There are and have been many alternatives, but the balance between moderation and userbase is delicate. Assuming a minimum of "only moderate illegal content": Too much moderation and you might get a large userbase, but you get boring content or loud complaints from those moderated, and it discourages real conversation. Too little moderation and you get fun but chaotic/edgy content that drives away an even bigger chunk of people, and also discourages real conversation.
It seems to me that people who want Twitter to moderate less are either looking for the best of both worlds, which might be impossible, or really just want Twitter to be like 4chan, not because they really think it's "what's best", but because they want to attack their enemies in the social/political war, and that would be a big symbolic win.
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 has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content.
To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the same content problem).
And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or reference "concerning developments") when they don't like the moderation, and scream for regulation when they deem the moderation too absent.
But the article is not talking about content moderation as such. It's about surfacing the right content for right people, and regain the trust that author believes twitter has lost, without really justifying how.
> They said the strange part is people applauding Twitter's content moderation for certain topics, while justifying their inaction on others.
There's nothing strange about that either - Twitter only acts to moderate when it has context and/or gets bad press. It's no surprise that American hot-button issues are the most moderated[1] by Twitter, and less sor for heinous, explicit threats to life in a language spoken by < 1 million speakers halfway around the world, or election misinformation in Kenya. That sort of thing never gets on Twitter's radar, and shouldn't come as a surprise.
1. This is a result of resource constraints, and Twitter's own sense of self-preservation. There is only one jurisdiction that can dissolve Twitter, and is also likely its largest revenue source; naturally, that gets an outsized fraction of Twitter's limited engineer-hours and moderator-hours.
> If Twitter had shared blocklists for example, it would be easier for people to coordinate that kind of signaling.
But Twitter doesn't. Hacker News doesn't. Reddit doesn't.
All three of these large Social Media sites require moderators to police the actions of their users. This isn't new or exotic, this is just how the web typically works. Forums, Usenet, Mailing lists, IRC, BBS, its always been like this.
If you want to try to make a new social network with different moderation systems (ex: user-based blocking), feel free to do so. But I've hung out enough on 8-chan to know that you'll have to deal with Swatters and Doxxers almost immediately, who are looking for an unmoderated coordination medium, and they'll take advantage of your features. You'll also have to deal with lesser forms of spam and advertisements: Cryptocoin spam these days, but it used to be Viagra, or Nigerian Prince scams.
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The question isn't "Twitter shouldn't be allowed to moderate its users". The question is if Twitter made the right move here or not.
So now lets actually discuss the crux of the issue: is spreading COVID19 misinformation a big enough reason to warrant a banning? I of course agree with the move. Our hospitals are filling up with the Omicron variant and the vast majority of these patients are not-vaccinated. Twitter leveraging their reputation to say that Marjorie Taylor Green is a net benefit to society.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. Twitter wants its users to see the garbage content, that's what's driving engagement. I'm not saying users will refuse to self moderate, I'm saying twitter doesn't want them to.
> [..] when moderators are afraid to ban people for potentially abusive language then it's very easy for the discourse to start slipping and become toxic.
I think it really depends on what the purpose of your forum actually is. Perhaps that's the problem - people go to these platforms for different reasons. In my opinion, Twitter is not a place for intellectual discussion and debate, the format itself encourages quick and low-depth hot-takes. And don't get me started on the Tweet numbering...
> [..] we all deserve a place where we can be treated respectfully and have intellectually stimulating conversations.
I don't think we fundamentally do. It would of course be nice and it's something I personally want - but I don't think it's something I deserve. I accept that some things will offend me, and that's okay. If I don't want to see it, there are many options available.
> I don't understand what the issue is here, if this is talking about twitter, you can just delete an old tweet if it's upsetting people later.
In theory, but you have "cancel culture" where something is taken entirely out of context and judged with modern sentimentality, rather than in the context it was written. Also it should be okay to openly disagree with your past self and not have the re-write history, it shows personal progress.
> The article even shows how twitter has a process to let you delete the tweet and restore your account.
"Let you" - it didn't seem like there was much of a choice if the person wanted to continue using the service.
My original point about a better social media still stands anyway, I believe censorship should be opt-in. "I don't want to see X content" - sure, here's your wall with X content removed. "I don't want to talk to Y" - sure, here's everything with Y removed.
I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.
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.
It's not about Twitter's ability to ban users it's about enabling them avoid a substantial expansion of their moderation responsibilities. Twitter considers it a positive thing to have transparent and relatively equitably-applied rules, and this is an obvious positive for its users, and society in general (given how central Twitter has become to national discourse). Capricious one-off expansions that are difficult to justify generally (or that would require massive increases in moderation that pretty much everyone would hate) are the last thing Twitter wants.
>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.
The original claim is that Twitter was the least moderated. The argument was an argument in support of that. You're tilting at windmills, arguing against claims nobody made.
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
I think the moral compasses of Twitter moderators are quite fallible, but the most extreme way that they could fail would be to stop doing their job.
Society has a better moral compass, in aggregate, than the content allowed by the combination of bots and low-paid workers that moderate Twitter. I say that means that Twitter needs to catch up. You seem to be saying that means Twitter should never moderate anything, which seems like exactly the wrong direction to me.
He seems to be intending to take Twitter back to the type and scale of content moderation social media firms had pre-2015, which is perhaps not co-incidentally when they achieved their huge levels of growth.
Too many HN readers appear to be trying to convince themselves of this idea: that content moderation is some insanely hard problem. It's not. Social media grew to billions of users with relatively straightforward policies. It only seems that way now because the type of people who are obsessed with "moderation" (read: banning ideas they don't like) also struggle to crystallize a coherent set of beliefs about what speech should and should not be allowed. The absurd false positive and noise rates on Twitter/FB moderation is evidence of this. In place of coherent policies there is an inconsistent and ever-shifting set of unwritten rules that must be reverse engineered by outsiders to even begin to understand the underlying "logic".
Reverting to a classical policy of:
1. No spamming.
2. No engaging in illegal activity (e.g. financial fraud, CP, copyright infringement).
3. Tweets that violate local laws will be hidden in that jurisdiction.
along with the usual boilerplates you find in any 2010-era ToS, would be plenty sufficient and would not in fact pose problems harder than literal rocket science.
"But it also means that it should no longer be seen as a neutral platform."
Bizarre to me that anyone would ever have thought that in the first place. Twitter has always been a for-profit enterprise, which completely precludes neutrality.
"I really wish some hackers got together and created a censorship resistant social media platform. It is sorely needed."
And then what happens when that platform is used to plan and execute violent attacks and share illegal pornography? I don't disagree that this is a good idea, but it's also not a silver bullet. Free and open communication will always be a perpetual struggle requiring trade-offs and compromises.
I disagree. Society is highly political, so why should Twitter be "apolitical" with their moderation? (if such a thing is even possible. I doubt the feasibility of apolitical moderation in general)
There are and have been many alternatives, but the balance between moderation and userbase is delicate. Assuming a minimum of "only moderate illegal content": Too much moderation and you might get a large userbase, but you get boring content or loud complaints from those moderated, and it discourages real conversation. Too little moderation and you get fun but chaotic/edgy content that drives away an even bigger chunk of people, and also discourages real conversation.
It seems to me that people who want Twitter to moderate less are either looking for the best of both worlds, which might be impossible, or really just want Twitter to be like 4chan, not because they really think it's "what's best", but because they want to attack their enemies in the social/political war, and that would be a big symbolic win.
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