Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

This is the amazing thing Yishan misses. He claims there's no difference between spam filtering, moderation and censorship.

How come he's been in charge at reddit all these years and never looked at it through the lens of "consent"?

Ask, can you consent to this? For spam filtering, the answer is obviously hell yes. That's pretty much how we define spam: stuff we don't want, and which essentially no one wants.

Moderation is when it's still about you and what you want for yourself, but where you concede that some people may want it. And it may be more or less OK that some people want it, but this is not the place for it. If you don't want religion or politics in your game discussion group, that's moderation.

Censorship is about controlling what other people want, in order to shape their opinions and beliefs. You can't coherently consent to it. You're not worried that there's some magically seductive piece of propaganda that will turn you into a Nazi, or a furry for that matter. No, you're worried that there's a seductive piece of propaganda that will work on other people. That's the defining aspect of censorship, that it's for other people's sake, not your own.

Now, censors will often claim that they're only doing it for themselves, that they just get so disgusted by furries (or whatever) that they just don't want to deal with it. A way to test that, is to see how transparent they are about their supposed moderation. If it's moderation, being transparent about it is perfectly fine. But for the censor, transparency is not possible, because even letting the poor flock know that the seductive information exists, could tempt them to go look for it.

Another way, of course, is whether they are content with moderating their own spaces. People that try their damndest to eliminate the thing they hate from existence with DDoS attacks, targeted harassment, or preventing communication they're not even a party to, are obviously censorious, not merely "moderating".

Now, there's a separate discussion of when, if ever, it's appropriate to censor. Maybe if we're talking about people who can't meaningfully consent and are easily manipulated (i.e. children). Maybe if there's some sort of existential issue at stake (e.g. national security).

But let's not pretend, like Yishan Wong does, that consent doesn't matter.

Point-by-point rebuttals are probably very annoying for the moderators, but knowing what actually gets moderated makes working with the rules easier. Imagine acting in a society where an often-invisible police enforces secret laws, you can blindly appeal, but you don't get to know what they're alleging you did, you don't get to defend yourself, the court is held in secrecy, and it's being made up entirely from members of the police. Predicting what is desired and then being maximally conformist is the safe way, or you just roll the dice, act the way you want, and hope that the secret police is similar enough to you that they'll tolerate it.

because HN users in royal we strongly believes in an automated technocracy by means of evolutionarily derived information technology techniques. This is a pseudo-religion without a sound scientific basis. Which I have my faith with by the way.

You’re minimizing the entire idea of content moderation to a profanity filter and boobs. Kind of missing the broader picture here.

> The Hunter Biden story is significant because there are emails which suggest Hunter Biden had ties to foreign companies that wanted access to his father. This could be grounds for a criminal case implicating his father. Now, in a sane society during a less polarized election, this would have been discussed in the open, and people would make cases as to the relevance or irrelevance of the evidence, relevance to Joe Biden specifically, and whether the evidence merits investigation through proper channels in an open and transparent way.

I agree with that in principle. The idea that a presidential candidate's son has obviously nepotistic business appointments in industries and countries that he has no business being in presents a facial conflict of interest and should invite a debate on quid pro quo corruption. I would say these kinds of stories are a feature of both political parties in the U.S. and across a wide swath of time -- this is effectively the same role as the Clinton Foundation played in the previous election, for instance. And I think it makes sense to debate or investigate this kind of thing in public, including during the election. In fact, Hunter Biden's role in these companies was scrutinized to some degree earlier in the presidential election and also in the primary and also indeed over the last four years. So I reject the notion on the right that this is an issue that "could not" be discussed because "the elites" suppressed the discussion. My sense is that the eventual conclusion was what it seemed from the very beginning: Hunter Biden is a colossal fuckup, everyone around him tried to help him not be a fuckup, he kept being a fuckup, and it should be to no one's surprise that he tried to leverage his father even though there's no to limited evidence any such quid pro quo occurred.

The laptop, though, is a pretty complicated thing. It feels more like a direct parallel to the Podesta email hacking in the 2016 election (which, among other things, spawned Pizzagate). Bad actors (in 2016, foreign intelligence; in 2020, a domestic political adversary) took steps to secure a large cache of material, potentially by committing crimes to do so, and released it to the public on the very eve of a presidential election as an October surprise. The framing of the stories on the right was that the _existence_ of the material (emails in 2016, laptop in 2020) was proof that the allegations against the candidate were true, even though basically none of the material seems at all connected to the allegations.

Furthermore, the nature of the release was that the people who secured the damaging material obfuscated and laundered it. The press had neither the time nor the resources necessary to verify the contents of the material. Finally, the biggest risk was that large amounts of true material would be combined with knowingly fabricated material in a way that laundered the reputation of the false material. This is hardly an empty false flag thing, it's literally exactly what a nefarious actor _should_ do if they come into possession of huge amounts of stolen material to make the greatest impact.

Although the reactions to the Hunter Biden story were overreactions, that's the framework that I think people had adopted. I think people were thinking back to the Podesta email hack and to the FBI confirmation of the Weiner stuff causing a significant late disruption in 2016 election and wanting to avoid the possibility of a similar disruption here. And I think in principle there is a responsibility to avoid this kind of chaos: for instance, if a candidate is accused of a heinous crime (say rape or murder) the day before an election, it is possible both that the accusation would have a serious impact on the election and that not enough time exists to validate, refute, or contextualize it.

I can't say the exact length of time before an election that should be a sundown period, informally or formally, but I just recognize that you might imagine some combination of late breaking, serious, and difficult to verify that would merit a deliberate choice to not interfere with the election. The same thing occurred in France about 36 hours before the 2017 presidential election: Huge cache of Macron emails were hacked and distributed (probably by foreign intelligence). Opponents of Macron said, without evidence, that this was proof of Macron's perfidy and would sink him. The media generally refused to engage the story because it was the fruit of a poison tree and 36 hours is not enough time to work it out. The far-right party noted that this was censorship and the end of free speech and investigative journalism is over.

The only winner in a situation like this are the agents of chaos.