Censorship vs. moderation 2020-10-16 This post is prompted by Twitter and Facebook's censorship of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101. I would not be writing this post if Twitter had simply de-ranked the news story from its list of trending tweets, or thrown fact-check warnings on there, or something like that. Instead, Twitter blocked links to the story, treating it the same way as a phishing website. It is certainly legal for Twitter to do this, but the fact that it IS legal is a big problem for freedom-of-speech. Calling back to an argument that I like to make, > "Freedom-of-speech" means people should be able to run a forum of > their own and talk all they want. It doesn't mean they are allowed to > inflict their speech on people who don't want to be bothered. > The only reason Twitter censorship is a "freedom-of-speech issue" is > that tech monopolism has driven out many of the smaller, competing > websites, so removing a troll from Twitter is akin to silencing them > on the Internet at large. What we see is that Twitter is slowly beginning to exert editorial control over their platform, but they are doing it clumsily. Their "moderation" is algorithmic, and it is not "sorting information into different categories so people can ignore it if they choose", but rather, "just straight-up blocking stuff", which is much more akin to censorship. This way lies madness. See, I would gladly opt-in to a social networking site that banned all political speech of any kind... but there needs to be some place on the Internet to discuss those topics. Twitter is taking a dangerous road in deciding which topics are "too extreme" or "too fallacious" to be shared, while simultaneously selling themselves as an open general-purpose communication platform. You can't be both. Remember the old saying "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"? Well if you slap a large centrally controlled website on top of the Net, then IT DOESN'T DO THAT ANYMORE. The existence of "giant private sites that everyone in the world uses to talk" is a huge problem, because these sites are vulnerable to top-down control. Anyone who is afraid of tyranny should be terrified of a tyrant's influence on the large, centralized US-based businesses that control the flow of information on the Internet. I will not deny that certain political cadres are masters at weaponizing freedom-of-speech to suit their own ends, but eroding freedom-of-speech itself is not a good defense against their tyranny. Here, I'll clarify again that when I say "freedom-of-speech", I am advocating peoples' right to discuss unpleasant and controversial things. I am not saying that unwilling participants should be forced into these discussions. - If you block me from posting hollow-Earth conspiracies in a "share cute cats" thread, that doesn't erode anyone's freedom of speech, because people who are sharing cat pictures shouldn't be forced to discuss conspiracies. - If you block me from sending hollow-Earth conspiracies to a "conspiracies" thread, or to my consenting friend, that DOES erode my freedom of speech. In the past, online communities had an "immune system" against disruptive and controversial topics: human moderators would either halt those discussions, telling the participants to "take it to private messages", or the moderators would sort the posts into a separate thread so they would not derail the main conversation. Meanwhile, there also existed a few unmoderated, "wild west" sites where any topic could be discussed, sites like 4chan, Something Awful, etc. -- and they were chaotic hellholes but they often came up with amazing, creative ideas, and birthed a lot of Internet culture in the process. Meanwhile, they served as "containment": people would go there to vent transgressive or destructive ideas before returning to normal life. There IS A REASON that every successful discussion site, until about 2010, relied on some kind of human-powered organization and moderation scheme. It's because people who ran websites back then understood that unmoderated sites would tend to devolve into chaotic hellholes. Anyway, each site tended to be organized and moderated in a different way, leading to a great diversity of smallish, village-sized social groups on the Internet, each with its own unique personality and community vibe. Then, of course, the social networks came in and paved everything over. Twitter etc., are trying to cram the whole Internet into one homogenous site, and this has broken the boundaries between different "circles" of conversation. Twitter is used for constructive discussion, and for official press releases, and and for sharing cat pictures, and for venting transgressive, destructive ideas... so its signal-noise ratio is terrible, and there isn't a good way to filter the site so it only shows you the reasoned political analyses (or cat pictures, or drunken 3am rants). Another difference between the older discussion boards vs. newer social networks is their (contributor:moderator) ratio. Most of what we call "social media" uses automated or crowdsourced moderation, if any. In some cases, moderation is replaced by algorithms that spread controversial posts as widely as possible. This automation has allowed the social networks to grow quickly (as moderation is no longer a limit on growth), but it has left them prone to chaos, trolling and manipulation, just like the "wild west" unmoderated websites of the old days. So far, we haven't seen much in the way of nuanced human moderation on these new websites, just clumsy automated censorship. The problem is that you can't solve Twitter's problems by banning rants and lies FROM THE INTERNET. People will always rant and lie, regardless of your best efforts. If, like Twitter, your website's goal is to distribute ALL THE WORLD'S COMMUNICATION, you cannot remove, or even categorize, all the rants and lies... there is not enough human or machine labor to do that, unless your site's "secret sauce" is actually large-scale community moderation, or super-advanced AI auto-moderation tech, or some other solution designed to maintain your site's harmony as it grows. Facebook and Twitter don't have that solution. It's fun to speculate how to "fix" these sites, but I've basically said they're unfixable and I think this post explains why. I think less of "fixing" them, and more of embracing the older, smaller, more resilient social structures that made the Internet of ten years ago such a cool place. Many of those sites and communities are still active, and they're still a great place to live, in a way that Twitter is not.