> The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression.
At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of people around the globe hear it and react instantly again?
When the printing press was invented ther was a backlash against it, because free speech was endangering existing power structures.
Nowadays we have it the other way around, powerful players use the accelerated chaos of social media to avoid any real discourse from forming — it is just very easy to manipulate just enough into your direction to hide behind "differing opinions" if you have a ton of resources — just like boulevard media has been for the past decades. Censorship and media control is one strategy to reduce the chaos by decelerating the spread of the most outrageous unfounded claims. Of course there can be such a thing as too much censorship (e.g. look to China and Russia), but this would be state censorship.
A billionaire does not want to buy a social media plattform because he cares about free speech — if that was the case he would have nothing about his workers discussing unions, post youtube videos he does not like or journalist writing negative things about him and still being able to buy a Tesla car.
I am not sure there is much wisdom in assuming we can have a world wide instant public microblogging platform without any moderation at all. Anyone who ever operated any public web platform knows the quality of the discourse falls drasticly if there is not at least some level of content moderation.
> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.
You are heavily overexpecting what the technology can do. Differenciating satire from a threat with sufficient accuracy is not something machine learning ("AI") could do right now.
> At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of people around the globe hear it and react instantly again?
Usenet, for several decades already. Good NNTP servers had nearly perfect spam filtering and the trolls were handled individually by each user in killfiles.
If Google had kept the simple original web interface from around 2004 we might not have had all these issues. GPT-3 spam is hard to detect, but can be handled by killfiles.
Of course the real goal of Twitter is to do user profiles and possibly log private messages, for which Usenet isn't suitable. I wonder who on earth would send a sensitive "private" message on Twitter.
Usenet was much, much smaller and quite certainly not a statistical representation of society (people who could afford, access and understand the thing).
Most modern problems with social media started emerging when the general public started using it.
Specialist communities like IRC channels, Hacker News, certain subreddits or webforums still work quite well, because let's face it: It is not the general public there.
And even in specialist communities there is a certain degree of moderation needed in order to keep it in order.
In the offline worlds individuals for which (reasonable) moderation is needed are kept in check by society (either through social pressure or physical force).
Very seldom they are the beginning of societal changes but usually they are just unpleasant (e.g. "I hope you and your loved ones get murdered because...") people which most others avoid if they can.
I'm very sure I would leave any platform where their kind is allowed to run wild and so would many of my family and friends.
Facebook is a very good example: Most people are boring and nice enough. Those who are not (ranging from annoying to vile) spoil the fun for everybody else.
People leave (in part) because they don't want constant conflict and not every opinion is worth to be heard.
> That's a false dichotomy and the exact argument one would expect from a proponent of censorship. That puts you in the wrong camp, the fascist authoritarian camp, sadly.
Sadly you don't really elaborate on how my comment reveals the authotarian position you do falsly assume I hold.
There is a position between no censorship and full authotarian style censorship and it is a common rethoric vehicle to first talk about the extremes to show that the reasonable area is somewhere inbetween (and then we can talk about trade offs and priorities).
My main point as someone who studied media science is that we cannot treat modern social media with the exact same rules we treated other speech with, because ultimatly it is a different place to speak in. The social distance is lower than anything we ever had in history, the audience bigger than ever in history, it feels private but you are in the spotlight at the same time (and people tend to act like this). It is a place where a rural person communicating a rural opinion will be directly next to a city person communicating a city opinion. Before social media you had natural borders of which people could actually hear (and/or react to) each other. So it is fundamentally different place than anything we ever had before it.
And different places have different rules. Someone who speaks loudly in a library will be thrown out (because the place has a certain function and them speaking loudly interferes with that function). Someone who repeatedly and loudly farts in a restaurant might be thrown out. Someone who listens to music in church might be thrown out. A bare-breasted women in a mall might get thrown out etc. Different places, different rules.
The question now is: what kind of place is something like twitter? What behaviour shall be accepted or restrict there and with what goals?
If our goal is the equivalent of a verbal bar brawl where people can let out their innermost emotions we might end up with different rules than if our goal is rational and fact-oriented discourse with the goal of moving discourse forward (these places have typically stricter rules of which speech is acceptable, as can be seen for example here on HN).
With twitter a lot of the emerging behavior that can be observed is a direct result of or a direct reacrion to the systemic structure of the place. If this shall be seriously changed you have to either establish a new culture how one has to behave in such a place (hard) or you change the systemic variables itself (easier).
But one point I want to stress is: by allowing most speech one might involuntarily prevent other, more nuanced speech from ever emerging.
Many, many people are absolutely arguing that zero moderation is appropriate.
Anyway, you also acknowledge that some moderation is both appropriate and necessary. So, now we know your opinion of a private company’s moderation is different from the parent commenters, but you both believe moderation is necessary — and then you call them an authoritarian fascist.
Moderating bot accounts and frivolous antagonists (by virtue of repeated defamation/inflammatory speech) is appropriate. Those are not in the same vein as restricting speech. If a bot account is openly listed as such with links to show it is not a human agent, then it can be openly suppressed.
This isn't a similar argument nor a difference in degree of the same position.
But I don't take your statement with any credulity based on your handle
At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of people around the globe hear it and react instantly again?
When the printing press was invented ther was a backlash against it, because free speech was endangering existing power structures.
Nowadays we have it the other way around, powerful players use the accelerated chaos of social media to avoid any real discourse from forming — it is just very easy to manipulate just enough into your direction to hide behind "differing opinions" if you have a ton of resources — just like boulevard media has been for the past decades. Censorship and media control is one strategy to reduce the chaos by decelerating the spread of the most outrageous unfounded claims. Of course there can be such a thing as too much censorship (e.g. look to China and Russia), but this would be state censorship.
A billionaire does not want to buy a social media plattform because he cares about free speech — if that was the case he would have nothing about his workers discussing unions, post youtube videos he does not like or journalist writing negative things about him and still being able to buy a Tesla car.
I am not sure there is much wisdom in assuming we can have a world wide instant public microblogging platform without any moderation at all. Anyone who ever operated any public web platform knows the quality of the discourse falls drasticly if there is not at least some level of content moderation.
> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.
You are heavily overexpecting what the technology can do. Differenciating satire from a threat with sufficient accuracy is not something machine learning ("AI") could do right now.