My take on Elon's offer for Twitter

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440

by slg • 4 years ago

591 604 4 years ago

This thread is an interesting perspective on social media "censorship" that you don't hear often.

Of course everyone working at a social media company has an ideological bias, and that can come out in the product. But consider also that the latest censorship controversy creates negative PR, makes people leave the platform, attracts regulatory attention, and ultimately, hurts the company's profits. Content moderators are at least as worried about that as they are about making sure their ideological opponents aren't given a voice.

Social media companies are in the unenviable position of playing referee in the culture war, and like referees in any sport, they're going to constantly be criticized for doing it, right or wrong. These companies are global and universal, and there's no way they can satisfy all parties. Sometimes, the values of left and right, or Iran and the US, or Israel and Palestine, are just irreconcilable. You're better off just trying to avoid as much trouble as possible, and avoiding negative media attention.

Reddit is probably the most ham-fisted example of this approach. Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not. When Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia Is Bad Now, they just straight up banned /r/russia and any link to an .ru domain! That does nothing to address the conflict, but it does keep those NYT opinion pieces from showcasing Problematic Russian Bot Behavior on Reddit.

I'll note that I don't think this model fully explains moderation policies at Twitter or other social media sites. I genuinely believe moderation leans left due to an ideological monoculture (I've seen it first hand). But it's important to recognize the difficult situation social media sites are in.

afpx• 4 years ago

If you look up the archive from that time frame, you'll see that /r/russia was pure Russian propaganda.

user39393823• 4 years ago

I've been accused several times recently of believing "Russian propaganda" about the war in Ukraine which of course I find very offensive. I'm an intelligent person, I've analyzed the situation, listened to different sources, and come to the conclusion that the western powers, the US in particular, and to some degree Ukraine, are not as much in the right as they pretend to be. From my perspective, the western political establishment is, through the corporate media, daily pushing propaganda to support their narrative.

When it comes to individuals, it would be nice if we could all respect each other's right to our own opinions without attacking other people's intelligence, attacking their character, or accusing them of bad faith.

wvenable2• 4 years ago

Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not.

That's the point. They just want the controversy to go away. To suggest that they should care about justification is to make them moral arbitrators.

pillowkusis2• 4 years ago

Exactly! I don't respect it, but it's a very understandable response. Just stop making this controversy our problem.

The "correct" response in my eyes is to say "we are a platform, we aren't responsible for the speech of our users as long as it is legal," but that's a very expensive and profit-negative strategy these days.

julianeon• 4 years ago

I'm surprised I haven't seen the 'steelman' argument for Musk and free speech on Twitter, made as faithfully as I can to emulate Musk's perspective. I'm going to make it (disclosure: I don't personally believe it).

When Trump was booted from social media, it was censorship. We tend to overlook this, because Twitter & FB agreed on it; but another perspective is possible, that Trump should be able to speak freely as the leader of the country supported by half its population (no less than 40%, anyway). Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation.

But to take this even further, this isn't simply about one guy's Twitter takes; it's much larger than that. Because under Trump we were starting to see the emergence of something that is probably inevitable: the full hybridization of popular culture, technology, and media, in the form of a perpetually on engine of user engagement. This is probably the model of the future, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to not just bring it to the people (as it was under Trump), but to monetize it (which they didn't do, really).

What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce. And, if done in a principled way, an end to the perception that people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump).

That's the value that Musk could unlock. That's what could conceivably make Twitter as important as FB, and even more central to American life. That, combined with some aggressive product delivery, and a shakeup away from the product doldrums, could be transformative for Twitter. If Musk gets his way, that's the change he could make.

chubot2• 4 years ago

Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation.

FWIW this isn't really adding something to the conversation, not that I've been paying very close attention.

I believe Facebook and Twitter already had a "heads of state" clause in their policy that recognizes this.

Yup: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474738/facebook-ending-p...

In other words, heads of state were already allowed to say things that normal users aren't, based on the reasoning you state.

According to executives that made a one-off decision, Trump crossed those more relaxed lines.

Of course a lot of it had to do with the transfer of power in the US -- he would soon no longer be a sitting president.

As Yishan says, these decisions aren't really based on "principles". They are based on "shitstorms that are brewing and that we want to avoid", of which January 6 was a perfect example.

zuminator• 4 years ago

another perspective is possible, that Trump should be able to speak freely as the leader of the country supported by half its population

Arguably Trump would've been banned under Twitter rules a whole lot quicker if he hadn't been the leader of the country supported by half its population.

people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump).

People are lying to themselves if they think they are in favor of unfettered speech. Otherwise your favorite online forum would be chock-filled with Viagra links, crypto, nft and forex spam, multipage crank proofs of the coming singularity, race-baiting rants of the worst sort, ASCII art, Base64 encodes of Blu-Rays, etc. We all want limits on speech, we just differ in where those lines should be drawn.

What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce.

People become strongly politically engaged because there is something they strongly dislike about current public policy. Politics being the center of cultural life is a sign of bad things going on. So I don't see fighting angrier and more hypercharged online wars as an upside. If anything it just primes people for fighting angrier and more hypercharged offline wars, which is where we seem to be headed.

sjg0079• 4 years ago

Nah, you can't incite a mob which is what did Trump in and Twitter should regulate the speech of foreign officials per US law. Trump has many other ways to communicate with the people including and not limited to Press conferences. Heck, Trump could email people.

Twitter has no moral requirement to broadcast anything he says. It ain't a utility and it ain't news.

pm90• 4 years ago

That, combined with some aggressive product delivery, and a shakeup away from the product doldrums

This argument seems to be that Musk is a hero and he will transform Twitter which is currently being mismanaged. That isn’t a very good argument unless you’re a Musk fanboi. Just to state one reason: actively transforming Twitter while also leading both SpaceX and Tesla just isn’t gonna work, and he hasn’t put forth anything serious so far to explain how he intends to make this change.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

The steelman is that they still allow the Taliban on Twitter but not Trump. The literal Taliban. The one that throws gays off buildings and stones women for allowing themselves to get raped. The one that thinks that, if the Holocaust didn’t happen, then it should have. The one that celebrates 9/11 as a national holiday. There is no logical rationale for which you can claim that Trump is worse than the Taliban unless you hate Trump and want him gone.

The actual steelman is simple - if you’re going to have a platform, then you should only be able to boot people off for legal reasons. Picking and choosing winners in any other fashion is too prone to human bias. The argument that some are too stupid to recognize misinformation from the truth is exactly the argument used by totalitarian regimes in the past.

madeofpalk4• 4 years ago

You're making the exact argument Twitter made for not banning Trump during the first 3.8 years of his presidency. Like literally "Trump is newsworthy" is word-for-word the reason Twitter used for keeping him on.

Then, they thought that they were, or could be, complicit in a violent domestic attack, and made a call.

qiskit2• 4 years ago

His description of "old internet" and freedom is wrong. The "old internet" was predominantly american ( 90%+ ) and we didn't just want to protect free speech from conservatives attacking porn, but from everyone ( soccer moms, woke leftist, europeans, ADL, canadians, etc ).

it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.

Exactly. That's why the old internet defaulted to free speech. Because everyone understood that taking their free speech meant my free speech was vulnerable and it was impossible to just censor one and not everyone else.

It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us

This nonsense. Just the russians? What about the british, israelis, canadians, australians, saudis, chinese, iranians, etc. Not to mention the biggest threat - our own government. What percentage of foreign propaganda is russian? 1%? Just like all the russian money spent on facebook gave trump the presidency? All $40K was it?

I want you to pause for a minute and think about your political alignment and whether you're on the left or right of this issue, because you probably think one of those things.

I'm neither and social media clearly leans towards one side.

Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture.

The culture was formed by censorship. The social media companies are trying to change culture. Get rid of censorship and we'll see about the culture. If yishan is right, how come real world culture is so different from social media culture? Perhaps because censorship allows a tiny minority to have the most influence/say?

Facebook's userbase has at various times been left-leaning, then right-leaning, then bifurcated. So has Reddit's. Twitter's also. The social platforms don't care.

Is that why they collectively banned trump. Because they don't care?

It is because we brought all of our old horrible collective dysfunctions onto the internet

The horrible collective dysfunctions were on the old internet long before social media.

They are censoring because they are large social platforms, and ideas are POWERFUL and DANGEROUS.

That must be why we censor libraries...

Instead of wasting pages of text and much of our time, he could have been honest and answered in less than 140 characters - "We censor because of money".

The only difference between old internet and new internet is money and shareholders and centralization. The guy talks about everything - culture, russians, old internet, etc but ignores the elephant int the room. Money makes the world go round and money makes social media censor. If you are dependent on ads, you probably will have to conform to money's demands. I do wonder how elon will deal with the problem of money/ads. Though taking the company private and owning it outright should give him more leeway, I doubt he's willing to lose money year after year on twitter.

JoeJonathan• 4 years ago

The "old internet" was predominantly american ( 90%+ ) and we didn't just want to protect free speech from conservatives attacking porn, but from everyone ( soccer moms, woke leftist, europeans, ADL, canadians, etc ).

No one was concerned with woke leftists in the 90s. No one. "Woke" wasn't a term, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, no one was worried about the corroding influence of leftists, or cultural marxism, or any of the bogeymen that resurfaced over the past decade.

qiskit2• 4 years ago

No one was concerned with woke leftists in the 90s. No one. "Woke" wasn't a term

I know woke wasn't a term. I grew up in the 90s. I just put it in there to emphasize "everyone". Thought people would be butthurt about me adding canadians/europeans, not woke leftist. But the precursors of modern "woke left" certainly existed in the 90s even though they didn't gain the power they did after the 2007 financial crisis.

psyc4• 4 years ago

In the 90s, we had “PC.” In retrospect, it was a very mild strain of what we have now.

memish3• 4 years ago

Yes, but that's where it started becoming noticeable. Too much language was being changed in a non-evolutionary way. That's why Bill Maher named his show Politically Incorrect and George Carlin roasted the euphemism treadmill. They were pointing out the excesses.

AussieWog934• 4 years ago

I don't know about the 90s specifically (I was 6 when the new millennium started!), but people were definitely talking about "politicial correctness gone mad" and the "war on Christmas" in the early 00s.

Here's a comedy sketch from '05 that's making fun of many of the same "woke" concepts we have now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u7Z5cNfc9w

chasd002• 4 years ago

The 1994 movie PCU lampooned the “wokeness” of the 90s. It was just called political correctness then.

yardstick• 4 years ago

That must be why we censor libraries...

The analogy doesn’t hold. Libraries don’t hold random internet posts.

You need to first have your work published as a book or similar, and then have the acquisitions team at the library buy copies. Yes self publishing is an option but convincing a library to stock your particular book will be more tricky. Sure the library of congress may hold a copy, but that’s about where it ends.

Donated books also aren’t guaranteed to hit the shelves either, they can end up in book sales or rejected if the library prioritises other books on its limited shelf space.

They also won’t for example carry books documenting how to commit suicide, construct a dirty bomb, child porn, well porn in general actually (you’ll still often find nudity and sex acts in books about sex, but those books are not designed to provide sexual gratification whereas porn is).

noasaservice• 4 years ago

You don't think that Pirate Bay is a library?

Or how about Library Genesis?

Or Sci-hub?

Or perhaps you're wanting torrents off of Archive.org? They have the biggest PS2 iso library anywhere in the world.

I really don't understand why people can't see this...

Face it: If book libraries were a new concept around 1998 (Napster), they too would be illegal dens of iniquity reviled by "copyright interests" and raided with the backing of federal copyright statute under criminal guidelines. .

DoctorOW2• 4 years ago

but from everyone ( soccer moms, woke leftist, europeans, ADL, canadians, etc ).

You literally mean _everyone_ I guess? You're talking about a few million people who were online early on. Now it's 100x that, your group owns a lot of the biggest social websites. YOU are the tiny minority having the most influence.

fellowniusmonk• 4 years ago

I co-ran a co-working space for many years in a zeitgeisty tech city as a side thing to keep my companies rent cheap (kind of.)

We were early holders of bitcoin meetups, we threw crypto events, we gave away schwag with those guys who 3d printed guns. We hosted "Young African Leaders" events (yali) and hosted some amazing people from overseas. We hosted the local 2600 meetup and other maker events. We hosted the local colleges Asian chamber of commerce events.

We threw parties with thousands of people filtering through our converted warehouse space.

We had actual communists and unabashed capitalists and new atheists and couldn't care less multi generational atheists and old burnouts and young idiots, people abandoned by their families, from loving families and Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus.. We had classes for robotics, pickling vegetables, we burned a lot of stuff and made some huge art installations.

We kicked people out for being shitty and insulting (which was extremely rare among members, totalling 3 people over many years). We occasionally reprimanded people who were fine in person but abusive online.

Hell is other people. I miss what we built and the ideas and companies and the hope and economic power our members could tap into.

But I do not miss the bad behavior, the guy who seemed cool and nerdy until he gets drunk and starts trying to physically corner women. The attempted rapists who came to some of our larger warehouse parties and had to be removed by police.

The assholes who came in with bad faith arguments or the copious number of bad faith actors trying to monetize our more inexperienced members.

We were a meatspace, old internet, freedom of speech group and we kept our facilities a little dingy just to keep things more maker oriented and attract less of the superficial.

