Even though it was easy to get around the firewall and perhaps even legal at the time, barely anyone was. People weren't using proxies to know about Tank Man when China was arguably only "moderating". People called it censorship.
I can't find the original article, maybe Wired?
[edit] Might be this one - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-con...
This is just to point out the naivety of using it's possible but it's not default is not 'censorship' when talking China. Viewing shadow banned is a ok middle on HN, the obvious hole is you have to have a login. I don't want gore on TikTok but I do want guns. It's very complex.
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416424
So as a result they are practically the same thing.
(the "cancel" message was hilarious since when invented it was unauthenticated, i.e. anyone could delete any post on any group in USENET! This had to be fixed:
https://www.templetons.com/usenet-format/cancel.html )
Also found https://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/NoSpam.html which is a great little time capsule site..
It’s not censorship unless the government itself is doing the censorship and making people face criminal consequences for disobeying.
If a private entity is doing it, even at the request of a government, it’s not censorship or a violation of free speech unless they were going to face legal consequences for ignoring the government’s request.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/c5urdn/what_i...
Apparently /r/TheDonald was very used to being in a safe space. Voat didn't cater to that, and TheDonald couldn't take that so eventually they returned to Reddit.
This was before their separate website.
Absolutely.
And as I understand it, many of those social media companies do a piss poor job in policing the kinds of criminal activity mentioned by GP.
That might be an area where targeted regulation could be useful.
But the larger discourse around moderation tends to be focused on political actors (both legitimate and otherwise -- I'm not going to get into a political discussion here, as it's tangential to my point and not likely to spark worthwhile interactions) and the slights they claim are disadvantaging them.
In my view, that's the wrong discussion. We should be much more focused on the very real criminal and tortious conduct that pretty much runs rampant on those platforms.
I voted with my feet a long time ago and don't give my attention to those sites, but that only helps me and doesn't address the larger issues.
As I mentioned in another (tangentially related) discussion[0]:
The best-case scenario in my mind would be more decentralization of
discussion forums. That gives us both the best and worst of both worlds:
Folks can express themselves freely in forums that are accepting of those
types of expression, while limiting the impact of mis/dis-information to
those who actively seek it out.
It's not a good solution, but it's becoming clear that moderation of huge forums like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc. isn't really practical.
If you accept that premise, what options (other than decentralization) could address these issues effectively?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law demands moderation. Community and society demand moderation. Hell, I'd even go as far and say physics demands it. The internet breaks our ideas of social norms on moderation by taking distance and anonymity and shoving them in the same place all at once. And much like if you take groups of conflicting fundamentalist religious groups and put them together, the enviable violence outbreak affects everyone around.
https://hn.algolia.com/settings
dang often references past discussions with search links, so here's a good starting point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=7&prefix=true&que...
The people who think the Jan 6 attack was a good idea will add it to the list of other things leftists do that they think justify the Jan 6 attack.
For that matter I'd say that a lot of what "Black Lives Matter" does is also nihilistic. That is, there is not a lot of expectation that things will change because their ideology doesn't believe that things can change and because it won't look at the variables that could be changed to make a difference. What I do know is that some investigator will come around in 20 years and ask "why is this neighborhood a food desert?" but the odds are worse than 50% that they'll conclude that "it used to have a supermarket but it got burned down in a riot" is part of the answer. In the meantime conservatives will deny that the concept of a "food desert" is meaningful at all and also say that Jan 6 was OK because leftists are always burning down their neighborhoods and getting away with it -- except you (almost) never get away with burning down your neighborhood in terms of the lasting damage it does to your community unless your community is in the gentrification fast track, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_riot
(It might be the sample I see, but I know a few right-wingers who admit that there is a lot of craziness on their side but it is justified by what the other side does whereas I never hear from leftists that it's justifiable to say that "A trans woman is indistinguishable from a natural woman" because of something stupid a conservative did.)
As to "many cases where online communities document or facilitate crimes elsewhere", why criminalise the speech if the action is already criminalised?
That leaves only "Campaigns to harass individuals and groups". Why wouldn't moderation tools as powerful as the ones employed by Twitter's own moderators deal with that?
[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...
It's a fun example because of how wrong Hollywood (and intuition) gets this one. You're on an elevator and an evil terrorist cuts the cables! Oh no! What happens next!? Not much, besides you being annoyed at probably being stuck somewhere in between floors. People had to be persuaded that the technology was safe and so Elisha Otis' [1] regular demonstrations of his safety stopping invention is a big part of the reason of why elevators were able to take off. It's practically impossible to make an elevator fall down a shaft.
Now us growing up with them simply take everything for granted to the point we have absolutely no clue at all about what we're using, but always have used it, so just assume it must be okay as is.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis#Lasting_success
> A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now...but have an opt-in setting
There's one problem with that. Often times, the product itself is the moderated version.
