order to have something to entice people to pay to access it.
That is a concern. But I suspect the market for a moderated ad-supported Twitter is quite a bit larger than that for a paid unmoderated Twitter, and the elasticity you have to "promote hate speech" without really alienating people is not large — people already got mad at Facebook for counting "angry react" as engagement, and that's not even close to being hate speech.
On the other hand, it also incentivizes aggressive moderation of the free section, since malingerers can be told to pay up.
The last time I dealt with Apple's app store terms of service that was a critical part. You couldn't default people into pornography or hate speech. There had to be a login and an option to enable adult content.
I think he'll find that even if he complies with that rule people will still leave. Forcing an opt-in for one client doesn't prevent them from sending harassing messages to others.
Issue with that though is that a lot who post offensive content want to actually offend, they just don't want to share it with fellow free speech absolutists. So you'll have some trying to get around that filter (e.g. instead of "groomer", they say "gr00mer".
> Fire the engineers! Bring me new engineers who don’t suck. And, I guess, maybe hire someone to manage at least some of these things. We can call them… “director of trust.” That sounds good!
Level Nine: “We’re the trustworthy free speech platform, doing our best to stop CSAM, hate speech, infringement, and spam, and we follow
Block illegal (civil and criminal) content and spam. Hate crime is already covered under that umbrella.
The problem again is the plague on our society, advertising. Ideal brand association isn’t compatible with free speech, you have to pick one, and SV picks ads. Lumberg: If the ad industry could just go ahead and disappear from the planet that would be great.
Elon went from free speech absolutist to "Twitter aims to serve center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate." Quite the u-turn. I'm sure he put zero thought into that 80% figure, but even banning 2% instead of 20% is a shockingly huge number.
I remember some stat that the loudest voices are the 8% on either end of the political spectrum. I couldn't find where I heard that, but Pew has some data that mirrors that.
I think that 20% is coming from this:
"The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%"[1]
"You could probably expand that 80% to 90% or even 95%. The extremists seem like they're more numerous than they are, because they talk so much and so loudly, but they're really a tiny minority." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1598720168737345539
> “Excuse me, boss, we’re getting reports that there are child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSAM) images and videos on the site.”
God people just love projecting and assuming the worst. Didn't Twitter close 500K additional accounts for child sexual exploitation? And Twitter didn't change their content moderation policy on child porn, no?
Yes, and this is the type of argument I also look for: looking at nuances and facts and what people do, instead of coming up with the most non-sensical worst-case scenarios and projecting them to the people we don't like.
This argument can be simplified as a nonalemma. You can promote or suppress content by centralized, decentralized, or null mechanisms. So nine combinations:
No promotion, no suppression: chatter (the early Internet)
Centralized promotion and centralized or no suppression: traditional media
Centralized promotion, decentralized suppression: modern electoral politics, basically
No promotion, any suppression: silence (obviously)
Decentralized promotion, decentralized suppression: echo-chamber/hive-mind/hug-box, see also: why FB/Twitter don't have downvotes, and Reddit discourages them
Decentralized promotion, no suppression: inflammatory content takes over
Decentralized promotion, centralized suppression: the modern social media model
People want an algorithm for how to moderate speech. But there's no such thing. You just need people with good judgement and it's hard to define what good judgement is. HN has it.
Previous twitter did not have good judgement. It had a left-bias and banned people for saying things like "there are two genders" and "men aren't women tho". It also banned various accounts for jokes (prominently Babylon Bee, a right-wing The Onion).
It remains to be seen if Elon will do better or worse. I think he'll do better because he has a sense of humor. But he's also a bit obnoxious so we'll see.
> "There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content."
The data suggests no such thing. As the report underlying this article describes (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6df958f8370af3217d4...), there's no high-quality data available on question of whether conservative views are disproportionately censored. The data shows that conservative accounts don't have systematically suppressed engagement, but that's fully compatible with the idea that there might be some views those accounts know they aren't allowed to talk about. At the end the report calls for Twitter to be more transparent in their moderation decisions, precisely because the lack of transparency makes it hard to figure out answers to this kind of question.
"Left-bias" is putting it mildly. It's becoming increasingly clear that twitter censored certain people/content at the behest of the Biden administration.
Ho ho ho, it turns out running a social media company isn't so easy after all. Cutting bloat and pushing out new monetization features is a walk in the park compared to walking the fine line of content.
I really like this post. These are lessons I learned a long time ago, when I was 10 or so running web forums.
But there are three big things this misses:
1. What is and is not legal is usually decided in the courts. That's expensive, and lawyers help prevent you from getting to the courts in the first place.
2. The ideal goal for good discussion on a forum is transparency and consistency in moderation. For example, StackExchange sites censor heavily, but with a good effort to be transparent and consistent in doing so. (This is the major flaw with most "free speech" sites-- they make no effort whatsoever. It's just buzzword branding.)
3. When you're beholden to shareholders, then the goal for discussion is to be profitable. Free-speech ideals matter *only* to the extent that they are profitable.
You'll generally find the ideals in point 2 on small social media sites (up to ~1000 monthly users who make posts). These are ones where the active users all know one another, and where it's feasible for a user to read and respond to all the posts made on the site. (If you're nostalgic for mid-2000s webforums, then good news: They still exist!)
Crucially, these are sites meant to serve a need for community, with no intention of profit.
These are sites small enough that the social dynamics are closer to a discord server or group chat. It's easy to tell when good members are or not acting in good faith, and it's feasible for the admins/mods to openly discuss moderation decisions.
It's one of the other benefits of small social media. A tiny site with ~1000 monthly users is much less likely to receive urgent takedown-request emails from Malaysia.
I'm confused by Level 5. I thought the safe harbor provision stopped applying if the company made a determination whether it was fair use. And not just for that one image/instance, but possibly for all content.
That is, if you say "Can we have the intern send some of these to our outside counsel to review for fair use before pulling them down?" you're opening yourself up to a ton of liability for all images.
One big online platform that has totally skimped on reasonable moderation is the charmingly named "E-Mail".
Child porn, copyright infringement, harassment, hate speech, spam, you name it. Anything goes. It's a complete free-for-all.
Giant internet companies like Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars a year through their partnerships with the E-Mail platform. These big companies do make a token effort to remove objectionable content from their servers, but that doesn't matter.
Anyone who wants to sidestep this reasonable moderation and spread hateful content on E-Mail can easily do so for a few dollars a month by setting up a darkweb technology known as a "Self-Hosted Mail-Server". Underground terrorist collectives such as the "postfix" organization distribute software making it possible to set up a Self-Hosted Mail-Server in a few clicks.
We need to rise up and pressure these billionaire tech companies to stop connecting to any E-Mail providers that do not have a full content council and policy, and a team of content moderators.
It's point to point, which does make a difference, though I would note that Big Tech companies who provide email are _extremely_ happy to "defederate" from email servers who send spam, or who merely look like they may send spam, or who share an IP range with someone who sent spam once in 2008. Like, the sort of guilt by association that would make even the most trigger-happy Mastodon service admin hesitate.
There was a time when it was pretty easy to set up an SMTP server, but, if you want your emails to actually get seen, it's non-trivial today.
What is scary to me is how censorship has become completely accepted by the new generation, including software engineers here in their 20s. No true hacker (this is Hacker News after all) would be OK with corporation or government censorship. Slippery slope is real.
In the past and in some places today profane and obscene material was/is censored and no one bats an eye. Books are being removed from libraries and that has happened apparently for decades.
This type of censorship has been completely accepted by all past generations.