Having seen it all in person it's always the bad faith actors, the predators, the non-makers and the fragile egos that come out. We did a good job in person having ideological, cultural and class diversity because "making" was our prime member criteria.

I don't see how it's possible on the internet at large. I've seen many terrible people in person and at least there were consequences for overtly evil or lying acts, I just don't see it happening on the consumer internets social media platforms.

Great perspective to read about and rings very true with my years "sitting at the city gates" in our modern times.

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

sounded like a fun place!

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

Apart from tbe rapists (plural).

shrimp_emoji• 4 years ago

I don't see how it's possible on the internet at large. I've seen many terrible people in person and at least there were consequences for overtly evil or lying acts, I just don't see it happening on the consumer internets social media platforms.

Everyone trying to control you is wondering where the switch in your head is that turns your brain off to the fact that they're controlling you.

Where's yours? Is it child porn? Hate speech? The futility of productive online discourse? Or isn't there one? ;)

saalweachter2• 4 years ago

Free speech?

omgmajk• 4 years ago

This is surprisingly sober.

oska• 4 years ago

This twitter thread was also submitted and discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31039827

eatonphil2• 4 years ago

Unclear to me from the comments why that submission was flagged. It seems reasonably on topic to me and not intrinsically flamebait-y. I guess enough people just hit the flag button.

cryptonector• 4 years ago

It's Musk day at HN. Some might be exhausted.

dang• 4 years ago

Probably because the title was badly editorialized, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Meekro3• 4 years ago

Replace "lab leak theory" with whatever topic you think has been unfairly censored, and the reason it was censored (or any other action taken against it) is not because of the content of that topic, I ABSOLUTELY ASSURE YOU.

Pretty sure this is not true. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored for one reason, and one reason only: it was a bombshell dropped at the 11th hour, and liberals were afraid that it would result in Trump winning re-election. The truth or untruth of the story was beside the point; if it had been Trump Jr's laptop, it would never have been censored.

Censorship is not inevitable. If Musk had been in charge of Twitter back then, this story would not have been censored.

jpgvm• 4 years ago

It wasn't so much censored as it was boring and irrelevant. If it was driving clicks it wouldn't have been "censored".

chasd002• 4 years ago

If it was driving clicks it wouldn't have been "censored".

You have it backwards, it was driving clicks and the algo was full steam ahead getting more clicks. It had to be manually removed to stop the spread.

Fervicus2• 4 years ago

Why would a big story like that involving the presidential candidate and his son be boring and irrelevant?

Meekro3• 4 years ago

No, it was censored. Twitter prevented anyone from tweeting links to the story, and prevented people from sharing the story via private message.[1] They also banned the @nypost twitter account for posting it and refusing to take it down.[2] Also, in a poll by a reputable pollster, a majority of likely voters called the story "important" or "very important"[3] -- pretty much the opposite of "boring and irrelevant."

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/30/twitter-n... [3] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...

PaulDavisThe1st7• 4 years ago

That must explain why numerous right wing media outlets also chose not to cover it (Fox, WSJ, others).

It was not covered at the time because the way it was "released" meant that the claims were unsubstantiated and unsubstaniable. As more information comes out the appears to be actually verifiable (and verified), it is showing up in "completely mainstream media" outlets.

There's a problem when you try to release a news story using more or less precisely the same playbook that would be used if the story was fabricated. You can't blame the media for not taking you seriously when you (in this case Guiliani) does more or less precisely what someone who was lying through their teeth and knew it. If you want them to take you seriously, you need to give them the chance to verify your claims. The Hunter Biden Laptop story was bungled as much by its "releasors" as by the media.

Also, even today, it's not entirely clear what the big deal actually is, other than being able to say "possible corruption" and "Joe Biden" in the same sentence.

prepend6• 4 years ago

It was not covered at the time because the way it was "released" meant that the claims were unsubstantiated and unsubstaniable.

No, I don’t think so. There are billions of unsubstantiated and unsustainable messages on Twitter. I think this one was censored because of the political impact. It seems weird to argue otherwise.

ehsankia5• 4 years ago

That must explain why numerous right wing media outlets also chose not to cover it (Fox, WSJ, others). No, it's because every other outlet has a standard, which is that they need to be able to independently confirm a story and not shout every random rumor they hear.

The whole laptop story has hearsay from one random technician. There was very little evidence to backup any of it. The files may have been real, but they very well could have stolen by a foreign entity (Russia), and given to this random technician as a way to make it look not stolen. By spreading it, they would have been helping Russia influence our elections, again.

Meekro3• 4 years ago

Glenn Greenwald believed in the story, and was later proven right. I don't blame other media outlets for waiting for additional confirmation, but I do blame Twitter for inventing a totally new policy for censoring this one story. In a case like this, where some journalists believe in a story and others don't, but neither side has won the debate (yet), the story should be published and discussed. That's the policy they take with literally every other news story, including many dubious ones that are later discredited.

I guess I can't prove this part, but I'm pretty sure Twitter would have taken the opposite stance if, say, CNN had found Trump Jr's laptop.

Regarding your claim that the story is not a big deal, you as a voter are entitled to decide that for yourself. However, a majority of likely voters disagree with you. A Rasmussen poll found that 48% of likely voters consider the story "very important" and another 18% consider it "important."[1] Rasmussen is considered a grade-B pollster by FiveThirtyEight, so their data can be trusted.

[1] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...

Havoc• 4 years ago

Speaking of Twitter - Still can't believe these stupid thread style posts are the prime way to communicate medium length messages these days. Mid sentence breaks and all. And then you need a threadreader to unfuck said stupid format.

Anyway - in this case the content is on point

drooby3• 4 years ago

The social platforms aren't censoring you (or some idea you like) because they disagree with you. They are censoring because they are large social platforms, and ideas are POWERFUL and DANGEROUS.
Let me be clear: if you run a large social network, you will be forced by inexorable circumstance to censor certain things, you will be forced to "arbitrate" on topics you have an (inevitably) limited understanding of, and it will all be really really shitty.
(The alternative is just collapse of the platform, so I guess you do always have a choice - but then you're not a social platform anymore)

I'd love if he provided an example of these powerful and dangerous ideas that must be censored. This is exactly the kind of language that any powerful organization that is scared of losing power says - it's all in the interest of saving lives... okay, what are the examples? Why is this not a matter best handled by law enforcement?

This just further convinces me that social media is a cancer to society.

throwmeariver1• 4 years ago

It's easy an idea that alienates more than 20-30% of your user base as he said they don't really care about politics and I believe him. Can be something simple like a fucked up redesign... looking at you Digg.

drooby3• 4 years ago

ahh shit okay I see. Yeah social media is a cancer. At least in its current centralized form.

Spivak2• 4 years ago

I mean the list of banned subreddits is (mostly) known if you want a few hundred examples. https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/fg3608/update...

Like I would post some highlights so people don't have to click the link but I don't even feel good about posting most of the names of the subs. They're just... awful.

syshum3• 4 years ago

Really. While some of them have clearly illegal content which goes beyond the topic of censorship there are LOTS of others a person that values the princible of free speech should have no problem with

Like Drugs, Guns, etc.

Then you have entire lists of subreddits that break the rules (harassment, hate speech, etc) but are deemed "acceptable" by the admins due to those subreddits breaking the rules against people that the reddit admins have deemed "acceptable targets"

astrange3• 4 years ago

Anything that causes a bunch of your userbase to get annoyed and leave, your own employees to have a bunch of their time wasted, trouble hiring new ones, or anything that causes real world consequences (from crimes to users getting in offline fights) you may have lawyers bill you for.

This has nothing to do with ~the powerful losing power~. You need to remember that most things that happen in real life aren't interesting.

drooby3• 4 years ago

This has nothing to do with ~the powerful losing power.

I guess I consider a company dying the "powerful losing power".

Its essentially what his whole thread was about - companies don't care about the politics - they want to survive. And they will survive at the expensive of society's well-being.

mjr00• 4 years ago

I'd love if he provided an example of these powerful and dangerous ideas that must be censored.

Plenty of historical reddit examples of this: /r/fatpeoplehate was the first sub I remember that got removed and caused huge site-wide drama, then there were all of the incel subreddits, then /r/watchpeopledie and the wave of gore subreddits, etc.

Why is this not a matter best handled by law enforcement?

Is there anything illegal about making fun of overweight people, ranting about how much you hate women, or posting industrial accident footage? Generally speaking, no. Is it something that should be on reddit? This is where the arbitration and individual judgment of admin comes in.

ALittleLight2• 4 years ago

At one point Yishan writes something like the various social media execs may vote, identify, and donate as Left much more than Right, but they are also typically white men. The implication seemingly being that white men aren't Lefties? Never mind that people from China or India are dramatically overrepresented in tech companies, more so than white people and those demographics tend to be Left leaning. Yishan's argument seems to boil down to "Trust me, they aren't biased."

AussieWog934• 4 years ago

people from China or India
Left leaning

Where the hell have you been working!?

ALittleLight2• 4 years ago

In the United States, where Indian and Chinese people tend to vote Democrat, and where Silicon Valley and Twitter are situated.

Barrin922• 4 years ago

My most immediate takeaway from this novella of a thread is that Twitter is way overdue for long form tweets! (Musk's response)

this may very well be the first thing in my life I've agreed with Musk on. By god scrolling through an entire essay chopped up with random replies and profile links thrown in because you have to click "show more replies" (which pops up twice?) over and over is awful. Just link to a Twitlonger.

On yishan's actual points I agree though. Companies moderate haphazardly and improvise and they care about their bottom-line and to extinguish shitstorms. There's no coherent ideological bias on any sufficiently large social network, they just pivot to whatever is causing chaos on any given weekday.

One important point stuck somewhere in the middle is his observation that in the physical world, no public square, or public debate looks like what's on display on internet social networks. All of them have rules, civility is a thing, if you're crazy someone's likely going to throw you out, there's identity instead of anonymity and so on. Maybe provocatively, "cancel culture" is simply culture. Culture is a bunch of rituals, rules, coercions, customs and traditions that predominantly tell us what not to so so we don't behave like a bunch of naked apes.

gpm• 4 years ago

random replies and profile links thrown in because you have to click "show more replies"

Huh, clicking show more replies only shows more of the original thread for me until I've reached the end of it.

That does sound horrible, if that's the common experience then all the complaints about Twitter threads make a lot more sense to me.

ec109685• 4 years ago

What Twitter client are you using? Mobile web at least threads it just fine. So much so I don’t understand why people use threadreader a given the junk that adds to a conversation as its being requested and replied to.

Barrin922• 4 years ago

What Twitter client are you using? Mobile web at least threads it just fine.

Chrome on the desktop right now. I agree that the mobile app is a better experience.

hoherd• 4 years ago

If you think mobile web threads fine, as in makes a good UX for reading written text, then that difference of opinion is the source of our and perhaps the parent of your post's disagreement. Mobile web looks just as awful as desktop web. I don't understand how people read on sites like this. I never read twitter threads unless I go through thread reader. It's intolerable otherwise.

I am not affiliated with thread reader at all.

EG for the OP link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html

dredmorbius2• 4 years ago

For anyone who doesn't have a Twitter account, the experience is endless nags and blocks.

I use Nitter for individual posts and searches, Threadreader to read threads.

The stock website is intentionally horrible.

Jules Dupuit explained why a over a century and a half ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170511130317/https://www.inc.c...

computerdork• 4 years ago

Agree with both you and Yishan on how social networks are simply trying to extinguish shitstorms. Yeah, for my part, hope Elon can just focus on solving real problems instead dealing with the rolling disaster area that is a social network (seems like Yishan himself seems jaded and cynical about the experience). Just doesn't seem worth it!

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Social media sites encourage shitstorms because their algorithms are coded to boost whatever maximizes measures of "engagement".

logicalmonster• 4 years ago

social networks are simply trying to extinguish shitstorms

Just rambling out loud, but perhaps Elon's superpower as the owner of Twitter might be having the luxury to care a whole lot less about user shitstorms.

Nobody has more Fuck-You money and ability to ignore a rabid mob than the richest guy on the planet.

At the very least, it could be very entertaining.

m348e912• 4 years ago

I whole-heartedly agree, and it's why I use threadreader app to read multi-part tweets.

Here is Yishan's thread. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html

Twitter could build their own multi-part reader functionality, but I'm content with using this tool.

riffic3• 4 years ago

this should have been a blog post. I absolutely can not stand threadreader because there's something about how people use it that rubs me the wrong way.

It does not help solve the fundamental problem (this should be a blog post not a series of Tweets).

slg9• 4 years ago

Strangely enough I originally posted this to HN as a threadreader link, but it looks like the mods switched it to the original thread on Twitter. I can't remember ever seeing that before. Is this a new stance that HN now frowns upon threading apps?

memish3• 4 years ago

You even disagree with him on physics, math, engineering and manufacturing?

Aeolun• 4 years ago

Disagree on everything it’s possible to have an opinion about.

Speed of light or length of a second are not going to change just because I want it to.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

There's no coherent ideological bias on any sufficiently large social network, they just pivot to whatever is causing chaos on any given weekday.

This is both true in a trivial sense and bullshit in an important sense. Governments and companies work every day, and employ armies of people full time to create the "shitstorms" that social media companies react to. Even the news cycle is motivated by billionaire owned news outlets, and a brush fire on twitter becomes a wildfire because those outlets magnify it, often prompted by press releases from PR companies, lobbyists, NGOs, and administration officials.