Letting users use a product with moderation turned off would be giving them what they want, but it would not be giving them "the product".
---
For example, people want a space where they can talk about mechanical keyboards. So they go to https://old.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards/
Some people want to sell their custom mechanical keyboards. They think, "I know where a bunch of potential customers are, /r/mk/!"
Queue the sub getting flooded with sales posts, and the moderators banning such posts. Now they have rule #2 and moderate accordingly.
OP's solution is to castrate the moderators by instead of allowing them to remove posts, only allowing them to hide posts. Then users who want to break the rules can simply toggle them.
But we already have a better solution: Just go somewhere else! Right there in the text of rule #2, there is a link to /r/mechmarket/, which is its own subreddit, moderated for the buying and selling of mechanical keyboards.
---
But, of course, that doesn't work with social media. There is only one Facebook. Only one Twitter. They are global namespaces. There is no room for traditional moderation. And that is its own problem.
It's hard to have meaningful conversation when every participant in your social circle, or even in the world is standing at their own soapbox. It's as useless as a daily company-wide meeting.
---
We don't just need to fight disinformation. We need to fight for information, for discussion. We need to show people who are busily engaged in identity politics that there are more interesting conversations to be had. Social media is a really poorly equipped space for those conversations, because it isn't moderated.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
Now, "just add a button marked 'see banned content'" to each of these cases. How much easier did Elon's job get?
It's got to me more like this.
You have to tell the ESG people that what matters about Exxon Mobil is (1) they have to stop fact investing in producing oil that other people burn, (2) it wouldn't matter if they became a "net zero" company by pumping CO₂ from their oil refineries in the ground and using synthetic fuels in their trucks, (3) it doesn't matter how many women they get on the board.
People who are concerned about climate change in the US should be concerned about institutional reform in the Democratic party. Namely, we shouldn't be in situations like
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/senate-debate-pen...
where a lunatic that could be beaten by a ham sandwich could win because the Democrats don't think that Pennsylvania deserves a senator who can verbally communicate effectively. (e.g. out of everybody in the state Philadelphia could get somebody in the top 1% of verbal communication skills as a Senator, why do they have to get somebody who is disabled?)
Again, I think you're under the impression that this particular event was supposed to be in some way Meaningful. Part of some grand strategy or a big movement or something. I'm telling you it's not.
As far as I can tell, https://juststopoil.org came into existence around February this year. They're just a small, new group formed around opposition to Big Oil that's trying to make some noise. This paintings thing is attempt #25, and it just happens to be weird enough to make the news, but not fundamentally different to the 24 that came before it.
In fact they tried previously gluing themselves to microphone at a news agency:
https://juststopoil.org/2022/04/03/just-stop-oil-supporter-g...
I see no indication that this is part of some grand strategy from the Democrats or something. No, it's just a small group doing a weird thing and getting news coverage because weird thing is weird.
Edit: And in fact, Just Stop Oil is UK based, so they have nothing to do with the US Democrats or Pennsylvania.
I also get a bit tired of looking someone up and it has "so and so says this person is <insert bad thing>", claims that usually stack up about as well as that SPLC claim against Maajid Nawaz[1] did.
Given this, I find it hard to see how they're doing better than the other companies you mention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majid_Nawaz#Claim_by_Southern_...
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_back_to_where_you_came_from
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Racism_in_the_United_...
I get that no machine learning is 100% perfect which is why it should be used as an indicator rather than the deciding factor.
I have had issues with gmail blocking emails but as you point out it was always because of ip reputation not over zealous Naive Bayes.
[1] https://demos.co.uk/press-release/staggering-scale-of-social...
It's because there are assholes everywhere. They are small in number, but they are pretty evenly spread throughout the population. Regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, age or any other demographic detail, they are everywhere.
And they always have been, and likely always will be.
I suppose that social media dynamic allows them to disproportionately visit their douchebaggery on the rest of us, but that's not "Eternal September." That's just humanity.
> The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded.
> the real issue: what gets amplified
But it can be (at least partially) fixed if you change the optimization function.
I advocate for that here: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank...
And Twitter's Birdwatch (that Elon recently got all excited about when it fact checked the White House: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1587884806020415491) actually does this "bridging-based ranking" for adding context on tweets.
Here's the paper with details on how it works for Birdwatch: https://github.com/twitter/birdwatch/blob/main/birdwatch_pap... (you can also check out the source code in that repo).
Well... It's a lot uglier of an issue than you state.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-officia...
If I had a tool that could (at least attempt to) filter out anti-semitism or Holocaust denial, then Germany could have that set to "on" to comply with the law. I'm all for democracies deciding what laws they want.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-hatecrime-idUSKBN...