We went from censoring things that everyone thinks is bad (CP, death threats), to now censoring opinions which 50% of Americans share, and probably 90% of the world in just a few years.
Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by -- and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing -- they only like `cooperation' that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults.
> Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy.
And authoritarians also thrive on chaos and propaganda. The recent rise in authoritarianism hasn't been related to censorship and secrecy as much as chaos, misdirection, conspiracy theories and forced polarization.
For one thing, you’re mistaken. A big realization of hacker culture in the 90s and early 2000s was that the old forums and the like had to be heavily moderated otherwise they digress into flame wars. Social media definitely knew this, but made their fortunes off of flame wars.
We’ve realized how idealistic and out of touch with humanity we were. If everyone online was a good faith actor attempting to have intellectual dialog then I would oppose all censorship.
The fact is though that bad faith and agenda driven actors dominate the public narrative, stressing all of society out in the process as they either directly, or by proxy, then the real world and daily interactions of society into a giant flame war.
I care a lot more about society not being divided and these tools of connection not being used to wage large scale disinformation campaigns than I do any ideologically driven morals. We have to live in this country, this world, together.
Censorship is a cheap and bad solution to a problem that a lot of people feel very real. We have a real issue of regular people and malicious actors using the unprecedented reach of social networks to spread falsehoods, conspiracy theories, attacks on certain groups... Yes, the usual response will be "it's the responsibility of adults to filter what they see" but the reality is that doesn't happen. We are not ready for such an influx of information, and the structure of social networks incentivizes outrage and false or misleading content, and penalizes nuance and well-researched arguments. Social networks are being used to manipulate massive amounts of people. That's what should be scary. Censorship is just a response to that.
Personally, I think the solution is to limit reach, for everyone, full stop. Place legal limits on recommendations and pushed content, to incentivize people choosing their sources. Limit how many times a content can be easily shared (think of the ease of retweeting something you didn't even read) to incentivize organic spread. Limit the reach of unverified and new accounts to incentivize trust building. Increase fines and punishments (through courts, of course) for organizations that blatantly lie to the public to incentivize proper research.
> Yes, the usual response will be "it's the responsibility of adults to filter what they see" but the reality is that doesn't happen.
Let me stop you there.
Those platforms dont give you tools for that! You can't say "but people won't do it" if they don't have any good option to do that in the first place.
But yeah, shoving algorithmic garbage to get people to click would be bad enough, but now we have that with added tries of trying to manipulate politics with it.
> Personally, I think the solution is to limit reach, for everyone, full stop. Place legal limits on recommendations and pushed content, to incentivize people choosing their sources. Limit how many times a content can be easily shared (think of the ease of retweeting something you didn't even read) to incentivize organic spread. Limit the reach of unverified and new accounts to incentivize trust building. Increase fines and punishments (through courts, of course) for organizations that blatantly lie to the public to incentivize proper research.
I firmly believe that RSS model of people having to choose what to subscribe to get anything would be much better off. If someone wants to put collective vomit of the internet (which what pretty much twitter algorithm does) as a feed they are free to do so but nobody is shoved whatever algorithmic crap decides that will get reaction and ad views out of them.
And before someone says Mastodon/Fediverse, nope, they fucked it up. The fact admin can decide "no, I decide for my users that any updates from this @server.address are bad and nobody, not even someone who subscribed explicitly, can engage with it" disqualifies that because it have same problem of exacerbating bubbles decided upon by tiny minority
FWIW, plenty of "true hackers" observed the same data points and concluded that the cyber-utopia envisioned in the '90s is a pipe dream and deserves to be dead and buried.
A lot has happened in the past couple decades as society has tilted around into the information age. Some assumptions have undergone rigorous testing. Some deserved to be discarded. I don't think anyone has the One True Approach yet, but freedom-of-speech idealism proved wanting as a strategy.
You can still choose who you follow on Twitter. It seems to be moving back towards that idea, which is good.
It's pretty easy to avoid political bullshit if you are careful with following.
For years Twitter used to make it impossibly hard to switch to just "latest tweets" instead of their awful recommendation feed which include likes/rts of people you don't even follow. No wonder Twitter became such a heated trainwreck when content feeds were no longer opt-in.
But the default behaviour is for you to see the Home feed which is populated with people you don't follow. So it is mostly just random topics and tweets from the most controversial people associated with that topic.
So you do see political bullshit. A lot of it in fact because Musk is clearly trying to juice the engagement numbers and having lots of controversial political tweets is a great way to do that.
Really? Maybe my Twitter UI is different than yours because my default home page is now "Latest Tweets" by default.
I never see likes/RTs by people I don't follow anymore.
After years of the homepage being AI-feed only (lists were the only chronological alternative) they finally added a small button in the top right corner to change to chronological aka Latest Tweets by default. Now the default options are "Latest Tweets" and "Retweets". I don't see an option to switch back to the AI feed w/ non-following content?
The default algorithm shows you what people you follow are most interested in. This does a lot to shape the conversation. You can switch to seeing tweets from people you follow in chronological order, but it typically doesn't show all of them. If you don't interact frequently enough with someone they'll fall out of your feed. It's quite a lot of work to get rid of all the friend suggestions and retweets etc. etc. from other people by using keyword muting; and even when you mute individuals, they still show up with their asinine opinions in your search results. The only way you can be sure of not seeing someone is to block them, and even then you'll still get notifications that there's more content, but it might be blocked.
Blocking is also not that effective of a self-curation tool because the userbase isn't static. Habitual trolls buy farmed accounts for 50 cents a pop and for the price of a hot lunch they can have 25 new accounts to troll people with.
Agreed, I noticed that too. It’s still not fully chronological. But it’s still a way better experience then it used to be.
Maybe they’ll add a chronological option again at some point. The Apple style middle ground of making it easy by default (instead of customizable) seems to hold sway among twitters UX/product team.
Hopefully that will change as well. Anything is better than the old default system. I could see the old way being good for entirely new users but it was awful for long time users who carefully curated their following list.
Sadly it seems controversial topics still get the most traction even within the limited set you follow.
And that's ignoring the misinformation, malinformation, and propaganda being willingly and unwillingly spread through the unregulated cesspool of the telephone system. These companies are near monopolies, and still won't take steps to crack down on the dangerous activities that they facilitate each and every day.
You say that as though email is not, in fact, currently an absolute minefield of authentication, peering, trust, spam-guarding, and black-holing policies.
In fact, email is more-or-less the most-used example of how a federated system deals with this: sloppily, one-at-a-time, generating a massive haves-and-have-nots Balkanization.
I can set up my own self-hosted mail server, but without some very careful configuration and planning good luck getting Gmail to forward its output to Google's users.
I think out of all of this the worst thing to come of it, is this term, seemingly re-invented here, called "free speech absolutists". Which isn't a thing. It's the inversion of "relative censorship" and much larger concept and strategy to turn everything "relative", i.e relativism, or "The Relativists Clan". Free speech can't be "relative" to somebody's interpretation, otherwise it wouldn't be speech that is free -- free -- of relative-style censorhip. The basis of relative speech is that some speech is harmful and it should be censored. That just means, hey we're not a free speech website. It comes down to be honest, there are people who don't want other people saying things and they will go as far to redefine words and meanings to censor them.
Free speech absolutism is a clear and useful term for the belief that anybody should be allowed to say anything, i.e. that absolute freedom of speech is inherently a good thing. It's not synonymous with "freedom of speech" (i.e. the "absolutism" part isn't redundant) because there are versions of the idea of freedom of speech that aren't absolute, that don't allow anybody to say anything they like.
