Censoring and moderating and content, as it relates to this lawsuit, is very expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it ranks pretty high in their cost chart. The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk. Well, if the politicians and the courts tell them they can't moderate political stuff, then the political risk has been removed. All that remains is the financial risk.
Advertisers aversion to controversy is based on, I assume, their adherence to cultural norms. These norms are fluid. So I actually think these laws will give them the cover they need to stop doing something that they would prefer not to do. I also believe that we'll be litigating this for eons.
It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.
Why not give users the power of moderation? Currently the website owner makes the decision for me about what content I should not be seeing. I want instead all or at least almost all content preserved and the ability to create and subscribe to blocklists. The website can have a default blocklist active to make it palatable for the majority.
This is an interesting model, and there's nothing stopping someone from starting a social media site that works like this. But that doesn't mean that existing ones should be forced to use this model. Let's try them both (and others) and see which ones work best for their users.
This is the model that social media had. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... they all started of just showing you content from people your followed.
Or course they now all demand to show you "recommended" content and with that take on the responsibly of how "pleasant" that recommended content is.
Where did they do this? I bet few people truly know. My personal guess it's because injected ads and promoted content logged to out of place between your friends posts whereas there is little difference between ads and most popular posts.
Actually this model does exist and is pretty successful. Facebook Groups. The admins of these groups are not employees and have the power to limit whatever, whenever.
How Twitter used to be I think? If I remember correctly, I only got tweets from people I followed, in chronological order. I could unfollow someone and never hear from them again. Now the algorithm decides what I see.
The current model of social media is analogous to an email host DELETING all emails that are sent to you but it considers to be spam.
What I propose is that the email host preserves all emails sent to you, but puts them in your spam folder if it considers so. Moreover, I should be able to disable that and let my email client to do spam filtering on the rules I make.
There's a weird bias towards "we need a daddy to tell us how to talk". Maybe it's because moderation is too hard for mere crowdsource+algorithms and maybe it isn't. I dunno.
And maybe the owners just want to keep that sweet fascist option open.
Perhaps that's how it should be, though? Paid content -- even if I'm required to see it in my feed and can't filter it out -- should be marked as such.
HN has something similar to "paid" content: YC alum companies are allowed to post hiring notices that end up on the front page, and decay down the page according to a pre-determined algorithm. They're obvious in that you can't comment or vote on them, but HN does allow them to be hidden. I think that's the right way to do things; if HN allowed YC companies to post on the front page, and made it look like they were regular posts that got organically upvoted, it would reduce my trust in HN.
Any social media platform that puts paid content in a feed, while trying to make it look like regular content, would also lose my trust.
A possible solution to this is to allow any user to be a moderator, and to allow other users who want moderation to subscribe to one or moderation "feeds" from other users.
If one wants to wade through the degenerate cesspool of content, they'd have that option. If one wants to only see fluffy non-hateful things, they could subscribe to moderation feeds that achieve that.
The notion that we can impose a single perspective of "good content" and "bad content" onto millions of people, with different perspectives, is simply asinine.
On the contrary, moderation feeds would almost certainly be completely protected by free speech laws, as they would essentially be the expressed opinions of individual people.
This discussion is specifically scoped to the legal system in the United States.
If you, as a US individual, express the opinion that "I do not like post with unique ID X on platform Y because of reasons a,b,c", that would be protected speech. A moderation feed would be equivalent to a series of such statements.
If other users decide to subscribe to your moderation feed, and have matching posts automatically hidden, that would specifically be the choice of that individual user, and not a private company.
One of the greatest scams governments around the world have managed to pull is making "free speech" a politically partisan issue. There are two sides to it though, but it's not conservative vs. liberal, it's the common people vs. governments and corporations.
People say this, but not long ago Twitter/Reddit/Youtube were basically a free for all for anything except porn. And their user numbers were skyrocketing at the time.
