[deleted]
Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
851–860 of 975 posts
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
This to me is a vital point. One of the things rarely touched on about Twitter / FB et al are that they are transmission platforms and then a discovery / recommendation layer on top. The "algorithm" is this layer on top and it is assumed that this actively sorts people into their bubbles and people passively follow - there is much discussion about splitting the companies AT&T style to improve matters. But countries w…
I think this gets almost all the way there but not quite — there is one more vital point: How we act depends on our environment and incentives. It is possible to build environments and incentives that make us better versions of ourselves. Just like GPT-3, we can all be primed (and we all are primed all the time, by every system we use). The way we got from small tribes to huge civilizations is by figuring out how to…
How do you go about determining what is collaborative or "bridging" discourse, though? That seems like a tricky task. You have to first identify the topic being discussed and then make assumptions based on past user metrics about what their biases are. Seems like you would have to have a lot of pre-existing data specific to each user before you could proceed. Nascent social networks couldn't pull this off.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and thereby appear to be passively endorsing the behavior). This “passive endorsing” is a great social construct! It allows anybody to go after TMobile for passively endorsing all the lies I said to pretty women over the phone.
That seems like a bit of a strawman. There's a pretty significant difference between public and private speech. Regardless, I'm not arguing what or when these platforms should censor. Just trying to explain why certain content on a platform could cause someone to choose to stop using that platform, even if they're not personally exposed to that content.
> Just trying to explain why certain content on a platform could cause someone to choose to stop using that platform, even if they're not personally exposed to that content.
This explanation seems pretty strange to me.
1. If I am not exposed to some content - how do I know that it exist?
2. If I see that platform does not delete an objectionable content and does not force me to contact it - I would feel much safer in re that my non-objectionable would not be deleted too.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#854In the US, where Twitter & Facebook are dominant, the current consensus in the public mind is that political polarization and radicalization are driven by the social media algorithms. However, I have always felt that this explanation was lacking. Here in Brazil we have many of the same problems but the dominant social media are Whatsapp group chats, which have no algorithms whatsoever (other than invisible spam filte…
This point he made aligns with non-specific features of user behavior: > "In fact, once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in?" However, I think discussions of controversial subjects often fall under 'this content is a problem' type of thinking. I was banned from all the major Reddit Covi…
you've been banned from EVERY major subreddit on all of those topics
and you were just "politely noting" things?
I struggle to believe you. Especially the one about noting economic causes of war...
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#855I wish we could all go back to phpBB forums. Small, dedicated, online communities were great. I can't remember massive problems like this back then.
As a moderator of one of such forums, all of the behavioural issues have been a staple there too. We always had to moderate not just spam, racism and insults, but also "that dude that rants about his pet peeve in every topic", "that dude that rants over Apple even in topics where someone is asking how to change keyboard layout in macos", "that dude that's obviously mentally ill" and many others.
It was always a job of ensuring a comfortable environment for the community gathering on the forum and it did require "censorship" beyond obvious to prevent a minority of users from souring the environment for everyone.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#856Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more nuanced than that. Social media has created watering holes for everything. Once communities of people who earnestly believe crazy shit. If you believed in alien lizard people controlling the world or in 1980, your options to collaborate with fellow lunatics were limited. Today, that’s a real thing with followers.
Not that limited. People like LaRouche managed.
yes but not anyone with an computing device could. Today he can easily start a group on social media and spread this thoughts and idea.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#857If you take a look and analyze the people that were fired, you will find developers who cannot code, people who run Bitcoin nodes on company electricity, people with no skills or qualification for what they do. Elon Musk is trying to implement a meritocracy, it remains to be seen if he will do it right or botch it.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#858Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good. The reality is everyone , myself included, can be and will be a bad actor. How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the…
>How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
That's...that's not a problem.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#859Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not the algorithms. It is the internet itself. The internet enables multicast communication, whereas before we could only afford broadcast communication. Broadcast requires the same message to be sent to all, so it forces that message to be moderate and non-polarizing. We always harbored the ability to be polarized according to our beliefs, but the technology didn't yet exist to allow that.
I believe the underlying problem is the actual human programming deep in our genes. People tend to get organized in clans (i.e. football teams in Europe, political parties etc) and to host polarized opinions such as conspiracy theories that tend to question the status quo. There are two reasons for that: 1. Psychological Reason: It is tempting for an non educated man to adopt an opinion that derides existing knowledg…
This seems to imply that the educated man is always right and should not be questioned by others. Regardless of the education level of the questioner (or of the educated man), I can't see that being a good thing.
Re: Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually went into a deep dive of any statistical efforts that showed bans on twitter based on American political leanings. Apparently in both studies I found the most statistically significant user behavior for bans was if the user had a tendency to post articles from low quality online ”news” sites. So essentially even the political controversy around moderation boils down to the fact that one side, the right, is…
The first concern is identifying "fake news". One of the biggest political news stories of 2020, Hunter Biden's laptop, was falsely declared misinformation, and the NY Post was accused of being a low quality site. Now we know it's true. On the other hand, the Steele Dossier was considered legitimate news at the time and "many of the dossier’s most explosive claims...have never materialized or have been proved false."…
As mentioned elsewhere, the laptop story was not restricted for being misinformation, it was restricted due to Twitter's policy (at the time) on hacked materials.
Some background: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/16/twitter-fixes-bad-policy...
It was a policy that had previously received criticism, and had already come into play in a significant story: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/16/content-moderation-case-...
And, following the laptop story, Twitter changed their policy on hacked materials.
And that's the thing with content moderation - specific examples of content moderation often themselves go viral, but often also shed the actual context of said moderation (as was the case in your example), and thus feed into existing narratives around bias in content moderation. With full context, one might still disagree with the policy, but the narrative falls away.