This is only improvisation for the first five minutes you become important. Once the relevant institutions have employed people full time to focus on the manipulation of your platform, it's systematic and routine. In the current climate, resistance will mean you're called to Congress and yelled at, and every other journalist will be screaming for your investigation and destruction. Instead, what happens is that you end up knowing all of the manipulators of your platform by their first names, you go golfing with them, and your kids date each other.

kaptain• 4 years ago

Underneath all our clothes, we’re all naked apes.

armchairhacker2• 4 years ago

I agree with this except that

"cancel culture" is simply culture

There are 2 types of cancel culture: society "cancelling" people when we discover they are extremely toxic and/or sexual predators, and private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark. The latter is a by-product of social networks, especially Twitter, and it's a real problem with real consequences.

Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.

But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". Then the definition of "borderline" politically-incorrect shifts further left, more and more becomes taboo, and people start to deny facts because they don't agree to societal norms. When reality is taboo, you get real consequences.

We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers. I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.

Retric2• 4 years ago

Saying the wrong thing in a private setting and getting fired has been a thing before computers existed.

Cancel culture is just a new name for an ancient practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

TameAntelope8• 4 years ago

Society is expressing its collective free speech when it "cancels" someone, for whatever reason.

When you support "free speech", you support all of it or none of it.

slg9• 4 years ago

But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled".

This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. Just look up someone like Anthony Jessolnik. Here is his most recent joke on Twitter[1]. Mocking both pedophilia and the death of a 4-year-old. This guy has 1.2m followers and plenty of those are liberals. A talented comedian can joke about anything.

I think this narrative comes from the fact that many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke. They see someone "canceled" for a transphobic joke and take it to mean we can't joke about trans people. It isn't the case. I have seen comedians kill with material about trans people in front of young leftist crowds. It is possible.

I see the value in joking about these issues. I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life.

[1] https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/15046838415957196...

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 4 years ago

The "best" part of the toxic Twitter cancel culture is the "if you're not actively fighting for our cause, you're the devil and need to be cancelled". There can be no neutral ground, you're either fervently for them, or the enemy to be destroyed.

imilk• 4 years ago

sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am firing someone who is says racist things. Keeping them around is not good for your company, for the other employees, for your vendors/clients, or anyone else associated with your company.

tambourine_man3• 4 years ago

I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.

Racism is a crime in any reasonable society. If anything, being yelled at on Twitter is too little punishment.

deanCommie2• 4 years ago

Saying or doing something racist or rude is bad, it should and would probably get you kicked out of a bar or event. But prior to social media, it would not get your entire reputation ruined, and you wouldn't get 50,000 random people to start harassing you. I hope most would agree that this is a disproportionate punishment.

If someone says something racist or sexist enough to get thrown out a bar, then I absolutely don't want to employ this person.

In the olden days there would be rumors and people would skate by. Hell, even the folks in first group of cancellation that you deem acceptable - the Weinsteins, Spaceys and Cosbys: everyone around them knew. FOR DECADES.

And nothing happened. It took until the same technological leaps that we are talking about for their victims to find each other, gather safety in numbers, and facilitate punishment.

This is of course going to be very unpopular with the "we are not racist/sexist - we are just asking questions" crowd.

linspace• 4 years ago

I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off.

The period after most people moved to big cities and before internet was widespread was the golden age of privacy.

afiori• 4 years ago

More than disincentivizing the borderline ideas of today (something that has always happened everywhere) it also disincentive the borderline ideas of tomorrow (something that is generally correlated with oppressive regimes)

something fun happened a few weeks back:

someone made a compilation of all the time Joe Rogan said the n-word;

the Young Turks made a segment how inexcusable it was to say it "so many times"; someone made a compilation of all the time the Young Turks;

some time later on an unrelated topic regarding dwarfism the Young Turks went on a rant about it being impossible to know whether the word dwarf was a slur or not and worrying about a new d-word compilation in 5 years

the particular details of what is cancel culture elude me, I am not smart enough to define it. but I find this future-based self-censoring (not based on visible trends but hypothetical ones) to be corrosive

ehnto• 4 years ago

We need a grey area, where you can say something which isn't "accepted by society", but it doesn't get you effectively blacklisted everywhere, and it doesn't affect things like job offers.

I am still thinking about all this, but I feel it is an unsolveable aspect of the global soapbox style social media platforms.

You also can't get away with risque jokes in big crowds when public speaking or with people you don't know. With your friends, there is a lot of nuance occuring, like them knowing you are a good person and have good intentions. To a crowd it's not necessarily obvious, and the range of people you could offend is way larger. You know you can grill your friend about their moustache because he knows you mean no harm. You know you can make a joke about bald heads because you know none of present company will be offended, you just can't achieve that in bigger groups. The internet is that issue but on a global scale.

The idea that you can say anything on the net without consequences is the wrong idea I think, because you can't even do that off the net. The solution is better community building and social tools for groups I think.

EndBlkAntiAznH8• 4 years ago

As a society, we have not developed appropriate, constructive, non-permanent repercussions for minor transgressions like an offensive online post or an off-color comment.

Our culture hasn't caught up with technology which can broadcast minor transgressions to millions of people and save them in perpetuity.

What is the modern equivalent of getting kicked out of a bar? Anti-social or bigoted behavior should have consequences but not permanent or life-ruining.

This is assuming the behavior was actually bad. The other problem with cancel culture is 1. Many of the "transgressions" were not transgressions at all; sometimes just an opposing opinion. 2. It is selectively applied according to identity. 3. No checks and balances. Easy for a mistaken identity or simple misunderstanding go viral. Once the mob is ignited, it's extremely difficult to issue a correction or walk back an accusation.

mnd999• 4 years ago

We need a grey area

Absolutely, life is shades of grey and never black and white. Unfortunately the noisiest people on the internet either can only think in black and white, or choose to do so to (to get note ‘engagement’ etc.)

wowokay2• 4 years ago

See but this is a big flaw in the way most people view free speech. No one wants to hear it, but some views considered extreme or “bad” are considered “bad” based on your point of view.

Currently the majority of our culture feels acting on racist motives are bad. An individual who internally is racist, posts racist things on the internet is only bad when they act racist towards someone.

If a platform blocks someone from posting a non individual targeting racist post and it gets blocked on Facebook, that is similar to someone posting something against a religion and it getting blocked because the moderator is religious, or posting something anti American and the site moderated by an American blocks it because they disagree with the content.

As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age, Amit of people would have compared promoting anti slavery content on posts to anti vax information today.

dav_Oz• 4 years ago

I'm too young to confirm but I assume we had something like this before social media took off. But with everyone connected and very scrutinizing/critical it's starting to go away.

As you correctly pointed out "open societies" need rituals/safe places in which a free flow of exchanges can emerge without stifling "artificial constraints" (= courtesies) which at some point just effectivley dissipates any drive for exchange/communication attaining maximum entropy within its boundaries devoid of any discernible "meaning" (other than our "box" has the highest moral value (i.e. tightly closed) compared to other "boxes").

Some examples of "safe open spaces": jesters (modern: comedians), interpreting dreams (modern: psychotherapy), ecstacy/dionysian rituals (modern: going out drinking) ...

I don't see Twitter in its actual form up to this challenge. And it's actually fine to admit that they have long reached a limit to reasonably scale up something resembling the first amendment. Fair enough: the 1st refers to the role of the government.

But then in a world of the WWW (with its current tech monopolies) and increasing PPPs: What exactly can be/is the role of governments and that of corporations in the 21st century? Most certainly not a recursion to an 18th/19th century understanding of social contracts (with "high-tech" movable types at their disposal).

bnralt2• 4 years ago

private citizens getting doxxed, slandered, and sometimes fired from their jobs because of a racist tweet or off-putting remark.

I think even more concerning for most people is a mob going after and firing people who didn't do these things. David Shor getting fired because he Tweeted that rioting was a bad political tactic, causing angry Twitter users to successfully press his employers to fire him. The case of the guy who got fired because someone thought he made an "OK" sign while driving and whipped up an angry Twitter mob (both cases are discussed here[1]).

Here's a random case I had stumbled upon a few years back that's now been forgotten[2] - man posts video of Chipotle telling him he has to pay for his burrito first because they say he's taken burritos without paying for them, accuses Chipotle workers of racism, and whips up a Twitter mob. Chipotle immediately apologizes and fires the manager. Then people notice old Tweets from the same guy bragging about stealing burritos from Chipotle. This leads Chipotle to rehire the person. If a random person decides to lie about you and whip of a Twitter mob, you have to hope that they've been so sloppy as to brag about their crimes on Twitter beforehand, because a simple unverified accusation from any random person is enough to get you fired.

And even after many cases like this, Twitter still let's people try to create Twitter mobs to get revenge on private citizens (particularly jarring when Yishan is arguing that the reason news articles are censored is to avoid angry mobs). However, they'll ban people who politely state heterodox opinions on controversial subjects (even if they are relatively common positions among the public). And since Yishan brings up Reddit, it's worth noting that they have a similar approach as well (whipping up angry mobs is fine, heterodox positions are not).

This culture on these sites is a result of the choices that social media companies have made (and not just the choices mentioned above, but others like the efforts made to push engagement). We see the results of that choice by the state of these sites. And the people involved, instead of taking responsibility for what they've created, decide to dump all the blame on the users.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chipotle-rehires-manage...

kgwxd• 4 years ago

The internet gives everyone a loud, personally branded, indestructible PA system and a wide choice of busy street corners to play whatever messages they want, on loop, 24/7. If someone decides to use that power in a way they already know is going piss off many passers by, well, pissed off mobs are going to do what they do. Mob mentality isn’t going anywhere unless humans go extinct. Speak your mind but read the room, the room is the entire world.

ricardonunez• 4 years ago

Twitter threads are just blog posts cut and simplified to fit the platform’s limitation. People have learn to adapt and write more concise post. I hope that if Twitter adds long tweets, people still write in a similar way.

fakethenews20222• 4 years ago

There is obvious ideological/institutional bias. Look at who Facebook offloads censorship to and who finances them.

There is obvious censorship not due to shitstorms. dang censored plain links to scientific studies highlighting myocarditis side effects to covid-19 vaccines. Now those effects are accepted fact.

ceejayoz10• 4 years ago

Look at who Facebook offloads censorship to and who finances them.

The usual accusation is they pick left-wing fact checkers, but this falls apart on even casual examination. https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-brings-in-rightwing-n...

"Facebook has brought in the right-wing news site The Daily Caller, which was co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and is known for pushing misinformation, to help fact-check articles, according to The Guardian."

sjg0079• 4 years ago

You can't yell Fire in a movie theatre if there's no fire. Your speech can't disturb the peace, your protest can be assigned to a specific location.

Perhaps we need online equivalents. Online on one hand you have 4chan and the other Hacker News. It's a race to the bottom in some sense if all bets are off.

Maursault• 4 years ago

You can't yell Fire in a movie theatre if there's no fire.

Actually Schenck v. United States was partially overturned and severely limited 53 years ago, so that hasn't been correct, technically, for some time. iow, you probably can shout fire in a crowded theater, but it depends on the circumstances whether you'll be arrested, whether you've presented a clear and present danger, whether you caused a stampede, whether anyone was injured or killed. But if you are arrested, it won't be a free speech case. The charge will be disorderly conduct, or negligent homicide, or some other charge. Justice Holmes' quote has sort of taken on a life of its own as a determination of what speech is not protected, but really there's no law against it. FWIW, I'm not advocating for it, just being pedantic.

initplus• 4 years ago

I really dislike the "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy - it was originally used in a court judgement where the accused had spoken out publicly against the draft.

It's honestly madness that this "fire in a crowded theatre" still comes up given where it originated - a court case where exactly the kind of speech that people worry about being restricted was in fact restricted.

rayiner11• 4 years ago

“Ideological bias” doesn’t require some coherent master plan, just like minded people acting according to their incentives. Everyone really needs to read Manufacturing Consent: https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...

chanakya• 4 years ago

Companies moderate haphazardly and improvise and they care about their bottom-line and to extinguish shitstorms.

Yes, after they've helped create the shitstorms in the first place with their escalatory like and recommendation models.

WalterBright• 4 years ago

Maybe you've hit on what the real problem is - using algorithms to enhance the spread of things. Maybe have a damper algorithm to counter the escalatory ones that succeed too well.

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

Social media companies are in the unenviable position of playing referee in the culture war

They are self-appointed referees in a game where many of the participants never wanted or asked for a referee. These companies could simply limit themselves to removing spam and explicitly illegal content (which should be referred to authorities), but instead they choose to put their finger on the scale and wade into the fray.

jdrc3• 4 years ago

no public square, or public debate looks like what's on display on internet social networks.

then there is the graffiti, the tags, the leaflets, the random crazy people shouting, singing, drug addicts, some people with guns etc etc.

Some people spend too much time in academic institutions. they are not the public square

considerw• 4 years ago

I have a friend who writes long WhatsApp threads instead of one message. Usually I can see past the media and can read the message what she is saying. But on the other hand she is not saying inappropriate things about me.