That's moderation. Both because they are actively excluding certain content, but also because 'porn' can be subjective and so decisions have to be made about what does and does not qualify.
And after they attempted to clean up, they were able to attract more advertisers and mainstream users the advertisers wanted to reach. Doesn’t the story of those sites back the person above you’s point?
That’s just saying “until it became a problem, it wasn’t a problem”. Those sites were a free for all, up until it became a problem. And then they were no longer free for alls.
Yeah, this is exactly right. Stronger moderation started happening because more and more toxic/abusive BS became prevalent. I only really experienced true "hostile attacks from a complete stranger" on Twitter in the last year or two, and I've been a heavy user of it since 2007. (tbh my usage has dwindled and I'm wayyy more focused on Mastodon now, which thus far fosters a stronger sense of community than Twitter will ever be able to)
It's not even close, admins ban subs all the time, mods are under strict grip of admins on how they need to mod thing otherwise they get replaced, there are cases where admins straight up say that mod teams need to get more people in the team or they'll lose the sub, i've seen subs with automods straight up saying that they need to be careful with what is written otherwise they'll be banned.
The huge Aimee Challenor thing, that lead to people being banned anywhere the name was uttered is just the super high profile example I know, i'm sure reddit users would be able to show more smaller cases.
Just want to make it clear, I'm not claiming this control is good or bad, there are good reasons for and against moderation, but reddit is not even close to a free for all.
Exactly, grey zones can happen really quickly. For example if someone says "I think Candidate X from Party Y is a total a-hole." Is that a political statement or a cesspool comment? I see legitimate arguments for either.
Whether or not pineapple on pizza is acceptable can technically be brought to a political argument but anyone not turned into a rage monster by current social media can tell that it isn't a political debate in the current environment.
Perhaps in the technical definition of political, but not in the layman's definition of political.
The definition of political used by the populace is almost always the narrow subset of societal/cultural fights that are actively being argued. Generally speaking these arguments are headed by politicians.
There is also a space in the definition for arguments directly impact the structure/scope of the government. Although this may be separate enough that it may warrant being considered a second definition instead of an additional category within the first definition.
I often see this sentiment associated with those who wish to regulate political speech they find offensive. It's convenient if everything is political so that everything said can be regulated.
Regulating political speech for whatever reason (including offense), should be considered a legitimate exercise of moderation. It happens on Hacker News all the time - political speech is only considered on topic if and when it contains evidence of a "new or interesting phenomenon," and even then, users will mod down anything they don't like. And given the quality of most political threads here, I don't think many people here would prefer it if that were allowed to run amok.
If I'm running a car forum, I should be able to ban pro-Nazi rhetoric if I want, regardless of whether I find it offensive or merely technically off topic. Not every space on the internet needs to be /pol/.
Yeah, internet content laws are becoming increasingly conflicting. On one hand, you have places that are making it more difficult to legally moderate websites. On the other, you have legislation like SESTA and FOSTA where websites are being held legally responsible for content that others may post on the website.
Section 230 was an unusually great piece of internet legislation, and it's not great to see it start to crumble with these new changes. Just let every site be its own site.
I think quite literally lots of things are political. This discussion is political. Anything to talk about h1b visa is political. Immigration is political. The most offensive speech is arguably political speech, such as advocating for genocide.
Using the widest definition, "affairs of the citizens", it's literally about everything outside of your private home. The twist though, is that since pretty much everything has consequences (including inaction), you are not safe from eventually having an outside impact even there. As the meme goes, "we live in a society". (Also why you should want to keep good relations with the other citizens...)
If you want to sell X to group Y which coincides mostly with party Z and has little overlap with the opposite party, it is worth your while to make buying X a political activity, however you can go about doing that.
I think the only thing that is clearly not political is people sharing pictures of pets. Everything else including Insta Thotts and what have you have been co-opted.
Firstly, that is _not_ what reductio ad Hitlerum means.
