Decentralised content moderation

-Devils Advocate

> I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on their premises as they see fit.

Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'. The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.

> If they do a poor job, I can just avoid using their services.

Issues arise when the poor job spills over outside their service. As an example, The people who live around the US Capitol endangered by pipe bombs in part because of incitement organised on Twitter.

> Isn't it just an example of democratic content moderation

A democracy makes great efforts to ensure 1 person = 1 vote. Online platforms do not.

> I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is good or bad, re: context.

There's a ton of material on that subject, thankfully; look at news groups, HN itself (flagging), Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky's blogs on Discourse, etc etc etc. My girlfriend is active on Twitter and frequently joins in mass reporting of certain content, which is both a strong signal, and easily influenced by mobs.

Good piece. This line articulates the problem well: "without objectivity and consistency, moderation can easily degenerate into a situation where one group of people forces their opinions on everyone else, like them or not." And it gets to the core of the problem. Objectivity and consistency are extremely difficult to scale and maintain over time. They require constant reinforcement from environment, context, and culture.

Let's take one step back. Just like in the Title I vs Title II debate, let's go one step earlier. WHY do we have these issues in the first place?

It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever.

Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am.

Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't...

Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook.

Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line.

Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform. You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have?

Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!