I think the real problem of the social media platforms is the users.

unityByFreedom• 4 years ago

No one's forcing you to write everything on Twitter in 40 tweets. He could have written a blog post and tweeted it.

hwers• 4 years ago

I agree. The limit encourages creativity and brevity

ansible• 4 years ago

It is not as if he Yishan was hitting the character limit on the individual tweets either, he was using the breaks for dramatic effect, like Shatner putting pauses in his speech.

lpa22• 4 years ago

I actually like the way it’s threaded - it allows you to discuss individual points in the essay instead of everyone talking about the entire contents at the same time. I do think they should have a collapse option to read it as one, but still allow you to reply to the individual thoughts

nathias2• 4 years ago

Enforcing civility and 'culture' is not just censorship, it censorship + imperialism.

Joeri• 4 years ago

Most people that I see behaving horribly on social media platforms do so under their own name, or at least an identity easily matched up to a real person, probably because they don’t feel like the repercussions affect them. So I don’t think the anonymity is that much of a cause or enabler for misbehavior in practice.

I think the idea of being thrown out of a bar for misbehaving is an interesting analogy. On twitter you can be thrown out of someone’s personal timeline, or you can be thrown out of all of twitter. In the real world that would be like either you are refused entry to someone’s home or you get thrown out of a country, with nothing in between. It seems like there is room there for more variations in between. Maybe hashtags could have moderators that forbid abusive individuals from using them, or maybe every tweet could form its micro-community, and individuals could be banned by the original tweeter from engaging with that tweet, but not from engaging with all of twitter. Twitter must have brainstormed a million variations on this concept of a moderated community, and I wonder why they have landed on the idea that you should only be allowed to curate your own timeline and not that of others who follow your tweets.

taneq• 4 years ago

this may very well be the first thing in my life I've agreed with Musk on.

You think electric cars and reusable rockets are bad?

wowokay2• 4 years ago

I’m not sure about the comparison between a town square and the internet. BLM protests and Jan 6th, are great examples of town squares where civility and rule of law are thrown out the window like a free open platform on the internet would perform.

elvis10ten• 4 years ago

Cancel culture isn’t new, what is new is that the cancellers are now “decentralized”. In fact this is the first successful web3 product built on web2. Someone create CancelCoin.

Just trying to be funny while still staying relevant to discuss. Please don’t downvote me to oblivion :)

NaturalPhallacy3• 4 years ago

No discussion including both reddit and free speech would be complete without this little bit of history:

We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
— Reddit FAQ 2005
We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
— u/kn0thing 2008
A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
— u/kn0thing 2012
We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
— u/reddit 2012
We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
— u/yishan 2012
Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
— u/spez 2015

And more recently this quote from reddit a employee:

"Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png

What is rule 1?

"Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy)

So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually:

"Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned."

And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct sex. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also.

Reddit used to be a cool new thing with real potential. I remember participating in the first secret Santa and my gift was the third most popular in the world. And the utterly wholesome Ameristralia movement. Then they shot it in the head in 2015 and completed their bait & switch.

tl;dr: reddit is really, really racist, sexist, and authoritarian

riffic3• 4 years ago

I have a nearly 16 year old reddit account and as a middle aged white guy I completely back the first rule given in Reddit's content policy. If you're unhappy with this being stated explicitly, you can like, just not use Reddit.

I do not want the site catering to anyone who those who will use Reddit to attack marginalized or vulnerable groups. These people will not be missed as Reddit users.

Content Policy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

YawningAngel• 4 years ago

The first rule is fine, but the interpretation given in the screenshot is in my view both unreasonable on its own merits and incorrect on the substance of what the rule actually says

RobertWHurst• 4 years ago

That kind of reply is a quintessential example of the arrogant self important horsedip that is runing reddit. You personally may want to live in an echo chamber with a bunch of highschoolers, anarchists, socialists, tankies, and the woke but there is a reason why reddit is not nearly as well regarded as it use to be, and its not because people lement the loss of hateful spaces. The idea that you have some sort of moral high ground; that people such as yourself are equipped to be the town censors - it's the peak of Dunning-Kruger effect in action. I have a reddit account as old as yours, the site has far less interesting conversations as it as languished severely, vandalized by by its self-flagulating management. I cannot wait for the day that these woke communities loose favor with society as a whole, their endless purity spiral will destroy them from within.

NaturalPhallacy3• 4 years ago

The way the rule it is written and the way it is enforced have nothing to do with each other.

TameAntelope8• 4 years ago

He literally said in this tweet thread that every one of these social media sites starts out being "pro free-speech" and learns how impossible that actually is to live up to.

Reddit is "really, really racist, sexist, and authoritarian" because there's literally no other way to be a major social media site. It's all shitty and horrible, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. That's exactly what the thing we're all commenting on is trying to say, that Elon thinks he can fix this but he can't, and it will cost Elon and the world a substantial amount.

NaturalPhallacy3• 4 years ago

Reddit is "really, really racist, sexist, and authoritarian" because there's literally no other way to be a major social media site.

This is flat out not true. .win, 4chan, gab, gettr, odysee all exist.

astrange3• 4 years ago

It more or less all seems true to me.

I thought it was amusing that the replies were full of people with no moderation experience trying to fight with him about all of it by going "umm actually it's obvious that x", where x is something that totally conflicts with the next reply over.

syshum3• 4 years ago

His entire thread falls apart when the very rules of a given platform show an ideological bent to them. you can not claim the company is not biased when the very rules for which guide the enforcement is biased

paulmd• 4 years ago

if what you're trying to say here is that one side makes use of antisocial tactics more than the other and is hit harder by moderation as a result, that's not really Twitter's fault or problem.

I think the example you're reaching for is racism/homophobia/transphobia, and how those run afoul of the "don't treat people like shit/debate the validity of their existence" rules, and how the left is comparatively un-affected by that rule because they don't generally do that stuff.

It's unfortunate that one of the parties continuously makes that stuff a voting issue, but like, you don't get a pass on the "no festering bigotry" just because it's mainstream discourse in your circles.

madrox• 4 years ago

It's for these reasons that I'm convinced massive social networks are not the future of the internet. It's too hard to win. Most people will fatigue and retreat to products that offer a more comfortable media experience made up of community members more like them. This seems to be happening on platforms like Twitch and Discord already.

I don't think Twitter is mismanaged. It's just as bad idea that's living past its point in time.

randomsearch• 4 years ago

Yes. Something that seems to be lost in the debate is _why should social media be allowed to exist at all?_

Social media is a tool that allows anyone to say anything, regardless of its basis in fact, and then amplify that statement to a level that is also unrelated to whether it is true (or nice, forgiving, generous).

A nasty or false statement actually gets amplified _more_ because algorithms optimise for engagement.

There’s then this weird argument of “we can’t act like a publisher because its logistically impossible to police the high volume of tweets.” Well, yes, I agree, it is logistically impossible. But the correct conclusion is not “therefore give up policing” but rather “don’t allow high volume broadcast of tweets.” That is, don’t allow this form of social media to exist.

This anything goes culture has not had great benefits for society, but has most certainly created great harm. The weaponisation of social media by enemy states is an obvious example. Making social more local, that is only your followers can see only your original content is a simple fix that probably works. It just makes less money.

rosmax_1337• 4 years ago

And yet, as the world communicates by way of technological means nowadays, rather than public gatherings and speeches, there is a larger and larger need for free speech on tech platforms.

I frankly don't see a good solution, because the world is multipolar and subject to different laws regarding free speech. If countries were concerned for the respect of their own boundries of free speech they would begin developing (godawful, I'm sure) alternatives to twitter, facebook, youtube, google, etc. If each country had their own echo chamber, it would make sense if you squint very hard and try to ignore the fact that people wish to communicated across country borders.

So yeah, it's not going to change any time soon.

I will say this though, while appreciating his thread, he is dead wrong about the idea that the censorship is equal ended. "Nationalism", in the broad sense, irregardless of wether it is left or right leaning economically, is censored across the board far, far greater than "Liberalism".

skippyboxedhero• 4 years ago

All of these problems existed before. Most of today's democracies have had rules around public gatherings and speeches. The situation with Twitter is, effectively, analogous to the invention of the printing press which started the political pamphleteering industry ("political"...the early state of that industry resembled Twitter, at least in England...lots of accusations of X public person being a secret papist or drinking children's blood...very little real discussion).

I am not sure exactly what the solution is (and you are right, that it becomes more complex on a global scale) but, as some of the comments in OP thread inadvertently allude to, a lot of today's moderation is just censorship. At no point in history has been up to companies to do this (in some countries the media is self-regulating, but that is regulation...not deciding that something shouldn't be published because it is "wrong" in some way...that is up to the courts and govt, not the press). The problem is the separation of content creation and distribution...the guy who runs the newspaper stand isn't responsible for the NY Times publishing something that is inaccurate. So I think the goal is parity with existing rules: people are responsible for what they post, not companies (and btw, this applies legally...in the UK, you can be prosecuted criminally for something you post...so quite why these companies need to stick their oar in to "protect" users is unclear).

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us, using free speech literally. But that's another story too

farmerstan2• 4 years ago

Pretty interesting perspective, I wish it were in a different format so I could read it easier.

I think the biggest problem with globally scaled companies is that HUMANS can’t mentally scale their expectations with the size. Meaning, if you have 10,000 people pissed and tweeting about something, you think “Oh my God this has gone viral, something has to be done!” But 10,000 angry tweets are nothing. 100,000 angry tweets are nothing. But to a single human it’s humongous but compared to the size of Twitters audience, some 300,000,000 people, 100,000 is not material.

Combine that with the majority that probably agree with you being silent, it’s easy to feel like you’re on the wrong side if you disagree. But you might not be.

Someone with guts needs to say, fuck the 100,000 angry tweets, this is the right thing to do. That person is Elon. And I’m not a fanboy at all because I generally hate him. But I admire his actions here. All I know is that he is a “fuck it” kind of guy and that’s what will lead social media out of this mess. People need to stop worrying about tens of thousands of angry tweets and just have the proper internal compass.

skinnymuch10• 4 years ago

You say you generally hate him but then list multiple positive things about him that go against generally hating him. How do you hate someone generally while saying the person with guts is that person and they are a “fuck it” kind of person that will help social media.

None of this remotely squares with hating the person. All the positives about Elon are what any one who likes him or admired him would say. None of what was written would be what most non status quo, non center/center right people would say.

farmerstan2• 4 years ago

I can generally hate someone but also see their good qualities. It’s not mutually exclusive at all.

temp8964• 4 years ago

He doesn't have clear thoughts.

His example: left wing wokes complain racist/sexist speeches exist, center / right / libertarians complain they are censored.

Are you kidding me, how are those two equivalent?

First, center / right / libertarians is a big group, they are not the opposite of the left wing wokes, they are not the one make racist/sexist speeches.

Second, left wing wokes complain the platform does not censor others enough, center / right / libertarians complain the platform censors themselves too much.

How the hell are those two comparable? Just because you mention the left this this, the right that that, does not make the two points comparable.

skinnymuch10• 4 years ago

Yes. It is painfully awful faux intellectual phony stuff. Every one is to blame. Everyone can be put into one side (multiple times when he said what the left does or thinks or said “you have thought this way as a person of X identity”...it was never true. Generalizations.

Meanwhile the praise for various billionaires and the defense of corporations where “they kind of care about money” before saying people in general are the problem. The thread actually contains “they [corporations] only kind of care about money”. Is there anything else to say.

TameAntelope8• 4 years ago

I'm glad he's putting a voice to something I feel has gone under-discussed during this whole "free speech" debate: it's rarely the mere topic that gets someone into trouble, but how the topic is presented.

If you want to say (almost) literally anything, you can find a way to do it that won't get you in trouble anywhere. It's the tone, the timing, and the specific phrasing that causes the problem, not the idea itself.

You can say some truly abhorrent things on Twitter and they won't ban you, if you say it the "right" way, and I feel like a depressingly small number of people realize that.

npunt4• 4 years ago

Agree, and to add further to this, the medium of Twitter does itself no favors in the 'how the topic is presented' dept.

Twitter's context-less, short-form, hot-take, free for all design is really great at priming people to react rather than consider. So many aspects of the product reinforce this, which is a result of the top line metric being engagement. It's a dumping ground for emotions and generally a shitty medium for anything mildly controversial.

When I see discussions like this, I'm disappointed people miss just how influential the product & medium is on these problems. Product is not 100% of the problem (everyone has content moderation problems) but it's definitely a big contributor to the problem as the medium makes it hard to have good faith discussions.

There are a lot of product improvements Twitter could make to improve discussion quality, and I've mocked up several [1]. While individuals there are very motivated to solve these problems, I'm not sure there's the same will to solve them at the top.

[1] https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1513429343833563139

swilliamsio• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

dropit_sphere2• 4 years ago

Eh...you won't find a nicer guy than Charles Murray, or less of a Stormfront nazi than Curtis Yarvin, but both are basically unmentionable. In both cases no one objects to their presentation, but to their (alleged) material.

I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.

someguydave3• 4 years ago

Yes, the whole thread reads something like “we need to suppress our ideological enemies because they are dangerous” while being highly vague about who and what he means exactly.

Notice he begins the thread by specifically naming his ideological enemies who deserved ruthless suppression (Christians against degenerate media) but implies it was ok because it was 25 years ago.

