zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are.

Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

>>chasd0+u8
They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.

So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.

>>Eddy_V+Db
Fighting spam and porn are a different category from censoring political viewpoonts with 25%+ adoption.

>>wooooo+gy
25% is a completely arbitrary number and context dependent. I can guarantee you can find many communities that have majority views that you find abhorrent and would not want to be a part of your community discourse. The problem is that social media gives the illusion of a broad town square where all opinions are heard, but that is not what happened. Everyone on social media is filtered into silos based on what the algorithms predict they will find engaging. In such an environment, it is not hard at all for malicious actors to propagate incendiary lies and exaggerations that metastasize into political beliefs. A fringe belief can easily become mainstream if it is amplified unchallenged, which is exactly what happens every day on social media.

>>norir+VP
The thing is, these services are exactly that. Services.

What the consumer wants from those services is "free speech", but with restrictions. They want "uncensored" content with the objectionable bits removed. For some people "objectionable" means spam and pornography, for others it includes certain types of political discourse or content from certain classes of person. If people really wanted uncensored content, the dark web would be far more popular.

The only way these companies can give people both uncensored "free speech" and content moderation is to build these bubbles where freedom of speech is only freedom of one type of speech.

They're stuck in a catch-22, and I can't help but feel like they actually ARE providing the service that we demand from them to the best of their abilities.