It is unfortunate that what is true and false has devolved into the hands of global corporates, whose interests and ideology is often different from the environment it operates in.

They don't operate under that pretense at all. They explicitly reserve the right to delete content from their site that they find to be harmful or offensive, and permanently ban anyone they deem a bad actor, and they always have done so.

You can try to paint them as commie totalitarians, but the fact remains that they're not censoring debates on which is the better political philosophy, they're making good faith efforts to keep people from getting killed by health misinformation or harassed by hateful conduct. They don't have to do a perfect job at that, either, just as long as they're genuinely making good faith efforts.

Twitter has failed to do so here and is showing a blatant political statement (unless there were specific cases of harassment with these people or something, in which case I may be overstepping).

I think generally views like this are better left in the spotlight of the public where they can be properly argued with and not dragged into private forums and facebook feeds where it's much harder for people to see a wider response to them. Banning them is harmful to people who are getting a casual interest in their ideas and start reading up on it. When the only place they can do that is Breitbart or similar, how do you think that'll go?

Covid-56 and flat earthers are some of the most outlandish examples, but the vast majority of misinformation is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. I'm not suggesting what the solution should be, but it's clear that complete un-regulation has lead to a completely broken information space.

Free speech for me but not for thee, much?

To those of you who have done this, or don't have a problem with it, or are about to downvote and/or flag this post, think carefully about if you're actually defending free speech or only speech that you agree with.

I also strongly object to the notion that liberals somehow own this, when clearly both sides of the spectrum instrumentalize speech and its suppression when it suits them.

Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist.

It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps.

I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.

Combine that with the culture that understands free speech issues in this way more generally: less from a regard for the value of liberal discourse and more for the privilege of indulgent speech, related to the idea “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” but extended into the realm of stewardship or even ownership of an entire platform. This indulgent and degraded view of free speech is required in order to understand twitter as a repressive forum as a consequence of limits on things like some trans jokes and deadnaming or even advocacy of identity-focused violence, which can only feel like repression to someone who fundamentally has nothing else of value to say.

If that seems tired to you, I’d be happy to inject more vigor.

In other words, you're saying no one should have input on it? There should be no rules at all?

Twitter is fairly unusual even among social networks, and different from most "normal" websites, in that it makes it relatively easy for random strangers to contact semi-famous people. Most of the time this is a great thing. But if you're annoyed by speech on, say, stormfront dot org, you can avoid it by not going there. If people are saying horrible things to you on Twitter, you can avoid it by blocking them - which works up until the point you become infamous enough among a specific subcommunity that a constant stream of random people show up in your mentions, most of them relatively innocuous (but annoying), some of them nastier than that. (And it's not like only misguided people have large numbers of haters - regardless of what you believe about Sarkeesian in particular, a look at mainstream politics is enough to refute that.)

Personally, I would prefer a decentralized social network where different subcommunities could use software to define their own interaction policies, much like the Internet as a whole. But Twitter is a centralized service; most users use the official apps (as is required to get the full feature list) and must rely on Twitter's centralized management to filter out both spam and abuse. There's no way around it short of a radical overhaul of the service.

I would support adding civil libertarian organizations to the mix of advisors, as a sibling comment mentions, for a variety of reasons. One reason is similar to why we have an adversarial system in law - if most people support an idea, such as free speech, in principle, but nobody is really dedicated to defending it and the easiest way to accomplish other goals is to compromise it, the slippery slope can easily become steep without people really noticing. Another is just that it's easy for these issues to be overpoliticized, especially when you have a physical presence in Silicon Valley.

But all that said, there must be rules. If you don't like that, go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe GNU Social will take off.

On the other hand, there are many ways to stymie speech which don't involve outright supression. Some of the things that Twitter does to stop certain speech are better than other ways -- I think it's good when they can be explicit about what they are doing and why they are doing it. It might be better business for them to be non-partisan as they provide a platform for people across the world but that is also their choice.

However, if for example, I was an admin on HN and had some special ability to put emphasized disclaimers below your comments about how they were mistaken and you were wrong, I think you would be right to feel like I was biasing the discussion and that it was unfair. An advocate for free speech (to the extent that I am, and in the way that I am) might be against this, since it does not create a good environment for discussion (new arguments or new ideas).

As I said, it kind of depends on the particulars and the context, but I kind of think about it like a debate between two people overseen by a moderator. If the moderator is neutral it is preferred by the audience, and if it looks like unfair treatment by the moderator it could easily backfire. Of course, this metaphor is quite specific and not guaranteed to apply to all situations -- but, I think it should be considered, since it's not uncommon for grifters on Twitter to make a fuss about how they are being unfairly targeted, in order to persuade their audience that "the truth" is being hidden from them by an unchecked elite (this is along the lines of my first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044396).

If this is aspirational, its also demonstrably not currently or historically correct or complete. (and I don't just mean that illegal expressions are removed: unpopular views are removed, including critiques of the owner)

Saying that Twitter should not be allowed to ban Trump is taking away Twitter's free speech rights to decide who they want to have in their community and on their private, non governmental platform. If you disagree with that, you are proposing to regulate Twitter as a public utility that will be able to censor Twitter's right to do that. But even without that, inciting riots and threatening people was never considered protected speech anyways, and that's exactly what he was doing with his account.

What's happened on Twitter instead, is that instead of banning him long ago for violating their policies multiple times over, they've in fact protected him unduly as he does things that would have gotten other people removed from the platform and probably sued or arrested a long time ago. He has in fact gotten more free speech rights than other people have.

