Twitter could be doing so much more to fix this problem. It's abundantly clear that "hands off" moderation doesn't work. It doesn't work for Twitter, it doesn't work for Facebook, it doesn't work for any shared social space online or offline.
It's hard to deal with spam and abuse even when there is such a team or effort. That's one reason Twitter is struggling, because unlike Facebook (where people can at least be semi sure only friends/family/connections view their content) Twitter is open to the public to view anyone's profile that isn't explicitly private.
Moderation ends up becoming an awkward balancing act between not completely restricting freedom of speech and stopping trolls/bullies flaming the hell out of anyone they disagree with while simultaneous trying to make it scale. Which is perhaps even harder than determining between what's free speech and what's a threat/harassment.
If someone can come up with a social network that doesn't discriminate between people from different backgrounds/with different political stances while filtering out actual trolls and which manages to do this on a large scale without a huge team of human moderators, then they'll likely pose a massive threat to the existing sites in the market.
Having tried the "Added context" contributions, I think Twitter solved the moderation. It simply works. There's an abundance of free labor and it scales linearly with controversy/spread.
The biggest problems with Twitter's moderation are what OP explicitly didn't talk about.
1. There isn't enough communication from moderators about why tweets are removed and users are banned. There is a missed learning opportunity when users don't get to hear why they are being moderated.
2. Bans are probably too harsh. If you can't come back having learned from your mistakes, why learn at all?
Most of it is a scaling issue, which is the same reason that popular subreddits are a predictably negative experience while niche subreddits tend to be well regarded.
Every time I've reported something it's taken well over a week for Twitter to respond; all denied, and all of them were very clear-cut cases IMO (I don't have the exact phrasings at hand, but all involved people fantasising about smashing someone's face in with a brick because they didn't like something they said).
I don't expect moderation to be 100% consistent or 100% perfect, but now it just seems like such a random unpredictable crapshoot that it's pretty broken IMO.
Fair moderation is one thing. What people who say Twitter has a free speech problem have something else in mind. They want a platform where they can say whatever bigoted things they want then hide behind it because “hurr durr free speech”, that never works. Twitter is already toxic, can you imagine the things that would be said with no moderation
There is a 0% chance that all moderation will be removed from Twitter. It would turn into a complete cesspool if that happened and alienate large segments of the user base. So the only question is how the moderation will differ from what they do now. It's easy to say it should be better, which I agree with generally, but it's an extremely hard problem to solve well.
What's false about the last statement? It is true that in some fediverse spaces, the moderation tools may be overused, but it still turns from the unusable mess twitter is - especiallhy when a nazi decides to QRT you, a move twitter almost never considers targeted harassment, even if it results in the same - into a comfortable space. Even if, incidentally, less people have access to it.
Not all social media needs to be constant exposure to other people's viewpoint (especially given that "other people's viewpoint" often is a euphemism when marginalized groups that tend to find the fediverse cozy are concerned).
If having to pick between flawed corporate moderation and flawed human moderation, the flawed human approach is often better for this group of people.
Twitter's problem isn't quite the same as Reddit's. It's because the site is incredibly inconsistent with its moderation.
If you run a community, you need consistency. Members need to know where the boundaries are in regards to how you can act and what is/isn't acceptable.
Twitter doesn't really do this well. If you agree with the staff political stances, you can basically get away with anything. If you're popular enough (or a large company), you can often get away with things that would get a less popular user banned.
For example, contrast what happens when a left wing user breaks the rules and attacks people and what happens when a right wing one does it. It seems like the former will get punished a lot less harshly for the same offence.
Twitter needs to stop this, and enforce the rules for everyone in every situation.
There are quite a few websites with little or no moderation working just fine, like 4chan.
But I honestly don't understand this whole argument. Twitter is a social network, you just need to only receive messages from your network or "friends of a friend".
You can't have both a global network and get offended given the multitude of opinions and laws in the world.
The problem seems to be less that people are offended by something, but that some people don't want other people to even be exposed to some thoughts. Some paternalistic higher-than-though attitude.
Twitter has increasingly slid into user-hostile territory. I moderate /r/Twitter on reddit and we have a pinned thread just showing nothing but complaint after complaint, because content moderation is a failure when you attempt to scale it.
We'd like to get Twitter Comms to address it at some point, but the company is opaque. It's just nuts.
It's notable that when it comes to content moderation, most people are positive that the execs at Twitter are morons for not addressing issues sufficiently, but few people can articulate a clear solution to the problem.
I too have concerns about how this will play out, but we should be open minded about different solutions to an important challenge.
>Twitter's problem isn't quite the same as Reddit's. It's because the site is incredibly inconsistent with its moderation.
That is the same. Both are absolutely terrible at consistency. They both have very clear and obvious "protected" groups who can violate the rules with impunity.
Having worked at Twitter on abuse, I think that Twitter could do far more. They've gotten better, but it's still trivially easy to evade bans, the moderation decisions are frequently terrible, and there are a zillion other things wrong.
That said, I think an ad-funded global discussion is impossible. You can't do good user moderation with that little money (~$0.10 per user per day total revenue, with a tiny fraction of that going to abuse prevention). I think Twitter should allow people to create semi-private spaces, zones for discussion where users can be much more firm about moderation. It should also make collaborative blocking and muting much more effective.
Twitter is a community and all communities require some level of moderation.
There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?
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