The version of freedom of speech that is encoded in US consitutional law (the first amendment and the long history of supreme court judgements on the subject) is an example. There are forms of speech that are not protected and there is a mainstream interpretation of freedom of speech that does not see restrictions against defamation, incitement of violence, etc., as infringements of it. A "free speech absolutist" would see these as infringements of freedom of speech, so the term is useful to distinguish that particular view.
You're seeing the term used a lot on Hacker News because there are people here who routinely argue that any speech should be allowed on a platform that claims to support freedom of speech. These people are free speech absolutists (at least in the context of the debate about online platforms) and, if they feel their views on the matter are correct, shouldn't be offended to be called that.
A lot of those issues are trivially solvable with the response, "We're a US company. We're not bound to whatever goofy laws there are in your country. If you don't like it, that's your problem, not ours. Block our site, or don't, we don't actually care."
Trouble is, that's a good way to build a $5 billion social networking site, not a $50 billion one. Also a good way to get arrested seconds after setting foot in country XYZ.
So many of these "problems" came from bad legislation and a culture that enabled it.
"Hi boss, we're getting millions of DMCA takedown requests."
The solution? Fix the brokenness of the DMCA.
"Hey boss, we're getting a lot of notifications about misleading info!"
Ok, tell the users to not believe everything they read on the Internet.
"Hey boss, we're getting lots of reports about hateful content that people find offensive."
Ok, delete the report button, tell people if they are threatened to contact their local law enforcement agencies, and supply them with better tools to manage troll armies.
So many of these things can be solved by deleting the problem to the appropriate level. But instead, our culture demands for Ministries of Truth and Love.
Dealing with a large number of DMCA takedown requests should not be much of a problem. They just need to:
1. Provide a form for copyright owners to use to request a takedown of material they claim is infringing. When the form is submitted verify that all the required fields have been filled in.
2. Take down the content claimed by the form submitted, and notify the user who posted the content. The provider does not need to try to figure out if the material claimed really infringes the claimant's copyright.
3. Provide a form for the user to submit a counterclaim. If the user does not submit a counterclaim, there is nothing more to do.
4. If the user submits a counterclaim, restore the taken down content, and notify the party that requested the takedown. The provider does not have to try to evaluate the merits of the counterclaim, such as whether or not the use was fair use.
If the claimant still wants the material taken down they have to take it up with the user, such as by suing them. The provider, having followed the DMCA procedure given above, is protected by the DMCA safe harbor.
It only gets hard when a site wants to use some system of their own, like YouTube does, instead of DMCA. Due to the nature of user created content on YouTube and how YouTube is monetized it is better for them if something that infringes gets licensed and stays up, so they have deals with major content distributors to encourage that.
For a site like Twitter, where the user content is small text posts instead of longer videos that can have ads within them, I don't think they need more than the DMCA procedure.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-suspends-yes-twitt...
I'm exaggerating, but there is a reason that HN is not the most popular social media site in the world.
If you're dealing with law might as well just pay good lawyers and stick to your principles instead of gently bending over.
The "we don't like your kind round here" meme is backwards thinking & leads to the cloistered groupthink that is the subject of comedy. The game of "soft power" is a net-negative game so there are winners & losers. The losers don't just go away, so they need to advocate for their God given rights to survive. There is no option not to play the game because the game is ever expanding until the particular systems collapse.
I don't want to reinforce my ego that I have people agreeing with me, I could get plenty of that if I wanted, I want those disagreeing and willing to listen to see the other side. I want to see what's actually a convincing argument that's changing opinion.
But hey, everyone's so used to the likes and points system, they forget that speaking is to covey a message, not to get internet points for your ego. If that's all free speech means to you, no wonder you give it away easily.
I happily paid those -5 internet points. If that surprised any of the downvoters, maybe they will think again what's the point of speech that does nothing. It's funny how none of them responded with actual speech, maybe because they think talking is about getting those downvotes and not about interacting with people.
Downvotes are meaningful speech too. Usually people use them when they think your comment isn't worth a reply or doesn't belong here. They exist to prevent people from feeling like they have to reply to something that otherwise wouldn't be worth replying to, as a way of communicating to the poster that their post is extremely uninteresting. One thing they actually do is move your comment down the page.
That being said, since you hold this opinion so strongly, maybe it's reasonable for me to point out: although the article mostly covers real and hypothetical laws that could make Twitter harder to moderate, there's also the question of how Twitter is supposed to make enough money to stay afloat, and how it can continue to do that if advertisers would rather not advertise on a platform that might show their ad next to messaging they'd prefer not to be associated with. There's no silver bullet here even if they did ignore EU laws or whatever it is you find unreasonable.
https://twitter.com/iamlejo/status/1331963359529414662/photo...
"if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
The measure of intolerance is basically whoever tries censorship and violence first. Ironically they often justify it with one or two sentences cherry-picked from Popper.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Reddit is orders of magnitude more heavily moderated than HN. Your average run of the mill subreddit has more moderators than the entirety of HN.
>Which is a good thing, it's why conversations here tend to be of a higher quality.
I think the conversations here are higher because of the userbase, not dang's moderation. The site doesn't lend itself to the toxic userbase that reddit and tumblr has.
>I don't think the HN style of moderation would scale to places like Reddit even if they wanted it.
There are subreddits with more scale than HN, with more moderation. Scale is definitely not an issue.
Uh, absolutely not the case. All you need to do is to not post bullshit all the time to be in positive on karma.
It's even worse on reddit (if you want closest approximate it would be like HN instance-per topic(subreddit)) where karma is global so you could get karma on one subreddit and lose on another and be net positive even easier.
the up/down vote thing mostly works but in bigger communities it quickly turns from "quality/garbage comment" to "I agree/I disagree" button
When I worked in a russian hosting provider a decade ago, I saw a glimpse of censorship, very small compared to current level. We received a message that some page on a small news website is illegal, because it "provides information on how to commit suicide", which was considered inappropriate information for kids. The page in question was a news report about a conscript who killed himself with an AK due to bulling.
is constitutionally-protected free speech.
> mocking presidents
ditto.
The only things that are actively illegal in the US on the list in the article are CSAM and copyright infringement. There are examples that are illegal in other countries, but in the US, vanishingly little speech can be illegal.
The other usage of the term is more of a principle. That citizens of the United States expect its various institutions to uphold the spirit of the First Amendment even though it isn't a legal requirement. That, in an ideal place, your Twitters and Facebooks would adopt a stance similar to the federal government.
There are factors that complect it. Social media platforms are basically entertainment sites and so need to attract advertisers which is at odds with that thinking. Users of the site often want others deplatformed. Standards of legality vary. Then you have cases where the government attempts to influence the moderation standards of a platform, blurring the lines farther.
From my point of view, individual users wanting the opinion of others banned and government influence are the ones that are the most worrying, not least because of what they potentially signify for the future. No right will be maintained if the populace doesn't value its protection.
Incidentally, is there anyone on the compliance teams left at Twitter?
There are politicians constantly testing their legislation boundaries all over CSAM. It's getting abused to make proof of concepts that companies are willing to implement something, and then they extend it to other shit every time. You can't just slap the "for CSAM" label on increasingly ridiculous things. It needs to actually make sense.
Interesting view. There was a time, not too long ago, when photos were developed in labs by actual people. I remember vividly when some photos just came back blank, until I learned that the people at the photo labs used to "censor" content they deemed problematic and that could get you in trouble.
Back then, one option was to simply develop the photos yourself (major PITA, never did it myself, but I knew a few people who actually went down that route). Today, it's the data storage providers who do the censoring and with much more dire consequences (e.g. police showing up at your residence and charges being pressed).