This shouldn't surprise anyone that has studied American history. Free speech laws disproportionately empower people of means of using them, and much less people like their victims. The flavor of free speech in this country I'm told to unconditionally believe in was conceived by landholders and plantation owners. How much freedom of speech did Thomas Jefferson's slaves have? Unconditional "free speech", which thanks to Citizens United now includes money, still principally serves the Masters: the rich and powerful, the owners, far more than it will ever serve their victims. We don't do free speech or it's victims any favors by whitewashing the history of free speech, who disproportionately benefits from it, and who are the victims of it.

I'm not opposed to "free speech", but the tech crowd needs to get a lot better about understanding that there are nuances and complexities to it, and stop treating it like a religious edict that has to be worshiped unconditionally. They need to understand that applying it in a pure form can lead to outcomes that are dangerous to our safety and our society. If 2020 hasn't made this crystal clear, I really don't know what else I can do to convince people of this. I can't even eat at restaurants anymore.

The whole point of democratic society in the United States is to allow people freedom of speech and thought. If we limit the discussion of ideas to only popular/accepted/politically-correct ones, then there is no chance to analyze ideas from a relative perspective; there is nothing to compare those ideas to. We must allow discourse, even at the extremes of the spectrum.

To quote various sources, "There can be no light without dark."

Should some content be censored?

That is a yes/no question.

I gave extremes of what content means, so that hopefully everyone would agree that some content should be censored. A free speech absolutist might say that the answer is no, but I suspect the overwhelming majority of people could find something above that they agree should be censored.

My reason for being so aggressive here is because I am sick of the “anti-censor” brigade claiming that they’re simply fighting for all free speech. What I want people to acknowledge is that they do there is simply that there’s just been a bunch of things censored that they want to be able to say.

We can argue about what that content is, but everyone here knows that different groups fundamentally disagree about a number of those things that are currently not allowed on Twitter. Personally I look at the things Twitter let’s you report, and which of those things are actually not allowed - many of the report pathways simply say “this is allowed, you can simply block this person” - the only things that I have actually ever seen actually get removed are people fairly explicitly calling for violence, saying entire races, lgbt people, specific religions, etc are “diseases”, “paedophiles”, “should be locked up, executed, …”, etc

Based on that experience, and based on the conversation surrounding “anti-wokeness”, it sounds fairly clearly as though that is the content that people believe is being wrongly censored.

Everyone here has seen the many, many reports from conservatives claiming that they are being unfairly censored and subjected to discrimination and bias on social media platforms. I’ve also seen how in every single study it has been found that there is no such bias.

So again, we get to I know the kind of content that has been censored, and if people are making the claim that Twitter is censoring “too much” or that it needs to “protect free speech”, then that is the only content that is available to “uncensor”.

I would love to be proved wrong, but I do not see any evidence of what people feel is being unfairly censored, that I do not believe falls into the above categories.

There's this idea that I hear mostly from the "right" that "freedom of speech" means "let people be assholes to one another with impunity."

We need to fight back when the government attempts to abridge free speech. That's what the ACLU is good at. But Twitter is a community -- a community under no legal obligation to include toxic users.

"Freedom of speech" gives people who don't fit in at Twitter the right to go build their own community that's as toxic as they want amongst themselves.

As a Twitter user, I don't want to have to worry about being attacked or experiencing floods of toxic responses to something I might say. Thankfully I don't. But I do see toxic content directed at people fairly regularly. Toxic content meaning: Stuff that attempts to make no point, just attempts to spread hate or fear.

We're talking within the scopes of twitter as a communicative platform. Wether or not other platforms exist and how much more or less censorship and tokens you get is irrelivant to the discussion on wether it is morally right for twitter to flag tweets it deems 'misinformation' Twitter as a platform has no register of what they can and cannot judge. Twitter does not replicate ANY evidence on what they call misinformation. Twitter does not even provide proof on what they call misinformation. Just the label at the bottom. Twitter also categorises criticism on mainstream 'facts' as the same 'misinformation'

How would you like HN if ITT everyone disagreed with twitter censorship and you would be labelled on every post ITT as 'misinformation'? would you think that constitutes as a usefull HN guideline?

> …Twitter is such a horrible place

Or

> [hateful content] is the *typical* content you get on Twitter

I agree there’s abominable things on Twitter - that’s what you get with a platform (now) focused on free speech. But you have to sort of go out looking for it. I think Twitter has done a good job championing freedom of speech while making it not so “hateful” for the average user.

> I think it's crazy, given how Russia is at least an indirect adversary to the US and EU in this war.

Why is this crazy? In general, would you like Twitter to ban sources that advocate for US adversaries in war?

> This doesn't work for people who aren't interested in information bubbles, yet nevertheless think free speech should reasonably restricted by law and by moderation.

I think you are conflating your unusual access pattern with the experience of people who don’t follow anyone (which is also rare). In addition, characterizing the act of following people as engaging in information bubble is very, very reductionist. Any decent intellectual would know to filter their sources and create a good information “bubble”; I want to hear from X because they are trustworthy, I want to read from Y because they are smart, etc. Without that information “bubble” every piece of information is of equal priority (and thus much waste in time).

Just because people throw the word around doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

That withstanding, one can truly fall into a lull where you don’t get any opinions of the opposing side. But the solution is not to reject information filters altogether - that’s just random chance, intellectual laziness.

But above all, what I have issue with mostly is one’s (strong) evaluation of something without a serious attempt to understand it. Perhaps a bit intellectually dishonest, no?

Do you use other social media platforms? Do you see value in social media at all?