Why free-speech platforms all end up moderating content

And that’s why I called my 1981 messaging program Wall. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Of course, there’s garbling. People “know” they have a right to free speech, but for at least some, they think it’s absolute.

I once told someone they were posting an ad in the wrong place (as I recall it wasn’t even just an ad, but it had nothing to do with the topic, so even beyond “you can’t,” it was about “somewhere else is better”). And he replied “I have my right to free speech”.

Some people conflate an idea to where it has little connection to the intent. I had the feeling that invasion of the US Capitol was based on the hyper-magnification of some key ideas.

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I was speaking to their philosophies - people in both professions have put their livelihoods on the line to protect similar freedoms.

He makes fonts now, I’ve posted about them a couple of times.

Totally agreed.

I think one thing that is getting confused in this is what the 1st Amendment is really trying to protect: they cover a lot of ground by putting freedom of religion, free practice thereof, freedom of the press and freedom of speech in the same right. And I think using “Free Speech” as the short hand, and conflating all those misses what is actually being danced around there: Free Thought.

I’m offensively cis-het-male and a recovering freeze peach absolutist (I did not change my mind recently, that happened over a decade ago). I think an absolute right to free thought is still totally defensible along with broad rights to free expression, but the limitation on the latter is where I’ve had a hard time defining the boundaries. Inciting violence is clearly past the line, and always has been, but spreading disinformation and violent ideologies is also a huge problem (both in terms of doing the work of correctly identifying them and then deplatforming them).

For me, personally, I am an ardent atheist, and I am thankful to live in a time and place where that just isn’t a problem. It’s also something I know the right wing of this country would oppress me over if they could consolidate enough power.

The other side of this is that there was a time when atheism was an unthinkable bad thing. Exploring that line of reasoning via freedom of religion has allowed that idea to flourish and allowed people who have their doubts about the supernatural to explore that without worrying about being punished for it.

On the other end of the spectrum of bad thoughts, there is some value in exploring obviously heinous things so that you can understand them and the psychology behind the history of the thing. So there is some use for preseving Nazi propaganda in libraries and museum collections for academic study (whether professional or personal). But the point is to spread understanding so that evil is not repeated. Clearly, giving neo-nazis access to media platforms of any type is a bad idea.

But who gets to parse the difference between how dangerous the ideas of the Oath Keepers are versus the Church of Satan. Neither of those are particularly great, but the former is actively dangerous and the latter are just kind of objectivist jerks and probably largely harmless. But man, point those two groups out to the right wing in the US and you are going to get the opposite assessment (“the former is just boys-will-be-boys wanting to defend the constitution and OMG SaTaNiC pAnIC!!1!”).

This is mostly a ramble, and just thinking out loud. I still haven’t hit on great conclusions about where good, defensible legal lines are. Probably a start is forums that can’t be effectively moderated shouldn’t exist, certainly not the monopolies we have now.

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I agree, people forget that any other kind of freedom is limited in some way by the law, because any freedom can be abused and become a weapon against other citizens.

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This is a hugely important question, and it’s one we need to find an answer to quickly in the Internet age. Who decides what speech is harmless enough to broadcast widely?

Enlightenment thinkers said “nobody should decide”. Again, that worked fine pre-Internet but is now doing a lot of damage.

For much of history, some said “governments decide”. That has never ended well, so we can probably mostly agree to avoid that.

Currently we’re defacto saying “tech billionaires decide” which is a scary situation. It’s swell that BezoZuckSey made the right choice this once, but we all know that won’t last (and they already make wrong choices about this constantly).

The answer is likely some form of “we all decide”. For much of human history, this is how we’ve done it- the community tells you what behavior of yours is unacceptable and shames you into stopping. Other measures are employed if the problem persists. This is imperfect of course, because important minority voices need to be heard too. We don’t want activists for whatever the next important cause is to be shouted down by bigoted Evangelicals yet again.

Currently we enact this community will through deplatforming and moderation, but these are proving difficult to scale. It’s a hard problem, but I sure hope we solve it before the next white nationalist uprising.

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Having slept on it, my earlier thought about “limit communities to sizes that can be moderated” has a huge problem: it’s going to further encourage the bubbles we’ve built. So finding something that can scale is a problem that needs to be solved.

And the tech billionaires aren’t likely to do a better job than they have.

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Yah, we’ve learned from the internet that compartmentalizing the Nazis doesn’t work. It causes them to concentrate, radicalize, and organize. We need to marginalize their voices. Make it clear they are not welcome anywhere, and keep them from building movements. That’s hard to do on the Internet with the barrier to community creation being so low. That low barrier is mostly a net win (all the niche hobbyists and oppressed groups can find each other, etc) but the price we’re paying for it is Organized Nazis. Again, so far, our defacto solution is to hope tech billionaires deplatform the right people. That’s a lousy strategy though. :confused:

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Also, ignoring them doesn’t work either.

Meme Reaction GIF by Robert E Blackmon

Right? Their abhorrent views aren’t the “other side” of civil rights. Their views are the destruction of a democratic society and many groups of people who have worked and struggled for equal rights in such a society.

Indeed. Because the goal of tech companies is the same as any other corporate entity - profit. And we’ve seen these part few years just what their willing to tolerate if it brings in the cash. It’s only when it became clear that these assholes were a threat to the very society that allows these corporations to flourish that they took action. We can’t depend on an entity that cares more about the bottom line than human life to fix this. It’s going to be on us to push our government to make the kind of changes needed to head this kind of thing off at the pass next time.

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But librarians often have to fight off demands to ban this or that book. And I’m vague on it (mostly because I don’t use the library for internet), but haven’t librarians been proponents of not tracking internet use at libraries?

Librarians don’t want anybody deciding what goes in a library except librarians

Newspaper editors don’t want anybody deciding what goes in a newspaper except newspaper editors

It’s no different from any other conflict where somebody resists regulation by somebody else

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