The option you have nowadays is to simply not use these online services and use an offline storage solution (even if it's just a thumb drive on your desk) while taking photos the old-fashioned way (e.g. not with a smartphone).
The problem isn't so much legislation itself, it's that modern technology is a massive enabler for this kind of crime on a scale that simply hasn't been possible before and cannot be managed by any methods that may have worked in the past.
> It needs to actually make sense.
I agree, but the problem is immense pressure from all sides while being a truly Herculean task that unfortunately has no simple and effective solutions. So what do legislators tell people then? Just let it go and accept that thousands of children have to suffer? Or rather live with the looming threat of your life being ruined by an innocent holiday picture your phone mislabelled?
I honestly don't have an answer to that I don't know there is a good one either.
I find the unlimited free speech arguments to be disingenuous and lazy most of the time. There's always a limit to speech, and it's not easy to find. That doesn't mean we shouldn't explore the space to find it (and that we'll have to acknowledge it's a dynamic and changing boundary).
How unfortunate that we're left to imagine this, rather than having the new ownership articulate a content moderation policy that reflects their curation decisions.
For example, I had set my region to Germany because Twitter would automatically block more content for German users (due to Nazi content being illegal in Germany).
So, is your imaginary conclusion that Elon has changed Twitter's policy from: "speech is restricted for users in a locale according to the local laws" to "speech is restricted platform wide according based on the most restrictive laws that exist in the world"?
It would seem very anti-free speech to me if this new system allows China to determine which content is available on Twitter, or we impose the UK's onerous libel laws on all American users.
The picture Ye posted is not illegal in the United States and so therefore it appears he no longer supports free speech.
The rules will come down, because they have to. If it took "Ye" posting a Swastika and saying Hitler was awesome to convince Elon then so be it. Elon will meet many, many other people who will push the moderation curve towards where everyone else has settled.
The solution it seems to me is in the name : moderation.
Instead of unfiltered thoughts, we moderate so we can more clearly communicate. In that sense the word censorship loses all meaning : because meaning should be conveyed carefully, especially when topics are sensitive. And so often online people aren’t sensitive at all, for many reasons that seem evident.
Source : moderated several chatrooms for many years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...
That was the case before acquisition. Just the lowest common denominator biased towards whatever political views twitter mods held
Instead his "free speech absolutism" is a brand, it's there to signal what kind of person he is, it's not a set of principles and therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny.
When Trump said on Jan 6th he wants his supporters to "fight" to "stop the steal" a lot of people took that as endorsing violence to storm the capitol. I think that's less clear-cut than Nazi endorsement, but other people disagree.
Main thing I care about is "covid misinformation" is no longer banned. So Twitter won't ban an epidemiologist who posts a clinical study saying mRNA vaccines lower sperm counts anymore. https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-... Bans like that were just absurd.
The real reason is that Kayne was booted is that he toxic waste and having him on Twitter would have damaged the Twitter brand and cost Elon money.
Edit: I want to add that I don't believe this is due to his manic depressive disorder but because he's a naraasstic asshole. Posting a picture of a swastika then saying how the Nazis and Hitler are great is the most obvious way to get attention.
Fuck Kayne West
My understanding is that Twitter did not specify what exactly (i.e. which set of tweets) Kanye is banned for.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
So when kayne used it, of course he referred to the Nazi symbol and just wanted attention and strongly hint at his antisemitism.
But other people can mean something very different:
"In several major Indo-European religions, the swastika symbolises lightning bolts, representing the thunder god and the king of the gods, such as Indra in Vedic Hinduism, Zeus in the ancient Greek religion, Jupiter in the ancient Roman religion, and Thor in the ancient Germanic religion."
Then why make this generalised statement?
" I can't see what other meaning today it could have?"
Because I know people who are into germanic livestyle and they are NOT nazis, but they would like to use that old symbol freely. So that is one counterexample. There are people today who use the swastika who explicitley do not refer to the nazis.
But like I said, when people like kayne use the swastika, their meaning is very clear and different.
If an individual book owner decides to have a backyard barbecue of all their pro-Nazi propaganda or an individual theater owner doesn't feel comfortable running Jojo Rabbit, that's up to them.
Most people would interpret the phrase "I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going (def) con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" to mean preparing to go to war or enter into conflict against, not preparing to defend against an attack from, jewish people.
Also being a republican (politican) is a choice and therefore valid to be a target of hatred. People aren't born Republican , however bring Jewish is considered both an ethnic group and religion. This is the key to why it's acceptable to attack a political group verus an ethnic group.
Jews have different views, they don't act as one group, they don't have a hierarchy like republicans, nor don't put out group statements.
Afaik, nobody at twitter2.0 has made a clear statement as to what tweet caused the permanent suspension. Just commenting "that is not" is not at all the same as saying "and this will get you banned".
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/10/kanye-wests-twitter...
Someone was proposing incitement to violence has a threahold etc. This to me is clearly incitement to violence.
Some have claimed he didn't know what "death con" (defcon) means to which I say what could he have possibly meant. It's <something negative> on Jewish People.
Personally, I think he probably meant something else that very likely could have been closer to an incitement of violence, but he doesn't have the vocabulary and we can't convict someone for what you think might be in their head.
Possibly due to very limited imagination?
The technical definition of a word is not as important as the real world usage of the word.
And pretty sure most people would consider using Defcon in that way to be hostile.
but i was thinking, does this tweet "I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE," incite violence? I don't think it does.
Now if he said "when i wake up i want to read on the news how all of you went death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE" that would be inciting violence to me. btw, i'm thankful Taylor Swift is mostly benign, her fans are fanatical to the point of acting like a brain washed cult. Anything she tells them to do is done.
Can't understand how you can be racing to explain and apologize that.
Nailed it
When you combine that with him using "death con" instead of "defcon" and the tenor of his comments both before and since (posting a swastika?) it is a little hard to imagine he meant he was preparing to defend himself from an attack rather than going on attack. "I'm a little sleepy, but after I wake up I'm going to prepare for an attach By JEWISH PEOPLE." Is this seriously what you think he was saying?
An incoherent person? What do you mean?
I wish more people would understand this. For people like Musk, his personal brand is extremely important and they spend a lot of effort portraying and selling a specific image. It is an important part of his success as a businessman. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative.
Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does. In his view Twitter is free speech. An attack on Twitter (as he alleged Apple was doing) is an attack on free speech. Twitter dying means the death of free speech. To claim that a company is the embodiment of free speech is ridiculous yet so many people buy into it.
Weird theory, but it points to Elon not being quite as foolish as the left would believe.
Let's not pretend the site wasn't an absolute disaster before the acquisition though. If I clicked on even a single trending topic about a game or news item I'd often be presented with unfiltered hardcore porn. Then there would be topics of innocent things like landscapes that get filtered. It was a complete joke and harmful place to visit.
No, you wouldn't. Either you don't know what hardcore porn actually is, or you're exaggerating.
Could be related?
Another data point: Been using Twitter daily within the past two years and I’ve never encountered anything remotely close to the filtering blunder you describe.
Also instead of a company struggling to be consistently profitable it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future if not for the timely intervention
Well, it never had a ban on porn as such, did it? Although I'd venture "full of porn" is an exaggeration. Do you have numbers?
> and especially child porn which previous leaders didn't care about.
Got a source for that? As best I know, they weren't considered a problem by the authorities. Unlike now where they have one (1) moderator (thanks to Musk's firings) for the entirety of Asia (tens of millions of users.)
