71–80 of 352 posts
People want an algorithm for how to moderate speech. But there's no such thing. You just need people with good judgement and it's hard to define what good judgement is. HN has it. Previous twitter did not have good judgement. It had a left-bias and banned people for saying things like "there are two genders" and "men aren't women tho". It also banned various accounts for jokes (prominently Babylon Bee, a right-wing T…
@dang is the GOAT.
90% of the problems come from laws not people. Except the CSAM laws (which are justified as they relate to real physical harm), I think all other laws shouldn't have existed. DMCA, hate speech, mocking presidents, it's all the same. If you're dealing with law might as well just pay good lawyers and stick to your principles instead of gently bending over.
I wish some small country would promise not to interfere with content moderation. I'd host all my stuff there and maybe even move there When I worked in a russian hosting provider a decade ago, I saw a glimpse of censorship, very small compared to current level. We received a message that some page on a small news website is illegal, because it "provides information on how to commit suicide", which was considered ina…
Doesn't banning Kanye West from the platform go against his whole "free speech" thing? The absolutists say that there should just be more free speech to drown out the hateful speech. Why isn't he just encouraging people to drown it out instead? I find the unlimited free speech arguments to be disingenuous and lazy most of the time. There's always a limit to speech, and it's not easy to find. That doesn't mean we shou…
Yes it does, at least in the United States... but I imagine he determined that free speech has limits in other parts of the world.
For example, I had set my region to Germany because Twitter would automatically block more content for German users (due to Nazi content being illegal in Germany).
So, is your imaginary conclusion that Elon has changed Twitter's policy from: "speech is restricted for users in a locale according to the local laws" to "speech is restricted platform wide according based on the most restrictive laws that exist in the world"?
It would seem very anti-free speech to me if this new system allows China to determine which content is available on Twitter, or we impose the UK's onerous libel laws on all American users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not relevant. Was his post blocked in those countries?
It is very relevant. His posts were blocked in every country (by removing his account). As an american, I dont expect to be banned from a social media company (ran in my country no less) because of a speech law halfway around the world. Elon isn't following policies, he is following his whim. The problem with that is all the previous moderation statements he made did not align with this banning.
90% of the problems come from laws not people. Except the CSAM laws (which are justified as they relate to real physical harm), I think all other laws shouldn't have existed. DMCA, hate speech, mocking presidents, it's all the same. If you're dealing with law might as well just pay good lawyers and stick to your principles instead of gently bending over.
> hate speech is constitutionally-protected free speech. > mocking presidents ditto. The only things that are actively illegal in the US on the list in the article are CSAM and copyright infringement. There are examples that are illegal in other countries, but in the US, vanishingly little speech can be illegal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swastika is illegal in many countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bans_on_Nazi_symbols
Did he post a swastika? I'm not aware of what exactly got him banned. Wasn't Elon talking about the US anyway? Political speech itself is banned in many countries, so surely that wasn't his measure.
The rapper said: “I see good things about Hitler … Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
Jones replied: “The Nazis were thugs.”
“But they did good things too,” Ye said. “We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
“Oh my goodness … just because you don’t like one group doesn’t mean –” Jones said, clearly uncomfortable. Ye interrupted: “I love Jewish people. But I also love Nazis.”
“I don’t think Hitler was a good guy,” Jones stated later. Ye replied: “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things.”
Doesn't banning Kanye West from the platform go against his whole "free speech" thing? The absolutists say that there should just be more free speech to drown out the hateful speech. Why isn't he just encouraging people to drown it out instead? I find the unlimited free speech arguments to be disingenuous and lazy most of the time. There's always a limit to speech, and it's not easy to find. That doesn't mean we shou…
In this particular context it's rather about commerce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered, what are people like you doing on HN anyway, a forum that is really far away from any notion of free speech.
Relative to other large social media sites (reddit, Tumblr, Twitter pre-Elon, etc.) HN is a bastion of free speech. Reddit being possibly the least free of them all.
He probably got scared by advertisers or Apple or something. Ideally in my opinion, Twitter should have a setting by default that hides all of that content, but if you disable it you get 4chan-like moderation (so anything that's legal). In countries with a lesser degree of freedom of speech (I think swastikas are illegal in Germany for example), you wouldn't be able to disable that setting.
My idea, which I've posted before, is that you require users to pay to turn off the filter. (After all, if they're bad for ad revenue, they can't be "the product".) This also mostly enforces region-locking, at least requiring some effort to bypass.
Doesn't banning Kanye West from the platform go against his whole "free speech" thing? The absolutists say that there should just be more free speech to drown out the hateful speech. Why isn't he just encouraging people to drown it out instead? I find the unlimited free speech arguments to be disingenuous and lazy most of the time. There's always a limit to speech, and it's not easy to find. That doesn't mean we shou…
Kanye posted some really super antisemetic things. At one point, he posted a picture of a swastika overtop of a star of David.
Then he posted an unflattering picture of Elon Musk- and was banned within minutes.
When Elon Musk says "free speech" he means "free speech for me, not for thee". You can say anything you like, as long as Elon likes it too.