Also he never really defines how “shitstorms” hurt platforms exactly.

TMWNN• 4 years ago

If you want to say (almost) literally anything, you can find a way to do it that won't get you in trouble anywhere.

No. If nothing else, the scold always has the "dog whistle" weapon.

TameAntelope8• 4 years ago

I’ve found people who don’t know how to express themselves well tend to also be the people who live frustrated and confused lives.

I assume that’s a result of being mostly ignored. Censored, if you can apply that to people not taking you seriously (and I’m sure they do).

But yes, continue to make poor arguments and then get upset when people tune you out (or ban you). The indignation probably feels pleasurable, at least!

noslenwerdna• 4 years ago

You shouldn't have to hide your message. It's not free speech if you can only talk about controversial things exactly the way some corporation wants you to.

SnowHill9902• 4 years ago

This reads more like he burned out on Reddit than a real analysis of why Twitter could or could not be “saved.”

gonzo412• 4 years ago

This is a good take, but I hate thread. Feature request for twitter would be a word limit per hour, so you could just put a couple of paragraphs up and not be able to tweet for 2 hours.

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

The worst interpretation of you request would be “he’s talking too much and should shut up for 2 hours”

It seems to me the more direct request would be an option to glue tweets together or have a max number of notifications per account per hour if that’s what’s hitting you the most.

gonzo412• 4 years ago

Yeah, I meant it more along the lines of a quota system around time, rather than silence people. But whatever, I with musk at least on one point, maybe it's time for longer tweets.

jimmydeans• 4 years ago

Twitter and Reddit came here to shout down free speech.

bspear• 4 years ago

This whole debacle has illustrated how distracting social media can be. Elon is taking time away from worthwhile things to pursue a fool's errand

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 4 years ago

A lot of really good points being made. What the thread didn't explain - how do platforms get destroyed if they don't moderate enough?

For example, what stopped reddit from letting the more extreme subs stand, letting the people screaming about it scream until enough people got tired of hearing it? Reddit in particular has the advantage of having separate subreddits, which can have different tolerances for different behaviors.

DoctorOW2• 4 years ago

I mean... remember Voat? That was literally the whole point was they would take the refugees from banned subreddits into their Reddit clone. The place got unbearably racist and then the site died. I remember because I checked Voat out periodically for a while, I was on the fence about this whole "free speech" debate until I saw the end result.

mynameishere• 4 years ago

I think that was a one-man operation and he ran out of money. My guess: Since he couldn't also spin up his own advertising network, he was out of luck.

account423• 4 years ago

Continuing to allow fringe views is entirely different from a forum made for those whose views were deemed too extreme elsewhere.

sangnoir2• 4 years ago

What the thread didn't explain - how do platforms get destroyed if they don't moderate enough?

You get brigading or other ever-escalating, internecine battles, and lose a huge chunk of users who get put off by the toxicity and dysfunction, and it becomes a downward spiral as the concentration of radicals in the userbase increases.

A sibling comment mentions Voat (which died in the cradle), but I think Digg is a different example of how platform can implode when most users - who are not ideologically invested either way - get tired of drama.

ehsankia5• 4 years ago

The thread actually touches on that roughly around here:

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514956233005928449

Digg and Voat aside, I think the whole T_D example on reddit is a good example. Like you said, subreddits aren't fully self-contained. They leak, fight against others, and it can very quickly get out of control.

npunt4• 4 years ago

If you want to get theoretical, look up paradox of tolerance. If you want a practical example, look up 'how to deal with nazis at your bar' [1]. Basically you get stuck with the assholes as the good people get silenced or leave. It's a pattern as old as time itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

asabjorn2• 4 years ago

Popper that formulated the paradox of tolerance was a marxist and invented the paradox of tolerance as an argument based upon victimology (pathos) for why Marxists need to pre-censor people that disagree with them. It’s a dangerous path, especially as Marxists are pathos driven not logos so you don’t need a logical argument before censoring. You just need a pathos statement by a Marxist that they felt victimized by your words, and voila … gulags.

The reason why this is so important for Marxists is that it’s a gnostic end times theology that believe the human collective will manifest Marxist utopia if all alive have gnostic Marxist knowledge, as they believe the Marxists as Gods would create utopia. This is why you hear communists say “communism has not been tried”, as some people alive did not have communist gnostic knowledge

bagels• 4 years ago

They get destroyed because people stop visiting due to the vile content, and advertisers leave because they don't want to be associated with the vile content.

throwaway483753• 4 years ago

They make their money from advertisers that don't want their brands associated with particular content.

nunez• 4 years ago

One of Yishan's bigger points is how managing a social media company can make you eat shit on a constant basis, which is exceptionally hard for CEOs entering that space.

Elon eats shit on a daily basis, from everyone, from multiple angles.

Wouldn't this actually make him a decent fit for the job?

rpmisms• 4 years ago

He definitely has the pain tolerance for it; I don't think that's a valid concern here. I honestly do think his ownership would cause significant improvements.

andrew_5• 4 years ago

They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't.

I'd like to know how that claim can be made given the videos that a certain dubious "Project" has collected of real employees talking about how much they care about the politics of it all. What of the employees who are completely transparent on the platform talking about their activism as related to their job at the platform? There must be nuance missing here, otherwise it's blatantly untrue and I'm unsure how Y could be that niave. I really don't believe he is, but this is baffling.

wokwokwok• 4 years ago

sigh That's the point though; who caaaarrrreeeeesssss what the employees think?

Do you care what the political views of your plumber are? I do not.

Do you care what the political views of the person who writes the app that runs your smart tv? I don't caaaare.

What I care about is what the platform does as a company, and yes, I know, people run companies, and that means they have some impact... but fundamentally twitter is run by a bunch of people who are trying to derive value for their shareholders.

That means building things, getting users, and not wasting a shit load of time and money on content moderation.

That's the point; it's not about caring about politics; it's about making problems go away, so they can make money by selling ads (or whatever) and making people click on cat videos.

You have a handful of examples you're clinging to, which show some people doing something you don't like, so EVERYONE MUST BE DOING IT. That's exactly the point this post was making; you're assuming the tiny bit of data you have, is reflective of the entire management structure, company, employees and corporate decision making process.

It's not.

I'm unsure how Y could be that niave. I really don't believe he is, but this is baffling.

That's the point this whole thread is making. You can choose to believe in that conspiracy theory style stuff, but, really... it shouldn't be a surprise to find that some people don't.

Fervicus2• 4 years ago

I would care about the political views of the person who wrote the app that runs on my smart TV if my TV started blocking certain content because they think it's wrong think and that I should be protected from it.

LudwigNagasena2• 4 years ago

You don't care about political views of other people, buy many people do care and they are ready to go to on a social justice jihad to make sure that no plumber, no smart tv developer and no Twitter user has any nazi inclinations.

vinhboy• 4 years ago

You have a handful of examples you're clinging to, which show some people doing something you don't like, so EVERYONE MUST BE DOING IT.

I feel like more than 50% of this thread right now is doing exactly this and is unaware they are doing it.

To be fair though. There does exist corporations who has a proven history of trying to push a specific point of view, case and point: Fox News.

People assume that since Fox News exists, there must also exist an equal, but opposite: MSNBC, CNN, and (maybe) now Twitter or whatever...

In my opinion, this sort of false equivalencies is extremely counter productive and dangerous to our society.

andrew_5• 4 years ago

Plumbers and Smart TVs are straw men. A more apt comparison might be: Your mail carrier who was recorded stating they only deliver mail to your address that they feel you should see.

you're clinging to

That's a pretty grand assumption. I'm not clinging to anything. I'm simply stating "how can you make this assertion when there are recordings of people who make decisions for the userbase, claiming they do so based on the thing you're asserting they don't care about?" On the contrary, it would seem that you desperately want the inverse to be true.

It's a fair question. To say that they're the small minority doesn't discount the fact that they exist. It honestly wouldn't matter the persuasion of these people in the context. "People there don't care about X" -> videos of people saying their actions at said company are based on X -> assertion is false.

If Twitter truly didn't care about activism - regardless of the slant - as part of their core business decision making, then they'd purge these people from their ranks, or make it wildly transparent that decisions weren't being executed by people who have broadcast their slant as influencing their work. I don't know about you; whenever I've stepped outside my bounds of what the company wanted to accomplish, I was put back in place pretty quickly.

You can choose to believe in that conspiracy theory style stuff

To paint any discussion as tin-foil conspiracy is to attempt to shut down the debate, which speaks to your disingenuous intentions and entering the debate in bad faith. This is a great example of one of the problems with discourse right now.

The argument sounds nice but evidence to the contrary exists, no matter how isolated, and has never been addressed by the company publicly. If the company had taken disciplinary measures in response to the recordings, had published procedures, quite literally a bare minimum of transparency, I would personally be very likely to dismiss them as isolated incidents. As it stands, combined with speech from leadership, it does look very much like the company supports and defends bad actors internally. And the twitter thread doesn't appear to hold much water.

arein32• 4 years ago

It's just words with no weight on them. They very much care about politics. They even banned Donald Trump.

hamter• 4 years ago

employees' political biases aside these platforms exist to make money and so they'll play within the boundaries of "acceptable" speech which in the west is pro-capitalist, pretty centerist, and with some scraps thrown to minorities from time to time. If you are outside the window you are off the platform because advertisers get anxious. saying they arent political is absurd.

slibhb2• 4 years ago

I find this rambling, repetitive, and wrong. What happens if we don't censor? Violence? Trump wins the election? Twitter dies?

The example he uses is the lab leak hypothesis which is the worst example he could have picked. Lab leak was unsayable for months then it became mainstream and nothing happened. Are we seriously supposed to think Twitter would have collapsed if lab leak hadn't been censored for N months?

It is true that moderation, which amounts to censorship, is required on these platforms. But the bar for moderation should be way higher and these platforms should stop playing whack-a-mole with "dangerous ideas". If they do stop, I predict that nothing bad will happen.

philjohn3• 4 years ago

Some people sent death threats to Fauci over the lab leak hypothesis as they blamed him for funding some research at the Wuhan lab. Real, taxpayer, money had to be spent on his security detail.

Once again - people who claimed that the lab leak hypothesis was 100% verifiably true were in the wrong, people who talked about it as one of the theories were unnafected.

skinnymuch10• 4 years ago

The general schtick were and is people convinced of the lab leak with no solid conclusive evidence. That never changed to this day.

occz• 4 years ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side

This is just plain false. There is a large contingent of people, myself included, who aren't on anyone's "side". The false, binary Republican vs Democrat crowd is, collectively, a shrinking minority of the population. Intelligent, moral people don't want to take away the speech rights of anyone. Twitter has a block button which everyone is free to use to shield themselves (and only themselves) from any speech they find objectionable. The very crux of free speech is being willing to fight for the right of people you hate and despise to speak freely. Obviously, there are many people who today oppose free speech (both those who openly admit their opposition, and those who cravenly claim to support it while opposing it at every turn). But its patently wrong and absurd to claim (as the author of this Tweet thread does), that everyone opposes free speech. Free speech and free thought are the two prerequisites for a free and democratic society. The twin pillars upon which all else rests. Those who oppose free speech are the enemies of freedom and democracy, despite their hollow claims and feigned benevolence.

muskmusk• 4 years ago

Why is it that people like this guy think the way he ran a social network is the only way to run one? Humans have been running online social networks for under two decades. We are awful at it. This "it can't be done better"-attitude is so defeatist. Not to mention egotistical (someone can do a better job than me? Preposterous!)

steve_adams_86• 4 years ago

I imagine I’d be pretty jaded after running Reddit. I get jaded scrolling through it for a few minutes

TedShiller• 4 years ago

Very good try, but he falls in the same camp as the very people he criticizes.

His reasoning completely falls apart once you introduce the Hunter Biden laptop.

bluehorseray• 4 years ago

I don't see how the problems the author describes can't be resolved by putting an end to banning accounts / de-platforming people for posting offensive, albeit legal, content. Which is what I thought Elon said he was going to do.

If neither the left or the right can point to accounts being banned, I think at the very least they may stop complaining about the "censorship" issue.

tb0ne• 4 years ago

Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.

This post gives an interesting perspective, but this statement cannot be right.

There are absolutely topics, that, no matter how civil you approach them, will result in a ban.

no_tea_please• 4 years ago

This is very true. One topic in particular will get you banned on Reddit and Twitter, and, usually, flagged on here, simply for stating observations of material reality. Any meaningful discussion of this topic only really takes place on niche feminist forums.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

I thought this was a very good thread, and I agree with most of his points.

Importantly, think how Reddit itself evolved it's stance against free speech. As Yishan points out, Reddit was pretty much "free speech absolutist" in the early days. They would allow anything that wasn't outright illegal. But then, things changed, and IIRC the first example of this was the ban of r/jailbait. I remember how many of the mainstream media were doing exposés on jailbait, and thinking "if Reddit doesn't ban this, they're toast" - it was a topic that was so universally abhorrent, on both the right and left, that despite being technically legal at the time, you could easily see how governments would either ban it themselves, or remove liability protection for platforms, which is essentially game over for all the platforms.

It's not hard to see how the platforms then carried this stance to ban anything causing "harassment" or "harm" - probably most people wouldn't be against the ban of r/FatPeopleHate, but then what about areas like trying to overturn the election results, which any rational reading of the facts is a clear falsehood (especially given the number of prominent Republicans who agreed there was no evidence of widespread fraud), despite how many people believe it.