> it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future
Their 2020 figures show that, apart from an unfortunately timed $800Mi settlement, they'd have made $580Mi profit. Now that's not a great profit on $5Bi revenue but it's definitely not "a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail", is it?
> if not for the timely intervention
Which has added $1Bi a year debt payments. Now that is "a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail"...
But it was a managed absolute disaster that was trying to be better.
And so regulators such as EU, FTC were okay to let it continue to operate.
That is clearly changing since Musk took over.
> Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does.
The models here are the guru/savior/grifter, which encompasses and goes beyond just "brand".
Why don't the followers see the contradictions in what the guru says and does? Some of them are truly deluded, but a whole lot of them understand it just fine and just want to see if they can get in on the action.
It accomplishes absolutely nothing - people are perfectly willing to put their real name and reputation behind their harrassing and toxic behavior. It does, however, make it easier to extend harassment campaigns to people's homes, businesses, families, etc.
Just like people are happy to have signs on the gardens or stickers on their truck they are more than willing to tell people their views online. Especially because they don't work for some multi-national that cares what their political views are. And so there are no consequences for whatever they say or do.
I expect that the whole account was banned worldwide, more because it made headline news (in the bad way) around the world. And so not banning Kanye's horrible, mentally ill, degrading and rather sad antics, would scare off the advertisers who pay the bills. I mean, the remaining advertisers.
> Elon isn't following policies, he is following his whim.
Agreed.
> The problem with that is all the previous moderation statements he made did not align with this banning
It's almost like it wasn't thought through. Like Elon still has no idea what he's doing.
It doesn't.
Wasn't Elon talking about the US anyway? Political speech itself is banned in many countries, so surely that wasn't his measure.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/02/kanye-west-sus...
The rapper said: “I see good things about Hitler … Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
Jones replied: “The Nazis were thugs.”
“But they did good things too,” Ye said. “We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
“Oh my goodness … just because you don’t like one group doesn’t mean –” Jones said, clearly uncomfortable. Ye interrupted: “I love Jewish people. But I also love Nazis.”
“I don’t think Hitler was a good guy,” Jones stated later. Ye replied: “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things.”
That is the same exact boilerplate response we get over here by extreme right wingers (assuming non extreme right wingers do exist, which over here is not the case) when talking about the atrocities committed by the Mussolini regime: "he did good things too". Yeah sure, like conscience is something that can be recharged like a cellphone battery: "Ok, I've helped 99 old ladies to cross the road, so now I'm entitled to beat and robber the next one!". Those people are full of shit, period.
So no, whatever you think of utilitarianism, this is not its problem.
https://nitter.net/dappergander/status/1598497428340088834#m
[edit: corrected the nitter URL]
https://www.abdpost.com/elon-musk-finally-sanctions-kanye-we...
Weirdly enough near-every site censored it, I had to go to duckduckgo to actually find that
Which is really really odd because quite a lot of his previous PR stunts — the Easter eggs in the Teslas, the “ring of fire” SpaceX video, the trans-Martian Roadster, the announcement of the Cybertruck — are things I regard as pretty effective brand building.
But this? This is weirder than trying to build a civil engineering brand by labelling weed-removal-torches as "flamethrowers".
He's been pretty clear that hated by ~50% and fine with the other 50% of the population is the old line, not the new one.
Where that puts the threshold is still an open question, and unfortunately one that will likely be answered somewhat capriciously. Then again, that's not really different from before.
More like 20% for both of those numbers [1]. Most choices are non-binary ... most Americans just don't care about Elon.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304563/us-adults-impres...
Neither position necessarily implies approval of the person or content.
"The Babylon Bee, was suspended by Twitter, after it had mockingly awarded transgender government official Rachel Levine the title 'Man of the Year.'"
This is the type of speech that Elon believes should be allowed, and I agree. He has repeatedly said freedom of speech absolutism is still subject to laws, and inciting violence past that line, but clearly not transgender satire.
No one complained about banning a dude posting swastikas unironically in 2005. The Overton Window has radically changed since then and not for the better.
And yet when the same satire it directed at Musk, he blows a gasket. Jeph Jacques[1] changed his profile picture and name to Musk's and tweeted (paraphrasing) "I like drinking my own piss first thing in the morning" and got permabanned for it. It was clearly satire to me, and broke no laws AFAICT.
1. Author of Questionable Content webcomic
> Level Three: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM and no infringement!”
> Power to the people. Freedom is great!
> “Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.”
> That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech.
As an example, SNL had a lady play Rudy Giuliani to make fun of him: https://popculture.com/tv-shows/news/snl-cecily-strongs-mich...
Why is one acceptable and the other not, other than one's own perceived bias about which 'side' has the moral upper hand?
Deliberately misgendering someone is not the same as making fun of them. The Babylon Bee's entire punchline is just that they're using a hateful slur.
The message underlying this is: if men who, as the Bee put it, "dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman" are now eligible for women's awards, then what does that leave for actual women to be honoured as women?
You see how that sounds? How do you think the Nazis treated trans people? You think it turned out any better for them than for the Jews?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings#The_burning...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_triangle
Not only that, the murder rate for women is higher than the rate for transwomen. And higher for men then transmen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender
Worldwide, men constitute 78.7% of homicide victims, making cis men the largest group of homicide victims.
Same goes for deliberately mis-labelling a person. Ironically, the Nazis started their hateful propaganda in the very same way.
Over 2000 years ago, Ovid said "Principiis obsta. Sero medicina parata, cum mala per longas convaluere moras." - stop it at the beginning; a cure is attempted too late when, through long delay, the illness has gained strength.
The history of social media platforms shows that not moderating away, well, "hateful speech" tends to lead to it drowning out all the other voices.
That hypothesis only functions if users are trapped in one conversational space. What happens instead is that users choose not to volunteer their time and labor to speak around or over those calling for their non-existence (or for the non-existence of their friends and loved ones) and go elsewhere... Taking their money and attention with them.
As those promulgating the hate speech tend to be a much smaller group than those who leave, it is in the selfish interest of most forums to police that kind of signal jamming to maximize their possible user-base. Otherwise, you end up with a forum full mostly of those dabbling in hate speech, which is (a) not particularly advertiser friendly, (b) hostile to further growth, and (c) not something most people who get into this gig find themselves proud of.
In this particular context it's rather about commerce.
Kanye posted some really super antisemetic things. At one point, he posted a picture of a swastika overtop of a star of David.
Then he posted an unflattering picture of Elon Musk- and was banned within minutes.
When Elon Musk says "free speech" he means "free speech for me, not for thee". You can say anything you like, as long as Elon likes it too.
Oh, that's probably the reason - Ol' Muskie is really quick on the suspension button for people who mock him.
"Just clarifying that his account is being suspended for incitement to violence, not an unflattering pic of me being hosed by Ari.
Frankly, I found those pics to be helpful motivation to lose weight!" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598546057138524160
https://twitter.com/EliErlick/status/1598011331658948609?s=2...
Seems like there’s multiple levels of trolling going on there… the “clarification” was added by readers, and the “link that contains an example of a Twitter suspension email“ links to the New York Post.
Just that Twitter didn't exactly consistently enforce it.
So sure the bans were just sad rich man being offended but they were still technically breaking TOS
The idea that Elon HAD to ban those people because of the TOS created by the previous ownership is absolutely hilarious.
No, like the broader right, his whole “free speech thing” is nothing more than “speech I like should be more favored by private parties than it currently is”.
Free speech absolutism is illegal. There are laws you must follow or the FBI will come knocking on your door.
