Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 1001 posts

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#91

Post by ceejayoz »

yboris wrote: post #37
koolba wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is lack of consensus not the inevitable outcome of a widely diverse committee? That sounds fine to me if there’s actually a diverse set of view points. Getting censored should require a wide swathe of agreement. Not just a vocal minority.

They could implement quadratic voting which may solve the challenge of getting people to more-correctly express their intensity of concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting

Imagine trying to explain this complex of a voting system to the folks whose argument the election was rigged sometimes boiled down to "I saw more Trump signs, so Biden can't have gotten votes".

The more complex the system, the less it'll be trusted; something with "quadratic" in the name is gonna make eyes glaze over.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#92

Post by UncleOxidant »

PaulsWallet wrote: post #77
rootusrootus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, sure. The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. We need to stop letting the 1% of people who bother to post online drive our national dialog. We have put the crazies in charge of the asylum.

> The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. The person who could arguably be considered the third most powerful politician in the US just had their own broken into and their spouse assaulted in a suspected act of domestic terrorism. I wouldn't say "imminent" but if you don't think the possibility is at least somewhere on the table I would consider that being naive.

And you've got MAGA "prophets" out there "prophesying" about the "Angel of Death" visiting their political opponents before the end of 2022.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#93

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

PaulsWallet wrote: post #77
rootusrootus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, sure. The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. We need to stop letting the 1% of people who bother to post online drive our national dialog. We have put the crazies in charge of the asylum.

> The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. The person who could arguably be considered the third most powerful politician in the US just had their own broken into and their spouse assaulted in a suspected act of domestic terrorism. I wouldn't say "imminent" but if you don't think the possibility is at least somewhere on the table I would consider that being naive.

I really don't think there's a straight line from this kind of lone-wolf domestic terrorism to civil war. A civil war happens when people who aren't mentally unstable, normal people just like you and I, decide that suchandsuch political objective is so important that our fellow citizens have to be shot in order to achieve it. If that seems like a crazy idea to you (it certianly does to me!) then a civil war isn't yet on the table.

A period of severe unrest like we had in the 60s? That's definitely a possibility.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#94

Post by 1123581321 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #47
rootusrootus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, sure. The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. We need to stop letting the 1% of people who bother to post online drive our national dialog. We have put the crazies in charge of the asylum.

> In the real world, sure. Can you point at one? A council with "widely diverse viewpoints" that is actually an effective, tie-braking decision maker?

Judge panels (like SCOTUS), county boards, city councils, school boards, non-profit boards and councils, corporate boards.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#95

Post by mikkergp »

duxup wrote: post #50
mikkergp wrote: post #7

This sort of justifies the viewpoint that despite all his bluster, Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds. Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers. Keep moderating content to reduce abuse, maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience. (probably less action on more…

>maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience It's either going to be a double standard or not. I moderated a busy gaming site for years. Users have nothing to do but re-post what got someone else banned and then complain things aren't consistent. I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.

I mean, if you think that “everyone is happy with Elon’s content moderation strategies” was one of the possible outcomes, well then I disagree, I think Elon is going to take heat for content moderation across the political spectrum.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#96

Post by pjkundert »

marstall wrote: post #85
pjkundert wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be, if Elon implements effective agent-based clustering, such as with K-Means Clustering. "Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it. But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "…

How does that help? The whole problem is that twitter provides a platform to legitimize hate speech by spreading it to like-minded people and thereby emboldening them. clustering does exactly that, but shields bad actors with a cloak of secrecy.

There's no secrecy. The FBI can (and should) infiltrate these groups (just like their tweets, and you're in), and then arrest them for their illegal behavior. And, limited in-real-life moderation of illegal posts can be focused on where the crazy people hang out. It should be a win.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#97

Post by rootusrootus »

PaulsWallet wrote: post #77
rootusrootus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, sure. The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. We need to stop letting the 1% of people who bother to post online drive our national dialog. We have put the crazies in charge of the asylum.

> The Internet would have us believe that civil war is imminent. The person who could arguably be considered the third most powerful politician in the US just had their own broken into and their spouse assaulted in a suspected act of domestic terrorism. I wouldn't say "imminent" but if you don't think the possibility is at least somewhere on the table I would consider that being naive.

I don't want to call it insignificant, but the US has a long history of more significant political violence that did not signal impending civil war. With a nation of 330M people, there are going to be a rather large number (in absolute numbers) that are unhinged.

If anything, it's kind of amazing that the combination of a large population, low regulation, and easy access to firearms hasn't resulted in more violence than it has.

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#98

Post by uniqueuid »

denton-scratch wrote: post #80
uniqueuid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most important worry. Populism from the far right has adopted a strategy of re-defining key terms such as nation, citizen, fairness, representation. Under these conditions, a highly diverse council will either not be able to decide or will need to decide in favor of maximum leniency. By the way, Adam Curtis made this point in his documentary "HyperNormalisation", where he argued that Trump had hijacked "f…

Redefining terms seems new, but it's a traditional rhetorical tactic. I think it's on the uprise. I think it's a sneaky, deceptive tactic. I'm a big admirer of Adam Curtis's films!

True, it's not entirely new. But re-defining concepts that are fundamental to democracy has bad consequences. Jan-Werner Müller has written about this in his book "Democracy Works":

“Now, it’s true that populists, when in opposition, criticize sitting governments (and, usually, also other parties). But, above all, they do something else, and that is crucial: in one way or another, they claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people” or also the “silent majority.” At first sight, this might not look particularly nefarious; it does not immediately amount to, let’s say, racism or a fanatical hatred of the European Union or, for that matter, the declaring of judges and particular media “enemies of the people.” And yet this claim to a distinctly moral monopoly of representation has two detrimental consequences for democracy. Rather obviously, once populists assert that only they represent the people, they also charge that all other contenders for office are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a matter of disputes about policy, or even about values; such disagreements, after all, are completely normal and, ideally, even productive in a democratic polity. Rather, populists assert that their rivals are corrupt and simply fail to serve the interests of the people on account of their bad, or indeed “crooked,” character. ”

Re: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints”

#99

Post by wahnfrieden »

mjr00 wrote: post #55
addingadimensio wrote: post #20

It would be amazing if a council with diverse viewpoints could even sit together without killing each other in this day and age. Does this exist anywhere?

Yes, this is how social interaction in the real world, or even smaller online communities, has worked for ages. It's only on pseudonymous mega-sites like Twitter, Reddit and HN where jumping down people's throats for having an opposing viewpoint is even a thing.

the hypothesis that attaching real names to posts improves civility is over ten years out of date
Post reply on HN