So the idea that you can have a viable "absolutist free speech" social platform is just nuts. The ones that have been tried always devolve into a cesspool of racism and QAnon-level conspiracy theories. There is simply no way to run a modern social network without moderation (or censorship as it's called if your posts are the ones removed).

Just look at this site: despite attracting a more "rational" crowd, at this point I think dang's moderation is a critical factor in its success.

mherdeg2• 4 years ago

As a total outsider the key pieces of Yishan's leadership I remember are:

* His "every man is responsible for his soul" view on free speech absolutism ( https://web.archive.org/web/20140908001917/http://www.reddit... ) -- somewhat different, I think, from current policy ( https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043513411 )

* Promising Condé Nast that if they surrendered some equity the tech people would build a big company and then ... delivering as promised? Advance Publications has gotta be pretty happy with where their investment has gone and I think it's credible it wouldn't have happened without the equity changes

hartator• 4 years ago

I don't know. The only argument against leftist views that he talk about is that Silicon Valley elites are men. Whereas everything else are right wing views that have been censored.

prepend6• 4 years ago

They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.

I don’t think so. I think they love the drama. They have more impressions and make more money from rage. The rage has to be over unimportant things so the status quo doesn’t change. They want people upset over the dumbest stuff possible and arguing all the time. They want people complaining about being banned or not banning people or whatever.

This is he problem with social media. It makes more money to be loud and without value. If people are fulfilled and learn the answer to their question they stop. If they are angry and searching they go forever.

riffraff• 4 years ago

Hear hear!

This is a beautiful and insightful thread which completely avoids talking about money.

Not all social networks devolved into hate filled screaming fests, the main reason they do is because that drives engagement, which brings money, which makes stakeholders happy.

This is the only reason that running Twitter as a private company owned by a single rich dude might make a difference.

pcurve• 4 years ago

I enjoyed reading it but I couldn’t get on aboard with his statement “ Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR”

It’s both.

In fact the most dangerous ideas to me are the ones that are discussed with perception of civility and factuality yet are patently false.

jamesrom2• 4 years ago

And why is it _never_ the reason given by the censors?

When topics are banned, some banal comment about verifiability or some other non-descript reason is given.

It's never "we believe this is causing too much drama and might escalate to violence". I don't buy yishan's framing at all.

refulgentis3• 4 years ago

I don't buy your framing more than I don't buy his, though his is sloppy: what "censors" have "banned" what topics?

jelliclesfarm6• 4 years ago

You know what we did when someone was obnoxious during the glory days of BBS and IRC? We banned and kicked their sorry arse off the server. So everyone behaved. Kinda. And everyone..even kids..acted like adults. Or we dealt with it.

And you know why it was glorious. The Internet was truly free. There was no money to be made there.

jdrc3• 4 years ago

IRC was/is notoriously unfree because of that, i dont think it claimed any free speech creds, because its realtime nature means that spam or bad faith had to be removed immediately. plus the 'acted like adults' thing is not true, more like everyone acted like kids but at least fun kids.

madeofpalk4• 4 years ago

We banned and kicked their sorry arse off the server.

Is this... a moderation policy?

The Internet was truly free.

Hmmm...

nialv7• 4 years ago

I wonder if things are too centralized nowadays - you are either on Twitter or not on Twitter. Whereas in the case of a BBS or IRC, you could be ban from one board/channel/server but not another, so everyone can have their own standard of free speech.

I guess this is still kind of the case for reddit? But given how concentrated moderation power is on reddit, and reddit's ability to de-platform whole communities, I don't know how true it still is.

gorgoiler• 4 years ago

It’s really nice on HN when the administrators detach a reply from the main thread. Folks can carry on arguing about vim/emacs but the number of newcomers piling on drops away.

Twitter, on the other hand, does this: #vimVSemacs is trending, click here to wade in!!

traviswt• 4 years ago

This is far longer than it needed to be. It’s a rant. A borderline incoherent one.

There is a massive confusion here between anonymity and the physical/online distinction. Anonymity is always hard, even in real life. There’s a reason criminals like masks!

Free speech is the guiding principle because nothing else makes sense and inevitably devolves into hive mind.

Platforms should not be figuring out what speech to limit, they need to figure out how to avoid being publishers. The problem isn’t that they’re hosting bad content, the problem is that they’re promoting/publishing it.

garbanz0• 4 years ago

Am I crazy? Yishan's whole thread is completely irrelevant because it assumes Musk is telling the truth when he says he cares about free speech. Free speech enforcement is probably pretty low on Elon's list of reasons to buy Twitter.

ehsankia5• 4 years ago

I think the bigger point, above free speech, was that running a social network is hard, and Musk will fail at it, regardless of what his "goal" is, unless his goal is to run it into the ground.

gbhn• 4 years ago

A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract.

The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless you censor topics that attract cranks, you'll eventually become a qanon platform (or the equivalent) and drive out all worthwhile participants.

I'm not sure what the global rule is called, but something like volume nonlinearity or kookiness asymmetry it something. If you have a bunch of looks everyone else leaves. You're options are to get rid of them or fail. It sucks but there it is.

RivieraKid2• 4 years ago

Exactly. The average Redditor can see through Elon's BS, most people here and Yishan can't. Or they want Twitter be owned by someone who is closer to them politically.

peepop6• 4 years ago

As an outsider looking at Twitter I think they're fooling themselves if they think the problem is lack of free speech.

When I click a Twitter link what I usually see are: - bots and spam - low quality replies that add nothing (usually from bimbos or 3rd worlders trying to get the attention of a celebrity) - shallow one liners to an idea that people don't like

As much as upvotes were made fun of, I think Reddit had the right idea because at least the upvoted posts were almost guaranteed to be of "readable" quality. And if you wanted to, you could easily sort the thread by most controversial and read the unpopular opinion.

Now Reddit is a website where free speech is actually lacking with shadow bans and slightly controversial posts getting removed.

jelliclesfarm6• 4 years ago

Is there a tl;dr for this Twitter thread?

He lost me at : [..]Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture. [..] They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.[..]

Internet ‘culture’ in 2004 and even a decade before that was Glorious!

I think we should all squabble more and get it out of our systems. A society that doesn’t interact genuinely(even if it’s ‘squabbling’) is a sterile society.

The sentiments expressed there..that I think I grokked..is like someone who has never had sex trying to explain sex to 40 year old virgins.

Free expression is too valuable and precious to be sacrificed for techbros to ‘write more features’.

They are trying to sterilize the Interwebs. They are trying to redefine the ‘Free’ in free speech. I hope they fail.

ehsankia5• 4 years ago

The tl;dr is that running a social network / content moderation is a really fucking hard problem, and Musk has no clue what he's in for. That no matter how much you are against censorship, you will eventually have to do it to some level when running a sufficiently large platform, and every tiny mistake you make will be interpreted the worst way possible, and each side will use it as proof that you are discriminating against them.

Also, I don't think that quote was saying 2004 culture was bad, far from it. He was just trying to say the way we ran the internet back in 2004 no longer "works" today.

throwaway483753• 4 years ago

I mean it does. 4chan still exists it just isn't as popular as twitter.

jelliclesfarm6• 4 years ago

Thanks.

I would still vote for more squabbling. Because every conflict will end if there are ways to exit and ‘keep face’(a Chinese concept of losing with dignity).

Having no other big social media alternatives, people are unable to find community and think it’s better to kill instead of sparring. As in..better to cancel someone and deplatform an opponent rather than fighting it out.

It’s good to ‘squabble’, I feel..because when you squabble, we recognize who to avoid and who is like minded. In the long run, it results in a truly diverse community that has long term peace.

Almost 8 billion people and only one Twitter. There should be more. Why isn’t SV and the rest of tech community not coming up with more viable competition?

Twitter could invest in non competing spawns for other topics or in other regions witb their systems code and/or open sourcing their code. I mean..with a little bit of creative thinking, so many possibilities exist.

Give people room to wander..the internet is big!

mherdeg2• 4 years ago

I've sometimes wondered if the way American media and culture treat people like Musk, Bezos, Gates is that we have no royalty -- there's no hereditary monarchy and indeed the old money keeps a studiously low profile.

Do human cultures just need kings and princes? Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?

I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king. Maybe it'll work -- he shot his shot, and he's a pro at putting in just the right Internet comments in just the right place. But I wonder why I'm so fascinated about seeing this conversation between these two nobles. Is this how the English lower classes saw their royalty in the 17th century? Did they chatter about the king's foibles on the street while they were out costermongering?

alephnan• 4 years ago

Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?

So basically the ruling class.

jmeister• 4 years ago

People tend to have instinctive respect for earned authority. This same reverence is also given to sportstars and artists.

American billionaires, for all their faults, have the most “legitimate” authority in modern(post-enlightenment, post-martial) history.

https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...

The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose Tightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place.

This is also why the “millionaiahs and billionaihs” rhetoric from the left falls flat with immigrant populations. The rich and successful people here are way better than the kleptocrats and oligarchs elsewhere.

For example: There’s some good stuff that’s been written comparing Russian oligarchs with western businessmen, their spending habits, values, lifestyles etc.

npunt4• 4 years ago

Do human cultures just need kings and princes?

It's an interesting question, and I like how you frame it as a duke's commissioning.

The root of it I think is that we're deeply social creatures, so much so that we anthropomorphize inanimate things and construct deities with suspiciously human personalities. It's our way to process the complexity of life and to retain a sense that there is a pattern to the randomness.

By personalizing everything we don't have to know anything about a subject to engage with it, we only need to know the personality in question, or even just general human motivations. In that way its super accessible. It's only with education that we can engage in the merits of ideas themselves. Else we're destined to get caught up in the cult of celebrity.

beowulfey• 4 years ago

It’s human nature to place everything in the world around us into categories. Think about your daily life and consider how much of it is built on the idea that ‘This’ is different from ‘That’. Social connections are no different and we could not feasibly ever have a 100% flat society, as inevitably we will categorize our contacts and hierarchies will emerge.

On some level I think this is inherently biological; maybe it all stems from the need to differentiate ‘good for existence’ (e.g. food) from ‘might kill me’ and all creatures do it.

sirodoht• 4 years ago

Yes, I think that’s an appropriate comment.

Why is them that we consider kings? Because our social imaginary [1] now is that of technocracy. Whoever can create technology and achieve money with technology is who’s worthy.

And why do we need kings? I don’t think there is consensus in this response but psychoanalysis and philosophy [2] have said a lot about this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_dialectic

dzikimarian2• 4 years ago

I don't think, this niche is necessarily kings & queens. I think it's people needing some kind of beacon, pointing for what should they aim with their life (even if they cannot realistically achieve it, at least not fully).

That's why we have huge libraries of biography books and millenia old stories of philosophers, heros and rulers.

Of course for some people such figure would be Ghandi and for some one of billioners (probably latter was always more appealing to the general public). Both are examples of extraordinary achievements in some area.

In highly religious society they would be probably replaced with saints & priests, in highly militarized by great strategists and war heroes.

If you dig deep enough, there will be probably some group telling stories, how exciting it was to be able to listen to some post stamps designer, who is considered local legend.

incompatible• 4 years ago

They are fans, basically. You could say the same about people who follow the Kardashians, or drill rap artists.

basisword• 4 years ago

As someone from a country with Royalty I can promise you most people do not care about them. The people that tend to care are foreigners. If there's a big event some subset of the population are interested in the celebrity sense but outside of that nobody cares.

dalbasal3• 4 years ago

Yes, broadly.

People think in stories and characters. It's easier and more natural like this.

So, we personify things (war, politics, free speech) into people like Putin, Musk, Hisham. They can play out the stories for us.

Also, the outcomes of princely squabbles does actually affect us.

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?

It’s interesting thinking of the English heritage. French heritage would lead to different views on how to deal with pseudo royalty.

I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king.

He writes at the beginning that a lot of people are requesting his take, so he made it public instead of answering each individually. It doesn’t feel like he cares much about what Elon would think about his opinion.

seanalltogether• 4 years ago

Your comment reminded me of a quote from Alan Moore

    “The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

Although he's talking mainly about conspiracy theories, I think it applies equally to "royalty" as you put it. People need someone to be in charge, and they'll latch onto whoever or whatever they think will satisfy that desire.

chartpath2• 4 years ago

Yes for sure, but just because we all like to follow sometimes doesn't mean we need to do so without any criticism of those figures. People who follow without any analysis are setting themselves up to harm their own culture because it's also part of human nature that some of us are power hungry sadists and genocidal egoists who just want to exploit anyone who doesn't support us. That fear is how some unquestioning followers understand that power works due to trauma, so they can neatly sidestep a lot of emotional processing by worshipping an authoritarian leader and just hope that their purity remains intact through the purges. In fact there is an alternative but it requires hard work to achieve.

chartpath2• 4 years ago

Agreed that it is astute pandering. I found the whole "both sides" thing off-putting because it's negligent. There seems to be a standard of care that comes with running a social network that isn't being acknowledged enough. A customer who slips and falls in a business due to a wet floor caused by an employee can sue the owner for negligence based on vicarious liability. These networks are property that customers access and use just like physical property. You can put whatever you want in the terms of service but it doesn't change the location and ownership of the electrons.

