Tim Miller has some smart thoughts on the current brouhaha over moderation at Twitter and elsewhere:
A couple years ago when chinless Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched Gettr, one of the myriad alt-right “free speech” social media platforms, I wrote about the pitfalls he was going to face and summed up his challenge this way:
The question has persisted for sites big and small since the days of the very first usenet groups: How do you balance user experience with the internet’s promise of unhindered expression?
This is the great content moderation paradox. Gettr crashed and burned in its attempts to navigate it. But Miller wasn’t alone. From scammers to bots to trolls to obnoxious jerks to impersonation to threats (and what constitutes a threat) to sending “assassination coordinates,” countless forum moderators have failed to come up with a clean answer. Some have done better than others. All have failed to please everyone.
If you allow completely unfettered speech, your forum becomes a wasteland for the dregs of society. If you over-moderate, some users will get upset and accuse you of stifling them. There’s no winning. In fact what is happening right now, today, on Twitter is really just a high-visibility replica of the fight that brought down my beloved GWHoops.com which eventually collapsed when the annoying, harassing, imposters became too big of a hassle for the post-and-let-post head-man in charge.
The best we can ask for is people at the helm who try in good faith to navigate this paradox in a manner that engenders trust—even if every decision is ultimately unsatisfying.
This has been my big problem with the “Twitter Files” brouhaha. The journalists participating in it treat the moderation question as if there is an obvious pro-free speech answer that Jack Dorsey et al. refused to implement because of their bias. They seem to think that there was some fundamental corruption in the old guard that needs to be rooted out and brought to light.
But to observers whose brains haven’t been broken by the message-board wars, what actually happened is quite run of the mill. Twitter was run by human beings who, like all human beings, have inherent biases (in this case, mostly liberal) and they were doing the best they could to solve an unsolvable puzzle.
Consider: When you strip everything down to the most basic facts, what did the previous Twitter moderation regime do?
They tried to crack down on the hate speech, harassment, Russian bots, and impersonators which flooded the platform in 2016. They had some success in this regard, driving the worst offenders to different social media platforms that were more welcoming to their hateful speech—to the relief of the site’s core users. As part of this process Twitter made one pretty clear screw-up: delinking a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after wrongly assuming it was part of a Russian plot. In less than two days Twitter remedied that error and apologized for it.
They also had one very high-profile judgment call: What were they supposed to do about a lame-duck president who had just sicced a mob on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to execute America’s first coup d’etat? In the face of this unprecedented situation Twitter banned him from the platform. Say what you will about this choice—and certainly it was undermined by Twitter not holding other autocrats to the same standard—any reasonable observer would concede it was defensible.
As a result of these moves, many on the right criticized Twitter’s management for overreach. Twitter made some changes to address its worst excesses and multiple competitors offering town squares more accommodating to right-wing hate speech sprouted up as alternatives.
Not a bad outcome, right?
Well, a handful of supposed free-speech absolutists were enraged by it. So the old guard at Twitter was replaced by a mad king who purchased the site so that he could implement different policies. His solution has been to reopen Twitter’s pearly gates to Nazis while indiscriminately banning users who offend him—most recently for tweeting links to public information about his private jet (a practice that is common to anyone familiar with college football coaching searches).
This, to me, does not seem like much of an improvement? Not because I am upset that Musk has chosen to employ content-moderation policies. But because I think his moderation priorities are stupid. Hopefully the public outcry will result in Musk doing exactly what Dorsey did: backing off from his worst decisions in an attempt to make the platform maximally useful to the largest number of users. (I am not optimistic, but we’ll see.)
I’m not optimistic either unless he finds a way to unload the thing. It’s driving him crazy and he’s acting in impulsive eccentric ways. It’s his $44 billion toy and he can do with it what he wants.
As for moderation, it’s just a Miller says. It’s necessary and very, very difficult. I went though it on a tiny scale with this site about 10 years ago and ended up removing comments and have never looked back. I didn’t want to but I was being overrun by trolls day in and day out and didn’t have the time to spend moderating the space. Once that happens the community is broken and even people who just want to read what you write are drawn into the fray and the whole place goes to hell. It’s a real challenge to keep your head in that cacophony.
I don’t think social media is going anywhere. But the first generations of Facebook and twitter may not go the distance. But there will be new ones to take their place.
Musk now says that you are not allowed to link to your other social media sites on twitter and will be banned if you do. This is a remarkably petty thing to do but he’s obviously a very petty man.
If you want to find me on those alternatives you can do so at
@digby@mastodon.social
@digby@counter.social
@digby@post.news
And, for the moment, I’m still on twitter @digby56. Where all this is going to end up I do not know. But this little corner of the universe seems to be safe for the moment. We’ll be here. Maybe I’ll even put comments back on at some point … maybe.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.