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
> 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.

If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.

>>ryandr+wt
> If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.

Let's distinguish two things here.

One is, you have ten thousand groups and they each have local moderators. If you're a gigantic tool, you get banned from 90% of groups you join and the other 10% are a trash fire. But this primarily happens on the basis of temperament rather than ideology. Most groups don't ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint, they ban you for being a jerk or a spammer, and the ones that do ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint are the ones that become a radicalized trash fire with a reputation for abusive moderation and decline in popularity. Also, you don't have to care much about them because there are plenty of other groups that don't ban you for engaging in civil debate, most people are members of many independent groups, and there are consequently plenty of well-trafficked places for civil debate to take place.

The other is, the platform itself does the moderation and there is nowhere to go to escape their errors without losing the massive network effect of the consolidated platform. The platform at large becomes a radicalized trash fire but the network effect keeps people from abandoning it, so the platform not only loses the incentive to stop that from happening, it becomes a target for capture by authoritarians who want to censor their opponents.

One of these things is not like the other.