Whether free speech is appropriate on a platform like Twitter I don't know or care really. But surely Twitter can't promote itself as a free speech platform while banning Kanye for legal speech.
I view the boundaries of acceptable speech as a resource. And like other resources in which we need to allocate in society, we use the power of markets to come to the “fairest” allocation that we can.
I believe Elon could implement a “free speech market” on Twitter where Twitter creates an asset which gives the owner the right to ban or allow a particular controversial user. This asset is then auctioned off (providing revenue for Twitter) and then the users get the ultimate control over who is or isn’t allowed on the platform.
This also has the benefit of taking the decision making out of the hands of Elon and those at Twitter and giving power directly to the people.
Also, the People have money too. They can organize. I just want to give them a chance to organize and have a seat at the table.
1. It sort of is that insofar as advertisers (the actual customers) are free to stop buying ads, but when they do so Musk throws a conniption fit and says not giving him money is a step away from tyranny
2. If there's a tradable 'right to offend' asset then it will either be bought up by wealthy people who are assholes or assholes who raise money from other assholes on the promise that they will be bigger assholes (see also politics, US)
I mean, why not have a market for murder, and just limit the number of permits to 10% less than the current homicide totals? The government makes tax revenue and homicide falls by 10%, (almost) everybody wins! Vote for me in '24!
do not vote for me
2. If there’s one thing I know about wealthy people, it’s that there’s wealthy people on both sides of any given politcal/social issue. So for every one that wants to allow certain speech there will be one that wants to ban it. Also people can organize from the grassroots to form large pools of capital and have their voice heard if the issue is important enough.
3. Although your hypothetical is a bit sensationalist and off topic, I’ll entertain it. If the outcome of such a scheme really did lower the homicide total by 10%, then it’d be hard to argue against it vs. the status quo as it is an objectively better outcome.
Absolute free speech is an illusion that has never existed and never will. Our problem in society is that that we censor the wrong kinds of speech and tolerate the wrong kinds of speech. Overton windows aren't bad. Ours has just been corrupted. Musk explicitly said he wants to essentially broaden and fix the tolerance window, not abolish it.
He was openly crowing over being able to hoax/troll the media on Twitter as of just a few days ago. The off-the-wall idea that what he says represents what he believes is constantly promoted even by the people who supposedly are frothing with hatred for him.
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."[0]
Louis Brandeis did believe that context and specifics are important, so I think the technology of the online platform is significant especially with respect to the first part of that quote.
[0] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/357/
> "Whitney was one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party, which was a radical wing of the Socialist Party that split from the rest of the Party after a convention in 1919. When she attended a convention to organize a California wing of the Labor Party, Whitney exhorted workers to vote for its candidates in elections and advocated for taking political action in a resolution. The Party eventually adopted a more extreme program than what Whitney advocated in her resolution, and she protested to no avail. Whitney was charged with violating the California Criminal Syndicalism Act on the basis that she had helped to organize a group that sought to effect economic and political change through the unlawful use of violence.
She argued that she had not intended the organization to act in this way and did not plan to aid it in those objectives, so she should not be charged merely for attending the convention. Whitney claimed that the California law violated the First Amendment."
As usual, lots of nice things may have been said about free speech, but in the end she was convicted and jailed for organising a political party.
Also he wrote this before social media. He wrote that before fascism swept in on the back of free speech and public persuasion in the 1930s. We're in a new paradigm now and worldviews need to be updated to fit new information and new evidence than what was available during his time.
It is. Mid 2000s 4chan and more recently 8kun found it immediately.
When you remove limiters people slap the rail immediately. What value does it add? No one is learning anything when posting anonymously without moderation, they're just lulling themselves into an easily manipulated state.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
My favorite memory is playing carnival music through my mic while spinning a grabbed merc around. That and everything about aquarium.
West tweeted an image of a swastika in a star of David - technically an obsolete symbol of the Raelian UFO cult, in practice it suggested Nazis vs Jews to any casual observer. In the context of West's long-simmering beef with Jewish people and current manic episode of shouting about his enthusiasm for Hitler from inside a ski mask, it was certainly meant to taunt and would fit most people's standard for hate speech.
But incitement to violence? Not exactly, and that's why I say Musk doesn't seem to know what he's doing. There is an indirect kind of incitement, in that it inciting people to behave like Nazis is synonymous with violence; neo-Nazis might deny the holocaust but are just as likely to follow up with the suggestion that it would be a good idea, and in conversation among themselves are a lot blunter about their desire to do violence, preferably on a grand scale. This is why Nazis complaining about free speech is a bad joke, since their gameplan for pretty much any speech they dislike is to simply kill the speakers.
But legally speaking, incitement to violence has a much narrower threshold; it has to be be specific and produce imminent lawless action. For a long time this meant internet speech didn't cunt at all, as jurists figured there couldn't be an imminent risk if the speaker and the recipient were in different places, and that electronic communication was too attenuated to inflame the passions of its receivers. Legislators and courts have somewhat caught up to the realities of the internet age and so things like SWATting or issuing threats by voicemail or online are taken much more seriously than they used to be (to a fault in some jurisdictions like the UK, whose legislators have a Canute-like fondness for prescriptivism).
In this sense, West's tweet absolutely is not incitement to violence, because while it endorses Nazism and Jew-hatred in a trollish way, it lacks the specificity (in action, time, or place) to merit a legal charge. It's not impossible that West might end up suing Twitter or Musk personally for defamation, given his wealth, mania, and apparent ability to hold a grudge.
Free speech advocates have long wrestled with the ramifications of declaring some speech to be 'hate speech' - I think myself that hate crimes are a legislative punt by making a new and scary-sounding law that doesn't mean very much, rather than clarifying existing law and letting juries weigh the significance of hatred as a possible motivation in the trials of violent crimes. Free speech absolutists, in whose company Musk previously placed himself, generally insist on the narrow legal standard of criminality as the only acceptable reason to inflict bans, and argue that all other speech should proceed unchecked. This argument generally arrives clad in the purple robes of Platonic idealism, though in practice totally un-moderated environments soon resemble an orgy of cynics behaving as obnoxiously as possible to maximize their sense of freedom.
So if Musk is just making it up as he goes along, then he's in the situation of alienating everyone to his left and right simultaneously. I don't know how closely he's supervising content moderation decisions, (probably not very) but the reappearance on Twitter of super far right figures like Brett Stephens and Andrew Anglin (currently evading a federal arrest warrant) suggests the 'public square' is going to see regular brawls for a while.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448038
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33442277
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33749415
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472646
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454735
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33461866
[6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33481049
[7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510043
[8]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33715919
[9]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33489801
[10]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33714846
[11]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33832866
Obviously Elon declaring war on Apple was the much bigger story. People on twitter were ready to burn their iPhones in support. It even had politicians threatening to get congress to go after Apple on behalf of Elon.
So much has been going with Twitter that it was odd that nothing appeared on HN.
I was expecting Kayne West being banned again to be the top post.
If because someone posted on a weird timewindow the article never make it to the front page it's fair to allow those article another go.
An ill intentioned actor also could use this as an adversial strategy. For instance by self publishing bad buzz stories at the worst possible timing to ensure it won't make it to front page and could then exploit the de-duplicating algorithm to reject the story if it get publish again on a more favorable timeframe.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea per se, but it should be extremely carefully though out. And I'm not sure it's more efficient that the organic downvote of called out duplicate by the human readers.
PS: Quite ironically by engaging discussion here instead of simply calling out the dupe we are actually boosting this story...
