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
Yes, it's arbitrary, 20 would also make the same point, 0.1 would not.

If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.

>>wooooo+GS
Sounds good.

Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to your cause, and your opinion on suppression / amplification will have some weight to throw around.

People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up because the censorship gives them something they want. It's a feedback loop.

>>shadow+Hj1
"Might makes right, sit there and take it" might be how the world works in some ways, but it's not exactly a moral cause.

>>wooooo+sl1
What does "might" mean in this context? Nobody showed up with a gun to force people to make a Facebook account.

It is, at worst, "popularity makes right." Which, to be clear: there are philosophies that take significant umbrage with that (there's a reason the US government isn't a strict popular vote for every position).

But the complaint seems to boil down to "I want people to go do something else because... I know they should." Not exactly compelling. People know themselves better than strangers do.

This isn't a claim that might makes right. It's a challenge to replace theory of how people want to engage with the world with practice. I suspect (because we keep seeing the same patterns over and over) that a replacement for Facebook is going to either not catch on like Facebook did or is going to find the need for heavy-handed moderation at some point in the not-too-distant future.