Having also worked on a social network and dealt with bots brigading back in 2016-2017, it is possible to apply facts and logic and ethics to these situations. Worshipping a "network" as some kind of neutral aether is greatly downplaying the significant opportunities for tuning the data streams based on knowledge and compliance.

Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where free speech is not what is protected explicitly, it's free expression that's protected as long as it's not invoked at the expense of any other Charter Rights. Hate speech is also illegal in the Criminal Code. These are factual matters that do not get the same amount of unquestioning reverence that free speech without consequences seems to get in some parts of the US.

About the historical theory that it's human nature to want kings and nobility, it seems that is mostly just our particular colonial and patriarchal part of the world. I'm not a historian or anthropologist but am pretty sure there have been societies that operated differently.

TeeMassive• 4 years ago

That was a long thread who didn't say much outside of the usual suspects for being against free speech: "far-right, harassment, Russia, think of the children".

All of which can are not the biggest criticisms directed at Twitter right now.

He does not address the Hunter Biden laptop story, the ban of the last president for saying the election was stolen (even if it happened twice before that in the last 20 years and was a frequent talking point), woke politics getting people banned (most normal people do not know what asking for pronouns are about), etc.

Also the fear that open discourse leads to genocide has no basis in History. Genocides happened because those in power could speak without any counter voices and their crimes not getting exposed publicly.

skinnymuch10• 4 years ago

The thread was equally against anything left of center. The thread was pretty kind to the right. Since the thread was about the status quo. Which is a core conservative stance. As well as the high praise of mega corps and billionaires. Which the center and right are much cozier with than the left.

jdrc3• 4 years ago

They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.

Hum, the whole thread sounds very narrowminded, lacking imagination and frankly a bit stupid. This sentence may be true , but where is the evidence that they will do anything to stop users from doing it? reduce engagement and you reduce flamewars. Find the balance that is good enough for you and you won't need to moderate too much. But it seems social networks choose not to do it because of both money and political power. IT's also a bit disingenuous to pretend that drama is a sideshow or distraction and that social networks have better things to do. Drama is at the core of glorified forums aka social networks, it is what attracts people's attention which brings the mony.

we ve all been running forums and communities on the internet for decades, these are not new problems

nobodyandproud• 4 years ago

And the old GenX tech titans are right there with you - vaguely left-wing but also center-right - seeing their version of "censorship" - and drawing all the wrong conclusions from it about what's happening with the management of social platforms.

Other than the tech-titan part, that’s spot on.

Also: OMG, a reference to GenX. It’s not flattering at all, but I’ll take it.

srcreigh• 4 years ago

The thing is, nobody except this dude has actually explained the situation properly.

The context of the "world of pain" is that nobody convinced everybody it's just damage control and profits and not about their ideas being bad.

Do you think Elon could convince everybody? would that make it less a world of pain?

skittleson• 4 years ago

Let him do it. Skake up that board a bit

chx• 4 years ago

Yishan is also behind. By now, one half of the debaters have simply left reality and facts behind. Makes moderating a tad bit hard.

rittera• 4 years ago

One of the ideas mentioned was that "ideas lead to real world events". This is true of all ideas. There are millions of tweets right now that are encouraging Ukrainians to kill Russians, other countries to get involved and kill Russians and escalate the war and get more Ukrainians and Russians killed. According to Yishan, these tweets should all be removed because they are dangerous, yet they are not removed.

Danger isn't bad, it is life. Maybe words on the internet will lead to a murderous government being violently overthrown. Who knows. It all goes back to a bunch of elitists determining which ideas should be visible, and therefore which violent and non-violent events occur. They are playing god with the world, and it is their own best interests that will be served, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Essentially, Yishan is arguing for real-life thought-police, and he is doing this because he probably did this at Reddit and needs to quell his cognitive dissonance. If somebody does something illegal in real life, arrest them. Until then, they must be allowed to discuss ideas that could lead to real life harm, theoretically. This is because there is no such thing as "we have removed all the posts that could lead to harm". It is like the "you can't talk about immigrants taking jobs because people will attack immigrants". What about the theoretical people who lose their jobs? There are always two sides, even when you are blocking the "harmful post", you are silencing someone else and creating harm.

Silencing particular groups is a great policy for those in power, because they can enact changes without pushback. Real life harm like "house prices so high I have to live with my parents at 50" will not be considered harm, but the pushback against ideas that lead to this situation might. There is no perfect utopia where everyone is at peace, there are just people trying to take resources from other people. That is the nature of life, and tech CEOs pretend this isn't the case for convenience reasons.

dustinmoris2• 4 years ago

A lot of what was said in this thread is very inconsistent with reality.

For example:

Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...
massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

This is not true.

Any message, irrespective if EVERYONE KNEW it was true, for example that COVID-19 is statistically less of a risk to children than the flu, was censored and labelled as fake news or even taken down. Free speech is dead in its current form where social media companies are peddling the fake news by our Western governments to control our thinking. They will make you believe that Iraq has mass destruction weapons if they want a war and they will make you believe that a minor cough virus will kill your child if they want to control your life.

philjohn3• 4 years ago

I think it's important to take a step back here.

I saw plenty of people saying "Covid is less severe in Children" without any issue. The people who had tweets taken down were saying things like "Children can't die from Covid, open the schools, there's no risk at all" but ignoring that:

a) Children did in fact die b) Children did in fact bring Covid home from school which infected potentially at risk parents/other family members.

See also the lab leak hypthesis (and a good example when people talk about "banning ideas!") - if someone said "Hey, we can't rule out the lab leak hypothesis", that's presenting an idea, not claiming something that hasn't been proven is true and I saw MANY people posting that without issue.

When people said "It was engineered in a lab to be more deadly to humans, and it leaked out" that's stating something as fact that had no definitive evidence, and would likely result in a "This may be untrue" labels.

dustinmoris2• 4 years ago

Literally just now as I was watching BBC Breakfast this is what was said on TV by two scientists who were interviewed almost daily for the last two years and portrayed as fact checkers and our sources of truth:

The Valneva vaccine was approved in the UK and might be very important because it trains our body against all proteins of the virus as opposed to just the spike protein which is what the AZ and Moderna/Pfizer vaccines were doing so far, so probably giving us better protection against future variants.

Cool... that sounds great and very logical. Body learns about the entirety of the virus and therefore will be better to fend off new variations of it in the future.

But that doesn't sound like some profound new scientific discovery we have made. This sounds like science 101 to me, so WHY did the same two scientists vehemently refuse to acknowledge in any shape or form that people who have had COVID-19 and therefore had been exposed to a huge viral load of the ENTIRE virus with all its proteins might have also acquired a better immune response than a vaccine which only trains your body against a single spike protein? It's the same principle, but because it was not WOKE to say the truth.

It's plain simple, we are all being brain washed with selective reporting and fake news and its enforced by social media so that critically thinking minds cannot undermine our increasingly more authoritarian governments which try to control our thinking in order to control our lives and get what they want - more powers in their favour.

RivieraKid2• 4 years ago

The key issue here is not content moderation or censorship but the possibility that someone like Musk gaining power over Twitter. Musk wants Twitter because he wants more power.

dalbasal3• 4 years ago

Like many liberty principles, free speech is a lot more complicated to implement as a ruleset than most proponents like to admit.

Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all.

Same goes for free speech.

The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated.

It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone.

Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement.

For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.

What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform?

This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.

reubens• 4 years ago

Strongly agree. I would be surprised if Elon himself doesn’t realise this, and is just using the phrase as a promotional tool. At the end of the day, he’s just hoping to buy a medium that has long term growth potential.

CryptoPunk3• 4 years ago

>For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.

Twitter acts as a public square, so people should be free to express themselves in any way they want, up to the limits of the law. We want Free Speech in places that act as public squares for the same reason we want the government to respect free speech: it is the only way to ensure critically important contrarian voices are not stifled.

Blocking/filtering algorithms should be open source, with every user free to implement any one that they want for their own feed.

madeofpalk4• 4 years ago

Twitter acts as a public square in the sense that there's basically no one there and only a fraction of the people actually talking.

People - mostly 'media types' - give Twitter and outsized amount of importance. Significantly more people 'use twitter' by way of journalists taking tweets off platform and talking about them in news/other sites for whatever reason.

troad• 4 years ago

To a degree you're right, but it's a somewhat navel-gazing point. There are circumstances where killing someone is legally and (arguably) ethically justified. (Defence, for example.) It's fine to adopt the principle "don't kill people" as an ideal, but - similarly to your point about free speech - it's naive to think an actual ruleset can derive from this ideal alone. Your point is reducible to "things are complicated", which - while true! - is kind of obvious.

No speech is unequivocally free, but there's certainly a gradient of more free to less free. I've spent time in North Korea, and boy was I glad when I crossed the Sinuiju-Dandong bridge back to China. And then on the other end of the scale there are things you can say in New York you could be prosecuted for in London. When someone says they want "free speech", they're saying they want to push the norms more towards the free end of the spectrum. It's fine to ask: "OK, how do we do that? What, specifically, does that entail in the present situation?" And those questions may entail compromises and nuances that aren't entirely satisfactory to everyone involved, while still all in all bolstering the ability to speak freely.

Free speech is messy and abstract, but it does exist in a meaningful sense, and there are concrete things that can bolster and weaken it. If someone says they want "more free speech", that's a meaningful political statement.

dalbasal3• 4 years ago

To a degree you're right, but it's a somewhat navel-gazing point.

With respect, nonsense.

My point is not ""free speech is complicated, there are exceptions".* This is not about shouting fire in a theatre.

It's about sloganized thinking. This then resolves to high-level, half baked "solutions" like adopting "constitutional free speech" or whatnot.

The laws used to determine if you go to jail are not suitable for determining what's allowable to say at work. You can legally tell "you suck" at The Rock on the street, but if you do it at a restaurant they will throw you out. Etc. Etc.

Currently, for all the idealistic takes about free speech online, there is nothing of practical use circulating. No protocol, pledge or method that twitter or any other site can adopt.

Free speech is currently an extremely vapid debate, all the worse for its shrill spectacle

Digital freedoms closely were at a high point 15-20 years ago. The WWW meant that mass digital communication was via a free and open protocol. Concepts like Wikipedia succeeded. Linux. OSS generally.

Those came with thought out, sometimes complex frameworks and philosophical ideas about freedoms.. eg FOSS.

The current free speech "drive" is, by comparison, sludge.

mrjangles2• 4 years ago

I couldn't agree more and I think the road the right takes with "free speech" is purely emotional and makes no sense.

What makes HN great isn't that there is free speech, it is that everyone is treated equally. The rules are the same no matter what your opinions. I really wish the people clamoring for free speech would use their heads instead of their hearts and realize that this is what they really want.

If Twitter openly said, "we ban anyone with a right of center opinion" then I would be perfectly happy. What bothers me is they lie about what they are doing. It tells me they know they are doing something wrong. It is really dark and manipulative what they are up to.

celdon25• 4 years ago

This guy's "take" made me cringe a bit with all the cliche arguments presented as if they were uniquely his.

akomtu• 4 years ago

This will be remembered as a historic battle for the Twitter Fortress between the Order of Control and the Order of Freedom. The fortress seems small, but its strategic location allows to steer speech in the kingdom. The King himself, who is a high ranked official in the Order of Control, has been taking a neutral position on public, but the knights of the Freedom look very determined this time and the King may have to unleash his royal army. Just like in the medieval ages, the King doesn't realise that it's his own people, the silent majority, who's fighting him: they've grown up and no longer need his "royal" permissions for anything.

anticristi• 4 years ago

May I express how annoying it is in the 21st century to read such a long prose in Twitter format? Feels like the UX is worse than paper newspaper.

p0d• 4 years ago

The creators of twitter, facebook were children who created a Frankenstein. They had no understanding of human nature. They have amplified good and more so evil. The mistake that people make is thinking that human nature is good by default

consumer451• 4 years ago

They had no understanding of human nature.

I find it impossible to believe that anyone who runs a social media site at any scale doesn't learn the truth, very quickly.

The whole "we just didn't know" explanation is such line of crap. Once you have a few thousand (maybe even few hundred) social users you will learn that some humans are psychopaths. This knowledge is unavoidable.

I would also like to point out that I disagree with lumping it all in as "human nature." When not brainwashed, humans are generally pretty agreeable, but we do have a significant number of psychopaths among us.

I don't buy the naivete explanation for a second, and no one else should either. That story only serves to hide the real explanations which are likely much more interesting.

nathias2• 4 years ago

This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet.

Free speech isn't from the 90s, or America. The mental gymnastics of people who have no principles but would still like to be seen as having them ...

throwawayacc2• 4 years ago

All my left-wing woke friends All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends

The woke mob would destroy him if he said something as taboo as “my alt right friends”. The mental censorship is so strong he can’t say it even for the sake of the example. But trust us, there’s actually no institutional bias!

jbverschoor• 4 years ago

I guess twitter contains a lot of data to feed to neuralink

langsoul-com• 4 years ago

Why can't he tweet the start and link to some blog for the rest. Instead of 50 stringed tweets :(

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

I don't know in which world this guy lives but after hours and hours of debate with both right wingers authoritarians and left wing authoritarians, right wingers complain about freedom of speech nowadays, left wingers complained about freedom of speech 15 years ago. As th Twitter thread mentions, 15 years ago it was about porn, gore and videogame - nowadays is about talking about your political ideas. I was firmly on the left side 15 years ago, nowadays the only left wing battle I support is drug liberalisation.