Elon Musk Continues Along The Content Moderation Learning Curve, But Doesn’t Seem To Be Learning A Damn Thing
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/01/elon-musk-continues-alon...
This seems to be, arguably, where the real problems start. I doubt many people expect Twitter to host actually illegal content. However, as long as a social media site is beholden to advertisers, it's going to have an existential requirement to pull certain content, irrespective of how they or anyone else feels about those restrictions.
Until Twitter can figure out a way to fund itself other than by advertising, the idea of it being a free speech platform is a pipe dream.
So my hypothesis is that, indirectly, the advertisers are helping represent the interests of the vast majority of users who don't want to see that crap, but are unable to have their voices heard over the clamouring minority who want to tweet out swastikas and misgender trans people for the lulz.
It seems that, similar to newspapers, purchasing ads is also in some manner purchasing control of the platform.
I would rather bang rusty carpet tacks through my thumb, than own a large social media site.
I can understand the perspective that if someone is making claims that your platform / forum allows “free speech” then people are justified in being upset when this is not the case.
On the other hand the rule since the days of dial up BBSs is: the sysop can do whatever they want with their system, and you are owed nothing. If people do not like how they operate, then they migrate somewhere else. Sure it sucks when you get on the wrong side of a sysop and get banned from a popular board, but that’s just the game.
The era of mobile phones / internet is truly the eternal September. :)
That's about as ham fisted a censorship policy as you can have.
Please don't be dismissive of valid free speech concerns. The open Internet is a critical feature of the kind of society I'd like to live in.
You don't get to dictate the kind of society other people want though.
And given the objective data we have people like moderated platforms.
Ideally in my opinion, Twitter should have a setting by default that hides all of that content, but if you disable it you get 4chan-like moderation (so anything that's legal). In countries with a lesser degree of freedom of speech (I think swastikas are illegal in Germany for example), you wouldn't be able to disable that setting.
Finally a problem that bitcoin reliably solves! "Here's my money, I'm from the internet, we have no censorship laws".
On the other hand, it also incentivizes aggressive moderation of the free section, since malingerers can be told to pay up.
I think he'll find that even if he complies with that rule people will still leave. Forcing an opt-in for one client doesn't prevent them from sending harassing messages to others.
> Fire the engineers! Bring me new engineers who don’t suck. And, I guess, maybe hire someone to manage at least some of these things. We can call them… “director of trust.” That sounds good! Level Nine: “We’re the trustworthy free speech platform, doing our best to stop CSAM, hate speech, infringement, and spam, and we follow
Block illegal (civil and criminal) content and spam. Hate crime is already covered under that umbrella.
The problem again is the plague on our society, advertising. Ideal brand association isn’t compatible with free speech, you have to pick one, and SV picks ads. Lumberg: If the ad industry could just go ahead and disappear from the planet that would be great.
I think that 20% is coming from this:
"The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%"[1]
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...
"You could probably expand that 80% to 90% or even 95%. The extremists seem like they're more numerous than they are, because they talk so much and so loudly, but they're really a tiny minority." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1598720168737345539
God people just love projecting and assuming the worst. Didn't Twitter close 500K additional accounts for child sexual exploitation? And Twitter didn't change their content moderation policy on child porn, no?
They have gutted their moderation teams though - looks like there's one (1) left for all of Asia[1] - tens of millions of Twitter users.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-child-sexual-abuse-m...
The latter construction makes it sound like Elon is saying those words while in fact the author of the article is saying those words _to_ Elon.
No promotion, no suppression: chatter (the early Internet)
Centralized promotion and centralized or no suppression: traditional media
Centralized promotion, decentralized suppression: modern electoral politics, basically
No promotion, any suppression: silence (obviously)
Decentralized promotion, decentralized suppression: echo-chamber/hive-mind/hug-box, see also: why FB/Twitter don't have downvotes, and Reddit discourages them
Decentralized promotion, no suppression: inflammatory content takes over
Decentralized promotion, centralized suppression: the modern social media model
But wait, there's a bonus:
Decentralized promotion, semi-centralized (approved user) suppression: Hacker News
Previous twitter did not have good judgement. It had a left-bias and banned people for saying things like "there are two genders" and "men aren't women tho". It also banned various accounts for jokes (prominently Babylon Bee, a right-wing The Onion).
It remains to be seen if Elon will do better or worse. I think he'll do better because he has a sense of humor. But he's also a bit obnoxious so we'll see.
@dang is the GOAT.
I don't know what it will take for this lie to die. It has absolutely zero supporting evidence. The data suggests just the opposite.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...
> "There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content."
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598833927405215744
But there are three big things this misses:
1. What is and is not legal is usually decided in the courts. That's expensive, and lawyers help prevent you from getting to the courts in the first place.
2. The ideal goal for good discussion on a forum is transparency and consistency in moderation. For example, StackExchange sites censor heavily, but with a good effort to be transparent and consistent in doing so. (This is the major flaw with most "free speech" sites-- they make no effort whatsoever. It's just buzzword branding.)
3. When you're beholden to shareholders, then the goal for discussion is to be profitable. Free-speech ideals matter *only* to the extent that they are profitable.
You'll generally find the ideals in point 2 on small social media sites (up to ~1000 monthly users who make posts). These are ones where the active users all know one another, and where it's feasible for a user to read and respond to all the posts made on the site. (If you're nostalgic for mid-2000s webforums, then good news: They still exist!)
Crucially, these are sites meant to serve a need for community, with no intention of profit.
These are sites small enough that the social dynamics are closer to a discord server or group chat. It's easy to tell when good members are or not acting in good faith, and it's feasible for the admins/mods to openly discuss moderation decisions.
It's one of the other benefits of small social media. A tiny site with ~1000 monthly users is much less likely to receive urgent takedown-request emails from Malaysia.
That is, if you say "Can we have the intern send some of these to our outside counsel to review for fair use before pulling them down?" you're opening yourself up to a ton of liability for all images.
Yes, you are exposing yourself to some liability.
But no, if you try to avoid that liability, you will run off all of your users.
How many memes have you seen today that are based on an image from a recent movie?
Child porn, copyright infringement, harassment, hate speech, spam, you name it. Anything goes. It's a complete free-for-all.
Giant internet companies like Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars a year through their partnerships with the E-Mail platform. These big companies do make a token effort to remove objectionable content from their servers, but that doesn't matter.
Anyone who wants to sidestep this reasonable moderation and spread hateful content on E-Mail can easily do so for a few dollars a month by setting up a darkweb technology known as a "Self-Hosted Mail-Server". Underground terrorist collectives such as the "postfix" organization distribute software making it possible to set up a Self-Hosted Mail-Server in a few clicks.
We need to rise up and pressure these billionaire tech companies to stop connecting to any E-Mail providers that do not have a full content council and policy, and a team of content moderators.
There was a time when it was pretty easy to set up an SMTP server, but, if you want your emails to actually get seen, it's non-trivial today.
What is scary to me is how censorship has become completely accepted by the new generation, including software engineers here in their 20s. No true hacker (this is Hacker News after all) would be OK with corporation or government censorship. Slippery slope is real.
This type of censorship has been completely accepted by all past generations.
Everyone agrees racism is wrong can we censor it?
"censoring opinions which 50% of Americans share, and probably 90% of the world in just a few years."
What opinion and why would the amount of people believing kt change?
Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by -- and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing -- they only like `cooperation' that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults.
https://courses.cs.duke.edu/spring01/cps004/readings/hacker....
And authoritarians also thrive on chaos and propaganda. The recent rise in authoritarianism hasn't been related to censorship and secrecy as much as chaos, misdirection, conspiracy theories and forced polarization.