More importantly, it's not a fallacy. It's pretty well documented by now that what you get when you have a social network with very little moderation is, almost inevitably, a social network for Nazis:
Just because people like bringing up Nazis a little too often doesn't mean every reference to Nazis is fallacious. Sometimes, it really is about [neo-]Nazis.
The exact fallacy that occurs (almost all the time) when you invoke Hitler is called poisoning the well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well). You are trying to make a position indefensible by associating it with an indefensible thing, without properly justifying the connection. In this case, it might also be a slippery slope fallacy.
The US has had unmoderated social networks, referred to as pubs, churches, clubs, and town squares, for the last few hundred years. Nazis never gained prominence in any of those fora. It is not a given that reducing the level of moderation leads to Nazis taking over. The truth is that Nazism is such a distasteful ideology that it pretty much never takes over the discourse in places where it is allowed. Rather, Nazis end up creating small hate groups in all sorts of fora, including the heavily-moderated ones (Facebook and Twitter) where they use euphemisms.
Here are a few other sources for you about Nazi communities on mainstream social networks:
I signed up for Gab in 2016 (internet drama voyeurism can be fun), and I got off in 2017. Neo-Nazis on Gab were about as prominent as neo-Nazis on Twitter: a few small neo-Nazi communities existed on both platforms. Gab had a lot of right-wing/pro-Trump users, and was also weirdly Christian, but there weren't many actual neo-Nazis. A platform for right-wingers isn't automatically a social network for Nazis.
The same is true of Voat, by the way. It was started when /r/fatpeoplehate and a bunch of racist subreddits were banned, and it attracted a ton of trolls and mean people, but very few actual Nazis. AFAIK /r/nazi migrated to Voat, so there were some Nazis there, but Voat was not a "social network for Nazis" by any means. Reddit still has many Nazi subreddits with far more users than Voat's Nazi groups at their peak.
I know that /pol/ on 8chan, at least, was full of Nazis and I think it was one of the biggest communities on 8chan. That was a social network for Nazis.
Gab and Voat (as well as other right-wing-focused social networks like Parler) ended up being the target of journalists and left-wing activists because there weren't many people they valued on those platforms, and a lot of people they wanted to hurt. They continue to largely ignore the presence of distasteful communities on Twitter and Facebook (see Jan 6 organizing as a good example of this - it was attributed to Parler, but most of it actually happened on Facebook and Twitter) and put other fora under a microscope to try to find Nazis - particularly if the forum has an overt right-wing bias. The presence of a small community of Nazis is then used to attack and take down the entire platform.
Nazis are on every platform in small, niche communities. They are surprisingly hard to ban. They don't take over platforms no matter how free their speech is. They are shitty people and their ideas are wrong, and everyone knows that.
So, what Voat was full of anti-Jewish slurs for fun?
Is your point that Voat may have been full of jew-hating racists but it's okay because they weren't actual Nazis?
I can't imagine most people caring about making that distinction at all. Except for jew-hating racists who don't want to be associated with Nazis for some reason.
No, that Voat had a small population of jew-hating Nazis, and another small population of racists. It had a large population of fat-shamers and trolls. It was not a "forum for Nazis" by any definition.
If OP had said, "a forum for terrible people," we wouldn't be having this discussion at all, and I would agree with you.
The same distinction I am drawing about Voat is what people routinely say about Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, and Twitter. All of which host far more Nazi content, by the way, than any side-show like Voat.
Toting out the token Nazi groups on a platform to say that every user is a Nazi is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
Hugely expensive. Zuck mentioned in the rogan episode they spend roughly $5b annual on "Defense" aka moderation and safety. To put it in perspective, that's roughly in line with what the defense budgets of Switzerland and Mexico.
Advertisers aversion to controversy is based on, I assume, their adherence to cultural norms. These norms are fluid. So I actually think these laws will give them the cover they need to stop doing something that they would prefer not to do. I also believe that we'll be litigating this for eons.