In the age of cancel culture I've heard of nobody on the left being persecuted for their ideas, at best I've heard them being criticised by the other side and they run successful campaigns to deplatform them.

My impression is that the educated substrata of society got progressively more left wing authoritarians (likely because of their strategic control of mainstream media and education) and nowadays all the 20-30 something that run big tech have certain authoritarians ideas painted as being virtuous. An authoritarian internet will undoubtedly raise kids who will be even more authoritarian than the current generation.

unixhero• 4 years ago

Who is Yishan?

arein32• 4 years ago

Bad take, disingenuous

nailer2• 4 years ago

they DONT CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don’t.

How was censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story not caring about politics? How is banning gender critical theory not caring about politics?

Yishan simply isn’t keeping up with twitter in the last few years.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

I find it very ironic how people who were fine with censuring people whose opinions they didn't like, repeating "free speech does not imply free reach" and "private companies can do as they please", are suddenly freaking out when there is a slight possibility that they might emerge on the censured side.

nailer2• 4 years ago

I honestly don’t think there is that possibility. Elon hasn’t discussed censoring the far left and I don’t think he cares or feels it’s productive to do so.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

I agree, that it is very unlikely to happen. But even the danger of losing the privileged position when the opposition is muffled it's already enough to feel threatened. This is deeply telling.

drnonsense422• 4 years ago

Yishan is trying to be impartial but some of that is bologna. What Elon really stands to lose is left-wingers leaving the platform in protest if a viable alternative emerges for the prominent figures to bring their audience over to. Right-wingers will come back in droves unless the platform dies altogether. Twitter would also get legislated to shreds in retaliation if the democrats have a strong majority + White House at any point in the future (assuming it maintains its relevancy).

But one part I really cannot reconcile is his capitalist interests and his free speech gambit are only potentially overlapping in the US. How many governments will put up with this crap or will many finally ban Twitter altogether? That statement even applies to democratic governments. That’s not going to increase his monetizable user base. Something’s got to give- and with a financed 43 billion it might be his morals. Perhaps he has another gameplan but it’s hard to imagine.

lvl102• 4 years ago

Elon Musk absolutely does not care about free speech. He’s no history of ever standing up for it. He doesn’t even understand what it means.

The fight over Twitter is about control. Control of narratives. And the price to do that right now, due to Twitter’s ridiculously bungled management, stands at $60-70B.

JacksonGariety• 4 years ago

This doesn't make sense. If Twitter isn't politically biased, then why do they have elite progressive news agencies doing fact-checking? If Twitter "doesn't censor topics, only behavior" then why do they explicitly state that they censor misinformation?

gverrilla• 4 years ago

So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private.

why is ":" out of use nowadays?

cloutchaser• 4 years ago

He’s right about the complexity of the problem.

He’s wrong about this being something equally affecting left and right. While I’m sure there’s plenty of extreme left wingers who have been banned, who are annoyed at Twitter, there is no left wing Hunter Biden laptop equivalent. There’s also no Donald Trump banning equivalent, even though there’s plenty of tweets from prominent politicians encouraging violence in the BLM times.

So no, it’s not just moderation.

Silicon Valley has picked a side, and it changing their businesses to suit that side.

heystefan• 4 years ago

"And the worst part, the part that is going to hurt ALL OF HUMANITY, is that this will distract from his mission at SpaceX and Tesla, because it's not just going to suck up his time and attention, IT WILL DAMAGE HIS PSYCHE."

Ugh, so cringy.

amelius• 4 years ago

Question: if someone built an alternative (e.g. open-source) version of Twitter, could the new EU regulation (see [1]) aid in forcing Twitter to interoperate with that new service?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement

tacosbane• 4 years ago

tldr; free speech is hard because regulating speech is impossible

JamesAdir• 4 years ago

This thread is ignoring one point - how social media companies manipulate the posts/tweets/reddits to create more engagement while promoting the most flaming and toxic debates and participants, since again it create more engagement. It's not that the fault lies on anonymous participants who can't behave. Their behavior is promoted by algorithms that look to trigger a response. Elon offer to make Twitter algorithms open source are one great step towards achieving a better Internet, even on social media.

Volker_W• 4 years ago

All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy... All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda...

Not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the difference seems to be that the left usually wants more censorship, and the right wants less censorship. The far right is usually mad that they got censored but only rarely mad that the left did not get censored. The far left is usually mad that the right did not get censored but only rarely mad that the far left did get censored.

Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.

Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive ... that the left, even when talking amongst themselves. Pacifists and civil talking people etc. are usually found on the left.

civilized• 4 years ago

Back when I was on Twitter, my biggest observation was that the left-right continuum doesn't necessarily help explain things very much by itself. You have to talk about specific coalitions and fan clubs. Here's a very incomplete list:

- On the right: right-wing journalists, right-wing podcast fans, Trump-heads, Cernovich-heads, Peterson-heads, Pepe avatars, right-wing anime avatars, ultra-trads, open neo-Nazis

- On the left: left-wing journalists, Tumblr fans, left-wing podcast fans, K-pop fans (this is a SURPRISINGLY large and powerful group), activist defenders of rights for various marginalized groups, left-wing anime avatars, nonprofit group figures, Antifa, tankies

On each side you have certain groups and certain subsets within those groups who use censorship or censorship-adjacent techniques, like mobbing, character assassination, public shaming, doxxing, or fabricating false and misleading narratives optimized for virality.

The biggest thing you want to avoid is getting into the gun-sights of anyone with a large following, left or right. Or someone who will work tirelessly to doxx or spread lies about you.

mrjangles2• 4 years ago

Well first, Twitter literally banned the President of the United States while allowing ISIS and other terrorist groups to have free reign. All this tells me is that one of your friend groups is perfectly happy lying to themselves about what is going on.

Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive

I am yet to see anyone on the right openly talking about murdering black people, whereas it is common for left wing twitter users to talk about murdering white people (remember the new editor for the New York Times had a number of tweets to that effect). Also, posting pictures of themselves with severed heads of their enemies while covered in blood seems like a thing among left wing users. I am in fact struggling to think of anything "rough" or "aggressive" from the right, even at the most extremes that comes close to the norm of the left on that platform.

lambdasquirrel• 4 years ago

The right's already got they wanted censored. Most people don't learn real American History until college. In my view, they're mad in part because the internet now exists, and people are reconsidering figures that maybe shouldn't have ever been put on a pedestal. And a lot of mistakes on the part of the police wouldn't have come to light without smartphones. The right needs to mount a counter-offensive to this. They've got "porn" censored in the media, but gratuitous depictions of gun violence is okay. What's okay to publish is very much biased for the right.

There are issues with the American left, but this isn't really it.

My issue with the right is that these grievances (amongst others) are legitimate, and instead of settling back, figuring it out politically, and doing better, a lot of folks decided that they rather just have power by any means, as if it's some pride thing. There ought to be folks from ethnic minorities (like myself) voting for some mix of both parties, but the politics of the right were unpalatable even before Jan 6. I could vote for folks like Schwarzeneggar, Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, but there's not many more. That's doubly a problem because you always need a counter-balance in Western democracies. I do not want to be voting down the column.

The left fights dirty and illegitimately in its own ways. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the right, but if you want some neutrality, it's in my view that the dirty fighting is questionable simply because I see it backfiring on both sides. The left creates their own bubble-chamber, which works against them.

If it weren't for gerrymandering securing safety seats for each political party (which ends up benefitting the extremes on both ends), I'd think everyone (including the folks at the "extremes") would be better off. Which isn't to let the moderates off the hook. Part of the reason why there's so much petty drama is because turnout at the primaries is what it is. We all need to take our responsibility in this drama and make things better. There's way too much intellectual laziness and/or regressing to narcissism going on.

memish3• 4 years ago

Paul Graham's response:

I read @yishan's thread about Twitter and agree, as I think anyone who's run a forum would, that Elon is "in for a world of pain," or at least for a type of pain both much nastier than hard engineering problems, and with far less upside as well.

Where I think he's mistaken is his claim that the left and right both want to ban each other roughly equally. Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right.

I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats.

It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html).

Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any.

The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left.

That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864

agloeregrets• 4 years ago

Paul Graham claiming to be left wing is some comical stuff.

daenz• 4 years ago

I made it through the whole thread. In my opinion this [0] is the crux of their argument. Essentially that some ideas are dangerous and cause bad behavior and that's why they're censored.

They also pine in for an old internet that was great because of free speech and something like that. They seem to forget that it was full of flame wars and people being terrible also.

Some of the language that they use indicates that this person views the users as lesser... As people that must be managed and shaped, and it's the leaders job to do that, despite the fact that the leaders are severely flawed.

I see their points, but they are looking at the problem purely through the lens of what has existed, and not through the lenses of what is possible. Elon is not that person, and so saying he's going to fail because no one has ever done it before doesn't really apply to Elon.

0. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514941586517336071?s=20&t...

dnsproxyserver• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/yishan

vivekd• 4 years ago

so in the thread he talks about;how ideas can be lightning rods' He says

That is just an unpleasant, inconvenient truth that all of you (regardless of your political leaning) need to accept about speech. Ideas really ARE powerful, and like anything else that is powerful, yes, they can be DANGEROUS.

thats the basis of free speech and the reason some people want to protect it. These guys dont agree with it and thats fine. I mean there are good reasons someone might disagree with free speech. But I mean be honest, be honest about what the debate is. Dont say you support free speech but some ideas can be dangerous. Just say you dont agree with giving everyone free speech at all times and have an honest conversation about that instead of spewing that silicon valley doublespeak

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

Looks like he's ok with everybody out there, except religious conservatives.

I wonder if he sees the blind spot.

hitovst• 4 years ago

I'm sure Elon is aware of this, but he should be prepared to deal with those who oppose freedom, and who flood platforms that do not restrict speech with the most disgusting, degenerate, awful, things possible. There are ways of managing this, but it will turn decent people away. It would be challenging to tolerate them on your own platform, and it is undesirable to use these platforms if you don't have to. There's the rub. The vast majority of, let's call it "communication", on the web is noise. The next largest portion is nonsense. We get all manner of stuff that is unimportant, and then we get the tiny percentage that is stuff that matters, or would matter, if anyone could find it.

The chicken and egg at the center of hope for humanity is the protection of free speech, and right to bear arms. One protects the other, and they both protect everything else.

We have an incredible need for truth, and for insight into what the world's most dangerous people are doing, while virtually all programming is intended to leave people disinterested in the info and condemning of the messengers.

There is a tactic that has not been used against the enemies of humanity, and their flooding any signal with noise..

Every individual has the right to speak freely, with few exceptions. One of them that used to be taught to kids is, "but, you can't shout "FIRE" in a theater when there isn't one". In other words, we're not allowed to communicate lies with the intention of terrorism.

Every individual has freedom of "press". The liars which own "media" (and the reason why Elon is interested in Twitter, and the liars are interested in preventing it) would have you believe that they are press, and you are not... when the truth is liars are not "press", and anyone communicating the truth is.

I have no idea how it would be achieved, but anyone running a free platform these days should look into eliminating liars from it. If anything good could come from AI, it might be the elimination of those useful idiots from platforms who use and tolerate logical fallacies.. but, one step at a time.

alophawen2• 4 years ago

You should probably start a blog instead.

DrBoring• 4 years ago

My premesis for any time I try to predict Elon Musk's motivations are: 1 his primary goal is to advance humanity, and 2 he is partially a Randian Objectionist.

I also make the presumptuous guess that his actions are often aimed at making money to fund his endeavors to venture into space etc.

He doesn't have the ability to fund his plan using the tax dollars (productive wealth) of a whole county's people, so to fund his goals, he skirts the laws to gain capital via various speculative bets.

I theorize that his absurd behavior is a ruse. He knows what he is doing. He plays the role of idiot rich kid to get people to underestimate him.

Based on these premesis, I theorize that his reason for buying Twitter is to either as a vehicle to fund his humanity aspirations. Whether it's a long term investment, or some cash grab, I don't know. I'm not knowledgeable enough on the financial probabilities of Twitter to make that call.

Working from the assumption that is interest in Twitter is part of his plan to advance humanity, I would say he wants it for it's user population. He wants to stear them from the toxic community which they sometimes are into something more productive. Think of the changes we've seen at stackoverflow in which they have tried to steer communication into a more friendly place for new members. I could imagine changes to the Twitter ui that would encourage users to reflect upon the words they are about to post.

skoczko• 4 years ago

It is some hilariously contrived premise that Elon Musk is going to "democratize" Twitter by taking it private. It's almost as contrived as Putin sending "peacekeeping and de-nazifying" forces to Ukraine. (If you're wondering why this unusual association occurred to me, it's because I saw a video with Musk saying that he's likely the second wealthiest man after Putin).

Why do we (the public) always fall for the "powerful men" type, be it billionaires or despots, promising to fix all our problems?. This is the antithesis of democracy. Democracy is slow, painful and often mistaken but the added value is that few people get shot on the street. Twitter under Musk will be like the Mad Max's Thunderdome.

My take on Elon's offer for Twitter

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