We’ve realized how idealistic and out of touch with humanity we were. If everyone online was a good faith actor attempting to have intellectual dialog then I would oppose all censorship.
The fact is though that bad faith and agenda driven actors dominate the public narrative, stressing all of society out in the process as they either directly, or by proxy, then the real world and daily interactions of society into a giant flame war.
I care a lot more about society not being divided and these tools of connection not being used to wage large scale disinformation campaigns than I do any ideologically driven morals. We have to live in this country, this world, together.
Personally, I think the solution is to limit reach, for everyone, full stop. Place legal limits on recommendations and pushed content, to incentivize people choosing their sources. Limit how many times a content can be easily shared (think of the ease of retweeting something you didn't even read) to incentivize organic spread. Limit the reach of unverified and new accounts to incentivize trust building. Increase fines and punishments (through courts, of course) for organizations that blatantly lie to the public to incentivize proper research.
Let me stop you there.
Those platforms dont give you tools for that! You can't say "but people won't do it" if they don't have any good option to do that in the first place.
But yeah, shoving algorithmic garbage to get people to click would be bad enough, but now we have that with added tries of trying to manipulate politics with it.
> Personally, I think the solution is to limit reach, for everyone, full stop. Place legal limits on recommendations and pushed content, to incentivize people choosing their sources. Limit how many times a content can be easily shared (think of the ease of retweeting something you didn't even read) to incentivize organic spread. Limit the reach of unverified and new accounts to incentivize trust building. Increase fines and punishments (through courts, of course) for organizations that blatantly lie to the public to incentivize proper research.
I firmly believe that RSS model of people having to choose what to subscribe to get anything would be much better off. If someone wants to put collective vomit of the internet (which what pretty much twitter algorithm does) as a feed they are free to do so but nobody is shoved whatever algorithmic crap decides that will get reaction and ad views out of them.
And before someone says Mastodon/Fediverse, nope, they fucked it up. The fact admin can decide "no, I decide for my users that any updates from this @server.address are bad and nobody, not even someone who subscribed explicitly, can engage with it" disqualifies that because it have same problem of exacerbating bubbles decided upon by tiny minority
A lot has happened in the past couple decades as society has tilted around into the information age. Some assumptions have undergone rigorous testing. Some deserved to be discarded. I don't think anyone has the One True Approach yet, but freedom-of-speech idealism proved wanting as a strategy.
It's pretty easy to avoid political bullshit if you are careful with following.
For years Twitter used to make it impossibly hard to switch to just "latest tweets" instead of their awful recommendation feed which include likes/rts of people you don't even follow. No wonder Twitter became such a heated trainwreck when content feeds were no longer opt-in.
But the default behaviour is for you to see the Home feed which is populated with people you don't follow. So it is mostly just random topics and tweets from the most controversial people associated with that topic.
So you do see political bullshit. A lot of it in fact because Musk is clearly trying to juice the engagement numbers and having lots of controversial political tweets is a great way to do that.
I never see likes/RTs by people I don't follow anymore.
After years of the homepage being AI-feed only (lists were the only chronological alternative) they finally added a small button in the top right corner to change to chronological aka Latest Tweets by default. Now the default options are "Latest Tweets" and "Retweets". I don't see an option to switch back to the AI feed w/ non-following content?
https://i.imgur.com/MaRjbcX.png
The default is now "Latest Tweets".
So I'm either seeing the new beta or you haven't been using Twitter recently.
The default algorithm shows you what people you follow are most interested in. This does a lot to shape the conversation. You can switch to seeing tweets from people you follow in chronological order, but it typically doesn't show all of them. If you don't interact frequently enough with someone they'll fall out of your feed. It's quite a lot of work to get rid of all the friend suggestions and retweets etc. etc. from other people by using keyword muting; and even when you mute individuals, they still show up with their asinine opinions in your search results. The only way you can be sure of not seeing someone is to block them, and even then you'll still get notifications that there's more content, but it might be blocked.
Blocking is also not that effective of a self-curation tool because the userbase isn't static. Habitual trolls buy farmed accounts for 50 cents a pop and for the price of a hot lunch they can have 25 new accounts to troll people with.
Maybe they’ll add a chronological option again at some point. The Apple style middle ground of making it easy by default (instead of customizable) seems to hold sway among twitters UX/product team.
Hopefully that will change as well. Anything is better than the old default system. I could see the old way being good for entirely new users but it was awful for long time users who carefully curated their following list.
Sadly it seems controversial topics still get the most traction even within the limited set you follow.
Elon Musk lied when he said he's a "free speech absolutist".
That sounds like a bug not a feature. If Twitter collapses i'll dance in the streets.
Seeing tweets from people you don't follow helps grow your network and in turn increases your engagement.
In fact, email is more-or-less the most-used example of how a federated system deals with this: sloppily, one-at-a-time, generating a massive haves-and-have-nots Balkanization.
I can set up my own self-hosted mail server, but without some very careful configuration and planning good luck getting Gmail to forward its output to Google's users.
The version of freedom of speech that is encoded in US consitutional law (the first amendment and the long history of supreme court judgements on the subject) is an example. There are forms of speech that are not protected and there is a mainstream interpretation of freedom of speech that does not see restrictions against defamation, incitement of violence, etc., as infringements of it. A "free speech absolutist" would see these as infringements of freedom of speech, so the term is useful to distinguish that particular view.
You're seeing the term used a lot on Hacker News because there are people here who routinely argue that any speech should be allowed on a platform that claims to support freedom of speech. These people are free speech absolutists (at least in the context of the debate about online platforms) and, if they feel their views on the matter are correct, shouldn't be offended to be called that.
Trouble is, that's a good way to build a $5 billion social networking site, not a $50 billion one. Also a good way to get arrested seconds after setting foot in country XYZ.
So many of these "problems" came from bad legislation and a culture that enabled it.
"Hi boss, we're getting millions of DMCA takedown requests."
The solution? Fix the brokenness of the DMCA.
"Hey boss, we're getting a lot of notifications about misleading info!"
Ok, tell the users to not believe everything they read on the Internet.
"Hey boss, we're getting lots of reports about hateful content that people find offensive."
Ok, delete the report button, tell people if they are threatened to contact their local law enforcement agencies, and supply them with better tools to manage troll armies.
So many of these things can be solved by deleting the problem to the appropriate level. But instead, our culture demands for Ministries of Truth and Love.
1. Provide a form for copyright owners to use to request a takedown of material they claim is infringing. When the form is submitted verify that all the required fields have been filled in.
2. Take down the content claimed by the form submitted, and notify the user who posted the content. The provider does not need to try to figure out if the material claimed really infringes the claimant's copyright.
3. Provide a form for the user to submit a counterclaim. If the user does not submit a counterclaim, there is nothing more to do.
4. If the user submits a counterclaim, restore the taken down content, and notify the party that requested the takedown. The provider does not have to try to evaluate the merits of the counterclaim, such as whether or not the use was fair use.
If the claimant still wants the material taken down they have to take it up with the user, such as by suing them. The provider, having followed the DMCA procedure given above, is protected by the DMCA safe harbor.
It only gets hard when a site wants to use some system of their own, like YouTube does, instead of DMCA. Due to the nature of user created content on YouTube and how YouTube is monetized it is better for them if something that infringes gets licensed and stays up, so they have deals with major content distributors to encourage that.
For a site like Twitter, where the user content is small text posts instead of longer videos that can have ads within them, I don't think they need more than the DMCA procedure.