Comment by alt227
5 days ago
To be honest, I have no idea what opinion you are trying to form here. You are twisting and turning my words all over the place and I am unable to gather your thoughts into a coherent point.
You seem to be trying to pin me down to an opinion, and Im not really sure why. Do I, a random person on the internet, matter to you that much that you need to clarify my exact opinion on stuff?
Sure, let me summarize.
Your position:
>Your position:
>… t and 'protect' their audience from it. That IMO is anti free speech, as the 'protect' part of the term is abiguous/subjective and depends on the beliefs/opinions of the gatekeepers.
Your position ignores the rights given to firms to run their business, and the choice of their speech via citizens united.
Firms have a right to do what they please, as long as it is legal.
You dont like what firms do.
You want to make them behave a certain way. You are asking the government to force them to do so.
This kills free speech.
——- The position that you set up, is inherently in contradiction to the norms of reality. I am a policy person and understand the trade offs here intimately, which is leading to me playing fast and loose, resulting in confusion.
And yes - you matter to me. Why shouldn’t you? You seem intelligent, or if not, you value looking intelligent.
It would be interesting to see how you resolve the contradiction that your position throws up.
———
Fair enough.
> You want to make them behave a certain way. You are asking the government to force them to do so.
Im actually not doing that. I dont know where I gave you that impression but I do not believe the government should force any company to allow full free speech on their commercial platform.
> Your position ignores the rights given to firms to run their business, and the choice of their speech via citizens united.
We are talking about twitter here in this context, which has been many times quoted as saying they are upholding free speech. The opinions you are referencing here apply to that company because that is what they state. Im not talking about all companies and their right to control what people say on their platforms, I feel this is more of an ideological discussion around Twitter/any social media which claims to uphold free speech in their public forum.
Therefore the contradiction does not really exist IMO, because they are being held to their own values and not mine.
Interesting thought experiment, I enjoyed chewing that over for a bit. Thanks :)
Ok. Sure, so I think my error was based on my over extrapolation from this:
>people here that gatekeepers (companies) should have the power to decide that and 'protect' their audience from it. That IMO is anti free speech, as the 'protect' part of the term is abiguous/subjective and depends on the beliefs/opinions of the gatekeepers.
Gatekeeping would be a right of platforms and I assumed that combating it would involve forcing them to behave in accordance with an external force.
And Since you are discussing only twitter, it does follow that Twitter has an anti-speech position, despite their stated intentions.
——-
For a bit more fun, I think what X was proclaiming is the naive version of free speech. The kind of “anyone can make this app” naive over generalization.
I have a mechanism which allows me to balance the needs of moderation and censorship with free speech. Its an interesting exercise, I think you might like working through it.
From personal experience - I have had to ban people, and it was a form of censorship. Resolving this contradiction effectively changed my career path.
So I have a 1000 users on my forum. One user is incredibly active, and spends their time abusing a specific local minority group.
Things like X minority needs to die, not arguing in good faith.
Now, ideally I shouldn’t ban him, and let counter speech do its things. But since they aren’t arguing in good faith, counter speech doesn’t work.
Over time, this is also creating second order effects in other conversations.
It’s attracting a new kind of user, its driving conversations to be more polarized, and its reducing time spent on longer more thoughtful posts.
How would you respond, and why?